I think the thing I miss most about this game is how much it did with hardware from 2005. It looked great, played well, had a decent length but also didn’t outstay its welcome.
I’ve played through it at least twice. I doubt I’ll ever replay City or Knight as they were amazing but far far too long.
I liked Arkham City, it felt more like the game they initially wanted to make. Batmans movement is a bit smoother, you get some fun gliding elements, and it opens up the map so there is a bit more of an exploration/investigation element.
I think Arkham Knight might have gone too large, and I feel like the batmobile sections felt too tank like.
Frontier: First Encounters (Elite3), (and Pioneer Space Sim (still playing)). – Found my safe space via such game. I go out into space, for my safe space. Life changing.
Soul Calibur. – I discovered it’s like chess, and there are depths to excellence. And, I don’t know how causal/influenced by it that I ended up basically looking like my fave character from it. LOL. Deep metaphors and synchronicities in it too. Life changing.
Diablo 2: Lord Of Destruction. – Ate up a huge chunk of my life. [Eventually] Learned the empty dopamine addiction hole’s to be avoided. Basically the game that stopped me being “a gamer” (as if I ever really were ~ was just a diablo2 addict). Found hanging out in the arcane sanctuary, the atmosphere, helped me sleep. n_n Life changing.
Minetest (now called “Luanti”). – Designed my house in it. LOL. Life changing.
I don’t know if it changed my life, but my god it was cathartic - Celeste. I’ve cried while listening to the soundtrack and I’ve cried while playing it. Like, actual sobbing. Having a positively-represented trans character in media, especially in a game as popular and highly-rated as Celeste, means so much to me.
As funny as this is, it’s also a very common logo, being a varient of the Penrose Triangle. Honestly more shocked they didn’t spring for some better graphics…
I mean, I’ll give them some money to activate developer mode so I can install emulators on my Xbox. I don’t need emulators on my Xbox but it’s gonna sit there doing nothing otherwise because I’m not paying for Gamepass
I’m in full agreement there, but at least it’s a small one-off payment to just use it the way I want to rather than playing cat-and-mouse with hacks and software updates
Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work
They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.
My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.
Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.
They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.
Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.
It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.
No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.
It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.
In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.
But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.
No-one will enjoy where that leads
There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.
You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes
You’d like to think so. But look at Robinhood. Five years ago, everyone was screaming about how it was a rigged game. Citadel Investments was manipulating the options markets. Fidelity was getting insider deals. Everything was rigged. People needed to protest. Close out your account. Yadda yadda yadda.
What happened after that? As far as I can tell, Robinhood is more popular than ever. They’re certainly more profitable than ever. There was never any reform or regulation. Mostly, Reddit and similar big name social media firms just purged all the whinners and inflated the profiles of the shills and hacks.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever
DraftKings has been making money hand over fist. They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on. This isn’t one bookie in one city, it’s an international conglomerate that’s expanded its market share around the globe. It is a worldwide bookie.
Why are trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?
What good does that do?
You’re not wrong.
But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.
The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.
Am I wrong?
They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.
It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it. They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day. Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.
It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.
For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.
They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.
Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.
Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.
I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?
Suicide Squad.
There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.
Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.
These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?
If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.
The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.
Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.
XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.
IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.
You continue to view everything through your personal lens while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care. There are no amount of times before people will walk away en masse. That much is abundantly clear at this point.
while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care
People, fundamentally, care.
That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.
No-one games because they don’t care.
You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.
I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.
I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.
That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.
Extremely scummy to not even list the price, but I shouldn’t be surprised since it appears they are going to milk whoever still has autosub on for an extra 10 bucks.
I’m personally a big fan of doing the very tiny semi-transparent (X) that’s impossible to click on as far away from the “Yes, Please Digitally Fuck My Wallet Pussy” blinking blue bar at bottom center of the screen.
Keepass2Android shows a pop-up each October asking for donations. Perfectly fine, but the dismiss button is labeled “I don’t like the app that much”. Even free software isn’t spared that sort of thing.
(The pop-up also breaks the fingerprint reader prompt for extra annoyance)
I’m a pessimist. The price increase won’t hurt them unless they lose more than 33% of the user base. Which is a big number of people choosing to change a habit/lifestyle.
Even if they do lose that amount, they could walk back the 50% and wait a few months and “only” increase it by 20%. People will feel good that they owned the big corpo and the big corpo still manages to increase profit.
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