Hottest Mess 2024: Part 2

To give you some perspective on how this year has gone, not just for the games industry but for me as well, my original version of this post was dated June. As you may have guessed, the wild spree of bizarre and terrible news kept pushing my plans further and further, and being busy at work sure didn’t help me finish the draft. As I typed this intro, I refreshed Twitter to see which of the Gamespot / Fandom people got laid off, as the media that covers the gaming industry continues to get choked to death by people too stupid, too talentless, and too unaccountable for their own managerial decisions. It’s a sad, weird state of affairs in the industry and everything it touches. And the fact that I’m posting this on November 7th, 2024 should tell you how I feel about stuff outside of the games industry right now, but I won’t get into it.

Yet like a salmon swimming upstream, I feel compelled on a daily basis to update my running log of the most notable bad / weird news throughout the world of gaming. I mostly avoided stories about layoffs because they’re so depressingly commonplace, and also there are websites dedicated to tracking them in a way I could never capture. But each of these messes involves a human cost, as any embarrassing gaffe from a CEO could trigger mass layoffs down the road when shareholders don’t get as obscenely wealthy as they believed they would. I want to be clear that I’m not making light of that human cost, and any snide affectations are directed solely at the people on top. I really hate needing to write two paragraphs’ worth of disclaimers before getting to the candidates themselves, but enough gamers are ignorant enough of these issues that I want my intentions known.

On to the list itself: some of these items are holdovers from part one of this year, which you might recognize immediately based on how quaint they seem now. I removed some outright for being lower impact, debunked, obsolete, or all of the above. Others have been consolidated or expanded, which (as you will soon see with Ubisoft) led to some really long entries on the updated list. Still others (such as the Yuzu entry) have been revised to better reflect the party most responsible for the mess. In any case, I’m always looking for feedback and suggestions, especially if there’s a glaring mess that I’m overlooking. As with last year, I’ll post a poll in December so all eleven of us left in the forums can figure out the Community’s winner.

Annapurna Interactive sees all 25 of its staff members resign in a day following a dispute with the group’s owner.

Apple unveils a new anticompetitive app policy that gets slammed by the EGDF and Microsoft. Later, Apple terminates Epic’s developer account temporarily, prompting an investigation by the European Union. The US Department of Justice sues Apple over a smartphone ‘monopoly’, accusing the company of preventing developers from offering cloud gaming apps on the App Store. Finally, it’s revealed that AAA games on newer iPhone hardware have very low purchase rates, despite being touted as a feature.

The Borderlands Movieflops, losing over $100 million and achieving a pathetic 10% on RottenTomatoes (up from 0% for a long time).

Bungielays off workers and restructures due to poor leadership. Some ex-employees report that CEO Pete Parsons showed off his expensive classic car collection to some employees two days prior to them being laid off.

Concord flops about as hard as any AAA video game possibly could. It fails to reach or even get close to 1,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is less than Gollum’s peak concurrent player count. The game debuts at #50 on the Playstation charts and sells about 25,000 copies combined across all platforms. All of those sales are refunded after Firewalk Studios announces the game will be taken offline 2 weeks after release, and the game became no longer available for purchase digitally. In October, Sony announces that the game would be permanently sunset and closed Firewalk, along with mobile developer Neon Koi.

Embracer Group splits into three entities, two of which have ridiculous names. They also double down on AI, claiming to “empower” programmers the three companies definitely won’t lay off.

Escape from Tarkov developer Battlestate Games gates a PvE feature behind $250 DLC, despite selling a version of the game that’s supposed to include all future DLC.

Foamstarsuses Midjourney, a highly unethical AI tool, to generate art and music; the game reviews poorly on release. When it’s announced that the game is going free to play, the response is generally “I thought it already was”.

GameStop shuts down Game Informer on the same week the CEO is sued for insider trading to the tune of $47 million. GameStop generates a farewell message from GI using ChatGPT and shuts down the site’s archives. Later, after an ex-employee hijacks the Game Informer twitter account to post a real goodbye message, GameStop deletes the entire twitter account in retaliation, erasing years of information and an exclusive Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story.

League of Legends introduces an anti-cheat program that is overly aggressive, which has led some people to lose their access to their computer or reinstalling their OS. Riot’s CEO responded petulantly and shut down all discussion to this program on the Riot forums.

