If they go this far, it won’t be a surprise if all of their articles is AI garbage
pokestans are religious zealots trying to defend they’re IP, they frankly need to grow up.
Gamerant is owned by Valent, which bought out and owns all the following:
Android Police, Comic Book Resources, Collider, Hardcore Gamer, MovieWeb, OpenCritic, Screen Rant, Game Rant, DualShockers, TheGamer, XDA Developers, How-To Geek, GiveMeSport, And Polygon
All of the above, and I mean all of them, had huge layoffs and pivoted to AI articles and adhoc underpaid contractors:
previous and current Valnet employees claim the company prioritizes “mass quantity over quality to churn out mind-numbing SEO bait.” Once websites are acquired by Valnet, the permanent staff are usually replaced by contractors, who are paid significantly less (reportedly around $19 for 1000 words at GameRant[3]) than the former tenured staff. One former contributor described Valnet website Collider to TheWrap as “a content mill, borderline like almost sweatshop-level”, while another writer suggested that Valnet forced contractors to create “junky clickbait” content. Valnet writers who complain about payment, working conditions, or reveal payment rates are alleged to be blacklisted by the company
You shouldn’t be allowed to own that much stuff. Simple solution.
Thankfully there’s the FTC and its antitrust law! /$
ah man that sucks. I kinda like XDA and polygon.
Yeah XDA is (or I guess, was) invaluable for custom ROMs for Android. There’s a huge modding/coding community on XDA.
Which has always been funny to me because they started as a Windows Mobile modding site.
Sadly the wild west days of custom ROMs is mostly over :(
You say “wild west” as if they were doing something uncivilized, but running the code you choose is nothing more than exercising your property rights.
The marginalization/destruction of custom ROMs isn’t civilization catching up, it’s totalitarianism closing in.
Camera: broken
Wifi radio: broken
Accelerometer broken: WIP no ETA.
Bugs: you tell me
Think this is what they meant
Another way of viewing the use of “wild west” was exactly that, the lack of over regulation and a more hands off government. In reality it wasn’t the utopia some want to make it out to be as slang like “snake oil salesmen” alludes.
Meh, the scene for custom softwares on PS2s, phones, psps, PS3 Emulation, etc are still going strong. We only really just figured out how to emulate the PS3 a couple of years ago.
XDA
Holy fucking shit no wonder it appears that they sold out
Cause they DID.
Valnet writers who […] reveal payment rates are alleged to be blacklisted by the company
That sounds flat out illegal.
XDA has gotten so much worse in the last 6 months it is astounding. Some unreal work is being done to kill custom android ROMs.
Oh that explains a bit!
I’m guessing they more or less get their marching orders from the ESA, the corrupt lying political lobby of AAA video game companies… the AIPAC of the gaming world, if you would.
Oooh that’s why all their articles in my feed are utter garbage, made the mistake of clicking a few and my god my phones built in feed is now inundated.
Like I mean easy to ignore and I don’t even know if video game “journalism” even counts as something worth reading most of the time anyways not that kind of blows.
I always liked polygon…
It feels like almost everyone who made a career on the internet in the 20-teens has sold their brand to private equity
I agree. Seems like all media is going this way… No good things last forever is certainly more true than false these days.
poor Polygon
is this why xda became shit?
I had to double take at freaking XDA!!! I had no idea.
If you’ve seen some of the half baked articles coming from there over the last year, you wouldn’t be surprised at all. There’s still some interesting stuff but there’s a lot of half assed trash articles as well. I saw this and immediately everything made sense lol.
Oof.
XDA ? Do they run the forums as well or?
link to what ur quoting,?
Its a qoute from the link in my comment under “reception.”
This would have been some Photoshop 101 shit.
Why has everyone forgotten how to manually manipulate photos?
The AI version is obviously not better.
It was probably quicker to ask an AI to edit it than to make the edit personally and the writers for these sites are paid very little to churn out multiple low effort articles a day
Nailed it.
Their boss probably wants to replace them with an agent too.
Any amount above $0.00 is WAY TOO much money to pay these “writers” to spend half-an hour a week hitting CTRL+X and CRTL+V.
