For my credentials: I’m not diagnosed myself. Growing up I always felt like a watered-down version of my older sister: a genius who suffered mental breakdowns. She helped to raise me and was eventually diagnosed with autism in been mid-30’s. I’ve always been high-functioning and never had a reason to seek a diagnosis or treatment, but I’ve had a lot of non-professional opinions that I’m probably on the spectrum too. It’s also possible that I’m neurotypical and was just heavily influenced by her growing up.

Also I feel obligated so say that the technically correct answer is to seek professional help, but I’m assuming that either that’s not an option or hasn’t worked if you’re posting here.

For the intimacy part, it might help to plan and talk about it in advance. Discuss in the morning what the plans for the day are and bring that up as an option. Or perhaps a recurring weekly schedule.

I have also found with adhd partners that they seem to be able to turn things on FAST. Like, one minute there’s no sign of anything sexual. We might be watching some nostalgic stuff from our childhood like pokemon, or some gross out horror movie, or a video essay on marine biology, or it’s late at night and I’m about to pass out to get up early the next day. Then all of a sudden “hey you wanna fuck” out of nowhere really catches me by surprise, and I struggle to switch gears that fast. Whereas if we planned in advance I might suggest we watch something a bit sexier to prepare: an action movie or HBO drama perhaps.

I don’t know you so this isn’t a personal attack: it’s possible that you might be displaying a lot of emotion that is intimidating to her. Facial expressions, voice tones, word choice, gestures, tears. She could be afraid of upsetting you, or just afraid of being in such an… Energetic conversation.

It’s worth noting that the trope of autistic people missing social cues is an oversimplification, and I suspect that only applies to people deep in the spectrum that do not function well. For myself it’s the opposite: I spent my childhood careful observing and noting social rules to try to follow them as best as I could, but the frustrating part is that no one else does. Everyone thinks they do, but people are just different from each other and most individuals are themselves inconsistent. So it might help you to keep an eye on your own mannerisms and behaviors too.

I understand my last 2 paragraphs were suggesting you change yourself. It’s totally valid for you to not want to, I’m just laying out options.

In my mind, emotions are the end result. They are a reflection of the past. Decisions, including communications, should be made rationally with the goal of producing good emotions in the future. In my experience, most people make decisions irrationally based on the emotions they are feeling in the present. Negative emotions can lead to bad decisions, which creates a downward cycle. Positive emotions can also cloud rational thought. To avoid the cycle, you need to make calm and rational decisions. When something goes wrong I set the emotions aside to become cold and calculating and make the best decisions I can. An important part (and one it sounds like she needs to work on) is to go back later and reflect on that emotion. Feel it fully, understand where it comes from, and understand if there needs to be any communication about it.

Also a great point.

I’m not ruling anything out at this point. It could be a classic case of a greedy corporation pushing out the real artists in order to exploit the art. It could be that the devs (specifically the 3 guys involved in the lawsuit) got lazy after they got paid. It could be both, neither, something else entirely. Honestly with how things go these days I’m just grateful there hasn’t been anything distasteful enough tl give me qualms about playing Subnautica.

After the last decade or more of people complaining about greedy publishers forcing devs to release half-baked messes too early (Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc), it feels like I’m living in a bizarro world to see so much criticism for a publisher delaying a game to (allegedly) make it better.

The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.

That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.

It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.

The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.

Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.

I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?

And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.

The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025

The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.

If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.

Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.

What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.

Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it

Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.

If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.

And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.

Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.

And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.

I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.

I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.

My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.

It only takes 1 badly made mod to make Skyrim unstable. I’m not sure what information you would be looking to gain from that.

That does not match my own experience.

Back in my day, I received a couple of demo disks packed in with my PS1, and I got a couple more through other means like magazines and the famous Pizza Hut promotion. Some games would include demos for other games too: Spyro and Crash Bandicoot used to do that a lot. Now that I think if it I don’t remember ever seeing any cartridge-based demos at all for any Nintendo or Sega systems, even the later ones like GBA and N64. There were kiosks in public places, but I never saw anything intended for a consumer to have- carts were just too expensive.

By the PS2 era demos had mostly dried up. I have a God of War demo that came with a magazine and that’s about it. I could only speculate as to why, but I suspect increasing game sizes and DVD’s being more expensive than CD’s may have been a factor?

