Rob

@jack1492 @hissgoescobra Imagine making this post and then...believing it. Incredible.

@hissgoescobra Five Eyes is not anything we want to be part of. Unconstitutional. Must have a warrant to spy on someone.

Five Eyes intelligence sharing just went bye bye if it hadn’t already.

@GoodnerThe @DavideCugini @elonmusk @Tesla Solid question. You don't need an attorney to press charges against a vandal. You don't need an attorney for small claims court. You might need one for petit court if you're going to sue, but suing people who own nothing and have $40k debt on average is...bad finances.

@DavideCugini @elonmusk @Tesla If your Tesla gets vandalized, why would you need to be represented?

If anyone in Ohio has a Tesla and it gets vandalized, call me. I’ll represent you for free. Cc:@elonmusk @Tesla

@assassinscreed Just push it back to November and take the time to remove Yasuke entirely.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows now releases March 20, 2025.

@FirewalkStudios Why the references nobody will understand? This is where you went wrong with your game. Nobody cares about something until you establish stakes. You can't keep attention to establish stakes without good content. Try being negative, it's apparently less toxic than positivity.

Firewalk is signing off one last time. Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience. Along the way we assembled an incredible team who were able to: - Navigate growing a new startup into a team during a global pandemic: Firewalk was founded in 2018 and was very small for its first couple years, only entering full Production in 2022. - Build a new, customized next-generation FPS engine in Unreal 4 -> 5, delivering top-tier gameplay feel, beautiful worlds, and a performant 60fps technical experience on a stable and scalable backend on PS5 and PC to hundreds of thousands of players in our beta. - Manage an acquisition / integration while readying technical and preliminary tests. - And ultimately ship and deliver a great FPS experience to players- even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market. We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward. The talent at Firewalk and the level of individual craft is truly world-class, and teams within Sony Interactive Entertainment and across the industry will be fortunate to work with them. Please reach out to Recruiting at PlayStation for inquiries, and thank you to all the very many teams, partners and fans who supported us along the way. See you in the Tempest. - Firewalk Studios … [end transmission]

@DevinNash @WolfWist Twitch's financial situation is weird because Twitch itself, a subsidiary of Amazon, is also the third largest customer of AWS, a subsidiary of Amazon. So Twitch not making money doesn't really mean Amazon doesn't make money from it. It's in the neighborhood of money laundering.