Well someone needs to prompt the AI, find reddit articles to copy and make sure the final article has all the SEO to make it show up in searches to earn the company ad revenue. The high ups at Valent aren’t going to do the dirty work and underpaying someone to be a writer also allows them to shift some of the blame should there be a major issue with an article.
The first sentence of Valent’s about page says “Valnet was founded in 2012 by builders with […] an obsession with scale.” Based on this I’m sure that at some point in their constant acquisition and gutting of known brands they will try or have tried having AI make and publish the articles directly, but I also feel like people are more likely to stop visiting a site where the content is directly from an LLM than one that has human written/edited articles with heavy LLM involvement.
The “6 finger thing” has also been mostly trained out of modern models and it’s such an old meme it’s the first thing anyone looks for in any sort of review.
Not only can they not photoshop, they can’t even AI properly.
That or the 6 fingers were a deliberate choice. Trying to associate palworld with AI and therefore copyright infringement?
Trying to associate palworld with AI
Which is even more stupid considering that Pocketpair publicly stated that they don’t use AI
I don’t think the “reporters” are paid enough to care
Because we’re now talking about it, and they’re getting more clicks/interactions because of it. AI does the work in a fraction of the time, with the added benefit of being rage-bait.
People don’t click through on rage bait. It only serves to push an agenda.
If it didn’t get clicks, and the associated ad revenue, it wouldn’t be so widespread.
Tell me you don’t understand how business works in real life without using those words.
If it didn’t get clicks, and the associated ad revenue, it wouldn’t be so widespread.
Well done! Genuine applause here!
For those who are, like Lyrl here, completely unaware of how businesses operate, here are a few things businesses routinely do that are counter-productive, yet businesses stick to them like glue.
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Open office layouts. Study after study shows that open office layouts reduce productivity, generate added employee stress, and spread illness rapidly. The excuse is that it fosters collaboration, but those same studies show this is rarely the case. Yet businesses, especially tech and media businesses, suckle at the teat of open office and keep doing so DECADES after it was proved counter-productive. Repeatedly. At length.
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Non-assigned seating (a.k.a. “hot desking”). This wastes employee time every day as they go hunting for their workplace for the day. It breeds cliques, intra-team resentment, and generally causes turf wars that are damaging to morale and team cohesion. It’s been a fad in tech circles, however, for decades after the numbers came in.
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Meeting culture. Most studies show that workers think they attend about 30% too many meetings. On top of that, most meetings are terribly unstructured, lack focus, and become, in effect, time sinks that steal productive “deep work” time in favour of performative nonsense. When you start factoring in things like “pre-meeting meetings” and other administrivial nonsense like that, meetings are quite possibly the single most destructive force to a company’s productivity … and yet meetings are on a rise, not a decline, across all white collar industries (and some blue collar ones).
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Performance reviews. There is literally zero evidence that these improve performance. Instead they tend to be backward looking matters that are used to excuse, through careful cherry-picking of data, management decisions on salaries, promotions, etc. Further, given that none of them are based on neutral, verifiable rubrics, they are guaranteed to be positively festooned with biases and grudges. They serve no purpose, they accomplish no material aims, yet they are almost omnipresent across all industries.
This is just a short list off the top of my head of counter-productive business behaviour that actively damages corporate profit yet which are practised widely. If I did the deep research I could probably easily expand that list into the dozens. I mean as I was typing this conclusion “hustle culture” and “entrenched bureaucracy” crossed my mind. And as I was typing that previous sentence “one size fits all rewards” also jammed in there.
If you actually work in business, and if you look around you with open eyes paired with just a wee little bit of education and/or research, you’ll find dozens, if not hundreds, of common things businesses and business managers do that are actively counter-productive … but that they stick to anyway.
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The news blogs have not been kind to Palworld in general. The Verge posts headlines like “Pokemon rip-off Palworld removes features due to lawsuit they deserve to lose”
“Doom clone features guns” this is how these titles should be read. Or for a more modern example, calling Terraria “2d Minecraft” (derogatorily).
Should be calling Minecraft ‘very shitty FPS dwarf fortress without any dwarves’.
Minecraft and Terraria are more similar than Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress.
Minecraft was inspired by DF
They’re not similar at all though. I know it was an inspiration. It’s like calling Minecraft and Infiniminer clone derogatorily, which is what Minecraft was first described as (but not derogatorily).
