If you want to be very sad or maybe inspired, spiritfarer was excellent. The two Oris are great time sinks. Horizon Zero Dawn ran fine on my deck but chews battery life.
It’s got Gareth Edwards on board at least. I’ll probably give it a watch at some point just for that. Plus action hero Chris Pratt is the worst Chris Pratt. I liked him better when he was fat.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more out of their depth than Colin Trevorrow. A real shame that, because I actually enjoyed Safety Not Guaranteed.
Game Pass obviously and absolutely affects game sales. At the same time this conversation only happens because we’re comparing “the industry with Game Pass” to “games at face value”. That second one only lasted 10-15-ish years. Before that, there was “the industry with game rentals”. Blockbuster was also absolutely eating up some sales.
But game rentals were often seen as a “try before you buy” case to many, as you may want to play a game more than 3-5 days. So maybe the answer is don’t lease your game to Game Pass for a year at a time. Just offer it for a month or three. (Also make an easy way for the non-technical to export/import saves.) This also would let Microsoft make more deals for more games in their rotation. Seems like a shorter time helps everyone out.
Yeah, it used to be quite common for PC gaming magazines to include a demo disk, basically, here’s the game and the first level or two, often you could fit a couple game’s demo versions on one cd.
GamesPass could easily do something like uh… hey, this game here, you can play for 2 or 5 or 10 hours, and then if you want more, you can buy it with… I dunno, a 1/4 to 1/3 discount if you’re subbed to GamesPass, and you’ve got the playtime.
backlog gamepass would be hype. Like, this whole thing is shit and old game should probably cycle into the public domain; if a corp put work into keeping old games playable, how cool would that be?
C Suite / Upper Management doesn’t listen when a seasoned software engineer of some kind points out an extremely obvious medium/long-run problem with the business model they’re being asked to either functionally invent, or massively contribute to.
Oh, no, it isn’t, and also taxis, largely don’t exist anymore, and also public transit (the much cheaper to the ‘consumer’ option) is now 10 to 15 years behind where it should be.
Roughly the same business model there.
You’re trading short term low cost and convenience and broad array of choices for long term higher prices and the broad stagnation/destruction of the entire industry, fucking over all the people who work in said industry.
You definitely have a point… if US was the only country in the world and Uber did not provide a much better service than our local taxis. I mean yeah the local ones are cheaper but considering overall service, fuck no.
For me, one of the major advantages of Game Pass is publishers are absolutely refusing to put local regional pricing nowadays. Games at 60$+ cannot be bought by anyone with middle class salaries. Now with push to 70-80 usd+ for AAA, even AA games getting to 60$ it is impossible to buy in my country.
So why should I get a single game at those prices when I can get few hundred at similar pricing? It’s MSs problem that they are willing to put their games day 1 on GP not mine. I don’t care whether games are getting “devalued” or whatever, I’m simply getting what I paid for.
Also, people do tend to buy games standalone and I really can’t see that going away honestly. I can’t see games ever going subscription only or anything like that.
You make good points, my view is obviously America centric.
As I literally used to work for MSFT, in various parts of their city sized corporate HQ outside of Seattle, and a few ‘smaller’, though still massive by the standards of any non megacorp, ‘satellite’ campuses in other parts of the broader Seattle area.
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I completely agree that refusal to do reasonable location specific pricing is a huge problem, and I’d say that basically stems from MSFT being astoundingly myopic, to the point of the management culture being cult-like.
Perhaps a sort of saving grace for international customers is that uh, the US dollar is currently crashing against basically every other currency?
Or perhaps that is an actual cause of why AAA game prices go up in USD: MSFTs costs are primarily in USD, so they figure out a way to smudge costs over the whole system in a way that trickles up to them in USD, by using their influence to functionally make everything else somewhat subsidize their attempt to grow or maintain market share.
MSFT gaming seems to be transitioning to pretty much abandoning being a ‘console maker’, and moving toward ‘we are an uber publisher’.
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But anyway… I get that from the consumer perspective, yes, it makes sense to go with GamesPass…
The problem is that from a business perspective, what this does is destroy the economics of actually making a game.
It reduces sales, which reduces profit, which means now game publishers force game studios to cut costs, so they fire half their staff or reassign them, which destroys all the undocumented knowledge of the game studio, and then they are replaced with cheaper per hour paid contractors who don’t know that information, which results in sloppier, buggier games that ironically always go overbudget, overschedule, and don’t sell as well.
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Maybe think if it as an infrasctucture style situation, with game devs as the road maintenance crews, and consumers of games as car drivers:
If you skimp on road maintenance, and then also make everyone drive much much more, by making public transit very expensive/shitty, and cars are now all a cheap personal rental service…
… eventually the roads give out, pot holes everywhere, bridges falling apart… and the entire system grinds to a halt rather rapidly, because now, a decade later, there aren’t any more talented road maintenance crews, they all quit from the shit wages and shit working conditions, their specialized vehicles sre in disrepair, and there is also not enough money to hire and train a massive new workforce to fix all the roads.
I know you’re joking but thanks to the Internet, I can confirm you do get the shotgun in the lost valley stage where dinosaurs are found. Now that I read up on it, the funniest part to me is that this meme might have actually chose a shotgun for that reason, especially since apparently you can totally take on a T-Rex with a shotgun.
the first Lara was unapologetically an asshole. she lived in a mansion that most world leaders can’t have in their dreams. it’s not like she was stealing out of necessity. she had a fucking butler and still went out to disturb world heritage sites and steal or destroy everything in them. just for fun.
The funniest thing is that I can guarantee that whatever numbers Deathloop did they would have been much worse without Gamepass. Great game, but not the kind of game that can have mass appeal.
Arkane sucks now because MSFT forced them to make the kind of game they did not have experience in making.
It’s like hiring a plumber to fix your electrical problems, hiring a car mechanic to diagnose your skin condition.
This is the whole thing of large publishers buying out successful dev teams, then mismanaging the fuck out of them, then destroying them, by firing 1/4 of the staff, throwing another 1/4 all around their various other studios, then hiring a bunch of contractors for the remaining dev team to babysit / onboard for 6 months before they know how to do anything useful…
…all for a game that’s either a castrated, mutated version of what the studio is known for, of course with latest trending corpo buzzwords a ‘core features’, or is just something wildly different from the studio’s previous work.
This happens with extreme regularity in the history of the video game industry.
Almost like being rich is more likely to indicate someone is a pompous buffoon that takes credit for other people’s successes and blames other people for their own failures, than it is to indicate they are some kind of Ayn Rand style entrepreneurial ubermensch, mr ‘gonzo- rand 19’.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne