Originally published at: Korean gamers who enjoy training cartoon girls with horse ears and tails hold a horse-and-buggy protest at game company over pay-to-play rules | Boing Boing
…
1 Like
They need a “gamers union”, bout time if you ask me.
3 Likes
pay-to-win business model that much of the Korean game industry relies on could collapse.
And with it the industry’s Web3 dreams. May it come to pass.
6 Likes
I’m eternally happy wordle and spelling bee have no loot boxes.
2 Likes
Korean gamers who enjoy training cartoon girls with horse ears and tails
Is this a weird sex thing?
4 Likes
My understanding is that outwardly: No. Namely the characters are female anthropomorphizations of real race horses whose “identity” or publicity rights or whatever are licensed from the horses’ owners, who do not want their horses associated with anything sexual.
OTOH, all the characters depicted in that heading image are young women. So… I don’t know what the racehorse owners thought would happen, but attractive masculine and feminine forms tend to invoke certain feelings in people.
Still pretty misogynistic, objectifying BS aimed at young women, tho. Just sayin’.
7 Likes
The ratio of how much people should care about the thing to how much people do care about the thing is very very broken here.
Just play something else if you don’t like their business model. There’s no shortage of other games modelling thinly veiled sexual slavery of women for you to choose from.
6 Likes
4 Likes
right?! the focus on a shitty, predatory business model glosses over the fact that this content is super cringe-y.
4 Likes
Also, I mean, this “issue” couldn’t matter less. Go protest in the streets for something that is important, like climate change or government corruption.
3 Likes
a mobile game in which players raise and train […] young girls with horse ears and tails
created by Japanese publisher
I really don’t think that needed to be specified
It’s not just Google translate. It’s also Google speech-to-text.
The Japanese subtitles actually say pretty much the same thing.
What is actually being said is "ウマ娘プリティダービーSeason ２、2021年1月放送スタート」, which means “Horse Daughters Pretty Derby Season 2 Broadcast Starts in January 2021.”
But the automatically generated YouTube subtitle says: "馬ブス女吹いディーラーdc全集2021年1月放送スタート」, which means “Ugly Horse Woman Blowing Dealer DC Complete Series Broadcast Starts in January 2021.”
Their speech-to-text really is awful.
ETA: Oh, and thanks for ruining my carefully curated YouTube recommendations. LOL
3 Likes
They picked a particularly seedy-sounding instance to get specifically worked up about; but there’s solid room for argument that the widespread embrace of psychological tactics that would make casinos envious in the comparatively lightly regulated and available-on-every-phone gaming sector is a matter of some concern.
The ‘Korean gamer dudes protest price of imported ponygirls’ bit specifically pushes this one into the realm of first-world non problems that one is probably a worse person for caring about; but that doesn’t change the overall problem of people using tactics that the Nevada Gaming Control Board explicitly forbids against target audiences that current regulations typically don’t recognize as effectively potential gamblers.
2 Likes
3 Likes
I worked in free-to-play mobile gaming for 10 years, so trust me I know. Predatory business practices up and down all the way through. I left when my soul couldn’t take any more soiling.
That’s not what this protest is about though, as far as I can tell. They are mad about their game being a different payment model than the Japanese market version. That’s a lot of manbabies worked up over very little.
This is the Korean version of the uproar over Diablo Immortal in the US. Gamers weren’t mad because of the predatory F2P business model. They were mad because they felt entitled to a specific consumer product that they didn’t get. That’s a very different outrage that is not worthy of supporting.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
