A bit of topic, but it pains me to see how powerful high end phones got. Like most people just use them to text and scroll social media. Why do people spend that much money?!
If anything, it makes me wonder why we don’t have more small dedicated handheld gaming devices that aren’t phones or pseudocomputers and don’t cost a bomb.
Like a £220 PSP/GBA/DS-like device with decent first-party support would be really nice for me imo
I’m probably part of the problem. I’ve never used a controller except a few times at friends’ houses. I grew up with Nintendo DS, Wii, PC, and smartphone games. I don’t want to ever have to pick up a controller.
With a phone, there’s a type of controller that wraps around the phone, turning it into a Switch form factor. That’s probably the middle ground between atrocious touchscreen d-pads (or only playing games that actually work well with touch controls) versus lugging around a Dualsense and some mount contraption or kickstanding your phone on a surface.
I’ve never had trouble with or resented touch screen D-pads ^^; again I am part of the problem I suppose, because it seems by your post that most people hate the things I’m genuinely satisfied with. I hope the general controller-liking population gets things to serve their needs too, though. Thanks for providing the information for what I’m assuming is the majority.
The Switch Lite is exactly this. $200 handheld that runs first party games. There are android handhelds like the Retroid pocket 5 as well.
A Steam Deck Lite would be incredible. Small, cheap, linux-based, and powerful enough to run indie games and some light 3D. I think that form factor basically needs an arm cpu though.
theres also isnt much difference, so the higher end , aka flagship ones are slightly better than the previous editions. no need to spend 800-1k+, i bought a OPR12 instead. pixels tries to justify thier flagship prices with thier useless AI chips.
Yea, I got the op 12 because it was just $50 more than the r on Amazon at the time.
It’s definitely powerful enough but I’m slightly disappointed by the software, arcore is just completely broken, and hdr is fairly spotty (works in yt app and photos app but doesn’t work in chrome or Google photos)
the op12 has higher memory capacity storage, and beter telephoto lens, i dont really like the curved screen though, other than that its good. i think 13 or mostly got rid of that curved screen.
There are real video games for phones now, and I’m pretty sure emulation is up to at least on the gamecube era. Slap a controller on it and a phone is pretty much just a hyper-powered gameboy advance.
The big benefit is that much horsepower allows the phone to very very rapidly “race to sleep” in that the faster it can crunch the numbers then return to a much slower clock the less power it’ll consume overall
I did assume a thing or two I guess lol. I got a refurb when it was cheaper than a fix. Wonder if that counts as a “new” phone… Theseus would probably like to have a word.
Apps by corporations are stuffed with ads, telemetry and other crap. It uses frameworks on top of other frameworks and import libraries for the dumbest shit. For example the reddit app is about 120mb while my lemmy voyager app is 8mb…
The twitch.tv app is 150mb while an open source twitch app is 25mb. It has even more functionality and options and runs like butter.
Most of the shit phones have to run and process is in the background to track and sell.
Its really bad and why i encourage people to use open source versions of stuff they use.
Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn’t coming together.
For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game’s and studio’s closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.
Yeah. Sometimes we’re lucky and get a leak of the cancelled game. Happened with the War Craft adventure game. It was almost finished. And it was really mid. Maybe up to today’s Blizzard standards but not back then.
It’s a word-puzzle game that incrementally teaches you how to use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find & replace text. Some of the puzzles add silly restraints for you to work around, and the game has charming NPC coworkers that introduce each challenge.
Never heard of it, and sounds awesome, regexes are the sort of things that need lots of practice to be good at, a game seems like a great way to keep the skill alive
Donkey Kong (1981) popularized having different levels in a game to progress a storyline. Until then, you would have the same level over and over with increasing difficulty
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
I don’t remember being possible to spawn on teammates in BF1942, but definitely remember it as a first to select spawn points on map like Battlefield always did.
I can’t remember if that mod had squad spawns. But I definitely remember playing it a lot, that was an absolutely revolutionary mod with so much content, not to distract from other great BF1942 mods though. I believe the original DICE team originated from that mod team to create Battlefield 2 as well.
DICE hired a few of the DC devs to work on BF2, then promptly laid them all off about 6 months or so after release, and then the laid off devs and others who weren’t hired made Kaos Studios, and made Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront, before being corporate acquisitioned into non existence.
There were a few BF42 mods that, on certain maps with certain vehicles, allowed you to spawn in vehicles.
