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Friday, September 7, 2012

Toronto Review: Snoop Dogg's Reincarnated


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Box Office Report: Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana's 'The Words' Leading Soft Weekend

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This Week’s Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

September 7th, 2012Top Story

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

This Week’s Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7thThis week we investigated whether it's worth shutting down your computer regularly, turned your closet full of junk into money, found a great VPN, and more. Here's a look back.

This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Is it Bad to Shutdown My Computer Regularly or Leave It On All the Time?

Dear Lifehacker, I've heard it's bad to shut down your computer every night. Is it really better to leave it on all the time? I have a high-end machine and want to take care of it but I don't know the best way to do that. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Top 10 Tricks for Turning Your Junk Into Money

If you're looking to declutter a little bit, there's no better way to do so than selling your junk online. Here are our top 10 tips and tricks for getting the most money possible out of your old, unwanted stuff. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Why You Should Start Using a VPN (and How to Choose the Best One for Your Needs)

You may know what a VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is; you probably don't use one. You really should be using a VPN, and even if you don't think so now, at some point in the future you may consider it as important as your internet connection. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

1 Million Apple Device IDs Leaked, 12 Million Total Stolen

One million Apple UDIDs (Universal Device IDs) were released to the public today, along with Notification Center tokens, device names, and device IDs, and while none of the data is personal information, it can potentially be tied back to device owners, names, and addresses. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Make Your Computer More Self-Sufficient This Weekend

Maintaining your computer, tidying your desktop, and doing a number of other digital chores requires a lot of effort-or at least time-on your part. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Why Remote Workers Are More (Yes, More) Engaged

If you work from home, you've probably gotten an eye roll or two from your office-bound friends. But as consultant Scott Edinger explains, working from home or in a remote office can lead to increased productivity, more effective communication, and better teamwork.
Who is more engaged and more... More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

The Best Things to Buy in September

Summer may be slowly drawing to a close, but that doesn't mean September can't still be awesome. Soothe your summer sadness by getting in on great deals this month. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

A Better Way to Practice

While it may be true that there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going, there certainly are ways of needlessly prolonging the journey. We often waste lots of time because nobody ever taught us the most effective and efficient way to practice. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

How to Block Annoying Political Posts on Facebook

I'm all for intelligent dialog, but if there's one thing I hate about election season, it's that some of my friends-god love 'em-can become extremely irritating when politics are involved. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Five Best Audio Editing Applications

Whether you need a soundtrack for your film, you're a DJ and need to polish up your sets before sharing them, or you're a musician looking to produce the next big club hit, you need a good audio editor to eliminate noise, convert your files, edit tracks, and output the whole thing. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Catch a Liar with the This/That Trap

People fumble around with their words a lot when they're lying. In fact, a liar often adds words so they can truthfully answer questions by obscuring the meaning. More »


This Week's Most Popular Posts: September 1st to 7th

Add Some Magical Scenery to Your Desktop with These Landscape Wallpapers

When desktop wallpaper first emerged as a computer customization option, landscapes were the photos of choice. Some of them are so stunning that they seem unreal. More »


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You Shouldn't Have To Be Middle Class or Rich To Make Video Games

September 7th, 2012Top Story

You Shouldn't Have To Be Middle Class or Rich To Make Video Games

By Patricia Hernandez

You Shouldn't Have To Be Middle Class or Rich To Make Video Games Steam Greenlight, the voter-determined submission system created by Valve, isn't free anymore. The point was to decrease the number of illegitimate submissions, which was neccesary after the insane influx of games that Greenlight saw just days after release. Some weren't happy with Valve's decision, given that other methods could have solved the submission problem without requiring such a high fee.

Many developers have sounded off on this in the last few days. The voice that I've seen that best encapsulates everything wrong with the $100 fee has to be from Jonas Kyratzes. Jonas is a developer veteran that's been making games for the last decade. His most recent creation is The Sea Will Claim Everything, an adventure game with a ton of heart. Over at his blog, he's posted something that walks us through the problem as he sees it.

