I don’t think it’s as black and white as that. Not to say that Microsoft isn’t dubious at times, but it seems they’re trying to weed out dodgy devices here.
Give companies free reign to create third party devices and they’ll create things that can be considered borderline cheat-y, or create things that are so bad that they affect people’s experience of Xbox consoles.
All this error code seems to be doing is requiring third party hardware to go through proper checks to verify hardware.
I mean I get it, it sucks for third party developers to pay a fee to develop for Xbox
But if you look at the quality of third party hardware available on PlayStation, Apple etc, it’s usually at a much higher quality and that gives people a perception that the hardware is better overall, even though Xbox series X and the PS5 are direct competitors.
If Xbox controllers cost $70 and crappy Chinese knockoffs are retailing for $20 and have no quality control, have cheat-y turbo buttons and break easily, they’re losing money that would have done to official controllers and also losing their brand image.
They’re not outright saying that third party devices are no longer allowed, but it does seem they want to manage the quality a little more
You’re looking at this from a “what is good for microsoft” position. You won’t find much purchase for that thought process here. People care more about what is good for consumers and real people over companies.
Absolutely! Who wouldn’t want to look at it purely from a consumer’s point of view?
It’s easy to just look at it from the consumer’s POV but the best plan is to check Microsoft when it’s actually being scummy, and not when it’s trying to just keep in line with every other company.
Sony issued takedowns of companies trying to sell PS5 faceplates, because they wanted to sell theirs at a premium. Apple is insanely notorious for proprietary hardware, to the point where the latest iPhone 15 even has its back glass fitted with a ribbon wire, so your iPhone won’t even start unless you’re using an iPhone certified back glass and it’s fitted by an iPhone tech that can enable the flag that lets your back glass work.
In a world like that, it makes no sense for Microsoft to put up with cheap knockoffs of its products especially if those products suck and are ruining its brand image.
Capitalism sucks but it is what it is. What we should do as consumers is vote with our money and not buy any accessories like this until these companies allow more third party developers to sell their parts. It just doesn’t work that way though. People keep buying this stuff no matter how high the prices go
You’ve now taken the stance that these other companies did scummy things so it’s okay for Microsoft to do scummy anti consumer things. This will also not find purchase.
I’m not saying that that’s my stance. I’m saying Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world. You’re not going to change their mind by saying “I don’t like it”.
All I’m saying is “this is how businesses work”. If we don’t like it, we need to protest, vote with our wallets.
If you must know, my personal stance is the same as everyone else’s: it sucks that they’re forcing us to pay for first party/verified third party hardware which usually comes with a price rise.
But I thought I’d inform people what Microsoft’s position is in all this. They’re not going to stop taking massive losses just because some people on Lemmy said “that’s not nice”. Reality is that every company wants to make a profit and retain a positive brand image, especially now that Microsoft spent 69 billion dollars on Activision -Blizzard.
Yes yes we all know that big companies are going to do bad things, you aren’t revealing new information here. And we know that leaving a comment on lemmy isn’t going to change anything, this is not new information.
We don’t really like this whole “big companies do bad things and we should expect that and not say anything about it” thing. should we just never talk about anything because big companies are big, so do what they want.
Yes yes we all know that big companies are going to do bad things, you aren’t revealing new information here.
You’re finding it extremely hard to understand the concepts of this conversation and still have the gall to be sarcastic and patronising. It’s surprising when you’re clearly misinformed.
We don’t really like this whole “big companies do bad things and we should expect that and not say anything about it” thing. should we just never talk about anything because big companies are big, so do what they want.
No one’s said you can’t talk about it? How are you so confused? I’ll break it down for you since you’re obviously struggling:
Companies sell products. Companies like Sony have a tighter control on their third party hardware. Companies like Microsoft are much more lenient, but it causes cheap knockoffs to flood the market and reduce their brand value and first-party profits. Microsoft will now implement a check to control third party hardware. People on Lemmy get upset. It’s hypocrisy.
You’re either upset with the whole system or none of it. Getting upset the moment Microsoft does it makes no sense. At no point is anyone saying that you can’t talk about it.
Sorry, I took “regular” to mean external drives, not non-proprietary internal drives. Last gen you could use an external HDD to expand your storage without any issues. This gen you can still do it, but its use is limited.
Their SSD prices dropped significantly this past year when they allowed another company to start making them. But it’s still nowhere near as cheap as PS5’s SSD expansion which isn’t proprietary at all.
This. I love GoG for what they do and their whole ethos, but I have damn near my entire collection already on Steam and like to condense as much as I can as hard as that may be. Steam is still by and far the best launcher, but every year GoG Galaxy gets a little bit closer to being an actual contender; literally all the rest are absolutely terrible dumpster fires.
Why is that by the way? On my PC I have Amazon, Battle.net, EA, Epic, GoG Galaxy 2.0, Itchio, Rockstar, and Uplay clients (along with some individual game launchers) and not a single one comes close to being as feature rich, streamlined, and just clearly built for the customer/player as Steam is. I know Valve has a lot more experience under their belt but it feels like the others aren’t even trying. Most of them are just in your face about their store fronts and barely function as a library after the fact.
Game is good, came out at the right time, had a lot of hype and lived up to the hype
Longer details:
The game is just really well made. It’s extremely fun, very polished (except for a few weird bugs), and complete
It has a massive IP tied to it. This game had impossible levels of hype and it met those expectations somehow
The recent D&D movie was a large success, and D&D in general has been the most popular it has ever been lately
Divinity OS 2 Definitive Edition was very well received, people trust Larian to deliver a good product
People are sharing this game with their friends. They had a strong marketing push as well as really strong word of mouth
Final Fantasy 16 left a lot of us wanting a more traditional RPG after FF16 was anything but traditional
We currently live in an era of games like Diablo 4 which ask for a $70 price tag, and then also have a paid battle pass and paid cosmetics. This game came out at $60 content complete with no additional microtransactions. Ultimately that makes this game much easier to reccomend to people.
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 you 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.
What the fuck? Lol. They are not cartoony villains preying for the old and weak.
Somebody has made a calculation, that shows that they will make more money from people who takes the deal than they are going to loose money from people who get mad and leave their enviroment.
In the future they will do test how far they can go using a/b test and/or testing different markets.
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.
MMOs and live service ruin lore. They’ll twist the existing story into knots so that players can fight or recruit every popular character from the series, even if it makes no sense. Even if they’re dead. Gotta keep those players engaged, even if it comes at the expense of the integrity of the world and writing that drew them in in the first place!
pong, and probaly other examples of early home console games
wolfenstein3d, doom, quake, quake3, doom3 because all of them were technical milestones, had lasting impact on the industry and they show the rapid advancement of pc gaming in the 90s and 2000s
the elder scrolls series, as a simmiliar showcase.
final fantasy 1, 6 and 7, as a showcase of jrpgs through various generations and the fmv of 7 and onwards were imho precursors of 3d rendered movies.
half-life, because of the impact of it’s scripted set pieces and its level design
counter-strike and starcraft, as the games that probably gave us professional e-sport.
dota, because its for mobas what doom is for first person shooters.
deus ex and thief, pioneered the “immersive sim” and they are great showcases of the interactive nature of games
Pokémon, cultural impact can’t be denied and the trading aspect is a great example of a non traditional multiplayer experience
various Mario Games, but definitely Mario Bros. Super Mario World and Mario 64 and probably Galaxy as a showcase of the evolution of plattformers in 2d and 3d, maybe throw a spyro or banjo kazooie in there.
Grim Fandango, Kings Quest, Monkey Island, point and click adventures are there very own beast and often feature actual memorable characters. I definitely think more often about Manny Calavera than i do about Gordon Freeman or any Morrowind NPC, even though i played half-life and Morrowind much more than Grim Fandango
Minecraft
super meat boy, fez, hollow knight… lots of interesting indie games and they show how much more accessible game development has become.
