SimCity 2000 had scenarios of pre existing cities with specific goals, and though it did not have as many or as elaborate mass transit systems as later city builders, I think a few of them required you to both grow and reduce traffic, basically requiring you to build a working mass transit system.
Personally I’m a fan of Smurf Juice brand colloidial silver.
I used to know sooo many people that would justify this, a cryptoscam, shilling literally any outright fraud or vastly overpriced bs on their social media.
‘They’re just getting their bag, you’re hating cuz you broke!’
This is the cyberpunk dystopia.
Made in a facility staffed by boned babies.
If this was a real lemmy shitpost it would be blinding bright beans splattering all over the windshield.
In the same vein, Simon Librande, lead designer of Sim City, decided to pretend that basically all plots above low density just have absurdly huge, invisible (underground) parking lots, otherwise a car centric city very often just turns into half parking lots.
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them – so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots – but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
EDIT: I got some details mixed up, corrected and expanded now.
I believe nuclear war was censored because the song came out in 2003.
FCC had temporarily banned a whole bunch of songs from live radio broadcast after 9/11 (Learning to Fly by Tom Petty, literally everything from RATM, many more) and in 2003 a while lot of Americans were terrified that Saddam would nuke us, or Israel, or terrorists would get a suitcase nuke or assemble a dirty bomb and blow up Chicago or something, as basically every journalism outfit in America was credulously reporting everything Bush admin officials were claiming about threats (which they knew were of dubious legitimacy), while the Bush admin itself was basically fabricating a claim to invade Iraq.
The uncensored version released in their album, but the music video and radio versions was censored likely so it could reach a larger audience on MTV and be allowed to be broadcast by the FCC.
This has been obvious, and written about, for years:
The Atlantic, 2018:
Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.
No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.
If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.
If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.
…
If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…
Who, other than children, do not know this yet?
That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.
It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.
Before we can commence with therapy relating to your suspected anxiety, adhd and trauma relating to people consistently extracting large amounts of time and money from you whilst making complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing promises (involving the complicated, conditional, arbitrarily changing views of multiple third parties you do not personally know) to repay you in some way, which they never do…
… please allow me to trigger all of your suspected conditions as thoroughly as possible in the name of ethical transparency and consent before we can proceed.
Don’t worry this will only take 15 minutes to explain adequately if you’re in a good headspace.
…
Subject appears irrationally angry and violent for no discernible reason, suspicion of psychosis.
Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.
Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.
Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.
Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.
I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.
I disagree.
Amazon still owns and operates New World.
All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.
They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.
The servers will be shut down in a few days.
There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.
Why would you promote a product that does not exist?
Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.
I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).
It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.
It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.
I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.
Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.
Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.
If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.
I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.
If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?
At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.
I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.
This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.
As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.
The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.
The estimates I’ve seen from people going off of PS achievements for the game put total PS sales at about 15,000 compared to about 10,000 on Steam.
So that would equate to roughly an all time PSN concurrent player count high of 1,000.
The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.
47 playable days.
All time steam peak player count: 38,104.
Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.
…
Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.
15 playable days.
All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.
Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.
…
Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.
Ah.
I am not aware of any games/sims that do that.
It might be possible to heavily mod such things into Cities Skylines 1 or 2, but it would be a ton of work and basically no fun to play for everyone other than masochistic uber nerds (I am counting myself as one).
It would be comparable to the percentage of players that play Kerbal Space Program vs the percentage that play KSP with the full suite of Realism Overhaul, Realistic Solar System, and all that.