Funniest possible response would be to send honest responses exclusively expressed in Australian slang.

"Is your organisation a climate or environmental justice project?"

"Yeah nah. We’re not here to fuck spiders. Rollin’ up the sleeves an givin’ it a red-hot crack!"

He's got one trick folks.

The pearl clutching from the bourgeois is becoming a bit annoying.

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here's the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft's XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a "perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat," according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

"Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game," Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company's official site. "Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition."

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”

Yep and in order for these companies to grow they must continue to increase the volume of ads being shown, which only makes them less effective, which they try and counter by making them ever more invasive.

You people bake your sausages?

Same. I got one after a trip to Japan. Life changing.

I appreciate this doesn't work for everyone and might not be a long term solution, but I dropped 20kg by fasting on a 20:4 schedule.

I also genuinely thought this was an AI image.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Michael Forsyth and Walt Bogdanich. A cutting expose into the forces that are shaping our society that most don't see.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles. Gives you a better understanding of the philosophies that shaped corporate offshoring, outsourcing and sell offs from the 70s to today.

Currowan: A Story of Fire and Community During Australia's Worst Summer by Bronwyn Adcock. A revealing firsthand account of what it's like to live through the catastrophic real life effects of climate change.

A Good Place on the Banks of the Euphrates: Stories from the War Against ISIS by Warren Stoddard II. A frightening and inspiring collection of short stories and diary entries from the perspective of an internationalist fighter on the ground.

The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton. A digestible collection of reassuring practical tactics to understanding personal attitudes and behaviours as framed by some of history's most influential philosophers.