@WolfWist not looking good

Twitch is in an advertising nightmare situation. Advertisers are leaving the website and not returning. Twitch has controversy after controversy and can’t get its enforcement straight. I don’t know if the website will survive long term without serious changes. The solution to it is simple, brutal, and efficient. Ban all extremist/controversial/political content, or none of it. But simple is not often easy. To understand it, and what’s going on, we need to go back in time a bit. Youtube’s own “adpocalypse” began in March 2017. Major advertisers discovered their ads were appearing alongside controversial or extremist content (sound familiar?) A ton of key advertisers pulled ads from the platform, including AT&T, Pepsi, and others. The next two years were savage for Youtube. The website had to build an algorithm that could identify brand-friendly content against controversial content at scale. It wasn’t always right at first. Dozens of creators were banned, sometimes for no reason. That STILL happens sometimes today. Building this system cost millions, thousands of hours, and countless controversies and risks. But today, Youtube is the most sophisticated ad network in the world. It keeps viewers happy by not serving them too many ads (mostly), and keeps advertisers happy by serving their ads on relevant, brand-friendly content. During this same period, Twitch was instead investing in their live CDN (content delivery network) and in broadcasting rights, content, and streamers. They paid $90,000,000 to broadcast the Overwatch league. They signed multi-year partnerships with Riot Games to broadcast League of Legends. They paid streamers like Ninja and Shroud, also on contracts worth millions of dollars. None of this amounted to much. It’s safe to say that most of this money was wasted. Meanwhile, their ad system - the primary way for Twitch to make money - languished. If you want to buy ads on Twitch, you need to pay a high minimum (think $100,000+) and talk to someone physically there. The ads have limited/no targeting. Ads get served everywhere across the website, and often to irrelevant or controversial streamers. Because ads are served everywhere, Twitch is only as good as its worst streamer. Maybe Twitch figured that these problems would work themselves out if the content was good. But they didn’t, and the content is now on the decline. Extremists (on all sides) run huge communities on the platform. Major and notable advertisers (ADL, big six agencies) are telling Twitch the current state of advertising isn’t okay. And they’re right. Because Twitch didn’t invest in ad targeting and good systems when they should’ve, they’re now on the backfoot compared to every other platform. Their ad inventory is getting cheaper because the quality of their website is declining, forcing them to run more cheap ads to appease Amazon. The increased ad inventory means viewers are sometimes getting served 8 ads at once when joining a stream, causing viewers to leave the platform. And so here we are. Twitch has always operated from fear. They were afraid other websites would cannibalize their audience (Mixer) so they bought streamers. They thought Youtube would take their viewers so they bought broadcasting rights (LCS, OWL.) They thought big music would come for them so they spent millions building libraries and licensing rights. Meanwhile Youtube built systems to address these problems long-term, and instead was willing to fail for years knowing a better future was possible. Twitch is now in an unenviable situation. They’ve allowed high brand-risk streamers to be a significant percentage of their audience. The team responsible for enforcement (Trust & Safety) can’t determine who should and shouldn’t be on the platform. They can’t do this because they’re human and have inconsistent (or by some opinions malicious) policy coming from the top. They insert their opinions and pick favorites because that’s what humans do. Twitch communities are outraged (justifiably) that certain streamers get chosen to stay on Twitch and others are permanently banned. Twitch is shoehorned into this position of picking favorites. It can never work, the website quality will continue to go down, and advertisers will continue to leave. The choice ahead for @djclancy999 is clear to me. You must either ban ALL controversial and extremist content or none of it. And because a competitor already exists where all content is allowed and owns 10% of Twitch’s audience (Kick), the choice is pretty clear. This means politics (all sides), hateful content, and so on. Some people may argue this “line is unclear.” That was true in 2015 when we were figuring out advertising. But today it’s VERY clear and these categories are well understood. You can see each level of what’s controversial or not on Youtube’s pages or when you upload a Youtube video. You can try forcing this content into categories and then demonetizing that content, but it’s too far gone and the Twitch kingmaker system still throws that content to the top of discovery. You can’t fool advertisers, but this is a stop gap that might at least help temporarily. The worst place to sit though is in the middle. And that’s the problem here, the waffling. By being half-in on every decision Twitch has managed to anger everyone - advertisers, viewers, and streamers. I don’t care if it’s a supervillain level take but Twitch was much better as a gaming-focused website. It could’ve been the live streaming platform for everything, but again, the systems weren’t built and that ship has sailed to Youtube and Tiktok. By removing all controversial content and bringing it back to gaming, music, crafts, etc, you pull back in advertisers and your core audience. Your CPMs go back up and you can serve less ads for more money. You appease Amazon and also completely end the debacle that is selective enforcement of policies. You heal. I don’t know if Twitch is willing to make the tough decisions. Along with the above you probably need to massively cut staff (500 last year was a start but it’s still bloated.) Then you need to rebuild the Trust and Safety team, apply policy evenly to every broadcaster, and start work on true ad filtering. But it starts with banning all extremist and political content. Twitch has proven its incapable of handling the responsibility of moderating their website. The line has to be drawn here. When you make extreme mistakes, you have to enact extreme solutions. I used to love people having good vibes and sharing epic moments together in gaming. I used to love the community. Fixing this will require ruthless executive oversight. But without it, we’ll continue to see the slow and sad decline of the platform so many people fell in love with in the past.

@pcgamer Here's all you need to know: Games as politics? Very bad; do not do this if you want to make money. Politics in games? Unless you're Kojima, you're probably not going to do this very well.

Let's talk about politics in games. trib.al/bO8KHRf

@DaddyWarpig The only question is who's going to give Hissrich another shot as a showrunner? Someone will, because no lessons can be learned.

Lauren Hissrich loathed the material, the stories and setting, and also loathed the fans. She made the Nilfgardians into literal “dickheads” and otherwise trashed the characters. She also pushed for actors and actresses who did not match the characters in the books. Henry Cavill was the reason we got the goodness we did get.

