Weekly Scroll: Gamers Rise Up
Plus: Reruns on Twitch, sites get original, and a very Radical Chicken
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On to the discourse…
Helldivers Destroys Itself For No Good Reason
Gaming is big enough that gaming culture now overlaps with internet culture in dozens of ways. And we’ve got two major stories from the gaming world this week.
The first story comes from the game Helldivers 2, which is one of the biggest breakout hit games of the last year. It’s true success story - the first Helldivers was moderately successful but nothing special, while the second one has sold more than 8 million copies in its first two months, rocketing to the top of the charts. The game’s player base is so large and enthusiastic that they’re even creating unique cultural moments - I’ve previously talked about the community’s fun Joel Conspiracies here.
The game, developed by Arrowhead Studios and published by Sony, is playable on either PlayStation or Windows/PC, with cross-platform play enabled. That’s both a source of strength and the cause of their downfall.
Yesterday, Sony posted a notice that Helldivers players who play on PC would need to link to a PlayStation Network account in order to keep playing. And the community, to put it lightly, is not happy:
The game has received more than 80,000 negative reviews in the last two days. Fans are sharing tips for how to request refunds. The Helldivers subreddit is in full meltdown, with the mood being almost universally against the game they’re all there to play. Why is it such a big deal to link a PlayStation account?
There are a few reasons the players are so upset. The first is that there’s no actual reason for the change - the game has been out for around three months at this point and never required PC players to have a PlayStation account before. Making it a requirement months after release when there’s no technical need seems stupid. And of course, it’s not like Sony is known for their data security - Helldivers fans are pointing out the long history of Sony data breaches.
The response from the game’s team has also been… mixed at best. One community manager posted this message:
It’s not like this is the first or even the fourteen mainstream game to require a third-party account that takes a couple of minutes to create, but if it’s a dealbreaker to have to take 120 seconds out of your day to enter an email and a password and then forget about it, change your Steam review and make your displeasure known on a platform where it matters.
Some free PR advice: might be a bad idea for your community manager’s tone to be ‘Why don’t you cry about it?’ when the fanbase is melting down. Apparently fans took his advice, and now are absolutely tanking the game’s rating anywhere they can.
The deeper problem, beyond the changing requirements for no reason, is that PlayStation accounts aren’t even available in a large number of countries. If you live in the Baltic States, or Russia, or the Philippines, or virtually anywhere in Africa - you’re just shit out of luck. You’ll be locked out of the game. And trying to fake your country of origin could get you banned from the game entirely. I have to sympathize with the gamers here. They’ve got a point!
The developers of the game seem - that one community manager aside - seem sympathetic. Arrowhead Studio’s CEO tweeted out that the review bombing was warranted, and expressed regret this was happening at all. Other community managers have made it clear this was not an Arrowhead Studios decision but rather came directly from Sony, and that they’re trying to fix it.
And that’s the puzzle piece that makes me say ‘Aha!’. Sony is the game’s publisher but also owns PlayStation. Of course they’d want every player on this very, very popular game to create a PlayStation account. From Sony’s perspective, this move has benefits in terms of getting a bunch of new user data1 and potentially getting new customers on their platform. Unfortunately for them, they may have tanked the popularity of one of their biggest breakout hits to do so.
To me this underscores how important it is to be able to understand the currents behind online communities and social media. Most PR fiascos come from a decision maker’s inability to understand how popular sentiment works online. Of course this was going to backfire! A smarter move would have been to create some desirable in game item or feature, and restrict that to only players with a PSN account. You’d be pulling in users gently and voluntarily rather than forcing them in, and complaints from players would seem less urgent and more petty. But Sony was thinking of players as numbers they can just move around a spreadsheet, when it turns out the numbers have feelings of their own and don’t like being treated that way.
Gamergate, but more pathetic
If the last story made you sympathetic, this one will give you whatever the opposite of sympathy is. Schadenfreude? Yeah, let’s go with schadenfreude. This one’s embarrassing and messy in a classic, neckbeard gamer kind of way.
Stellar Blade is an action-adventure game released on PlayStation2 in late April. You don’t need to know much about the game other than two facts: it’s got strongly positive reviews, and the main character Eve is a sexy anime lady.