IIRC, Forgotten Hope had a number of para-assault maps that allowed players to spawn inside of the aircraft they would parachute out of.
I believe you could also do this in… I can’t remember the name of it, but the Star Wars themed 42 mod (which the BattleFront series either largely copied or was directly inspired by), I think it had some spawn-in-able vehicles as well.
Also BF Vietnam, the official game, used a similar concept of having ‘tunnel exits’ that could be built/placed by Viet Cong engineers, which were placeable spawn points, and the US had the ‘Tango’ … mobile river boat with a helipad thing… which was a mobile spawn point.
I am 99% sure it was BF2 that first introduced being able to spawn on a player, I don’t think any of the mods for the earlier games pulled that off always had to be a vehicle or placeable static object.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
EA did this thing a while back where they saw people were still playing Bad Company 2 on PC on community servers. They updated the game to require a login to EA’s server on boot, then took those servers down. Always online is cancer.
They finally killed off BC2? So I can finally give up on the futile effort of reinstalling the game every year, in hopes that maybe I’ll find a populated server this time around?
I miss that game so much. Rush was so much fun. The maps were designed perfectly for that game mode, unlike future BF titles where it’s a tacked on feature. It was so good, that I found out the hard way that I actually don’t like Battlefield games, after wasting money on BF3, 4, and Hardline, and hating all of them. I just want more Bad Company games.
It was dead last time I tried playing (because of the login thing). Unless someone made a community patch to bypass the login prompt, I guess.
You’re pretty much in the same situation I’m in. BFBC2 was the last Battlefield game I liked, and it was because Rush was so much fucking fun in that. I hate how much the newer ones kind of mostly focus on Conquest, personally.
Conquest is not my idea of fun, either. It’s a lot of running back and forth between the same objectives over and over again until someone wins. To me there’s no thrill in that.
I like the concept of “push/bomb/capture the objective and move on to the next phase of the map” in any game that has it. Used to play a lot of Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch because of it. But now I’ve moved past those games as well. Overwatch has an issue where the meta evolves faster than I can keep up, and TF2 has the opposite problem we’re the meta doesn’t evolve at all because Valve doesn’t update the game. So I’ve stopped playing shooters for now until something new comes out that satisfies my desire for this kind of gameplay.
That’s what every game company has said about every game for decades though! A game disc which installs and plays the game was legally still some nebulous “this provides a licence to play the game which can be revoked at any time”, it’s only now that the companies actually have the power to revoke them at any time.
👨🚀🔫👨🚀Always has been. You never owned the software. Even when games were on cd or cartridge. The only thing that is your legal possession is the physical CD or cartridge and the license that came with it.
Always has been a blatant motherfucking lie, you mean.
Saying you don’t own a game you bought is exactly as batshit insane as saying you don’t own a paper book you bought. We wouldn’t put up with this shit for that, so we shouldn’t put up with it for games either!
Stop letting the copyright cartel steal our property rights and drive us into serfdom.
There are two different ownerships that are being conflated here. When you buy a book, let’s say it’s a new book, just released, and rapidly becoming a best seller. You own your copy of the book, you can read it, you can make notes in it, you can lend it to a friend but while your friend has the book you can’t read that book yourself, or you can sell the book again but once you sell it you won’t be able to read it anymore until you purchase another copy or go to the library. What you’re not allowed to do just because you have the book is make copies of it to sell or give away (which is somewhat challenging to do anyway with a physical book that has hundreds of pages), you’re not allowed to make and sell an audiobook recording of the book, you’re not allowed to go and make a movie based on the book. You’re not allowed to take the characters and write a sequel to the book and sell it. The author still owns the rights to the contents of the book.
In the early days of books, especially the 19th century as books became easier to produce and more people could read, a lot of this started to become problems. People with printing presses would see a book people like, get a copy, and start printing and selling copies on their own. They made translations and sold copies in other countries. People would produce plays based on the books, and depending on where it was performed the author might never know about it. This was all usually done without the involvement of the author and the author often was not paid from these. A surprising number of highly regarded and top selling authors wound up making very little money from their books because they weren’t being paid for most of the copies being sold. Many died poor. This led to the development of the concept of copyright and various other associated rights.
These rights became more complicated as media progressed. With audio recordings there are multiple rights involved: the person who wrote the song has a copyright on the actual music and lyrics, and the person who performed the song has a copyright to the recording of their performance. Sometimes these are the same person, sometimes they’re different.
