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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.
Wikipedia talk page
(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)
Summary on Know Your Meme
Shoeonhead's video
Forbes review
Slant Magazine review
I’d put forth the following arguments:
It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.
I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.
One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.
Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.
Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.
All of this is a nothingburger, other than the fact that it's successful despite doing a bunch of things that nobody in the western games industry wants to do. So they have no excuse for not doing it.
If it had sold 30,000 copies nobody would have cared. But it is successful.
Out of fear of backlash, you mean? Or out of simple profit considerations? Or something else?
Pragmata is:
The game industry doesn't like any of these things. They like predictable fiscal outcomes, safe products, and the industry itself is staffed by people who despise their (mostly male) audience and have seen games as an opportunity for social engineering for years.
It's no surprise the current wave of independent developer success has come from generally outside the games industry, or people who had to leave the entrenched game industry to start up their own companies.
Is this actually true? One major point of criticism these days towards AAA games the last few years is that so many companies are trying to create the new Fortnite, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into live service game after live service game, with the Venture Capital-like math where 1 "infinite money glitch" success pays for 9 failures.
Concord is the most prominent example (rumored to have cost $400MM, almost certainly at least $100MM - shut down in under 2 weeks due to lack of players), but there are others, like Marathon this year (also by Sony, which bought the devs Bungie for almost $4 billion, with likely an additional >$100MM spent on development - currently averaging around 10-20k players on Steam). Sony is also currently working on a live service game based on the Horizon franchise. I'm not the first person who has pointed out that Sony owns a ton of franchises known for great singleplayer games that they could have poured a "modest" sum of around $20MM-$50MM for development to generate a "modest" profit fairly reliably instead of going for moonshots. Likewise, Ubisoft owns a ton of great singleplayer franchises like Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia, which they tend to ignore in favor of trying to make the next 10MM+ selling AssCreed game with microtransactions. Maybe they finally hit rock bottom and are reversing course with remaking Black Flag.
Heck, if you gave me $20MM, I bet I could get enough devs together to make a competent remaster Bloodborne which would almost certainly make a nice, safe profit, given how much bigger Soulslikes and Fromsoft have gotten in the 11 years since the original release. Yet Sony seems to have no interest in that.
The whole point of live service, as pointed out by someone here recently re: Adobe, is predictable fiscal outcomes. Bean counters and finance execs like predictable cashflow statements that come from subscriptions or regular cash injections. They'd rather make $20 every two months on a battlepass for the next two years than $60 up front, but if they could charge you $60 and then use the battlepass model as well that's even better.
Concord was a bad idea from the beginning because it was developed and designed by morons who internally steamrolled any criticism of the project and it was attached to the reputation and faith of Herman Hulst, who believed in it so much he didn't bother playing it. There's also rumors that the entire thing was a grift to get Sony to pay for the studio and in that essence it was very successful. Bloodborne is a bit of a special case, from what we know it's because Miyazaki doesn't trust Sony with it.
Subscriptions surely are nice and low-volatility when it works, but it seems like a case of "10% of the time, it works every time." Which is necessarily high volatility.
For Bloodborne, I was under the impression that Sony owned the rights and could just tell Miyazaki to pound sand? Are there weird rights issues surrounding the exclusive deal they made back then?
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