Prince of Persia and karateka, the way they were animated alone would be enough, but they also featured an actual story, they were interested in showing and featured music used simmiliar to a movies soundtrack.
probably much more
games that are a product of a very localized culture (gothic could not have been made anywhere else but the ruhrarea for example)
the whole military complex is missing (from Mil Sims like Operation Flashpoint to actual recruitment vehicles like Americas Army)
more modern games, which i just don’t know or that have not been rattling around in my brain for long enough, but baldurs gate 3, the last of us, or alan wake would probably end up on my list in a couple of years.
Videogames are still a young medium, very diverse and changing so rapidly, that i feel like there is no established canon of ‘classics’ or ‘high impact’ works. We’ll probably end up with dozens of lists like this in such a topic, and might end up without a single game that made it onto all of them, besides tetris.
if a simmiliar question was asked in a movies community i’d bet any list with more than 10 entries would include metropolis, nosferatu, citizen kane and star wars, just because those are widely agreed upon movies that had an impact.
Amazing list. I personally would add couple games, that defined my "gaming hobby":
XCOM/UFO: Enemy Unknown - not sure how this fits in the list, but it was ground breaking for me: perfect blend of micro- and macro management, strategical decisions, tactical battles, what a great game and so much memories of it (and I'd put honorable mention of Jagged Alliance 1&2 here, 'cause they are very similar concept)
Civilization - genius idea, one of the 4X pioneers, easy to pick up, hard to master, and so much replay value; its overall depth is quite a feat, especially given it's from 1991, no wonder the franchise is still alive and well now
Fallout - esp. 1 & 2 might not be the best gameplay-wise, but their world building, characters and atmosphere are excellent... and everyone knows the legendary intro "War, war never changes..."
Planescape: Torment - similar to above, amazing world, unbelievable story, one of a kind game
Gothic - mainly 1&2 were simply awesome, there are no barriers (ahem), the world is your to explore, but it's deadly so you have to plan your progress, nothing is streamlined for you; I can't remember different game with such a vibe (other than piranha bytes later production)
VtM: Bloodlines - kind of similar to Deus Ex, but also taking from the table top; and in my book it has THE best atmosphere of all the games I've played
Witcher - this might be just European thing, but playing especially W1 felt kind of like folklore fairy tale from childhood turned into pretty grim adult game
Disco Elysium - this is probably the only "sort of new" game that I've played and which definitely deserves a place in the list, great characters, amazing story and writing
there are plenty of others too, but my brain farts
To my limited knowledge, it was the first games where true orchestral music was used. It was influential enough to be remade for PS3 and PS4, there are few games to get such a treatment.
i think that honour might go to total annihilation.
i also remember the final fantasies on the psx having an orchestral pieces jn their soundtrack, but those might have not been performed by an actual orchestra originally.
yes, arcade stuff is lacking on my list. The few i have played where mostly on an atari 2600 and simmiliar home consoles way after the fact and the only arcade i’ve ever seen was in a holiday resort thingy :D
Zelda: yep, was surprised there was no mention of it after i looked over my “finished” list, original Zelda and ocarina of time should probably be there, maybe a link to the past. did not play breath of the wild, so don’t have an opinion on it. But zelda -> altp -> ocarina of time is a nice showcase of 2d games transitioning to 3d, and the item based exploration and progression is found in a lot of games.
halo: i am not a console shooter guy and on pc it felt like a very good game, but atleast to me not ground breaking. through the lense of console shooters it’s probably a huge milestone.
unreal tournament: if i’d be listing my favourite games it would be there. but it did not have the impact on e-sport cs or the quakes had so it would be another technical showcase. the unreal engines became very important however.
sonic: yes, at the very least to show another take on plattformers.
gta: yeah, 3 onwards as blockbuster movie equivalents. don’t ask me why they are not on the list, no idea.
gran turismo: if we include simulators, we should also list a bunch of microprose work, richard burns rally, the microsoft flight simulators and so on. Definitely an interesting section of gaming, but not one iam part of so hard to tell what to include for it.
chrono trigger: yeah, my list lacks non western games and chrono trigger deserves to be there simply because of its ambitious scale and the fact that its one of the greatest games i’ve ever played, what was i thinking?
earthbound: never played it :(
castlevania: the early metroids and later castlevanias for what we know as “metroidvanias” today. I’ve played castlevania 1 and 2 and there is not much of what makes metroidvanias in them. fun games though.
it’s been a while since I’ve used windows, but I remember having to give administrator privileges to software installers, whether they are from legitimate vendors or from ripping groups with modified code
Some software installers still ask if I want to install for all users, which require elevated permissions, or only for me, which don’t. In that last option it will not prompt for elevated permissions as it will use one of my user’s folders which I have already all permissions for, obviously.
