There have been ‘too many games to play all the ones that seem interesting to me’ since the late 90s, at least.
There has always been absurd levels of competiton in video game releases.
What this person is describing has been the broad state of the overall industry as long as I have been alive.
It is not a problem.
It is totally fine that decent games are moderately popular and quite good games are quite popular and occassionally something seemingly simple is actually novel in a fun way, or hits just the right combo of gameplay / art style / narrative elements at the right time and is a breakout hit.
It is totally fine that giant evil megapublishers who exploit their employees and then slave drive and mismanage them into producing shiny, but buggy and lackluster garbage… are not making back their marketing budgets.
It is in fact very very good that they are failing.
The only thing different now is that video gaming is massively mainstream nowadays and normies struggle with choice paralysis more publically these days.
A real dedicated nerd is capable of seeing through marketing and doing their own research, thats… kinda the whole thing that makes one into a nerd, a seemingly odd obsession and inordinate amount of time spent trying to understand their hobby.
If you are just a consumer who is overwhelmed by choice and marketing, pff i dunno, get gud scrub, capitalism be doin what it do, figure it out, develop your own actual personality and sense of taste and discernment, or keep crying I guess?
Video game development democratizing via lower barrier to entry is a great thing.
Players are more likely to find and get something they want for a reasonable price, megacorps are more and more likely to spend way too much money on things they don’t understand anywhere near as well as they think they do.
Whats not to love?
If their form of video gaming as a business model is unsustainable, well that sucks for them I guess?
“Of the 1,431 games released last year that garnered more than 500 reviews — an indication that they were played by at least a few thousand people — more than 260 were rated positively by 90% or more of the players. More than 800 scored 80% or better.”
Problem - You can’t trust Steam reviews. Steam users will give top ratings to “Click the Duck”.
You can’t trust the reviews, it’s true. But also, it’s very much a buyers market with games in general right now. The headline issue is only a problem if you take the side of AAA studios who have to compete with passion-driven indie projects that aren’t just out to make a buck.
I’m going to spend how much to play a game with an obligatory launcher after I already opened steam? And it’s badly optimised? 100gb you say? And I have to see ads for skins? And that’s competing with a game less than half the price that’s amazing, 3gb, no ads, and it can run on a decade old computer?
This is a big-budget problem. They made their omelette, and now they’ve got to sleep in it.
It’s not only big budget. A number of indie games that I thought were superb didn’t go on to make enough money for that team to make another. Mimimi games made excellent games within their niche, but it wasn’t enough to keep finding funding, and they closed. A game like The Thaumaturge from last year has a similar scope, budget, and genre to Expedition 33, but I don’t know that they made enough to keep the studio going. Sword of the Sea this year released to excellent reviews but subpar sales. There are a lot of examples, but this is a snapshot.
It’s one thing if a reviewer says it’s good. His livelyhood relies on the video game industry thriveing. If you stop buying this game, the studio won’t make the next game. If the studio won’t make the next game, the reviewer can’t review the next game. If the reviewer can’t review the next game, then where does their paycheck come from?
So I’m not saying they knowingly artificially raise scores and sell games. I’m just saying maybe a 7 gets reviewed as an 8 just so the reviewer won’t feel awkward when meeting with industry folk at the next industry get together.
But when gamers collectively band together, and say itxs 10/10, and game of the year, I feel rest assured that Elden Ring is as good as people say.
I have not bought Elden Ring. I have not played Elden Ring. In all honesty, I probably won’t. Why?
BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED TO PLAY EVERY SINGLE GAME JUST BECAUSE IT’S AMAZING!!! YOU CAN JUST NOOOOOT PLAY IT!
Don’t blame too many games. Don’t blame reviewers. Don’t blame anything. This is only a problem if you let it control your life. Variety is good for everybody. Some games you can just let others enjoy. I’m glad Elden Ring is so great. I don’t feel bad I missed it. I’m happy for you if you loved it.
Isn’t that so much healthier of an attitude to have?
The article is about how so many games are coming out that many of the companies making them are going under even when they make games that are evaluated as being good or great. I provided an anecdote about myself that probably contributes to it. I didn’t really share it to be about my attitude toward being able to play these games. I’ll be just fine.
In my dreams, regulators would require UP and NS to divest older or redundant ROW so that publicly-owned transit systems can repurpose them for passenger rail services. Even so much as a single-track minor branch line could be reinvigorated with high-floor DMUs while maintaining freight access in the off-hours, such as with SMART in San Francisco area. And in the long run, electrification without UP’s typical objections to overhead wires could enable performant EMUs like with CalTrain.