The laws kept getting more complicated. With software, the developer or publisher owned the software, often because the developer was working under contract to the publisher or sold the software to the publisher. It’s kind of rare to sell the actual software to a customer, and is usually done only for corporate or government clients. In that case the entire rights to the software are transferred and the publisher/developer can’t sell another copy to someone else. Much more commonly only a license to the software is sold to many different customers, and what exactly that license involves can vary widely in the legal terms of that license (which most people never read). Some are very restrictive. It used to be that a lot of licenses specifically tied the copy that you purchased to the hardware you first installed it on. If that hardware died or you purchased a new model, too bad, you’re now supposed to buy a new copy. Some licenses said you’re not allowed to change the code of the software, some licenses allow it. Ten or fifteen years ago people didn’t really think about the idea of streaming gameplay and creating a video from a game was considered a derivative work and not allowed, like making a movie from a book. Now a lot of licenses explicitly allow streaming gameplay, but some older games that weren’t planning for it might not have the rights to stream the music from the game.
If you violated those rights in the past, the terms technically said those rights ended and you were supposed to stop using the license. In practice this was on the honor system and the licensor would rarely know about it, unless they sent an auditor to check compliance, which was usually only worth doing at large companies. With the internet, companies now have the ability to actually access your computer and monitor your use of the software you’ve licensed. They can even disable your access to this software. Unfortunately, of course, a lot of companies have gone the greedy route and used this to their own advantage and at cost to the customer. Not everyone does, though. It’s really important to know what the terms of the license say. If they say they can delete the game you’ve bought and not refund you, don’t buy from them. Don’t give them money for this crap. Let the game flop, even if it otherwise looked great. Support the developers and publishers who want to support the customers. Read the terms on your software; you should always have the option to say you don’t agree and get your money back if you don’t go through with installation. And the laws that allow bad licenses don’t have to stay as they are; some jurisdictions are friendlier to consumers than others.
It’s the same with paper books though. If you buy a paper book you don’t automatically own the rights of that work. You own the copy and can sell that copy or even make a copy for private use. But you can’t make copies of that book to sell, since you don’t own the copyright
Copyright is definitely being abused by the big corporations but without copyright small artists/software developers would constantly get their work stolen by those big corporations.
…which is the entirety of the important part. Once the store sells you the copy, that’s it: the copryight holder has no more right whatsoever to say what gets done to that copy. In particular, it does not have the right to dictate to you when, where, or how you may use your property, e.g. by requiring an Internet connection for the fucking thing to run!
The copyright holder’s temporary monopoly privilege should not be allowed to supersede or infringe upon the copy owner’s actual property rights in even the slightest way. Full stop, end of. The publisher’s business model is its own damn problem, not the customer’s. If it relies on destroying the latter’s rights in order to achieve profitability, the business deserves to fail!
For its 30th Anniversary Magic the Gathering hyped up the return of $1000 card packs with the CHANCE of pulling non legal reprints of its original Alpha set, including the covered Black Lotus, that is…again…not legally playable in any format and is worth the same as a lotus you get from your home printer. For $1000.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Older games are a laggy mess when there is too much on the screen. Not to mention sprites disappearing. The issue I think is, we have gotten better and better over the decades until recently. We are just seeing a backward slide in performance (for many reasons, not just poor optimization).
I’ve only recently (2 years ago) started to play older games I was interested in but never got the time to play. I even got a 16:9 CRT-TV and modded all the original consoles. It toatally depends on the game if it is a smooth and optimized experience or just an unresponsive mess of code.
Examples: Virtua Racing on the Genesis or Star Fox on the SNES. they were slow and quite laggy. sure they were essentially pushing the limits of what the console could do and in the case of Star Fox had to have the FX chip in the cartridge but I wouldn't call racing around on the Genesis in Virtua Racing a "smooth" experience.
Other games are like this too with loading. Mortal Kombat CD on the Sega CD. you get to the Shang Tsung fight and the game has to load every time he morphs. Other games would also slow to a crawl if there was a lot on the screen. To your point Ranger X on the Genesis had these little tadpole enemy things that could quickly populate the screen if you didn't take them out quickly it would slow the game down. Same would happen on the PSX with the game Loaded.
