I don’t think that’s right, I’m terrible at games but I still respect women (enough to spare them from interacting with me whenever possible. Same goes for all people really)
More likely higher ranked players finally figured out that keeping harmony within your team does wonders for your chance at winning. The amount of infighting I’ve had to stop just to save my elo is insane, why would i start something just because of someone’s gender.
Perhaps RPG’s with a party, like Mass Effect, Baldurs Gate 3, Fallout New Vegas (many companions with their own stories to find and tag along), Star Wars: knights of the old republic, dragon age.
Some shooters like the later Band of Brothers games, valkyria chronicles or the Mafia series you may enjoy as well.
In Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, there are multiple paths to choose to complete the game, and one option is to choose a fun companion come with you to help you throughout.
Since OP likes open world games, in the later Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4 you can have companions. not the same level of interaction as Bioware-like parties, but it’s something.
also not really an open world game, but in Midnight Suns you’re a mystical hero in a party with some of the avengers, other marvel heroes, and even some villains. there’s a lot of personal interactions with all the members between missions.
The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
I’d like more games to be like FromSoft games. The difficulty is adjusted by what gear you have and what spells you use. None of that turning bosses into bullet sponges nonsense.
Yeah, Sekiro has a pretty adaptive way of making the game harder, if you start a replay and get rid of the charm item, you can’t almost parry, it has to be precise, and if you ring the demon bell everything gets higher life and damage, but drops much better loot.
Just going to ignore the hundreds of levels most players need to accumulate?
Sekiro was the only one that actually respected players time. Players bitched endlessly it was too hard.
If fromsoft actually gave a shit they’d add in adjustable parry windows and iframes and that works cover 90% of the people who weren’t good enough from sekiro. They won’t because they love to be gatekeepers.
I’ve beaten every day since 2 in addition to sekiro, the actual hard game. We’re talking about easing the game for the average population. So yeah if you are in the top .5% of players fromsoft gives a fuck about your time.
For everyone else your talking somewhere between 50 and 200. I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Modern world of Warcraft has less leveling these days 🤦♂️
Yeah, but the point is that you aren’t just grinding levels. You literally said it yourself, you go explore a different area, you play more of the game (not just grind the same part of the game)
I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Kind of like when you’re lower level in other games and have to level up to beat the boss? Do level 1 gnomes go straight to killing The Lich King in world of warcraft?
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.
I’ve been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
but there’s so many other ways to change difficulty.
change number of enemies and where they spawn change gear and abilities, the Witcher did that one with how the stamina system worked. it didn’t drain on the lower difficulties. horizon zero dawn made everything in the shops more expensive and made the enemies drop less money. honestly, that one also sucked. only served to make the game grindier.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
There are other open source remakes (2004, 2006) but they’re not as popular. I’ve actually contributed upstream to all 3 of the above, it’s a very nice community!
(thanks! I have a lot of nostalgia for Runescape but don’t want to waste months of my life, so I’m considering getting a single player server up and running with a like 10x exp multiplier. Now to decide on 2003, 2009 or 2012…)
I downloaded a single-player server a while ago, 20x XP let me actually experience the damn game, lmao. It was neat, getting to see what I only got glimpses of as a child.
I would say play whichever era you played in the past :P. If you played RuneScape classic, OpenRSC (the 2003 remake) is the best, otherwise 2009scape is a good shout. You could also check out 2004scape.org, their beta starts soon
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.
You can still play it but increasingly games are becoming very different from what you bought.
I’ve started noticing a disturbing trend. More and more games that are older being sold at steep discounts or “free to play” and simultaneously jampacked with invasive telemetry and/or ads/microtransactions. And since Steam won’t let you play older versions, those games are effectively dead.
The most recent ones I’ve noticed are Riders Republic and Borderlands 2. Helldivers also introduced a bunch of new microtransactions years after it’s launch.
So it’s the fault of the delivery-device? Why didn’t you make a backup of an older version just in case? Besides, last time I checked, you can. With a bit more hassle. All not the case for a “live” online-game. Which borderlands wants to be.
If BL is “exactly the problem”. And GOG does it better. Why is it still steam’s fault? Use GOG then? Where is it the delivery-device’s fault? As BL2 offers online-coop, and is also the major selling point of that game, a fragmented market is impossible.
