whenever i find a game that i actually want to keep playing i give a quick prayer to the gods, thanking them for their mercy
go figure that game was The Long Dark this time, only thing more violently autistic than a realistic canadian survival game would be a railway planning ga- sigh
Fools Rush In appears to be a fannish remake of the PC-98-only versus STG Touhou Yumeijikū ~ Phantasmagoria of Dim. Dream, for modern computer systems, released around 2017, though it's a bit jank on the gameplay side of things. Caught wind of it from a couple Jaimers vids on this a while back.
And then you have Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, an AA indy gem that goes for what, 50€ ?
80€ games are a symptom of the marketing cancer that plagues modern AAA games. No need for a 1000 person team, what they need is passion for the medium, and a dedicated team that isn’t impeded by executive greed.
One of the most obvious signs of this is the fact that EA had a small team of about 10 people who made one of the best Star wars games that have been released in years. Of course it’s EA, so they screwed it up by shutting the servers down eventually but still, much better than Battlefront II
They are pointing out that there’s loads of good games on Steam that don’t cost $80, given the prevalence of such good games there really isn’t justification for that price point.
The picture shows that a game that is yet to be released (I actually thought it was already out but apparently not) is only £35 ($45) If you want the bundle which gives you two games it’s only an extra £1
Personally I’m not that interested in snow runners it just seems like an infuriating game, but the fact that you can get it for virtually nothing is interesting.
Yeah, I’m not sure about the mechanics, but I’m sure plenty of palms are greased to keep gas prices low. It’s one of the things people like to blame on the president.
I dunno, I heard about the history of Bungie and what Pete Parsons did to the company. There should be no surprise. He destroyed it and Marathon is just another indicator it seems.
I feel bad for the artist and hope they get more than just “exposure” after this.
This looks like Silent Hill or maybe a Resident Evil so Imma go out on a limb and guess that Japanese developers don’t know how much gas actually costs here.
Or, if this is indeed Silent Hill 2, they’re using average prices of the Eastern US from back in the 70s/80s, where the game is set (according to the dev; shit looks more like the 90s to me). 🤷🏻♂️
Resident Evil takes place in 1998, and apparently the average cost was $1.06 per gallon at the time. Obviously, they just put the average price on the sign rather than deviating from it a little bit for realism, but it does look fairly accurate. Apparently it was $1.23 the year before and $1.17 the year after so it wasn’t always that nice.
Eh, I’m not to beaten up about it. It kind looks like any of the good talent at Bungie is long gone and they’re just outsourcing a lot of work. It kinda feels like they crapped this out under pressure from Sony.
Embark is working wonders through The Finals. I came from Destiny 2 and am so glad to have devs that listen to their entire community and put so much effort into their game.
I am excited to see what they do with Arc Raiders!
Rozwala mnie cały ten Ezra Klein do którego podkastu mnie tu namawiali. Posłuchałam trochę i w sumie to co rozmawia z jakimś ekonomistą to opowiada o tym jak bardzo jest przeciwko deficytowi budżetowemu i jakie to smutne że USA traci hegemonię na świecie. A i tak uchodzi tam za radykalnie lewackiego jak na standardy NYT.
I think cosmetics can be fine, but they aren’t always. I remember spending a lot of time and effort unlocking all the armor in Halo 3, and it made it feel rewarding. Now, skins can be interesting customization, but they’re never rewarding.
I like MTX to an extent, because it let’s other people pay for continued development of games I like. However, even cosmetics only absolutely still has an opportunity cost to the feel of the game that’s being payed. I think we should all be aware of this. I know at this point most people probably don’t remember when cosmetics were opportunities to make the game feel more fun, not just products to sell, but that is how it used to be.
Oh, definitely. The one issue with cosmetic DLC is that they used to be unlockable. Sometimes paid cosmetics are more development work than the kinds of things that were unlocked in-game back in the day, but not always.
Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a way to support the developers. Sometimes cosmetic DLC is a cashgrab. But if the game stands on its own, players generally aren’t missing much if cosmetics are paid DLC. Smash Bros. Ultimate comes to mind – there’s plenty of stuff to unlock in the game even with lots of costumes and such being behind paywalls.