Game pass was always going to be bad for consumers, and probably bad for smaller orgs. The problem is people are short sighted and don’t care.
Like with Walmart moving into a neighborhood. People are like oh it’s so much cheaper than the local shops! And then those get priced out of business and Walmart raises prices and lowers salary. People won’t or can’t think ahead
Just be careful that irrecoverable damage hasn’t been dealt to the game industry and traditional distribution methods by the point that the enshittification starts. What I’m really concerned about is that Microsoft will do everything in their power to smash the current games industry to bits and then rule the ashes. The games industry will end up smaller and worse off, but Microsoft still makes more money since they control a larger share even if the pie shrinks and shrivels.
Enshittification is the process of squeezing money out of both sides of the transaction after you have built a sufficient customer and supplier base with initially attractive offerings that were possibly made at a loss.
First the service is great for consumers (and likely bleeding money). People flock to it.
Then they use that consumer base to lure more suppliers to the platform. Phase two. The service is great for suppliers because it means easy access to a big customer base.
When both a lot of customers and a lot of suppliers are using the platform they start making changes that redirect revenue from both sides to the platform itself. Prices increase, fees for suppliers increase or their cut decreases, maybe they have to sign that they won’t sell under a certain price elsewhere, customers can’t use all things on the platform anymore without paying extra, they introduce ads, maybe exclusives, that stuff. Customers won’t leave because they are used to the platform, there are network effects (all my friends use it), sunk cost fallacies (I have paid them x dollars over the years and if I leave I keep nothing for it) in the case of gamepass they have maybe stopped buying games elsewhere and wouldn’t have a library at all if they lost access. Suppliers won’t leave because the customer base is huge and they have no other simple way to reach those customers. Both are the literal frog in slowly boiling water. “What’s a few more bucks a month, what’s a little additional ad before my game loads, what’s a few more % to MS when the alternative is losing all those customers”. That’s the enshittification part.
What’s “short” about the short-sightedness, though? I’ve been a Game Pass subscriber for something like 8 years and it’s still crushing it as far as services go - probably moreso now than any year prior.
Will it last / remain a good deal forever? Nope. But nothing does/is. Might as well enjoy the great variety of games I’d never purchase (like Blue Prince, Arcade Paradise, Shipbreaker, South of Midnight, Expedition 33, etc.) along with the convenience of access to games I totally would pay for (like THPS 1+2, Gears, Diablo, etc.). Plus the built-in rewards subsidize like 1/4 of the cost.
When (not “if”, when) they jack up the price to a point that’s not worth the games or I don’t have enough time to play to justify the spend, I’ll just cancel.
i get the feeling gamepass gives you access to the library of games that my library has. fantastic if your library doesn’t have video games or you have difficulty getting out of the house, but i love my local library
I’m glad. But don’t get your hopes up because of this. Commission could (and probably will) just say “we have considered it and we are going to do nothing”.
I think the commission will take action in some form. The worst case scenario in my mind is that they will only require clear labelling. Similar to what they did with smart phones recently. While this not exactly what I am hoping for, having “This game will at least be playable until XXXX” on the package or store page would still be a massive improvement over the status quo.
I dont understand how such a broad requirement would work. They just have to pick some arbitrary date, and then after that they can continue as things currently are? Can you give an example of a game where this type of labelling would have helped?
Yes if we would have known that Concord only lasted two weeks then those that bought the battle pass wouldn’t have bought them. Know eol timing help consumers.
They didnt plan for it to last two weeks, the game failed. How do you expect them to guarantee a certain uptime when they have no idea if anyone will even play it.
They didnt know it would only last two weeks. They probably knew it was a possibility but I doubt they planned for it.
This is what I mean though, if concord had to say the game would be live for a guaranteed amount of time, why wouldnt they just say something low like 6 months. Why wouldnt every company do that unless they knew for sure it would be successful? Its too risky to choose longer periods of time, and we just have the same situation as now.
‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect of this labelling requirement might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.
If you are saying they knew it was closing and they sold it for months anyways, that sounds like fraud. Has there been proof ubisoft decided to do this anyways?
Yes, I think calling it fraud is a fair conclusion, but what do you mean with “they knew it was closing”? This decision is completely in the hands of Ubisoft. Something doesn’t stop being fraud just because someone only decides to defraud you 2 months after they sold you something.