It’s a security measure that’s half assed. People are so used to it they just click allow but don’t actually look at the prompt anymore. Like I see a lot of people do with cookies on websites.
Thats a windows thing so it can put files in “protected” folders like program files
The unfortunate thing about the UAC prompt is that it gives the software permission to put files in protected folders, but it also gives the software root permission so it can do literally anything else without prompting the user. Except, I believe, if it tries to install unsigned kernel drivers, then the user has to click a new prompt… but you can completely compromise a machine with the permissions that users routinely give to executables that they download from the Internet.
There is nuance here. Not every crack is malicious but you have to assume they all are because some of them are. Trusting a source is irrelevant. Many security products will falsely tag cracked software as dangerous just because it’s cracked, not because it found a specific bit of nasty code, and this feeds the idea that you can’t believe when people tell you cracked software is unsafe. But there are many truly bad cracks out there. When in doubt, don’t trust it.
This is true. Even projects with good reputations get caught up in shit like the XZ back door in Linux.
If you haven’t read up on that fiasco, you really should look into it. It got way too far before being caught all because people suck and ruin things for others.
A game with a malicious crack that can escape a VM running on Windows and get to the main OS?
Sure, possible, but not by any means common.
A game with a malicious crack made for Windows that can… do anything nefarious when you’re running it on linux via WINE and Proton?
… Theoretically possible, but I’ve never heard of this actually occuring.
The same, but also inside another linux OS inside of a Bottle or Distrobox… or full VM… all running on a linux system that is significantly atomized with a read only core-os?
… At that point I am quite doubtful anyone is bothering to make a malicious crack that capable… when 99% of the existing game trainers and hacks that you can find or buy online… only work on Windows.
The crowd of people making game exploits and cheat engines… and the crowd of people making malicious game cracks… that venn diagram is almost a circle… and 99% of these people do not bother to ‘support’ linux, in anyway, at all, with anything they do.
Is using any random cracked software ever 100% safe? No.
But neither is say, using a Windows system, with 0 cracks or hacks… but with a MSFT trusted vendor’s 3rd party anti malware software… where said trusted vendor is allowed to push an unverified update to their kernel level anti-malware system… that is actually malformed, and then knocks out about 1/4 of every enterprise Windows PCs on Earth for 2 weeks.
Oh my god we need John Brown simulator. Old western setting, open world, muskets, horses and hand-drawn maps, tracking down slavers and stalking them across the prairie and conducting raids on their properties.
Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we’ll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to play this shit. I’ve got better shit that I can play for free.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
Those aren’t re-skins though, they just used the battle royals game type as their main game type.
I can’t really think of a similar game to fortnite before it in regards to the combination of building and competitive shooter, although I’m sure someone can point out an early example, and Apex is smashing together counterstrike and maybe overwatch or something similar for the gameplay.
Personally I don’t think apex would have worked if it just looked like a re-skin but its got a lot of great artwork and the level designs are interesting at least to me.
Also fortnite has become the everything game, they have Lego and rocket racing and a guitar hero minigame, its sort of gone wild IMO.
You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment
Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality
There have been a number of voxel shooter that have shipped lowkey since Minecraft that attempted to add block placement to the team v team ticket shooter, e.g. Ace of Spades.
I think we should just forget the game exists. One day they will announce it, but until them, let’s just assume there is no Silksong, and Team Cherry is just taking a long long vacation.
My hype train was put away for a couple years, but it came back out this year. If there’s not a definitive release date by the end of the year, then I will go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.
Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.
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