Katie Payn

Not a day goes by when I’m not saying this.

So yeah reminder to TRY to react proportionately to that kind of stuff and not let it ruin your day. Just because a couple idiots want to shit on your day you shouldnt ignore the many wonderful vocal supporters and even just silent viewers

People are nice, actually

Like what do you MEAN two thousand people saying my work is cool and beautiful can be actively ruined in my brain by 4 nobodies saying its mid? 😂
Nonsense

I feel like its very easy to go "I would simply react logically" when presented with the idea that you latch onto negative comments disproportionately to positive ones. But when you actually have something go semi-viral and get thousands of comments its a real different story haha

Even if you feel the world is ending, beauty will remain. I can find it comforting, in a way 🤔#pixelart

Nearly two years after the project's revival, The Aether II has finally entered Public Alpha Testing!

Explore The Aether's Holy Isles, a greatly expanded and reimagined version of the classic dimension, featuring new biomes, mobs, resources, structures, and a reworked Sentry Ruins dungeon.

It also might just be because its the server slam but there is literally 0 social element to the game. Every player Ive met has had voice chat completely disabled, every squad has been hostile off the bat. I feel like the social side of this genre hasnt penetrated here yet which is frustrating

Marathon so far has immaculate vibes and cool stuff in it but I feel the TTK is overwhelmingly brutal, so far I have not been in a single firefight where Ive had any chance to reasonably respond to anything happening. Its just "I am being shot and now I am dead"

only the greens can stop reform, a vote for labour is utterly wasted right now, they are collapsing everywhere

Labour coming third in a by-election they ran on "Only Labour can beat Reform" when the Greens won a majority of over 4 thousand is pretty poetic.

I really cannot see how the Labour party can spin this other than a complete rejection of their horrible politics.

When "you could have pushed a less appropriate candidate to further parliamentary movements over local issues" is the only criticism they can muster you know the campaign has done a good job

"Check on your trans frie-" No. Give them money. Hire them. Buy them a video game.

It really comes off as "We continue to learn nothing under the guise of learning from mistakes"

Its so common in huge scale corporate bureaucracy that it should be no surprise Xbox suffers from it but you don't usually have execs just saying it out loud.

Still got lots to do, many bits of content to produce over public alpha testing, but already this is easily the best version of the project I've worked on in my 14 years on the project.

I hope players agree with us and I hope everyone who worked on the project in the past is proud of the end result

In other news

We're aiming to release The Aether II into public alpha testing at the end of February, after roughly 21 months of development following the project's revival in 2024

Genuinely so proud of my small team, really hope people love The Aether II as much as we do!

Like at what point is this company owning these studios just making their job's actually harder and less sustainable? I think we're past that point. And a leadership shakeup is only gonna make it worse imo.

I cant and wont name names but everyone Ive spoken to about Xbox/MS upper management in the games space paints a picture of catastrophic incompetence and lack of guidance. The main benefits of having a large platform holder backing you are completely missing at ALL Xbox Studios

I hate saying it because my livelihood is tied up in Xbox via Minecraft but Microsoft need to get out of the games industry imo. They need breaking up into smaller publishers again who can actually run their operations properly and take care of their staff.

This shit is so tiring to read about.

Mood

Oh this news has made me legitimately so angry what the fuck??

Skeleton Crew was so good I can't believe how little people talk about it. It's like so far on the other end of the scale of Star Wars to Andor but it does that absolutely perfectly.

I hope things in our industry change for the better in the future. I will not allow anyone to feel this way again.

I am no longer part of the problem

just be pointing to these company's earnings reports and going "surely they can eat these costs at this point, look at how much profit they're making already!"

They CAN afford to not increase prices, they just don't want to in fear of spooking markets. (2/2)

While I think in the current shareholder hyper financialised world of corporate hellscape you can *rationalise* the “need” to raise prices in response to the baffling hardware market conditions caused by the AI sector, any time these convos about price increases happen we really should (1/2)

Idiot

We recently passed a monumental milestone with 100 *million* total downloads across all our projects on @curseforge.com

This time two years ago we celebrated 30 million downloads, so in the last two years alone we got a staggering 70 million downloads! Aether 1 itself has passed 60M alone!

Velma holding a stylus pen, crawling on the ground looking for something and saying "My video essays! I can't draw without my video essays!". On the ground are two youtube thumbnails of video essays "Line goes up -the problem with NFTs" by Dan Olson and "ROBLOX_OOF.MP3" by hbomberguy

They're a requirement

Read through his posts because he seemed to be spouting absolute nonsense. Still not any more illuminated.
Think they're just being awkward for the sake of contrarianism and finding every possible opportunity to misunderstand points and shift goal posts.
Bizarre (very Twitter coded) behaviour.

Feel like part of the problem as I'm a fan of Obsidian's RPGs but have not got Avowed or OW2

But I simply don't have the spare cash to be dropping £60 on a new OW and Avowed still hasn't come to PS5

I want to support this studio but the pricing and platform choices are making that difficult