@unusual_whales Producing that one dashboard meant the AI doing the employee talent evaluations determined he had shown "marked improvement" and he now has another eighteen months to deliver two dashboards.

Oh, no:

@PaulHook_em @greg_price11 @StephenM Is the punchline to this joke illiteracy? Verses vs. versus

@greg_price11 @StephenM What America just witnessed!

This is the most important 3 minutes you'll watch today about America's health crisis. RFK explains how ultra processed food, seed oils, pesticides, and food additives are messing up kids. "We are mass poisoning all of our children."

@assassinscreed You still have time to fix this. Push the game a year, hire a Japanese writer to create a story for a Japanese samurai, make Yasuke a side character like every other historical figure in the series, and deliver a real apology. Or you can let Ubisoft burn. Choices.

The Assassin's Creed Shadows team has a message for our Japanese community.

@Grummz @Ubisoft What do you think will be the lessons learned for Ubisoft if they end up getting banned in Japan (presumably for copyright violation)?

Just got a report from someone at Japan Expo. @Ubisoft staff are asking that anyone using the seats at the Assassins Creed: Shadows booth to turn around to face their screen. People were using them as benches to watch the much more popular Nintendo booth across the way. Nobody cares about Ubisoft.

@The_PunKing @Grummz @Ubisoft Italian-Americans love Mario Mario, though. No word yet on whether Luigi Mario has lived up to his nona's expectations.

@Grummz @Ubisoft Japanese: Here's an italian that we make fun of, but he's lovable and your favorite hero. Ubisoft: Here's a horrible take on Japan, and we hate everyone who doesn't agree.

@GreenTextRepost Cars aren't an asset, they are a liability. If you were wealthy, you'd already know that.

@Pilestedt @papi_street Your community management team has made it very, very hard to remain interested. Every time I hear something about the game it's your Discord mods behaving like dicks. Beyond that, my friends stopped playing. They may come back to it, but I likely won't. Too busy for nonsense.

@papi_street Hey, what made you lose your hype? Asking for a friend. 🤔

Are you all excited for the patch? I am! There's so many changes and buffs to unused stratagems! Also, maybe some old/new threats 🤔

@_XboxNews It's RDR2 or No Man's Sky, and 2018 NMS is a no.

Pick ONE game from 2018 to keep.

@IAmToastMan Nintendo won. Sony lost. Sega lost first.

PC gamers won't buy a PS5 to play its exclusive games because their PCs are "superior" but they have no issue buying a Switch to play its exclusive games?

@sherlock_hulmes I figure you may find this valuable from a feedback perspective: if I am going to run D&D, we are not playing a pre-written. We're not playing in a published setting. These are hard and fast rules because players cannot help reading available materials.

Simple D&D Question for you today. When you play/played D&D (any edition), what do you mostly play? (Canon Setting w/Homebrew = Forgotten Realms/Eberron/Dark Sun etc with a story created by the DM themselves, not official adventures).

@Grummz Nobody really enjoys the consequences of their actions when their actions are terminally stupid.

He called for the hunting down of your (and my own) family and mothers, and then... Accused *me* of harassing him. Then he went protected and blocked me. How is this sane?

@Grummz @RealJackkkkk We are getting so close @Pilestedt We're almost there. Keep it going.

BREAKING: Helldivers has FIRED Discord COMMUNITY MANAGER Spitz, who inflamed the community with his flip defense of PSN, which he later walked back. All roles removed, and he cites asking players to do negative reviews as the reason. Thanks to @RealJackkkkk for the screencaps. Has the cleanup begun? Purple was also demoted (but not fired) after falsely accusing me of crimes.

@Pilestedt @helldivers2 @PlayStation Next step is removing the community managers and community team who made this much, much worse than it had to be. Then we can talk about those reviews.

Firstly, I am impressed by the willpower of the @helldivers2 community and your ability to collaborate. Secondly I want to thank our partners and friends at @PlayStation for quickly and effectively making the decision to leave PSN linking optional. We together want to set a new standard for what a live game is, and how developers and community can support each other to create the best game experiences.