Limited Run sends CD-Rs that don’t run on 3DOs to some people that bought D: The Game Collector’s Edition.

Microsoft shuts down several Bethesda studios, including Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin. Later, Matt Booty says they need more games like the last one Tango Gameworks made.

Nintendo lawyers go after Ryujinx and sends copyright strikes to content creators, with neither group of targets appearing to do anything illegal or inappropriate.

Overwatch 2 finally scraps its PvE mode, then announces plans to return to 6v6 play.

Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs, a 64-person battle royale, hits a peak concurrent player count of 52 and will probably never have 64 concurrent players.

PEGI and other ratings boards spontaneously change Balatro’s rating for being a gambling game, which it decidedly is not. This change temporarily removes Balatro from digital storefronts in many countries.

Possibility Space is shut down by its owner Jeff Strain, who claimed that employees leaked information to the press on an unpublished article.

Roblox defends its exploitation of child labor as “educational”, even as reports emerge that there have been over 13,000 instances of child exploitation through the game. Another report labels it a “pedophile hellscape” where children will find “grooming, pornography, violent content, and extremely abusive speech”. Finally, a short-seller group alleges Roblox is lying about its active player count, causing the developer’s stock to fall dramatically.

Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Edition launches in an extremely rough state, including only having server room for less than 1% of its PC audience. Aspyr also allegedly stole modder work without credit.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is pulled from its early launch window for giving players the full story completion on startup. It gets poor reviews and lower concurrent player numbers than older games in the Arkham franchise.

Ubisoft (takes a deep breath) - man. OK, Skull & Bones fails to hit 1 million players even after offering a free trial. The company releases a patch for Star Wars Outlaws during its early access period (which costs $110 USD) because it was deleting save data on the PS5. Later, stock prices fall to an 11-year low for the company due largely in part to soft sales numbers for Outlaws, and they delay Assassin’s Creed Shadows to try and fix their Star Wars game. Also, Ubisoft shuts down the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown team after claiming the game underperformed. Around the same time, the company was dealing with striking workers because it was trying to enforce a mandatory return to office work policy. Finally(?), Ubisoft quietly releases an NFT game claiming to be rated by the ESRB, but the game was never submitted and Ubisoft later claimed the rating was included “in error”. That NFT game was unplayable shortly after launch due to a single user automatically winning every battle, even after they were banned.

Yuzu settles their lawsuit with Nintendo and is no longer able to offer their Switch emulator. Instructions in their Discord are cited as proof, and Discord shuts down other channels for similar emulators. The lawsuit also inspires the Citra and Pizza Emulators to voluntarily shut down before Nintendo turns their lawyers on them.

Ziff Davis shutters Humble Games because the company doesn’t know how long games take to make.

My goal is to winnow this down to 20 candidates for the final poll, and I'm sure something else will come up before I finish posting this blog. The future sure is dumb.

Americ- sorry, games, right.

Concord feels right for this, but I’m a little behind on all of the years fuck ups to be honest.

Despite everything that happened with Bungie, Microsoft, and Ubisoft, the blunder by Sony with Concord wins Hottest Mess for 2024 easily, and it's not even close.

A potential future one might be the PS5 Pro and how it hardly makes an overall difference in games from the PS5, despite costing $700. But the verdict is pending on that one.

Yeah, there's something so bizarre about a platform holder launching a game and shuttering it faster than Liz Truss' time as Prime Minister.

Yeah, Concord wins this so far. If the rumoured amount of money spent on that game is even remotely in the ballpark of what they actually spent, then that's a massive failure. They had to have had warnings show up somewhere. Games with budgets that big are focus tested to death. Did nobody they got feedback from really say "hey this seems like it's chasing trends from five years ago and feels inauthentic" because that was the immediate response from literally everyone the second that game trailer started? Or were their heads that far buried in the sand? Everyone involved in leading that project failed spectacularly. I feel bad for the rank and file developers because they did the job. The game looked okay and apparently played fine but it was just not what anyone actually wanted, especially in comparison to the free alternatives.

Ubisoft is an easy second place. That company might be on death watch soon.

Nintendo going after emulators is probably third place for me. There are so many layers to what a mess it is. Nintendo going after emulators obviously sucks from a preservation perspective. Yuzu trying to blatantly profit off their emulator and promising patches for new games to Patreon backers was super gross and broke the cardinal rule of emulation: don't make money from it since that attracts the lawyers. Ryujinx in my view didn't really do anything wrong but were an unfortunate casualty of dumb people on social media trying to farm views/likes/whatever by posting videos of the new Zelda running on Ryujinx in 4K on launch day. As Gerstmann said at the TOTK launch, people used to understand that you had to be low key when talking about emulation to avoid the lawyers but now people would rather get the attention and are blowing up everyone's spot as a result.

Picking a third was legit tough since Possibility Space being closed, GameStop closing Game Informer, all the Roblox shit, and the Bungie layoffs are all up there too. I went with Nintendo because if going after emulation becomes a thing then a huge portion of game preservation will be at risk.

Gerstmann described it as a console that exists for Digital Foundry, and that seems apt from everything I've seen so far about it.

I agree that Concord gets my #1 followed by Ubisoft. Concord takes #1 because, Sony has a pretty good track record for making first party games that do well, or even if they don't sell well, there's still a cult following, such as Guardians of the Galaxy. But Concord just bombed harder than anyone would've expected. I don't even know if Microsoft's Redfall did that badly and that was my go to for big name flops.

Ubisoft doing poorly? I mean, how many times have they been in poor financial straits so much so that there's talk of them selling or being bought out by some other company? Kind of not a surprise but they have a LOT of stuff this year which brings it to #2 for me.

If I needed to pick a 3rd, I guess it'd be Game Informer. Print media has been going away since the mid 2000's so I'm actually surprised it survived in its print format for as long as it did. But it's such a huge bummer that the archives got shut down so no one can see them online anymore. The risks of digital media.

@chamurai: When you consider that Concord was an overall good product, and it got pulled within weeks after release. But Redfall was a poorly designed and executed game all around, including the many bugs that Concord didn't have. Then Concord is a much hotter mess, because it was the overall timing that was bad. Concord came out during a time when no one cared about the theme of the game, and there were better and free alternatives. It was one big waste of time and money, at the end of the day, and this is why it's such a hot mess.

@ben_h: So far it seems that way. Unlike Digital Foundry and others like them, most gamers don't care if the PS5 Pro renders shadows and textures a little smoother than the PS5, and has slightly better Ray Tracing, etc. Most people will not notice the difference on their television. From what I've seen, it makes performance mode look a little bit better, but that's not worth $700, imo. And most gamers are fine with games running at 4K 30fps, as long as the game runs smooth and doesn't have frame pacing issues, like many games on the Switch do. The fact the PS5 Pro still has options between 30fps quality mode and 60fps performance mode, is a hot mess to me. They say GTA 6 will be the true test whether the PS5 Pro is really worth it or not. For 700 bones, I hope it is for those who have FOMO and are going to buy one no matter what.

@av_gamer: Nothing about that would ever merit in this list though. If it performed worse than a base PS5, somehow, then maybe you'd get somewhere but not for just "It's too expensive for what it is."

I would never buy a PS5 Pro because I play nearly everything on PC, but seeing the absolutely atrocious image quality in the 60 FPS mode of FF7 Rebirth on a base PS5 and how much better it looks on the Pro, it's hard to say that thing isn't at least offering something of value. Sure, it's too expensive and the number of use cases like FF7 Rebirth don't seem huge, but as someone that is waiting for the PC version of Rebirth specifically because of how bad it looked on PS5, I can certainly appreciate something that allows console only players to play that game at 60 FPS in a way that doesn't look terrible.

From my perspective I think Concord wins. Every part of how that was handled was a mess. And it was nothing but mess. The game itself was competent and all that but it made no money, generated a ton of controversy, and ended up a financial and PR disaster.

Second I would put Ubisoft just because there are SO MANY mistakes it's impossible to even remember them all. Every part of how that company is run seems terrible and stupid.

Borderlands Movie is a bit of a Concord situation but it didn't shut down its studio and movies flop all the time so is less interesting.

Embracer is a huge mess but it has more complex causes than Ubisoft, and I don't think THIS year has been the truly messy year for them. That was last year.

My personal take is that y’all are understating the hot messitude of the GameStop/Game Informer debacle. That shit was all kinds of messy.

@nocall: I think it's a question of size vs intensity. Game Informer was tiny and though it was a messy implosion it only involved a couple dozen people. Compared to Concord, which was a massive black eye, ended up with like 200 people getting fired, and cost hundreds of millions.

So are we doing pound for pound or overall mess?

Gamestop as a company is also messy, and big, but has been decaying for like a decade now, partially for reasons outside its own control.

likely unpopular opinion, but Concord feels like biggest miss, most tragic, or biggest failure...less of a mess.

the Roblox and Ubisoft situations feel messier to me.

@allthedinos:Oh my god!! I forgot about all of this stuff. The more I see these garbage attitudes, the more I wonder: Why don't consumers sue companies? I know plenty of people marry companies, and some contracts add that you can't go against them, but still...

its hands down tonights giant dumptruck where dan thought cows boobs were at balls level

Can we just nominate the whole fucking year? Inside the industry and out? No? Okay, I guess Ubisoft has my vote but you could make some pretty strong arguments for Microsoft going for broke on being full evil and the astounding Concord fuckery.

From an industry perspective I wonder if the Embracer stuff won't have the longest-ranging effects but I guess that's too early to tell.

@mellotronrules: I kind of agree about Concord. The game wasn't a mess. It was competently made and accomplished what it set out to do, it just showed up late to the hero shooter party with forgettable heroes, and a dated monetization method. Most people didn't care it existed, some people got super butthurt it existed, but nothing about it was broken.

@judaspete: The GAME wasn't a mess but everything else around it was. The promotion, Sony's failure to course correct after the Beta, only to then pull the game after it very predictably underperformed and then permanently kill it and shut down the studio after indicating it was likely being retooled.

The game wasn't salvageable because it was the wrong product at the wrong time (terrible misreading of the market is also messy) but everything about how it was released and then unreleased was messymessy.

@ll_exile_ll: Man, pitching this as not that bad because a person has a chance to play a game "as it was meant to look" for anywhere from $770 to more likely $1270 (base PS5 + PS5 Pro + FF7) is wild. Still, I don't think releasing something that people will definitely (foolishly) buy is really a hot mess.

Roblox, knowing how many kids play it (including my niece and nephew) was a real alarming one for me. Concord is still fascinating and bad, especially after Colin Moriarty stupidly "leaked" the unverified rumor that it cost 400 million AFTER marketing to make (I highly doubt it's true but anything that shows gross mismanagement in an era of rampant layoffs and worker exploitation/mistreatment is worth keeping an eye on). Ubisoft is my third, beginning with the absolute mess of Skull & Bones and ending in the sadness that was the PoP team getting axed for the crime of making one of my favorite games of its genre.

Yeah, when it comes to Concord, the hot mess isn't the game itself, it's everything that happened around it. To the deflating trailer that made almost everyone sigh. The completely failed open beta. They ran it for two weeks and even let PS Plus members get access to it first. Most people didn't care. Like many I played an hour of it, then I uninstalled it and forgot about it. Then charging money for it, instead of making it free to play from the start. Claiming it wasn't a live service game, because they knew it wouldn't go over well. And of course the disastrous launch and cancellation. This was something that either never happened before, or is extremely rare. Redfall was mentioned earlier. Despite all of its faults (I haven't played it since launch) you can still download and play Redfall on Gamepass, and you can still buy it. The way Sony was so quick to kill a game that took years and a lot of money to make is beyond a hot mess. It's a disaster. And if I was a developer, I'd have a hard time trusting Sony from this point onward. They made the game Sony wanted, and then got spat on.

i think the thing that makes the Concord situation difficult to categorize for me is there's 2 aspects going on with it.

it was competent- and it nobody wanted to buy it. that's powerfully open and shut to me. if it had sold even middlingly- "mess" wouldn't even be a talking point. the simplicity of that feels antithetical to the "WHAT A MESS!" nature of the category. the market spoke unequivocally- and kinda predictably, Sony decided they weren't going to pay for a game that stood to be an ongoing cost center IN ADDITION TO upfront sunk cost. and they gave out refunds- which from a strictly consumer angle, kinda snuffs out some of the mess for me.

