NVIDIA's AI Pump & Dump Scheme? Plus Games Industry Lashes Out At Stop Killing Games | OTC #38
Nvidia: The First $4,000,000,000,000 (Trillion) dollar company
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Nvidia was already one of the most valuable companies in the world and now it’s become THE most valuable company in the world thanks to its AI products.
The Industry v Stop Killing Games
Link: https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/statement-on-stop-killing-games/
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Ay%5FaOUcFw
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
We actually spoke to Ross about this last week, but Video Games Europe (the lobbying group) has put out a statement surrounding the SKG movement. VGEU is helmed by many in the games industry and is backed by many of the BIGGEST publishers in gaming. Their main points of contention are as follows:
- Discontinuing Live Service Games must be an option companies can take when it is no longer commercially viable.
- Private Servers may not always be the best option due to safety and security.
- Games are designed to be Online-Only from the ground up. SKG would effectively force such games to be designed differently.
All of these points make sense if you maybe never read what SKG was actually about. As with any good game, the further we progress, the harder the enemies and bosses. We should also check on the petition progress during the show.
Nearly Half of 2025’s Best Performing Games (on Steam) came from Indies and AA studios.
Link: https://www.thegamer.com/40-percent-of-2025-top-steam-games-from-double-a-indie-studios/
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
About half of Steam’s top 20 games this year were NOT AAA. The list is as follows. Said Indie/AA games are marked as such.
| Game | Peak Playercount | |––|––| | Monster Hunter Wilds | 1384608 | | > Schedule I | 459798 | | > R.E.P.O | 271571 | | Split Fiction | 259003 | | > Kingdom Come: Deliverance II | 256206 | | > Bongo Cat | 194508 | | Stellar Blade | 192078 | | Dune: Awakening | 189333 | | > Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | 145063 | | Mecha Break | 132816 | | > Peak | 114492 | | FragPunk | 113946 | | Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond | 109246 | | > Rematch | 92841 | | InZOI | 87377 | | FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time | 65389 | | Assassin’s Creed Shadows | 64825 | | RuneScape: Dragonwilds | 52501 | | > Sultan’s Game | 46106 | | Persona5: The Phantom X | 41622 |
“Gamepass is an unsustainable model” - Founder of Arkane Studios
https://insider-gaming.com/game-pass-killed-by-first-party-development-costs/
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has publicly stated that they believe Gamepass is unsustainable. Gamepass has been found to lose up to 80% “premium sales” for games on the service. Gamepass’s main selling point is that First Party Xbox games come day 1. But some contrary sources suggest that Gamepass IS sustainable.
Why you (as a dev) actually give Valve the 30%
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Games Industry Analyst Chris Zukowski explicitly mentions why having access to Steam is so valuable. It’s the fact that people ON steam will just, BUY games and never play them. Drunken sailors with more money than sense! You don’t have THAT on Epic!
Call of Duty: WW2 removed from PC (Xbox Store) following Remote Code Execution attacks
https://x.com/wrioh75753/status/1940597447467979053
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Remote Code Execution attacks are considered the holy grail of hacks and arguably the worst sort of exploit outside of just having physical access to the hardware in question. CoDWW2 is not the only game to have suffered a RCE attack though. Dark Souls 3 suffered one such an exploit a few years ago, prompting Bandai Namco to shut the servers down for an extended period of time. Thankfully the exploits seem to have been fixed and the online is totally playable now. But even during then DS3 was still playable from start to finish offline.
Big Companies Breaking Steam’s Rules… Will they be punished?
Link: https://x.com/altersgame/status/1939707458152448118
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blue-archive-pc-release-appears-to-break-steam-rules/1100-6533084/
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
The Alters was caught with AI generated content in the game, but without a proper AI disclosure section on the Steam Page. If not enforced, this WILL cause issues especially with other devs attempting to hide the fact that some assets are AI generated. One instance was supposed to be a placeholder asset while most of the other instances of AI were AI powered localizations. Something that would DEFINTIELY warrant disclosure.
The OTHER major rulebreaker is in fact Nexon with review manipulation of a gacha game we’ve already talked about once on this channel. Blue Archive was hosting a review event. Hitting 10k reviews means players get rewarded! The post about the event has since been deleted, but it is worth mentioning. I am curious if and how Valve will reprimand these developers.
Capcom canceled a lecture in Japan about “Optimizing Monster Hunter Wilds”
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Capcom cancels lecture about optimizing MHW at the upcoming CEDEC 2025 conference in Japan. There is no cited reason for this cancellation, but this comes amidst concerns about harassment and threats towards staff in regards to MHW’s gameplay and PC performance. I do find it kind of ironic that Capcom would host a lecture about optimizing arguably one of the most unoptimized games to release this year. But how much of it actually IS unoptimization vs being too advanced for modern hardware?
Infamous Crowd Funded Sega Genesis Game “Paprium” now able to run in emulators
Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/1lt2eog/paprium_sega_genesis_is_now_emulated/
Submitter: Hi-Tech Lo-Life
Paprium is a beat-em-up released for the Sega Genesis game released in 2020, which was crowd funded all the way back in 2012. Many backers have not gotten their physical Sega Genesis copy, but arguably the worst thing about this game is its copy protection hardware built in, which is unheard of for homebrew games made for older retro systems. This is effectively DRM and has caused issues preventing you from emulating it properly with standard Emulators. It’s even caused issues with some Sega Genesis models and even FPGA recreations like the Mega SG. Thankfully the game has finally been cracked and can now be preserved for all, which still requires a special emulator core available in RetroArch. Of course, all of this could have been avoided had they released it on other consoles and PC like their prior Sega Genesis game “Pier Solar and the Great Architects”.