At first, the way Greenlight was initially set up didn't seem right:

My first thought after I filled out the Greenlight submission form for The Sea Will Claim Everything and clicked "publish" was wait, there's no approval queue? That struck me as very peculiar. This is the internet. Any submissions system is likely to be abused within seconds. It's entirely normal for blogs to keep comments for moderator approval to make sure they're legit. Why was Greenlight allowing any submission to go through?

Moderation might've helped, but Greenlight didn't have it. Nor did it make sense to have downvotes, since they didn't really serve a purpose—isn't the question "how many people DO want to buy this game?"

But nevermind the voting aspect, just about everything about Greenlight wasn't set up very well. It was a nightmare to try to find a game, especially when Greenlight would repeat games you'd already looked at, and the sorting options weren't very good either.

Then came the fee, which seems like the worst way to try to mitigate the problems Greenlight was seeing.

The $100 fee does not cut out the nonsense (at least judging from our experience with other platforms), but it does exclude many of us indies who come from economic backgrounds that simply do not allow them to spend $100 on the mere possibility of being judged by a subset of the Steam community that is generally not very friendly to indie games.

$100 may not seem like much money to some. That's great, those for who $100 isn't a big deal are fortunate. But the sad reality is that the indie game scene spans beyond what most major gaming websites cover. Most indie developers I know are starving artists for who $100 dollars is a month's worth of food. And maybe they have a game that could catch the public's attention, but they don't have the money to be considered for that chance. Steam can be a curator for content if it wants, and nobody is entitled to its virtual shelf space. But everyone deserves the chance to at least be considered, no?

But in the last few days, some of the responses from people have been highly classist. I've watched critics and developers alike on Twitter making it clear that they couldn't even fathom how it was possible that people couldn't have the money, or find a way to come up with it. It was common to read something along the lines of "maybe you shouldn't be making games if you can't even raise $100 for the submission fee."

A disappointingly large number of developers and journalists could not even imagine that some people don't have this amount of money. I found this genuinely shocking. It's not that they hadn't experienced it themselves, but that they could not even conceive of it. That's a disconnection from reality so fundamental that it is quite frightening. Ever wonder why there aren't more political games? This is why. Not only are the majority of developers (those who have a voice, anyway) white heterosexual middle-class males from the US or the UK, but a scary amount of them have absolutely no understanding of the existence of anything outside their own experience, and are in fact offended by the very suggestion that anything else exists.

Some of us are poor, Jonas goes on to say. But maybe for most of us, that's not something we have to see or deal with most of the time. Gaming is not a cheap hobby, and it's a luxury to have the money to participate in it. And when the developers you hear about tend to be the high profile ones, I'm afraid that cognizance or care about the lower class in this space doesn't exist.

So maybe a game is good enough to sell enough on its own to raise the money. But that money then needs to go to actual living costs. The fact that people can be so snide about this is cause for concern, especially with the current state of the economy.

The crux of this issue, in a way, doesn't lie with Greenlight—not exactly. It's with who we allow to be legible within a series of gatekeepers who tend to favor a very specific type of developer. One in the right socioeconomic bracket who would be able to afford costs like licenses, development kids and submission fees. Some might go as far as to suggest that it also favors those who make specific types of games (how many puzzle platformers will the indie scene most of us know spew?)

For now, Valve says that Greenlight will continue to evolve. Fantastic. But it's not just Greenlight that needs to change. So, too, does the attitude surrounding who should be making games. Some people do it for the love, and so yes, they're going to keep going at it even though they might not make much of any money. So to tell a developer that they might want to reconsider their passion just because they're not rolling in cash is heartbreaking. They deserve to be here just as much as anyone else, and there's no shortage of things trying to keep them out.

The One Hundred Dollar Question Jonas Kyratzes

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