It doesn’t matter if you prefer offline or not or that you CAN play solo, it is online coop. I never played it coop either, but that’s what it is and hence everyone has to have the same version. Simple as that.
Point with gog was that they do it better. Vastly so. Yet only a tiny fraction of devs choose them. Hence it begs the question whether it’s the platform’s fault per se.
It only matters in the sense that you’re allowed to not purchase online games.
Virtually every game in existence has some sort of online element. But what you seem to be unable to grasp is that many of them have single player modes that don’t require any internet connection.
It’s as simple has having a server that checks the version of the game installed before allowing access to online services.
[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.
They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria
Literally never seen that before. I think I see if the dev pushing their 4th update that day and now I have to wait a half an hour to play the damn game.
downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy.
Not my problem. Guess I’d better just pirate the game instead.
Firewalls and especially sinkholes are VERY necessary, far beyond silly game telemetry.
They don’t allow this for a good reason. Imagine 1 million clueless gamers running an older version of their game because they’re too lazy too update. And, of course, then complain about a buggy game and the tech-support will drown even more and review would end up more badly. nothing worse than a fragmented game-world. how should online games work if every Joe and Jane got their “own” favorite version? the average user is a total clueless (pc-wise) person.
Also, you can install an older version. Just with more hassles. Also you could by GUI with many games IF the Dev wants you to be able to. Like a select few versions, if you’d prefer an older state. But, of course, only indie devs do that.
Gog does it, but Gog only offers a mere fraction of what Steam has. Also your example of BL2 is not on gog either. For that reason.
Sure, Valve could enforce that, but…as said…why? They already offer the option for different versions. If the devs don’t use that, they will have their reasons. The biggest one i mentioned before: Fragmentation and the resulting nightmare of customer-support. On steam’s AND the dev’s side. Look at the Android or Windows-market. Someone complaining “my windows sucks”, but still uses Windows Vista. Or people screaming for support because “my favourite app doesn’t work” and use android 10.
Don’t get me wrong, personally I’d value the freedom of choice. But the vast majority of people are clueless (and still use those devices) and need to be “guided”. Every system gets dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. That’s why apple does so well (besides the “brand”-shit ofc).
Just because YOU don’t see why support on both sides hate fragmentation, doesn’t matter. They do nonetheless for very obvious reasons unless you are very alien to tech.
And yes, people do need guidance. If they’re not forced to update, they rarely do. And then they complain shit’s not working. People don’t read manuals, FAQs, guidelines and also they don’t update unless forced to (or strooongly motivated or just nagged to death). I’ve been in this industry for nearly 4 decades now. From all sides. The average Joe or Jane is the worst.
And yeah sure, it doesn’t matter at all for some games. You play the version you want and it’s all fine. But either you offer this option (which steam does BTW, as mentioned before) or you don’t. If you don’t, maaaany devs would be going to use another platform. Maybe fucking EPIC. That’d be grand.
While you’re not wrong, by that logic, it’s actually fairly trivial to take my Steam downloads drive and run it on any computer even without my Steam account.
It works in the same way that dumping your GameCube games and running them on Dolphin works… It’s quick and easy, but it’s against the ToS and requires breaking DRM.
Steam’s DRM is weak, and in some interviews some Valve developers even gave hints that this is on purpose. Many Steam games will simply run without Steam if you just double click the .exe in the install folder, and the vast majority that only rely on Steam’s DRM can be opened by running a free “Steam Emulator” software that pretends to be an active Steam account with a correct license.
A lot of Steam games don’t have any DRM, and most of the rest are pretty easy to strip.
Give it a shot sometime. Completely quit out of Steam, turn off your internet, and try running some of your older Steam games directly from the Steam folder.
I do this somewhat often when my kids are on my other computer playing games on my account and I still want to play something. It’s a little trickier on Linux since you need something to run the Proton/WINE layer, so I mostly stick to Linux-native games in that pretty rare case.
It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.
But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.
So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.
Really? I haven’t tried that since they revamped the sharing thing. I have three accounts, one for me, my wife, and one my kids share, and they’re all linked. Most of the time my kids use my account, but I can easily change that if it’ll allow simultaneous play (on different games).
