so many will shit on a studio that chooses to stick to it’s values, good on them.
It’s interesting that BDS targets are somewhat chosen out of the feasibility of action (eg targetting “Xbox” instead of Microsoft as a whole, whereas AWS has no easy alternative for end-consumers so it’s on a less severe list). I suppose it makes it feel like open source software is more important than ever when things like this are popping up, but at the same time it makes the crushing weight of capitalism feel even more inescapable.
Very true, but BDS has different angles - consumer, b2b, academic, etc…
Boycotts are very good when their impact is measurable. Which is why BDS has targeted consumer boycotts and different campaign targets at different times. Seeing a huge drop in Xbox users at the start of a campaign launch is a powerful sign to the boycotted company and to the BDS community.
B2B (like in this case) is also important because consumers would be able to direct their purchases to other avenues that are in line with BDS (and also the headlines it gets). So measurable stream of money flowing from Xbox to another platform.
It’s also why BDS says that everyone is free to do blanket boycotts, but targeted boycotting helps with their measurable effectiveness. But BDS is realistic.
Like you said about AWS; some things just are hard to boycott, but the intention is to turn so many away from Israel that eventually the bigger things will be pressured to change as well.
For those that don’t understand the headline. TIL: “BDS is a Palestinian-led movement promoting nonviolent actions against Israel for violating international law and Palestinian rights.” Microsoft is on the BDS boycott list for providing support for Israeli prisons.
Not just for providing support to Israeli prisons, but was literally their server drive for all illegal surveillance of Palestinians for many years until word got out.
There’s a Steam Curator named like “Palestine Will Never Fall!!!” that you can follow on steam that’ll put a little note on the store pages of games that the curator has made a note for it.
Like for example, the new ‘Silent Hill: Townfall’ game, on the sidebar, there’s a little red X and a short description that says
“Annapurna Interactive is the gaming division of Annapurna Pictures both owned by the Zionist, Megan Ellison, daughter of Larry Ellison, she produced propaganda films such as Zero Dark Thirty”
If you follow the curator, you get those notes on whatever game the curator has notes for. They’re character limited to 250 i think, so it’s low impact. You can follow up to 100 curators. There are all sorts, from whether games use rootkit drm, to if the game uses AI, if the game has forced TAA (temporal anti aliasing, its blurry and looks like shit), or just memes.
The curator can either make a yes, no, or just information mark on a game, as a recommendation, along with their short write up.
The curator system is a weirdly under talked about, kind of hidden, and under developed system on steam, but I highly recommend exploring it. It’s a subsystem (and a separate follow) of steam groups.
To get there, go to the main storefront, open the “menu”, open the “recommendations” drop-down, and near the bottom will be “steam curators”.
Thanks. I’ll add that to the others I use “Owned by China” and “Made with AI”
Ha. I don’t think I’ve seen owned by China.
“Jestr Detected” is good too. Just to know what uses it.
Here is the steam link
It will not recommend things from a studio owned by china and be informational for the studios that are partially owned by china. Edit, Actually it looks like they don’t do the informational anymore. Not recommended for anything full or partially owned by china.
when the curator system was new it was immediately flooded with low effort shit, single line reviews, and people doing bits. i imagine a lot of users only remember it for that.
It seems like even valve devs working on the system only remember it for that, too. It really is a pity. But hey, at least the system is still there.
i was given the option to hide em after some update, and i bet a lot of users did just that and haven’t thought about it since. i further bet that valve saw that metric and decided to basically wallpaper over em with subsequent layout updates.
like it started as opt-out and now it’s more of an opt-in situation
I think it’s been less than a year since I discovered curators. I kind of remember them in a patch notes and maybe friends talking about them years ago, but I don’t remember ever exploring them until recently.
I’m very curious what they were like, pre-wallpapering.
But at the same time… I do actually like it, how, now, it’s an underground feature. It makes it an enthusiast avenue of information that’s basically corporate eyes off, to a certain extent. I still get offered keys for slop occasionally, but it seems like a method of critique or even journalism that’s adulterated by corruption. And I do want to keep it that way, because I think that corruption counts for the great majority of issues in …almost all media, not just gaming. Which is weird to think about, but, I whenever things have ads and/paid promoters (you should look up Jestr, it’ll ruin some things for you), I think there’s space for improvement of culture by elimination of corruption, so to speak.
The curator system is a weirdly under talked about, kind of hidden, and under developed system on steam, but I highly recommend exploring it. It’s a subsystem (and a separate follow) of steam groups.
I’ve been trying to follow more Steam curators recently, but they make it very difficult. I basically can’t find the curators section in the regular UI in the Steam client, and even when I go there from a web search and then paste the URL, their search is shit so I can’t find the curators I want.
Lmao. You aren’t wrong.
Also, I just remembered, I have a write up from my own curator page. It has instructions near the bottom on how to get to the curator page. I don’t want to clog everything up with what’s essentially the same info but more, so I’m gonna try to put it in a spoiler tag and won’t include my page because self promotion is annoying and I’m annoying.
spoiler
I occasionally post very short reviews of games I play that are separate from user-account reviews. These reviews are 200 character limited and VERY short. These Curator reviews may include this type of content:
- My Honest Opinion
- Ethical Concerns
- Notification of Bad Actors
- Sometimes More! (Sometimes Less!)
By following my Curator page, I get nothing . But, you will get an extra, somewhat hidden Steam Feature …
“What Do I Get?”