For all we know when the decision to pull the game was formalized, they pulled it that day. It depends what they did after they decided the game was being pulled. Did they leave it up for a few months to get some stuff in order beforehand, but kept selling it? I’d have a tough time accepting a reasoning from Ubisoft for that.
Thats why I asked for any sort of comment or reporting on it.
On December 14, 2023, Ubisoft delisted The Crew and its expansions from digital platforms, suspended sales of microtransactions, and announced that the game’s servers would be shut down on March 31, 2024, citing “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”.
People who paid around us$40 for the game on December 13 were being sold a lemon.
Given that it was released in 2014 it seems likely that their licenses were given a 10 year duration and they always intended to shutdown in 2024 at the latest (of course if its user base failed to reach critical mass they could have pulled the plug earlier).
Does selling a game in 2023 when you plan to kill it in 2024 legally qualify as fraud?
Thats not what I’m asking. You just have me evidence that they didnt sell it as soon as an EOL date was announced. Are you saying they should have stopped selling it before they publicly announce the EOL? Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
Should they have announced and removed it as soon as the board meeting ended? How much earlier would that be in this case?
My unsubstantiated theory is the the licences they signed for all the vehicles and real world content had a 10 year lifetime.
Usually those contracts would just require that they stop selling the game, but they may have included something about the servers in the contract too.
Either way they new something was going to change in 2024 and realistically they knew which of these possibilities were viable:
sign new deals with all licensors and continue business as usual
sign new deals with cooperative licensors and modify the game to remove the others
remove the game from sale and keep the servers running for current customers
remove the game from sale and kill the servers - tell people to buy the sequal
I’d they waited until December of 2023 to have that meeting then that feels negligent.
If they had that meeting earlier and continued to sell the game (until ≈100 days to EOL) without warning customers that feels fraudulent.
I think its a bit ridiculous that you think you have enough information to say they should have acted sooner.
Its also ridiculous that your arguments rely on what feels wrong.
The game was 10 years old and people are salty it went EOL. How have this many people not played an online service game before to realize that 10 years is a fantastic run, and nothing lasts forever. Move onto a new game or help build one, this effort to make games live forever is absurd, entitled, and shortsighted.
I’m using the word “feel” because I’m not qualified to provide a legal opinion.
It lasting 10 years doesn’t mean much to the people who were sold the game in the last 6 months without any warning they were buying into the final hours.
They weren’t aware they were buying a 10 year old online game? This isn’t new either, many MMOs have dead periods after their final patch and before a new expansion. The crew didnt even die, they made the crew 2, which apparently was awful or else people wouldnt have complained.
They are supposed to meet with the seven people who first put the initiative forward. It won’t change their minds if they’re already against the initiative but if they don’t care it may sway them to hear it explained to them. I have zero expectations since EU bureaucrats live in a parallel dimension but there’s some hope something happens.
It’s messy. Making a balanced law around it is sketchy. Consumers deserve to own the games they buy, straight up. Businesses deserve to be able to sell their assets when they fold and have them continue to be worth something so they can live on to make new games and their old games can go to new companies to keep development rolling.
There’s obviously low-hanging fruit. If your game is single-player and you’re just doing an online piracy check, and you go out of business, you leave the check servers running in a trust for like five years with the code to remove the check from escrow. Tick Tock, you either relight the game in time somewhere, or it becomes free to play.
But when you have something like Clash of Clans, where you need battle servers. Those assets are useless once you open that code and 100% support a community-run game. The game could otherwise be passed to another studio, and development could continue. Selling and moving games to other companies and publishers with breaks in the middle happens a lot. How long after a game collapses should they wait for it to become worthless to the market? The obvious answer to the consumer is immediately, because they bought it, they own it. Maybe you have to keep a certain amount of money from the proceeds and use it to refund the users. It still sucks for the you don’t own it anymore concept.
Developers and publishers aren’t fair to consumers without guardrails (and there are none), but those rails should also be reasonable to companies.
If the commission does nothing, it’ll probably be wrapped around this clusterfuck.
I do have a worry that the studios will just stop selling games and everything will go subscription if they are required to provide servers and source on game shutdown. It’ll just push more piracy, less sales, less games and everyone loses.
I really wish companies would just have pride in their stuff and be fair to their users and users could just bear a fair price for good games.
Hmm I’m not sure using gacha games which are designed for addictive gameplay loops and predatory monetisation being the games that your kid prefers over standalone experiences is a good argument to make
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