The problem is what follows from microtransactions. When the managers see line go up because they released a paid element to the game, all the incentives push toward more paid elements. This means any dev hours that can be redirected away from work on the core game to the paid elements will be redirected.
Regarding the first point, if they can hire someone to make a feature happen, and maybe get an unpredictable increase in revenue, or hire someone to crank out cosmetics, which are much easier to make, and for which they often have metrics to show how much they expect to get, which do you think they’ll pick?
As for the second, I’m not sure if I’m understanding you.
I’m not talking about firings, or even other specific examples. The talk of hiring A vs B is just an example, not the whole concept. I’m talking about the inputs that influence internal decisions. Microtransactions incentivise decisions that put the focus on generating microtransactions, often to the detriment of other objectives.
And, okay, I get you now. DLC is kind of a case by case thing, but still not great to me. Some devs put out incredible DLCs that actually add something to an already complete game. However, some companies put things into DLC that should just be in the base game. (playable characters, etc.) The practice of having paid DLCs incentivises that approach, so I’m not a huge fan, even if some of them are good. It’s kind of like political donations. I can like the effect some of them have, but I recognize the problems that come from a system that uses them.
I have to say that the customer holds some of the blame. If people are obsessively buying cosmetics that do nothing and that’s the only way the game is being sustained…either the game is that good already, or the players are the reason the game sucks.
When players need to spend money to be competitive, I think it’s fair to place the blame jointly on both the devs/publisher and the players. When spending money doesn’t change the game OR provides new content, it generally indicates that the player base is happy with what they’re spending money on. I don’t think that’s a problem.
Enh… iffy hand wiggleI tend to put blame more at the point of informed decision-making.
In the same way I wouldn’t blame a person from the 1930s for their lung cancer after their doctor sold them cigarettes, I wouldn’t blame gamers for the DLC. A huge percentage of gamers are kids, legally incapable of giving informed consent. Many others are people who have never had the chance to learn the implications of their buying habits. It’s hard to blame people who aren’t making an informed decision.
The people at dev companies on the other hand, are immersed in the gaming world. It’s effectively a form of incompetence or negligence to not pay attention to the industry if that’s your job. They are either knowingly engaging in the practice, or failing to pay attention to the effect they are having on the world.
Part of it is the question of where you assign fault in a bad system. These days, and I’d hope you can agree, slavery is bad. But where should the blame lie if you lived in ~1800s America? Should it be on the producers, who choose to use slave labour, on the providers, who capture the slaves, on the legislators, who make/keep it legal, or on the customers, who choose to buy the fruits of slave labour? They all could be said to play a part but I’m inclined to find the customers, who have the least power in the system, have the least blame as well.
I think you’re making large reaches in your analogies. Are we supposed to have the government come in and bad cosmetic DLC, and then fight a war over it that splits the country (or world) in two? Lol
My point is that cosmetic DLC (and expansion packs) isn’t the problem – the problem is loot boxes and pay-to-win microtransactions.
I just wanted an unambiguous evil to serve as an example. You’ve gotten lost in taking the example as the point again. It’s an analogy, not an exact replication of of a previous event. See the similarities between the two and not the particulars of either one. That’s the point of an analogy.
The point is that the system of microtransactions incentivises the bad results (manipulative practices and distortion of decisions) without necessitating the good. (enjoyable content) As long as paid DLC exists, there are reasons for people to use paid DLC to manipulate people out of their money. However, nothing about paid DLC means there will necessarily be benefit to anything other than revenue, and things that exist within DLC could exist without it. I’d try to give another illustrative example but I don’t know if it would help.
You don’t understand the use of analogies. Common enough. Many people can get lost in them. Not a big deal. Not your fault.
You do understand them, but were actively trying to focus on the ways the chosen analogies were not one to one with the object instead of on the point the analogies were only used to illustrate. This falls under the category of bad-faith communication.
I assumed you were well-meaning in assuming your ignorance. Was I wrong?
Microtransactions have gone wildly past financing devs
The entirety of the Starcraft wings of liberty campaign made less money than a single mount cosmetic in WoW. That money definitely didn’t to to the developers
Dude, I just installed The Force Engine on my Steamdeck, found a good write-up how to do that via the flatpak the project now offers. It’s fantastic, looks so much better and plays very smooth! And since you point it to the current game directory I could even continue my progress from the original game!
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