but then again yes, absolutely- it's a mess in that there was no clear path to success. marketing, pricing, aesthetic, management, lost jobs- that's all messy and terrible. but isn't it mostly because straight up the game didn't sell? maybe it was the path to market that was messy, but is that really tantamount child exploitation on Roblox?

that's my thinking anyway- no need to re-litigate Concord. it's just one person's interpretation of "mess" anyway : )

It's interesting to me that so many people are saying Concord is #1 hottest mess when I never really understood what the deal with it was, and still don't. What I remember is that it came out as an AAA game with high expectations, it got reviewed as pretty "meh," and no one bought it. And when I did a search just now to try and figure out what exactly the "mess" was, I couldn't find a lot of clear answers. Just that a lot of money was spent on it and no one bought it.

IDK, it may be a mess, and maybe it was the worst on the list in terms of pure financial waste, but it seems like a thoroughly standard and uninteresting mess: company makes a big game, no one buys it, it shuts down. Not really seeing the messiness so much? Plenty of other recent games I could name that did that... if it's a mess, it's an exceedingly uninteresting one. Moreover, here's a question: if Sony had continued to try to support it instead of quickly making the decision to shut it down, would that have made the mess more or less hot? E.g., Anthem was a terrible failure that EA tried to save for quite some time, pouring yet more resources into a complete dud. One could argue that Sony acting decisively after launch made it less messy than it could have been. But maybe I'm missing something.

Honestly I haven't even heard a lot of this stuff, but the Roblox thing seems pretty bad? That might get my vote out of what's here. GameStop/GI also sucks camel wang. Though the one that leaves me personally sighing the most is the OW2 thing. Blizzard did a glorified update of OW, ostensibly to add a PvE mode and change team comps from 6 to 5. Now they're reverting (have reverted?) both of those things, and we're simply left with OW, but now with gross F2P hooks in it. Yeesh. What BS.

@atheistpreacher: The difference with Concord vs Anthem is A) Everyone could see Concord's issues coming. It was a hero shooter launching at $40 into a saturated market full of F2P juggernauts, and it had an unpopular artstyle and very little interest or reaction to the marketing/beta. Yet Sony did NOTHING to course correct. Nothing. They just launched it right into the buzzsaw. Which led to

B) They then, after launching it into the buzzsaw that everyone predicted, immediately pulled it offline and dumpstered it ALONG WITH THE STUDIO. They even issued refunds. It tanked so hard it got unreleased, which almost never happens except with a profoundly broken title that literally does not work. Concord worked fine. Yet they unreleased it, and that's Sony, a company notorious for never giving refunds.

Compare that with Anthem, which is still online, playable, and buyable today and whose studio, Bioware, is still perfectly alive and kicking, or even Babylon's Fall, another game that tanked incredibly hard but at least stayed up for nearly a year, and it's on another level.

What makes it messy is that Sony walked it into a situation everyone predicted, and then immediately panicked when everyone's predictions came true, jettisoning both game and studio immediately. I can't think of another time that happened with a game that was fundamentally okay. Concord has a higher Metacritic than Skull & Bones or Suicide Squad, two other notorious flops from this year that are always online and have been kept up and even supported post launch. Yet Concord flopped so hard that it got unreleased.

That's a mess!

@bigsocrates: Hmm, OK, well that's a better and clearer explanation of the case than I'd seen. Again, this isn't something that really broke through for me or that I paid any attention to.

Maybe it's also just harder to be impressed by any mess after the duo of Embracer and Unity from last year. Those felt like generational, mess-of-the-decade contenders that both popped up in the same year. Just hard for other stuff to compete!

Also easy toforget that Concord was supposed to have an episode on that Amazon Prime TV series about video games. Sony apparently believed in Concord enough to OK it for production. Was there any word on whether that episode was scrapped or not?

The thing about Concord is that in one hand, outside the speed which it closed, this isn't so much never seen before (Hyenas beat that by never releasing), Battleborn, Lawbreakers, and others end closing tool, they just did it slightly slower. However, the way which Concord failed to connect and the indifference it caused is sort unseen. Because there is a lot of online and mmos (some which you might never hear about) out there, which might not have huge audiences, but find their niches or at least have enough people, to carry on.

Back there when WoW was viewed as the gold standard of population, it wasn't unusual, for any MMO which did instantly reach that cap (due unrealistic expectations), be labelled a failure, but...of them keep pushing on for years and maybe become success on their own terms.