Fully agree. In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails (because, I mean obviously it would) and operators would put out timetables and requests for trains - all managed by the government. Just like the UK and most other countries, the government is in charge of maintaining the rails, keeping them safe, and expansion, while the operators do what they do best - they manage their schedules and try to squeeze the most profit out of it.
It’s a win-win, private industry doesn’t have to worry about safety or maintenance beyond their own vehicles, they work with the government on scheduling, and passenger rail would get a resurgence because adding new train lines and stops would just be a matter of starting a new operator.
If you thought of a new commuter line that you think would benefit a region, it wouldn’t be trying to convince Amtrak to do it - you could literally raise the money and start your own operator, lease some vehicles, and then literally just start running your train line operated on government tracks. Just as the semis do on the interstate system, just like airlines do.
In a civilized modern country the government would own the rails
I agree with the sentiment, but also have to mention some implementation quirks that should be addressed along the way.
Just like the UK
I personally find the UK to be something of mixed bag. Yes, they do have Network Rail managing the fixed infrastructure for the national rail system, but they’ve bungled the working model with a half-hearted attempt at semi-privati(s)ation with franchise operators for different rail segments. And while that problem has flared and simmered since the 80s, attempts to fully open the network for any operator (aka open access) runs into the age-old problem of too much demand.
Open access – which should absolutely be a starting point of any regulated monopoly, government owned or not – comes with the challenge where if every train operator wants to run their own London to Edinburgh service, then very quickly, the East Coast Main Line and West Coast Main Line are going to be booked up, leaving scant capacity for local service. Obviously, a high-speed corridor between Scotland and England would solve that particular issue, but the central challenge remains one of finding balance: local vs long-distance express, minimum train speeds, freight capacity, first-class vs economy vs sleepers. Open-access is open like a door, but even the widest doors enter to a limited space.
The proper balance is a matter of policy, rather than technical merit, so I’m not entirely sold on the notion that it should be the infrastructure manager (eg Network Rail) making those decisions. Such decisions would have major consequences, and so I think properly belong to public policy makers (eg lawmakers or regulatory agencies). But for technical decisions like loading gauge or max axle loads, those are almost exclusively for the infra manager to adopt, but with public consultation with operators and the public. After all, we wouldn’t want adoption of obsolete or unusable standards on the national system.
they work with the government on scheduling
I think this is implied, but I’ll state it for clarity: operators should have to make a showing to the regulator that their services operate “in the public’s interest” before being granted access to the national rails. And even when granted access, operators must conform to the infra manager’s technical requirements for uniform operation.
In the USA, this is almost identical to the process of setting up a television broadcast: radio spectrum is a limited commodity, and so it must be used in furtherance of public interest. In practice, this isn’t a very high standard, but it does prevent waste such as having one’s own private TV channel. So too would it be wasteful to schedule a “corporate train” service for the exclusive use of select personnel while still physically occupying the rails despite carrying zero passengers.
Basically, there’s much to be fixed in the USA, but the UK model could also use some work too, towards a principled model that maximizes the public investment.
Completely get all of your points, and respect them. I think on the spectrum of bad to perfect systems, I see the UK as “good” - but a long ways from perfect too. The US however is just obviously bad, and I think moving towards the UK’s system would be a massive step in the right direction. Personally, I think the first step is that the private companies should not own the rails themselves, they have proven that they are not the proper stewards of those systems and should not own that.
That’s step one. After step one though, I completely see your points and that there would be a lot of details worth looking into.
And, as someone how has ridden the Azuma service from London to Edinburgh 4 times - I have seen it cancelled twice. Ridiculous that in my very very infrequent trips to the UK I have seen my train trips cancelled just as many times as I’ve ridden them.
There is exactly one nice thing I can say about the USA rail system, and it kinda underscores essentially every issue we have with the rails today: the privately-owned railroads are absurdly good at moving freight.
If we were to ignore the entire notion of using trains to move passengers, then suddenly the American railroads are remarkable in how much tonnage they can move over across the continent, even with their horrifically skeletal network, and still achieve the highest energy efficiency for land transport. They really shouldn’t be as successful as they are, given that they have unionized labor, are not exempt from federal emissions regulations, and serve huge tracts of the country using only single-track lines dating back to the 19th Century.
To say that they’ve devoted all of their efforts to making freight work is an understatement. And it is from this foundation that all other uses of the rails are incompatible. And it shows.
The national passenger operator, when seeking to (re)start a line somewhere, must negotiate with host railroads – except when Amtrak owns the tracks, such as in New England – and that’s primarily a matter of paying for time on the track, plus the “inconvenience” of regular schedule services when most freight doesn’t really need to follow a schedule at all.