I’ll admit I stopped paying attention to demo’s for a while, so maybe I missed a peak at some point from like 2010-2020. But nowadays Steam, the Switch, and the PS5 all have a category or filter option to look through demos. There’s tons of indie games trying to get attention, and of course tons of shovelware too. But most of Nintendo’s published games have demos on Switch. Scrolling through the PlayStation store I see EA sports games, Persona 3, Power wash Simulator, Ys, Diablo 4, FF VII Rebirth, Tekken 8, Crow Country., Chants of Senaar, Sea of Stars, Ghost Trick (I didn’t even know that was on the PS5 lol), Like a Dragon, Resident Evil 4… So Square, Capcom, Sega, EA, Activision-Blizzard, tons of indies, and more. Sony is the only publisher whose absence I noticed, unless you count VR stuff. The number of demos available today is overwhelming, if you look for them.

I mean… Your last sentence is already becoming more and more true every day, and has been for years. Microsoft was trying to eliminate the used game market back with the Xbox One. In the US at least there has been a sever decline in videogame stores. Gamestop used to be just one of a handful like Babbage’s and EB Games. Other stores on this initial post like Toys-R-Us also used to carry physical videogames too (I think Circuit City may have too?).

Plus I always felt that videogames are just consumed too differently from movies. Movies are something easy to consume in a night or a weekend, especially because the rental versions were usually just the movie with none of the special features. I rented videogames a few times as a kid, and I always felt so much pressure to try to play as much of the game on the time I had it as possible. It ended up a stressful and unpleasant experience. Plus you had some videogame developers who adjusted difficulty specifically for rental markets, like Lion King and Battletoads, which I would argue was detrimental to those games.

There’s a reason TV show rentals never really caught on like movies either- it just takes too long to consume comfortably. The Netflix mail model made a bit more sense for shows at least, but couldn’t quite bridge the gal for videogames. GameFly tried it and I suppose technically still exists, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about it in years. RedBox tried and had a nice moment, but ultimately got swallowed by streaming.

Plus DLC and updates are becoming more common, so it would be annoying to have to go and re-rent a game, purchase the DLC, try to speed through it in a weekend, then return the rented game but still be out whatever you paid for the DLC with no way to play it.

Rentals were pretty good for being a low-risk way to try a game out. You could spend $1-$5 usually for a game that might cost $40-$50 to buy new, and occasionally publishers would have promotions where a rental would come with a coupon to offset the rental price if you want to buy the game. Nowadays that has been replaced by free downloadable demos. Which aren’t perfect, but I think are better than the old rental system.

Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?

Please enlighten me then- what does Scarecrow Video do that makes them special? From a quick Internet search it looks like they re-organized into a non-profit, got officially recognized as a museum by the state, have relied on Kickstarter campaigns to stay running, and seem to still be struggling to keep the lights on. So just from skimming their website it seems like less of a business and more of a preserved piece of nostalgia and novelty.

Don’t get me wrong- I’m very much in favor of physical media and media preservation. Today’s streaming and digital “purchase” landscape has a ton of issues. I just think the solution to that is public libraries, and it looks like Scarecrow is trying to be a hybrid of a library, museum, and business with the business part failing.

Video rental is just plain outdated. Streaming as it is today has a lot of problems, but they are ones that could be easily solved through regulation if regulators ever had the appetite. These stores went out of business because technology made their industry obsolete. I bet most people would have to do a little work to even play a DVD or Blu-Ray today. Maybe dig out an old device and hook it up, or use a laptop with a disc drive. Maybe a gaming console, but there have been a lot on the market for a while now that don’t have optical drives. There’s enthusiasts of course- including people who still keep VCR’s and laser disc players and even people with their own reel-to-reel projectors, but they’re a tiny minority.

Friendly’s I only went to once and it was unremarkable casual dining. That industry DOES have a problem where private equity keeps on buying, looting, and destroying companies, but I’m also hopeful that can open up more space for small businesses instead. I’ll pass on this one.

My memories of RadioShack were that it was cheap junk that was overpriced, but often the only reasonable option unless you wanted to order online or through a catalog from somewhere that could take months to arrive. I do wonder what the world would have been like if RadioShack had positioned itself as a repaor parts supplier and lobbied for Right to Repair legislation. Probably a stretch of the imagination.

Circuit City… For some reason I thought they went out of business largely due to embezzlement, but when I look forward that now I can’t find anything so maybe I’m thinking of another company? Best Buy seems to be struggling to compete with Amazon and Wal-Mart still today, so I don’t think Circuit City could have lasted much longer than it did either way.

