Daily Tech News 1 September 2024

• Bluesky Social has seen record levels of user signups after the Brazilian Communist Party banned Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The depravity here is threefold:
  
  First, a psychotic judge in Brazil violated the country's laws in pursuit of, well, violating the country's laws some more.
  
  Second, the banning of Twitter only rated an "in brief" item on Tech Crunch, while this full article is spinning it as a win for a favoured site (as in, not connected to Emmanuel Goldstein).
  
  Third, this message from Bluesky's CEO:

  good job Brazil, you made the right choice

  This is rather like Belgium congratulating Germany on choosing to invade Poland and not, well, Belgium.
  
  
  

• The much maligned Chinese adventure game Black Myth Wukong has declined from an all time peak of 2.4 million players to a high for the past 24 hours of 1.4 million with a little over one million playing right this second.
  
  Meanwhile the highly praised game Dustborn has 13.
  
  Not 13 million. 13.
  
  And some of those - I can't tell exactly how many, but with just thirteen people playing even one is significant - are vtubers playing the game to show how bad it truly is.
  
  But as I noted before, there's more difference between these two games than the fact that Black Myth Wukong tries to appeal to its audience and Dustborn wants to see gamers dead in a ditch. Wukong had a real budget, while Dustborn survived off government handouts.
  
  
  
• But those aren't the only two games that have launched recently. There's also Concord.
  
  Concord is an online team-based combat game, very much in the style of Overwatch. You get together with four friends and shoot it out against another team of five friends. Digital paintball.
  
  If you don't have five friends who all want to play Concord right this moment, you can go to the lobby and match up with other players looking for a game.
  
  And this is where the pain arrives because there are 81 people playing Concord right now. In the entire world.
  
  So if there are 8 matches going on, there is one person just sitting there, waiting.
  
  But it's just an indie game, right? It might be struggling, but it will grow over time.
  
  Not exactly. It's published by Sony and has been in development for eight years, with an estimated budget between $100 million and $200 million. So they spent more than a million dollars per player.
  
  And a game that depends on having a lot of active players to survive, that has fallen into just double digits a week after launch, is dead. Even making it free is not going to fix this.
  
  The problem is the game looks like a cross between Overwatch and Guardians of the Galaxy... That you found on a dusty shelf in the back of a Dollar Tree, made in China by way of Berkeley.
  
  Oh, and just to rub it in, it costs $40 where Overwatch is free to play. Overwatch makes money by selling custom outfits for your characters, which works because the characters are attractive. There's fanart and cosplays of Overwatch characters everywhere because the designs are great.
  
  While the pre-rendered cut scenes in Concord look good - you can see where the money went - there's no reason to watch them because the character design and gameplay are, at best, meh.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile on the indie side of things Core Keeper launched on the 27th of August after a couple of years in early access (open beta test).
  
  It has 33,000 players right now. I couldn't find any reviews from the propaganda outlets fluffing Dustborn and Concord, but the reviews from the smaller outlets that have not yet sold their souls are uniformly positive.
  
  
  
• And in the as-indie-as-it-gets category is Soulash 2, a labour of love by a single developer, currently still in beta.
  
  He's been targeted lately by the alphabet soup mafia, demanding he put same-sex marriage into the game, and bombing the game with bad reviews when he said he was focusing on other features right now. He didn't even refuse, he just said not now.
  
  As a result of the constant attacks, the game... Has more players than Dustborn and Concord combined. Where those games bled to death over the course of last week, Soulash 2 grew by 60%.
  
  
  
• There's also Star Wars Outlaws, another big budget game with some great scenery that plays like a potato with brain damage, but it only just came out and it's not on Steam so there's an absence of hard data.
  
  It's probably just an ordinary level flop, rather than a Concord-class catastrophe. But it's being fluffed by all the same outlets as Concord and Dustborn which may be the kiss of death.
  
  
  
• They even tried to fluff the Borderlands movie. (The Verge)
  
  Borderlands - a movie based on a computer game that was not complete garbage - had a budget of $120 million and made $30 million at the box office. So the verdict on that one is definitely in.
  
  
  
• A judge has thrown out a lawsuit by crypto investors against Elon Musk as without merit. (WCCFTech)
  
  They should have asked Belgium.
  
  
  
• A brief history of barbed wire fence telephony networks. (Lorie Merson)
  
  Well, that's novel.
  
  
  
• Apple has deliberately broken support for Spotify after being forced to open up its platform by EU regulations. (Thurrott)
  
  It's an ongoing pattern with Apple. It will do anything to avoid letting other companies make money selling services.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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