I know literally nothing about Palworld but from what I’ve seen of it, it does look like a rip of the Pokemon Legends games but with violence. Is that not so? Asking out of legitimate curiosity
Was Heretic a Doom knockoff? Does it matter? Palworld does enough differently and scratches an itch that GameFreak isn’t interested in scratching. GameFreak should just make a better Pokemon game.
Was Heretic a Doom knockoff?
Yes, actually. Explicitly. Video game nerd history pedantry alert: John Romero himself pitched it as a Doom-like game but in a medieval fantasy setting, and id prevented Raven Software from implementing too many of the RPG mechanics in it that they originally wanted to, instructing them not to deviate from the Doom formula. John Carmack’s instructions were, “Do it like Doom, and add the fantasy flavor.”
id also hired Raven to make the game in the first place, though, so it’s kind of hard to be a rip-off when you have the support and permission of the creators of the original thing.
Yes, I know the history and that’s why I also asked if it mattered. None of those “Doom clones” threatened Doom or id and breed innovation in the FPS scene. Palworld doesn’t actually threaten Pokemon and if we had more Pokemon-likes, we’d probably have better official Pokemon games.
It’s closer to monster hunter, breath of the wild, and Ark than Pokemon. The only passing resemblance to pokemon is the fact the ‘pals’ are on the cartoony side (and a couple are just digimon rejects).
It’s the media that dubed it pokemon with guns and slavery after the first trailer dropped way, way back when, and even then that was exclusively due to the cartoony design before any game play elements had been revealed.
Look, I’m generally not on the side of any corporation bludgeoning people with ip law. I think that copyrught law as it currently exists exclusively protects the interest of capital and works against the average artist.
That said, you’re crazy if you deny that there are many pals that are nearly identical clones of Pokemon.
I like the idea of palworld and I want them to win this lawsuit, but to say that palworld is some glorious high effort piece of art is pretty disingenuous. It’s a sloppy roughly slapped together game with mismatched assets and art styles because they made it as cheaply as possible. It’s survival slop like so so many other cheap shitty games these days.
I want palworld to win this suit because I want more games like Pokemon, but let’s be honest and stop riding this cheap shitty game’s dick just for being the victims of a bad lawsuit.
They are victims, not heroes.
Edit, honestly, I have a hard time believing they didn’t bring this suit upon themselves intentionally. When that first trailer dropped every single person they saw it was wondering how Nintendo wasn’t already suing them. If this was all a stunt to intentionally defeat game freak in court by carefully designing their game to slip through the Japanese ip system then maybe they are kind of heroes. Still doesn’t make the game good. Honestly, the fact that it’s sticking it to Nintendo is the only thing I like about it. So like, I argue that they are ripping of Pokemon, but I aplaud them for that. I just don’t like survival slop.
Pokemon has a cartoon version of nearly any type of animal and many other stuff to say it’s a rip off is like refusing a comedy show because some of gags have been used by the simpsons
I didn’t say it’s a ripoff of Pokemon. I said it’s survival slop and that some of the pals are more than somewhat similar to specific Pokemon.
I’ve played the game and was struck repeatedly with a moment of of hey, that’s just like x Pokemon. Like… Really very a lot just like that Pokemon… There are definitely pals that are designed to evoke the imagery and memory of popular Pokemon. Again, I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but you’d have to turn your eyes off to fully deny that palworld was inspired directly by Pokemon designs.
I think that should be allowed. I just refuse to reject the reality in front of me. Pals are inspired directly by Pokemon and draw design inspiration from them. That doesn’t make them bad. Palworld is bad for other reasons.
and a couple are just digimon rejects and more are straight pokemon rip offs, clones, and fusions that the developer never bothered to fix, alter, or remove.
Oh hey, it’s a nintendfan that doesn’t realize weird game theory blogs making wild claims by literally changing both colour and shape of pals kinda doesn’t hold up, even in Japanese Copyright court which is by far the strictest and least fair in the world.
oh hey look a internet dick. who makes false claims and gets his comments moderated and removed a ton.
