Eolirin

It's not exactly replacing voice actors with AI though. There's no way you can pre-record having an open ended conversation. Which is all this system is being used for. And they've paid the actors to develop the models.

If they start replacing static voice lines with AI generation that'd be something else, but they haven't actually done that.

CHARNAME Valve is run with a dysfunctional managerial structure in which no one has any actual authority and only does what they want, and if they hadn't stumbled backwards into a platform monopoly they would have failed as a company ages ago. It's why they struggle to make any games too.

So there's no moderation because there's no dedicated moderation team and having one doesn't gel with how the company is run. This is a real weakness of the company. They've been shit at customer service, shit at moderation, and shit at dev relations the entire time they've existed because for a company operating at the scale of Valve those all require a pretty large set of employees dedicated specifically to those tasks and they don't work like that.

I think there should be persistent push back on everything JK is doing, but she's a multi-billionaire already. The money isn't going to make a difference to her ability to do what she's doing. She'll make more on interest on her existing wealth than any of these projects will bring in for her. She's that rich.

We can only engage in activism around how problematic her views are. Boycotts for personal reasons are fine, but I don't think we need to try to shame people into not spending on the franchise on the grounds that she'll get some of that money. It won't make a difference. She already has effectively infinite money.

Pressuring companies to cut her out of the loop where they can and driving down the popularity of Potter may dent her cultural clout, and that's worth doing, but there's really no way to deny her the resources to attack the Trans community absent the establishment some kind of hate law banning the attacks in the UK, which is not anywhere near happening.

The issue is they're not. And also reviews are not the appropriate place for that kind of feedback, especially for a beta branch build.

They're review bombing the game currently. The fact that this is happening is going to complicate the dev's balance strategy going forward, as they now need to consider PR effects to their beta branch experimentation. That's not something they should have to worry about at this stage of release.