… Its totally fine to include a casino as a setting so long as interactive gambling is not a thing the player can do.

Did you read the article or the actual government literature it links to and quotes from?

Nothing is going to change about existing Mario game ratings.

I’d say it would be outlandish for family friendly Nintendo to suddenly reverse course on general world cultural/legal perspectives and re introduce gambling games when they have not done so in years, the same years many countries have been cracking down on lootboxes/gambling in games for their target demo, kids.

Finally, I didn’t downvote you. I only downvote people who are being exceptionally idiotic or abrasive or rude. I almost always prefer to engage with ideas or comments I take issue with but are not presented horrifically: the point of a discussion board should be discussion, not an internet points contest.

You’ll have to pay a subscription fee.

I still have not forgiven them for what they did to Maxis.

Same apologies to you for my edit, but again as with the other similar reply, games are not retroactively rated R 18+ unless simulated gambling is added after September 22.

Yes, if older Mario Party games were patched or updated or remastered and released in a week, they’d be R 18+, but thats probably not gonna happen, and the upcoming Mario Party game doesn’t appear to have any casino like minigames.

Apologies for editing after you replied, I have a tendency of making a quick point and then expanding on it with an edit.

Hard to copy and paste lots of shit on a shitty phone.

But basically, its not a retroactive re rating of any game unless the game is patched to add in simulated gambling or loot boxes.

While sure, Mario Party 3 has simulated gambling minigames, I doubt its getting patched any time soon, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree does not appear to have any mini games simulating a casino type game.

EDIT: sorry for another edit lol, but yes, I do think its stupid that a poker minigame with in game currency only, which cannot be purchased or redeemed for real currency, is rated worse than a game with lootboxes.

… I’m sorry, what?

Do … does any Mario Party game even have microtransactions? You know, specific game content unlocked by an additional purchase with real world currency? Much less ones where the outcome of a purchase is substantially randomized?

EDIT:

Games that feature “simulated gambling,” such as casino games, will be legally restricted to adults aged 18 and over with a minimum classification of ‘R 18+.’ Projects that were classified before September 22 won’t need to be reclassified unless they lose their current rating due to “revocation or modification.”

This sounds like it isn’t a retroactive change, its a going forward change. It’s explained further in the actual guidelines:

Situations where video games may require reclassification Video games that were classified prior to 22 September 2024, but add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance or simulated gambling content may require reclassification if adding this content is likely to affect the classification of the game. For example: – video games classified G or PG that add in-game purchases linked to elements of chance after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification – video games classified G, PG, M or MA 15+ that add simulated gambling content after 22 September 2024 are likely to require reclassification

So… yeah, Mario Party games would have to be patched or re released or something to add more gambling content.

It does seem to indicate that, going forward, a Mario Party game that simulates casino like gambling would get an R 18+ rating, but the Mario Party franchise does not seem to me to have had any minigames that even sort of resemble a casino type game, even with neutered or non existent betting/staking mechanics, in about a decade.

The upcoming Super Mario Jamboree, though public info on the minigames is incomplete, also does not appear to depict any casino like games.

The facial animations are somehow still wooden and lifeless as fuck, despite Half Life 2 doing significantly better fucking 20 years ago…

… so, acting wise, you don’t even need a mod for Tommy Wiseau levels of quality.

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.

Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69gs773bZRI

And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IM11RtGLJ8

Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, and you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…

So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?

Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?

What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?

To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:

You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.

All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.

Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.

Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.

I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…

…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.

These people have literally zero self awareness.

They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.

Except that you can effectively screen for basic interpersonal skills with a casual conversation of 15 to 30 minutes where the interviewer throws in some flashpoint / hot topics and asks a few more pointed or consequential questions after a general report has been established.

Or better yet, do that with their possible coworkers, or get said coworkers to suggest topics and questions for the recruiter in the above scenario.

Why ask?

To further solidify the notion that you, as a recruitee, must show total devotion and unwavering loyalty to a potential employer.

Obviously recruiters know that people jump around after contracts or when they feel they are not being paid enough, that people scatter shot apply to anything like guys swiping on tinder because their prior experience trying to get a job has shown them that there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, that desired qualifications are nearly always absurdly niche or dramatically overinflated, and that there’s a hundred or a thousand people applying to every job opening.

It is literally their job to facilitate this process. Of course they know how all if this works.

This rhetoric is basically an attempt at conditioning you into being servile. If you ‘play ball’, you might get this particular job, and then they’ll basically lie to you about upward mobility, job stability or repeating contracts.

They are salesman. They sell the job to you and you to the company.

Why would they be anything other than slimy underhanded liars?

Any baddie capable of being hit by you, in a river or bog or lake, with a ppsh, is going to have an exponentially easier time shooting you than visa versa.

Popped condom cork.

He’ll require every American to write the IRS a multipage letter each year where they must explain why they deserve their tax rebate.

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.

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.