By following a Curator, if you go to a game page (on the store) that Curator has made a review for, you will see one or two [new rows of icons] next to where you see which steam friends own or have wishlisted that game: [Recommend by Curators you follow:] And/or [Recommended against by Curators you follow:]
There will also be a new, banner for the latest curator review directly above the “buy now” section. This banner will contain the latest (I believe) curator’s review. (Complete with censorship! Oh boy!)
There are a couple other minor features, but you can just notice those as you go.
To Follow a Curator by Going to Their “Group” Page, First:
-(Note 1: A “Curator” is a sub-feature of a “Group”. Groups can exist without also being a Curator, but a Curator is always a sub-section of a Group, and may even have a different logo.) -(Note 2: You do not need to be in the Group to Follow the Curator.)
- Go to a Group’s page (Click the big “I” Icon for the group above this section!!)
- Scroll to the bottom “Curator” section, right above the comments, there will be cluster of tiles of games
- Click the “view all” tile . (clicking the “view all” text goes someplace else)
- Finally, now on the Curator’s page, click the green “Follow” button, right under the Curator’s name …It’s clunky, but worth it.
To Find OTHER Curators:
To get to the Steam Curators section on steam, go to the steam store homepage (the “Featured” page), on the top bar click “Recommendations” to open the dropdown, and on the far right of that dropdown, near the bottom of the plain text list, there’s a “Steam Curators” button.
Two important (white) buttons near the top:
- CURATORS YOU FOLLOW
- FIND MORE CURATORS
You should follow Curators! Even if not mine! :praisesun:
(FYI: you can only follow 100 and ignore another 100). I follow curators that keep track of AI in games, rootkit level anticheat, and some other systems/priorities, as well as normal reviews, just for some suggestions.
This is great, thank you! No wonder I couldn’t find the curators section in the client’s UI. To expand on their search being shit, if I search for an exact word that is part of a curator’s name/title, it shows no results. The word in this case is “frame”. No results whatsoever, even though I follow a curator that includes that in their title. SMH.
You might be in the “recommend” section. You might have to click “most popular”.
It doesn’t make sense at all, but does the curator you’re trying to search for show up, then?
Prisons, Military, and Civilian surveillance.
Yeah. Fuck everything Microsoft.
Microslop*
Are there more RL blocklists I could subscribe to?
Just when I thought I couldn’t loce the game more, they do this!
It’s hard to put into words how fantastic this game is. I know of three very different experiences the game offers, each of which is worthwhile on its own.
First, if you play with a kid who hasn’t been ruined by the kind of min/maxxing attitude that you develop when you play a video game, you’ll get stuff like: “let’s go to the top of the mountain because the sun is going down” or “let’s stay here to listen to music for 10 minutes” type stuff. It’s really hard to facilitate this type of play, and the game does it expertly.
Second, if you play with one other person, you get to get good. After a couple of puzzles you start working together like a well-oiled machine, and it’s very satisfying to feel this.
Third, if you play with a large group, you don’t become a well oiled machine at all, and every puzzle is a new chaotic mess of misscommunication with 3 people wanting to do x and 3 others y, and this is fun in it’s own right. In addition, with this setup, you can lose each other, and get lost and randomly encounter eachother. The game has a host of imperfect remote communication options, and they kind of make for a meta puzzle on their own.
I remember one session where someone joined late (so the rest of the group was already on the other side of the island). Our group knew he was around because he’d shot some fireworks, but we didn’t see him for quite a while. At some point we were waiting for the train, and as it approached the bell rang, which it doesn’t do unless someone’s on it. Our friend was on the train! It felt almost like the riders of rohan arriving at helm’s deep or something. Never experienced anything like it in a video game.
Truly, truly a fantastic game.
i’ve played it 3 times with 3 different groups and each time it was fun for different reasons. surprisingly repayable!
Alright that settles it, I’m buying this game
It’s a good little puzzle game to play with friends, very silly
Is it still good if you play with strangers?
If only more people had morals and supported devs who do this. Buying the game now even if I dont play it.
boycott major franchises including Call of Duty and Candy Crush
O.O candy crush? major franchise??? Excuse me??
Oh it is a major franchise, mobile gaming is huge
################
- Candy Crush generated $1 billion in 2024, similar to the previous two years
- Candy Crush has made over $10 billion revenue for King since launch
- 180 million people play Candy Crush once a month. MAUs peaked in 2015 with 327 million users
- Across all platforms, Candy Crush has been downloaded more than 3.6 billion times
################
Source: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/candy-crush-statistics/
That is wild.
Considering this is Lemmy.ca and the article is from Eurogamer, perhaps the entire US should be on their boycott list, no? Russia was boycotted pretty eagerly when they started a war.
Well maybe they should just ban the US. Hopefully less circuses leads to more war
But they released on Windows?
They’ve also released on PS5, and Sony has an official non-position position, so I guess they’re not a BDS target: https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/News/Press/202310/23-030E/
Sure, but the store takes a financial cut, not the OS. Selling on steam doesn’t directly support Microsoft.
I imagine they would be testing their windows version on official windows OS/hardware at least once, giving money to Microsoft
You’re right, they aren’t perfectly pure, so they may as well do absolutely nothing instead. That makes perfect sense.
I was expecting it to be the smaller install base, but this is a good reason
Played this all the way through with a friend. Wish I could experience 4+ coop, but my larger coop group doesn’t like that type of game
anyway I recommend it!