Would more time allowed helped Concord ? I don't know, but the way the narrative and image of the game got tied and the way a lot of bad takes/clickbait focus on number of players (I feel that people don't understand that population take time to grow) would that hard to avoid the image that failed.

Then there is the closure of the studio, which is pretty messy.

Sometimes people try to compare Concord to either NMS or Cyberpunk, which for me does not work, those two later game didn't suffer from indifference (much by contrary) and had more clear ways to work to turn it around. Concord suffered with indifference, but not bugs or missing features, for all we know, it worked (as a game), but might not enough to match up competition on it own subgenre of hero shooter.

@valorianendymion: Games getting canceled isn't messy, it's just unfortunate for the developers/publisher. Unless there are messy reasons. Also obviously games flopping isn't unprecedented (but a mess can have precedent.)

The thing about Concord that differentiates it from MMOs (and especially something like NMS or Cyberpunk) is that it needed a player population to be playable (since it was strictly PVP) and it lost it quickly. This made it basically impossible for it to build an audience because any new players would find long waiting times for matches and bail out. This is a big problem with PVP games. PVE focused games can build an audience over time (though it's kind of rare) but for pure PVP you need the player base.

I don't think it's comparable to NMS or Cyberpunk at all because they were both single player games AND they sold incredibly well. Their studios were flush with cash from initial sales to fix the issues.

Yeah, I agree, what I was trying to say that I also don't agree with those comparisons, because those were very different situations, I was just commented because I saw some people making it and I don't agree with it.

This element about the differences of models you pointed, is spot on, and why I think would be difficult for them turn around or even make a road map, you can't add anything, because the population is small enough that might not be enough people to man the play modes which you already feature.

But to back on the topic, I would say the closure of Game Informer (and the whole thing around it) is a big one and Ubisoft stepping over thousand of rakes too, which make me worried about that new Heroes of Might and Magic game, since at last they appear to have something excellent on hand, because it would not be the first time they self defeat themselves and sabotage it own HOMM game.

First, thanks everyone for reading and to those who commented. It's gratifying to do this work and then actually see a discussion result from it.

Second, looking ahead to the poll in a few weeks, I think I can safely remove the following entries from contention. But let me know if you want any kept on for the final Community's Choice vote.

• Escape from Tarkov DLC
• Foamstars
• League of Legends
• Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs
• PEGI (for rating Balatro stupidly)
• Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Edition
• Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League

I decided to keep Apple, Annapurna Interactive, Limited Run, Yuzu, and Ziff Davis on board because they seemed germane to this userbase. Stuff like Foamstars and Suicide Squad doesn't really stack up to more notable failures like Concord and Skull & Bones, and Balatro seems to be doing just fine in spite of PEGI.

For future new items, I'm going to keep an eye on PS5 Pro to see if anything gets messier about it, and the ADL just released a bombshell report about extremism on Steam that will appear as well. Feel free to tag this thread if you spot anything too.

And there goes XDefiant. By no means a mess, and certainly not hot, but I guess it's as good a time as any to put my vote against Concord as the hottest mess -- unless, that is, it's as a representative for the *all this* going on in the biz right now. The Concord implosion was big and fast, but it wasn't novel. It's got no zazz. Personally, I think the Game Pass situation is the more interesting flavor of this issue -- the Cooler Ranch to Sony's Nacho Cheesier -- because there's the nonzero chance that we are watching one of the big three show themselves the door in real time. That and I just can not get over the insane doubletalk of "we need more Tango games" written in Tango's still-warm blood.

@peezmachine: XDefiant is part of the Ubisoft mess, which is definitely both messy and hot.

This latest entry into the Ubisoft 2024 canon caused me to hit an important milestone: my Notes app that I used to track hot messes throughout the year can no longer fit all the Ubisoft items into a single screenshot.

My goal is to post the poll this week. Hopefully I don't miss something that moves the needle even more than this.

I know you wrote this three weeks ago, but I hadn't seen it until now. Went and glanced the report. Yeesh. But it certainly tracks. I remember when Steam seemed to be less of a sewer than GameFAQs was, but Steam now seems positively vile. I generally avoid the forums when I can, though things are notably worse for tentpole games, as one would expect. I was on the Hades 2 board for long enough giving feedback in the early going that it was impossible not to notice that every other thread was devoted to complaining about "DEI design" and wokeness and pronouns and other such BS. Steve Bannon eat your heart out.

