WotC Chris Cao has left WotC

[Morrus]

he's a scumbag

You’re confused. If you want to call people names, go hang out in the YouTube comments. We expect better here.

 

[Electrik Wizard]

You’re confused. If you want to call people names, go hang out in the YouTube comments. We expect better here.

I did qualify it with "Even if only half the rumours about him are true..." but, having re-read my comment, I realise it sounds like I was damning him either way. This was not my intent.

I apologise.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Chris Cao's by-line description did teach me something – that the term "live service" game is the nice way of saying future-enshittified game. I'm starting to see the term "live service game" more often since reading that and now I have the right connections in my brain to know what that means.

 

[dave2008]

Chris Cao's by-line description did teach me something – that the term "live service" game is the nice way of saying future-enshittified game. I'm starting to see the term "live service game" more often since reading that and now I have the right connections in my brain to know what that means.

I would like to understand, but I don't understand your analogy. What does "future-enshittified game" mean?

 

[darjr]

I would like to understand, but I don't understand your analogy. What does "future-enshittified game" mean?

If you are a player you are not the customer, you are the product. Among other things.

Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net

first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

 

[Staffan]

I would like to understand, but I don't understand your analogy. What does "future-enshittified game" mean?

"Enshittification" is a term coined, I believe, by Cory Doctorow, and basically means taking a popular and well-functioning thing (usually a website or other online service, but it can apply to other things too) and trying to extract more value from it by means that also lowers the thing's quality, but not to the point where people start leaving in droves.

Take Facebook, for example. It started out as a reasonably useful site where people could post things and connect with their friends and acquaintances, as well as follow topics and stuff they found interesting. But Facebook has gradually increased the number of ads in your feed, been messing around with the algorithm so it shows things out of order, arbitrarily hiding post made by your friends in order to show more ads, and assorted other nonsense to the point where it is barely functional for the purpose most people originally joined. That's enshittification.

I'm assuming "future-enshittified" means that it's designed in such a way that starting to enshittify it is just a matter of turning a dial to reduce the amount of signal in favor of more noise, rather than a whole redesign.

 

[SlyFlourish]

"Enshittification" is a term coined, I believe, by Cory Doctorow, and basically means taking a popular and well-functioning thing (usually a website or other online service, but it can apply to other things too) and trying to extract more value from it by means that also lowers the thing's quality, but not to the point where people start leaving in droves.

Take Facebook, for example. It started out as a reasonably useful site where people could post things and connect with their friends and acquaintances, as well as follow topics and stuff they found interesting. But Facebook has gradually increased the number of ads in your feed, been messing around with the algorithm so it shows things out of order, arbitrarily hiding post made by your friends in order to show more ads, and assorted other nonsense to the point where it is barely functional for the purpose most people originally joined. That's enshittification.

I'm assuming "future-enshittified" means that it's designed in such a way that starting to enshittify it is just a matter of turning a dial to reduce the amount of signal in favor of more noise, rather than a whole redesign.

A "live service" game is one that is continually controlled by the publisher, thus open to "twiddling" by making things worse for the end users for the benefit business partners and then profits to shareholders until its miserable for everyone.

 

[darjr]

Live service game - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

In the video game industry, a live-service game(also referred to as games as a service (GaaS)) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service. Live service games are ways to monetize video games either after their initial sale, or to support a free-to-play model.