There’s nothing wrong with having a sexy female protagonist. Games like Nier Automata and Bayonetta are critically beloved while leaning heavily into that trope. There’s a reason Angelia Jolie was chosen to play Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. We’re all adults here.
But some gamers are mad! No, they’re not mad that Eve wears revealing clothing. They’re mad that the clothing isn’t revealing enough. They’ve created a whole campaign decrying the ‘censorship’ of Eve’s sexy, sexy outfits that they feel entitled to, I guess. I’m trying to put this in a neutral tone, but there’s really no way to present this without making them out to be the saddest virgins you’ve ever encountered.
For reference, this is the level of ‘censorship’ we’re talking about. The left image was from the game’s marketing material, the right in the actual in-game costume. She’s wearing maybe 5% more clothing.
Other examples of horrifying censorship here, but you get the point.
In response to the main character showing 10% less cleavage, a group of disgruntled fans have thrown enormous tantrums and created a Change.org petition which now has over 75,000 signatures. This is really a kick in the pants for a certain kind of gamer, because anti-woke partisans were celebrating the game before it came out as an unabashedly sexualized game that was ‘uncensored’.
I try not to be overly cruel to anyone on this blog, but I really do want to emphasize how sad this all is. These are some of the most disaffected losers I’ve ever seen and I’ve been online for decades. Just check out the testimonial videos they’ve voluntarily uploaded to the anti-censorship petition. I mean this seriously - if can report back to me that you watched those four videos without cringing, I’ll give you a free month paid sub. It’s impossible to portray them worse than they portray themselves. This is GamerGate reborn, only somehow sadder, whinier and more pathetic.
Unlike Helldivers, where the entire community seems outraged, the Stellar Blade drama is an isolated phenomenon to anti-woke weirdos obsessed with their little corner of the culture war. Despite their tantrums, reviews for the game are very strong and the game is doing well. It this seems like a prime example of how cooked GamerGate is as a movement. GamerGate was instrumental in the creation of the modern alt-right, but all those types have moved on from taking advantage of gamers in to actual politics. The sad, angry gamers who want more booba are now just ineffective losers, raging alone against a world that has passed them by.
Reruns on Twitch
One of the realities of being a full-time streamer is that you have a looooooooooooot of time to fill on air. Most full time streamers are streaming 4+ days a week, 6-12 hours per session. You’ve got dozens of hours of airtime each week, and you’ve got to fill it with something. This why gaming is so popular - it’s an easy way to keep your audience engaged while you burn through those hours.
Something else that can eat up the hours is watching TV with your audience. Just pop on some DragonBall Z, some Game of Thrones, you know? Those are hugely popular shows, your chat likes your commentary and personality, what could go wrong?
Well, it turns out copyright is a thing that still exists online! Lots of streamers - famous and non-famous - still watch TV shows and movies on stream without permission. But they do tend to catch bans for that behavior, even big names like Pokimane and xQc. And as streaming has gotten bigger, the sites have been taking copyright more seriously.
All of that background is to introduce a startup with a fairly exciting new idea: Why not just buy the licenses for shows so that they can be shown legally? Gaggl has a nifty video showing off how the concept works:
Right now the only license they seem to have is for older reruns of the Price is Right, and they’re in a limited release test mode. But the tests seem to have gone well, and there’s no reason Gaggl couldn’t expand and eventually build a profitable business model. Buy up the rights to older/cheaper shows that you can get at a heavy discount. Sell access to streamers who desperately need content to fill the 50+ hours a week they stream. Seems like it could work!
I’m very interested to see if this sort of thing can grow. And I think game shows are the perfect type of content to do this with - they’re inherently interactive, fast-paced and reaction-based in a way that makes them chat-friendly and streamer-friendly.
The value of OC
A couple stories caught my eye recently. The first is from Instagram, who are making changes to benefit original content:
Historically because of how we’ve ranked content, creators with large followings and aggregators of reposted content have gotten more reach in recommendations than smaller, original content creators. We think it’s important to correct this to give all creators a more equal chance of breaking through to new audiences.