Quick, delete this post! Nintendo has already dispatched two elite snipers to home in on your position and dispose of you, but maybe they’ll fall back if you delete this quickly enough!
Really? Because there are plenty of reviews that captured the state of that game at release, and they’re generally better at articulating it than the guy who has 1000 hours in a game and calls it “literally unplayable” in a Steam review.
Individual Steam reviews may be trash but the average rating is valuable and usually pretty reliable. The biggest downside of the system is that it isn’t quick to “respond” to updates but the separate “Recent” rating helps a lot.
The point you’re responding to is that C:S 2 was praised by reviewers at launch despite it having TONS of issues and missing features. The Steam ratings were a way more accurate picture of the game.
Especially in a game like Civ. it’s hard to know how people feel about it until a week or so later. I remember when Civ 6 was said to be the best game in the series on release, but after spending some time with it, it was lacking. Reviews like these are more of a first impressions.
Unless my friends, who have put a lot of hours into both Civ 5 and 6, unanimously recommend 7 to me, I have no intention of getting it.
I’m both satisfied enough with what I already own, and not sold on the new one yet. Not to mention that it’ll inevitably be a vehicle for more dlc and expansion packs
No one’s said anything about hating it. For me, it’s primarily a co-op game, and if they’re not going to switch to it, it’s better for me to save the cash, and put it towards something else
I don’t know what it’s using specifically under the hood, but in Street Fighter 6 Capcom recently added a new AI opponent you can fight that they say is trained on actual player ranked matches and fights more like a human opponent. You can even have it try to mimic your own playstyle if you’ve played enough.
It can do some odd things and its mimicry isn’t perfect. But it definitely doesn’t feel like the typical high difficulty CPU opponent which uses things like input reading to react faster than a real player ever could.
You can train it in mirror matches, but the V Rivals that you can fight other than your own mirror are an amalgamation of a particular rank. There’s a whole lot of skill variance in Master rank alone, so it might be good for training me against Dhalsim, because hardly anyone plays Dhalsim, so no one knows the matchup, but it won’t help me learn how to beat Punk, specifically.
Yeah, there are some disappointing limitations for sure, but it definitely is interesting, and does at least feel more like a human player than the normal CPU opponents.
On 11 December, four days after The Day Before launched to widespread criticism, Fntastic announced their closure, stating that as their game had “failed financially” they could not afford to continue operating. The Day Before was removed from sale on Steam later that day.
Day Before was basically a scam though, and they kept the servers up for a few weeks.
By all accounts this was a real game. It’s just that nobody wanted to play it.
In the last 2 years we’ve seen these live-service games fail at launch time and time and time again. The execs need to just accept that Fortnite already exists and you can’t force that kind of success.
I personally don’t like Epic for paying developers for exclusivity deals, keeping games off other PC platforms for a year or more. Artificial scarcity is bad for consumers.
Which they don’t do. Their platform has very few features, and doesn’t even have a cart. (Well last time I booted EGS like a year ago).
They have almost no features and of the features they do provide, none of them are great. Their only “feature” is operating at a loss, subsidized by megacorps, for many years like Amazon to gain a bunch of market share.
Luckily for gamers, steam already existed so they couldn’t corner the market and enshittify the entire industry like amazon did.
It doesn’t really bother me since it’s still on pc anyway, it doesn’t matter massively where you get a game from (unless you specifically want drm free copies).
Even worse is that they do this while trying to paint themselves as the underdog against the Steam monopoly. It’s not only hypocritical, but also deceitful. A new monopoly is not a solution to an existing monopoly, but a solution to investments paying off.
Don’t forget them being hypocritical again for suing google/apple for being monopolistic because they don’t want to have to go through them for payment.
I do know what it is, and I don’t actually think Steam is one. They have a considerable market share, but they are by no means the only way to get games on PC, nor do they exercise their dominance in a way that stifles competition.
I’m pretty sure Tim Sweeny knows this as well, but he still calls it a “monopoly” whenever he has the chance.
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They’re currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don’t need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn’t have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
Why not say fuck the developers instead? They’re the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the “influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost” lottery.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don’t sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you’re sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There’s tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you’ve got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there’s tens of unsuccessful ones…
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.
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