Party City and Toys-R-Us are the 2 that make me upset, because both were successful businesses ruined by Private Equity. Not that I want to simo for these corporations, but what PE has been doing to so many industries in the past decade is absolutely disgusting. Id I had to choose one to bring back I’d say Party City because a lot of the custom and specific party supplies there aren’t going to be stocked by your local Target or Wal-Mart, and that’s the kind of thing you’d prefer to see in person rather than order online.

I find gyro on handhelds is tricky. When I’m lying on the couch or in bed in some weird way it’s more hindrance than help, and even when I’m sitting upright it’s kinda weird. I prefer to only use gyro if I have a separate screen, like with the PS5 or a docked switch.

The back buttons are great for their own things though.

They bought the Perfect Dark IP though. That’s probably just going to languish now.

I think of that with BioShock 1 and Infinite too. Rapture was an atheist society while Colombia was highly religious. Colombia was highly centralized and regulated by an authoritarian dictator, while Rapture is deregulated and allows private businesses to run wild and cause chaos. It’s almost as if BioShock Infinite was written as a counterpoint, to clarify that the first game was not meant to be political.

I suppose you could say both games are criticizing extremism, which combine to form a centrist message. But even that I think was less of a choice to discuss politics and moreso just “We need conflict to create an interesting videogame. What’s a good way to create conflict? Just take some political views and crank them up to the extreme- surely no one will sympathize with them then!”

Interestingly - I have 4 (two Pro 2’s, an SN30 Pro, and one of the Ultimate C variants) and have used them all on my Steam Deck before. The past couple of years at family gatherings I’ve hooked up my Deck to a big screen and allowed the kids to play Mario Party and such.

So I’m kind of confused about what is being added now. Their post says more details to come so I guess I’ll see?

Perhaps i’m too optimistic, but I think these conflicts tend to be resolved much earlier on. I don’t think someone just wakes up one day and says “hey I want to be an evil selfless despot”.

Not a dictator, but I think a close enough example is Mackenzie Scott, formerly Bezos. I don’t know her or Jeff personally of course. We know about Jeff’s privelege of course, but Mackenzie was the daughter of a financial planner and granddaughter of a natural gas executive herself. The two of them met working at a hedge fund. I hate hedge funds and think they shouldn’t exist, and I suspect there was some nepotism and privelege that helped them both get there, but i’m not going to call everyone who works at a hedge fund or benefits from privelege evil.

Then they quit to start Amazon. Privelege aside I am sure there was a lot of hard work and risk in those early years. She reportedly did a lot of work while also having 3 children (and they adopted a 4th), and she also put off her passion of writing novels to do so. I’ve known a lot of people who own their own small businesses, and there’s a lot of hard decisions and sleepless nights involved. I’m sure they both made mistakes and learned lessons, and occasionally made selfish decisions.

To use a scientifically inaccurate idiom- the frog boiled. Amazon became more ruthless, certainly unethical, and most likely violated antitrust laws that never get enforced. They applied more pressure to everyone - their employees (which led to union suppression tactics), their suppliers, their customers, governments, and that’s just what I know about.

It’s possible that Mackenzie knew about all of that and was fine benefitting from it until Jeff cheated or grew distant or whatever. But from her quotes and her actions afterwards, it seems like she had enough of the exploitation. She divorced him in 2019, getting half of Jeff’s net worth and making Musk the world’s richest man instead.

She signed the Giving Pledge, which at face value is basically a promise to give away most of her wealth to charity in her lifetime. The efficacy of the Giving Pledge is beyond the scope of this comment, but according to her website she’s given away over $19 billion. Philanthropy like that can often be a shady scheme to funnel money to friends and family, avoid taxes, or lobby governments for favorable legislation. It’s possible that she is doing some of that too, but I haven’t seen an expose yet. So maybe she actually is giving that wealth back to the world.

She also has written and released a couple of novels. Maybe she hired a ghost writer, and I’m sure her money helped her get published, but it does kinda seem like that was her dream and she followed it. She also married (and shortly thereafter divorced) a private schoolteacher- not skme celebrity or politician or billionaire.

Maybe it’s just a well-crafted facade, but from a distance it looks to me like a rare case of someone actually realizing that such wealth accumulation was bad for the world and stepping away from it. She’s still quite wealthy, allegedly with a net worth over $30 billion left, but that kind of money takes time to get rid of and she seems to be making progress.

Questions like “how much money should a person be allowed to have” are details that are going to change over time and I’m not sure what the answer is right now, but at the very least i think the world would be a better place if more billionaires did what Mackenzie Scott is claiming to be doing.