To do this, we’re introducing four changes:
A new input to ranking that will give smaller creators more distribution.
Replacing reposts with original content in recommendations.
Adding labels to reposted content, linking to the original creator.
Removing content aggregators from recommendations.
You may also remember a link from last week’s Weekly Scroll mentioning that Reddit seems to have changed their algorithm to benefit small subreddits and original content.
The wisdom of the ancients says that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.3 I’m ready to call it after only two examples: we’ve got a trend going on here. Original content is vital, social media companies know it, and they’re acting on it to make sure the original content is on their site - not somewhere else.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. In the age of AI, as everyone is hoovering up as much data and text as they can, original content is king. You’re in a much stronger position in the AI wars (or just as a data broker) if your site is filled with original posts rather than copies. But beyond AI, original content is what drives cultural relevance and ultimately power. The graph below might be the single most interesting and important graph in the history of the social internet:
This comes courtesy of the site Know Your Meme, who document notable memes, events, people and trends from across the internet. This graph shows the ‘place of origin’ of every meme or trend that the site documented for more than a decade. And it essentially functions as a history of social media.
Early on YouTube and 4chan were dominant, but both have declined in relative importance over time. This graph shows the rise of Twitter - not as the biggest site in revenue or number of users, but as the dominant cultural force it became. It shows that yes, Tumblr had about a 2-3 year period around 2014 where it really was one of the most influential places on the internet. We see Reddit as a fairly steady presence. We see that Facebook, despite their size, hasn’t been a prime driver of internet culture in more than a decade. And we see how the death of Vine led directly into the explosive popularity of TikTok.
What the sites are beginning to realize is that while you don’t need cultural relevance to make money (hello Facebook!) it sure helps with your site’s staying power. You’d much rather be the site where all the memes and discourse originate from, rather than the site where the memes are reposted from somewhere else. You can goose your engagement numbers by resorting to the lowest-common-denominator of reposted content, but that’s unlikely to work as a long term strategy.
Links
YouTube accounted for 10% of all TV viewing time in March, according to Nielsen. Netflix is around 8% and all cable networks combined are 28%.
Substack has big plans for Notes. Notes can now be embedded on external sites, and Substack seems to be growing more and more towards a social network model. I’m not sure whether this will work, but I don’t fault them for trying.
In the wake of last week’s commentary on how gambling is metastasizing everywhere - Dave and Buster’s is introducing gambling on their arcade games. We may be taking things too far.
TikTok finally struck a deal with Universal Music Group, making the music for a vast array of artists available once more on the platform. Dance away, kids (while you still can).
In the ‘Well, yeah, duh” category - Google warns that tech companies and AI companies will lose out on top talent if the US doesn’t update their immigration policies.
Reddit users finally identified the previously unidentified viral song ‘Everyone Knows That’ after a multi-year search that drove tens of thousands of people to try to identify the catchy tune. Turns out it was from porn.
Posts
I am deeply unsure why The Economist needed to cover this
I genuinely would not be surprised if some executive at Sony read a ‘Data is the new oil’ blog post and then forced this move through just to get a couple million emails.
Not involved in the drama this time! Just a coincidence.
This is actually a quote from James Bond, but it’s more fun to imagine it was Descartes.
Amazon should be able to strangle Gaggl in the crib by giving licenses for prime originals to Twitch. Doing it with the Fallout show would have been a no brainer.
Well, Sony has backtracked on the Helldivers PSN account linking.
Personally, I thought this whole thing was really dumb. For almost 20 years people have been making PSN accounts in different regions to access different versions of the store and Sony has never made a big issue out of it. People don't get banned for it unless they were doing something else illegal on top of it and drawing attention to themselves. All people in unsupported regions had to do was make an account in the nearest available region and then forget about it. Was it against TOS? Yeah, technically, but 1) Sony has never taken action against that sort of thing, and 2) gamers acting like the TOS is some sacred document (and not full of CYA legalese) that they don't regularly violate for innocent (and less innocent) reasons was eyeroll-worthy.
I feel bad for Arrowhead for being an innocent participant unwillingly caught in that drama storm, but this was such a nontroversy.