@atheistpreacher: Almost everywhere, especially with light moderation, is a cesspool now. I don't fully understand it, but I think it has to do with how the social media sites and their "engagement" algorithms have warped perceptions of how people should behave online. You can find pockets of decency but it's wild how bad discourse has gotten in what should be mainstream places.

The 4channification of everywhere.

Can we nominate the entire world for the hot mess list? Just all of it?

@bigsocrates: That does actually make me think of the BlueSky solution being conspicuously effective IMO. I'm really not a social media person, but I've had a BlueSky account since shortly before it became open to everyone, and it seems like its lack of algorithms and the nuclear functionality of its blocking has managed to create an experience that is not shitty. There seems to be an ethos there of "don't engage, just block," sending the trolls to the cornfield to snipe only at one another.

Of course there has already been discourse about how BlueSky is essentially just allowing people to completely silo themselves from anyone with a vaguely different opinion and outlook than themselves, but that is not an argument that goes very far with me. Maybe this is the way. Then again, perhaps give it a few years for the enshittification to happen.

It's definitely largely caused by social media and media sites using engagement as their primary metric since that generates ad revenue. They've all decided to take it a step further and done the Facebook thing of concluding *any* engagement is good, even if it's almost entirely negative. They're all so desperate for for clicks/ad views that all semblance of ethics have been thrown out the window and they've decided it's totally fine to show people the most vile and incendiary stuff possible in hopes of scaring them into clicking on it, which is in turn making tons of people angry and others emboldened to be shitty.

There's a great book on this topic by Tim Wu called The Attention Merchants which is about the cycle of advertising in media and how it always inevitably ends with a race to the bottom that temporarily destroys a form of media before it finally stabilizes. We're currently in that race to the bottom part of the cycle when it comes to advertising-driven internet media. The same cycle happened with newspapers, radio, and TV in the past. Essentially what happens is that early on, a new form of media catches on but it's mostly expensive and niche (think 90s internet or early 00s social media), then ad-supported competitors join the field, then after a while competition becomes spread so thin and ads become so devalued that the competitors throw all ethics out the window and do anything they can to lure in and keep customers/viewers. In the late 1800s and early 1900s this was in the form of what were called "yellow press", which were ad-funded super cheap newspapers that printed conspiracies, blatantly obvious propaganda, and deliberately incendiary pieces as news. There's so many parallels between the yellow press and current internet media that it's kinda haunting. I've been hoping that the bottom will fall out of the internet ad business for a long time now. It's doing so much harm to the world and all just for money.

It's not a shock the internet is now a very toxic place no matter where you go. Remember, the reason Elon Musk bought Twitter, is because the people in charge of it at the time, were banning a lot of the racism and extremism, and Musk claimed they were censoring free speech. The first thing he did when he took over was unban all of those vile people. Sadly, we live in a time when certain people are celebrated for being their worse selves. And its not ending anytime soon. Just recently, Alex Jones was about to lose everything to the victims of Sandy Hook he attacked and bashed for nearly a decade, and once again Elon Musk stepped in and prevented it from happening using his money and connections.

@av_gamer: It's getting a bit afield of the topic but for what it's worth Elon in all his shittiness has not done anything to prevent bad shit from happening to Alex Jones, the man is still in the slow process of losing all of his shit.

Now the process moves so slow that we might all be dead before it resolves fully but for as much as they all pretend otherwise neither Elon or Jones have found a way to wave a wand and make it all stop.

And the Onion will still own his show which remains very funny.

@efesell: He hasn't done anything that we know of, yet. Though it's possible he's funding Jones behind the scenes (I don't mean as a business entity, he might be giving him personal resources, but that's raw speculation.)

However IMO Musk doesn't care about Jones per se, he cares about Infowars and what it represents, and so he's protecting the Infowars account.

Jones is a clown and a tainted brand. But conspiracy theorism is thriving and Musk is doing a lot to promote that.

@bigsocrates: The way he acts on his show nowadays is very much a typical “notice me musk senpai” that you’d see from crypto bros so it’s hard to say.