No, it was determined in court that the similarities of the designs was due to being inspired by the same prior art that Pokemon was inspired by.
it was not. you look at anubus pal and then look at lucario and tell me that’s not a AI generated rip of off lucario, or Robinquill and Decidueye. Foxparks and Vulpix. Jet ragon and Latios/Latias. Orserk and Garchomp. too many pals are way to similar to be “original” designs. the fucking creators of palworld are huge supporters of AI, so of course they would use AI to generate pals and it jsut took pokemon designs.
but no no “nInTeNdo Is BaD” mindeset infested the stooges that love ‘pokemon with gunz’, i mean palword.
Orserk and Garchomp
This is especially silly since they share zero design themes in common. Did you get this list from some random 6 year old reddit post?
the fucking creators of palworld are huge supporters of AI, so of course they would use AI to generate pals and it jsut took pokemon designs.
So you (and Nintendo apparently) have no proof of plagiarism and switched to speculations. Noted.
Yeah, I hear people use “Stardew Valley” clone or rip-off too. Which doesn’t bother me either. Stardrew Valley is a ripoff of Harvest Moon.
I think Palworld is more base-building and stuff than the turn-based Pokemon games that are out there – but it definitely looks more of a ripoff than the game itself leads on.
Pokemon is derivitave of Dragon Quest Monsters
Imagine a survival game (like enshroud or even ark) but there are these creatures that are not realistic.
It’s only “pokemon” in the sense that you can catch these pals with spheres, but I’d love to see a pokemon game that allows you to build a base, explore dungeons, farm, craft stuff, carry weapons to fight alongside your pals IN REAL TIME and, in general, treats its players as if they weren’t mentally challenged toddlers
No, it’s not “pokemon with violence”.
I’ve played both games. The only similarity between the two is the monster collection aspect of it. It has more in common with Ark, with the real-time combat, directly fighting alongside your tamed monsters, and the base building.
If I were Palworld I would be suing the pants off of GameRant and Valent. Textbook defamation with serious monetary and reputation damages.
Hmm, not a good look for Gamerant, looks like I can safely ignore them and the numerous associated sites that Valent acquired.
looks like I can safely ignore them
Way ahead of you.
Continuing the tradition of superfluous one-upping from Reddit I see
↑ this
Holy hell
I didn’t realize that Gamerant was part of a dark web of bullshit, strings being pulled by Valent until I looked deeper due to this post. I never fully trusted most of the listed sites anyway because sometimes there was something off about their articles, as if they missed the point or were deliberately trying to steer the conversation in a bad direction. Should’ve opened my eyes a lot sooner.
Isn’t it Liabel when it’s publicly committed to text? I don’t know if that’s better or worse than slander from a legal standpoint but… Somebody ought to sue, in either case.
Libel. And “slander” when applied to the spoken word. Or if you want the generic term that covers both, “defamation”. (It has always been a puzzle why libel and slander are separate terms when they’re the same thing wearing slightly different gowns.)
Yeah it seems like those terms simply are antiquated to modernity, cause public and private life are so intertwined by the nature of our technology and media these days. I can see how 80 years ago your name being dragged in the local newspaper would feel distinct in its reach and effect from say someone doing the same in the town square or a smaller public venue, the distinction must have been the scale of quantity of potential witnesses. Interesting to ponder, but I think you’re right to use defamation in any case.
Gamerant and all of its sister sites are just the worst writing on the internet. Shitty takes and shitty business practices.
And some of the most egregious and misleading click bait titles for their articles as well. I can often spot a Gamerant article just from the title before I even see the URL.
lol wtf the six finger thing isn’t fixed?
Maybe nobody knowing how the thing works makes it hard to fix.
More like nobody noticed, as usual with people using genAI.
Edit: wait, you’re saying they can’t fix the AI so that it doesn’t do the 6 finger thing. Carry on.
Is there any legit reason gamerant couldn’t just use the thumbnail from the video?
Obviously they did it to change it to a pokeball, wondering if there is any other reason.
Ragebait
In the USA, using the Thumbnail would fall under Fair Use and be perfectly fine.
Instead, what they’ve done is defame Palworld by making false claims about them in an attempt to cause direct monetary and reputation damages as well as indirect damages via ongoing legal disputes from Nintendo, which is highly illegal as a civil matter.
Imagine cheering for Nintendo to sue….
Wait is this even legal?
It is not, but it is a civil matter.
