I think the games you mention are one of the reason why people are working on making horse games better. 😄

TIL there is still a temple of Caesar in Rome.

Maybe this one works for you.

Telling people in danger that their attempts to save themselves are contemptible is nothing but cynical callousness.

The """alpha male's""" masculinity is so fragile, they threw a conniption when seeing a picture of a fit woman.

A little long maybe, I assume it won't be long until it's just "likensub".

George Lucas introduced evil guys wearing SS uniforms who conduct genocide before the viewers' eyes and somehow people still pretend that Star Wars is apolitical.

Because there are lots of people in this thread who paint whales as "rich schmucks" who can afford to spend $48k without thinking twic. This is a myth that lots of the gaming industry itself loves to perpetuate, because it absolves them of taking responsibility for ruining lives.

Research has shown repeatedly that whales are much more likely to be people with mental health problems and/or gambling addicts. That Star Citizen isn't a freemium game with loot boxes makes it marginally better than - let's say - Genshin Impact, but offers like the bundle in the article is still predatory.

Everybody knows that these claims are bullshit. "1st Amendment rights" is the biggest dog whistle for bigots that they claim whenever their disrespectful conduct has consequences. You don't give a flying fuck about other people's "1st Amendment rights" when it isn't your racist, sexist or transphobic friends. Otherwise you'd be up in arms against book bans, but your kind cheers for them and every other effort to silence people you don't like.

They are totally right, it's a shame that PC Gamer did not name a single woman.

One nitpick though: Two of the women named in the article, Rieko Kodama and Amy Hennig, did not create games for PC. Both were employed by console makers. Jen Zee being acknowledged is certainly deserved, but a there are many, many trailblazing women in PC gaming which should be highlighted: Roberta Williams (co-founder of Sierra Online), Brenda Romero (Wizardry series), Jade Raymond (Assassin's Creed producer) or Danielle Bunten Berry (M.U.L.E.), just to name a few.

Particularly the omission of Roberta Williams who has not only co-founded one of early gaming's most successful game dev studios and publishers, but also designed the long-running King's Quest series which transformed and defined the adventure game genre, is inexcusable. It does not get more influential in gaming than that.

Ars Technica has done an interview with Unity's Marc Whitten and Whitten's responses are very, very telling:

"It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way," he said. [...]
"A large part of the problem, Whitten said, was that Unity "didn't communicate effectively... There were areas where there was some confusion, and we could have done a better job." [...]
"That's on us," he continued. "We didn't do a good enough job... of delivering the information that would help people."

It shows how dishonest he still is: Of course, they wanted to nickel-and-dime everything. People were not "confused", they were outraged. No matter how much of a mess Unity's initial explanations of the details were, the core message was pretty clear: Unity was aiming to get as much money out of developers as it can and it did neither bother to iron out the details of the changes, nor assess the potential damage their plans could do.

Rumours from inside Unity said that their own employees warned management, but managment saw a chance to make money and plowed ahead.

And going by Whitten's statements, they still want to hide behind meaningless corpo-speak and the same people who got their business into this mess now claim that they have changed their ways.

Personally I am convinced that 99% of that is just performative. They know it's bullshit to get angry about pronouns, but they do it because it generates attention and serves as a anti-LGBT+ dog whistle.