Unlike any other product or service, there is no eminent domain at the state-level for access to a railroad, so if a small public transit operator is rebuffed by the host railroad in their area, then that’s basically it. Only Amtrak has a right to use eminent domain for railroads, and that’s only ever been used once, resulting in a 20 year lawsuit to settle the matter at great cost.
Query whether a wealthy state like California or Texas can make a market-rate offer to outright buy the rail network within their state. I imagine the answer is yes, though this would have been much more useful if the idea came up when Southern Pacific was having their difficulties in the 1990s. Further query whether a state-owned railroad located in multiple states can unilaterally deny access to all other states – like what the private railroads can do. Who knows.
In all fairness, we do have a few objectively nicer things, like level-boarding for wheelchairs and strollers into LRT carriages, and pantographs rather than trolley poles.
But we did lose 100+ MPH operation in the 30s, when the 79 MPH track limits came into being for most railroads.
So in total, if that’s all we’ve progressed after a century, then yeah, we haven’t gone very far.
This story comes alongside numerous reports from the dev team that said the team felt it was ready. Plus it was only supposed to launch into early access.
They still both “could” be true. Though more likely something else was a foot. Maybe the earnings target was set poorly such that the payout was more than the increased earnings. You would think in general that such a clause would be mutually beneficial, but clearly one side didn’t think so.
That’s basically what I’ve been saying ever since the switch 2 announcement, I’m glad I can just copy the Sources from this article to support my intuition. Thank you, Superjoost!
For the last 10 years I’ve only paid full price for one AAA game: Elden Ring. I’ve gotten something like 200 hours out of it. It may be the best value for a AAA game ever, in my book. (And I haven’t yet played the expansion.)
I’m happy to wait for sales on everything else, including the secondary market for Nintendo games, but after their recent fuckery in multiple arenas, I’m not keen buying anything they produce. (Not that it matters. Their stuff will sell regardless.)
Hopefully, I won’t have to get the console for several months - if not years. Nintendo’s launch titles usually aren’t anything to write home about. BotW was a notable exception in recent memory, but was also available on the previous generation.
Well, no, once a Monster Hunter game releases on the S2, my partner makes me buy one.
I could get something else, assuming cross play exists, but the only exclusives across all platforms I care about are games made by Monolith. So, at some point I’ll need the S2.
I notice they tend to have one “killer app” and then the rest of it isn’t much to write home about, at least since the N64 (SNES had a whopping 2: F-Zerp and Mario World). The exception being the Wii U, which had… Nintendo Land? NSMB-U? Nothing really.
N64: Mario 64 (and had almost literally nothing else until StarFox) GameCube: Luigi’s Mansion Wii: Twilight Princess, or Wii Sports, since TP also released for GameCube Switch: BotW
It’s been so long since Odyssey and we’ve just had Totk, I’d guess another 3D Mario is likely their S2 ‘killer app’. Could be Legends Z-A or Metroid Prime 4 too, both of which would be cross generation. However, I’m not exactly dying to get my hands on any of these either way, especially not Pokemon.
Yeah, I’m betting on at least a new 3D Mario too. Wouldn’t be surprised if Z-A was cross generation. Maybe the new Mario Kart they showed off in the short trailer. I don’t think Prime 4 will be out right at launch but I could see it in the first year.
I’m not sure this is going to directly affect that, because their deal talks mainly about financing for the Control game, and the other news is about movie adaptations, so probably it is going to be another team, lead by the newly re-hired Hector Sanchez, working on that…
But who knows, this kind of things are always hard to follow from the outside
‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’
To the people saying he threatened a kid, I think he did the exact opposite? He made them aware that technically it’s a crime, to convey the severity, but also said he doesn’t want that to be the conversation he’s having with the parents.
To me that sounds like he didn’t want to threaten with legal action, but the parents did need to be aware that it was a crime, technically speaking.
The parent literally asked whether their kid was in trouble. Wouldn’t it be disingenuous to not answer truthfully (at the caveat that it was actually the truth)?
I saw it more as a way to resolve it peacefully without getting to the stuff nobody likes
And he still didnt answer yes or no. His response, to immediately bring up that “hacking” is a federal crime, implied that the kid is in trouble, but then what he said after changed it to “well, the kid WOULD be in trouble, but if you do XYZ, maybe we can change that.” That’s a threat, plain and simple.
I think the crime here is to post those images online? I don’t know the specifics of US copyright law. This article is about leaking though, the datamining wasn’t the problem.
bloomberg.com
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