I can’t speak to Rockstar directly but I do know some game companies send anti-union propaganda emails regularly. To take the next step and fire people is entirely believable given when I’ve seen HR push out.
More or less all companies (that are legally allowed to (and some that aren’t)) send anti-union propaganda. Whether it is outright villification or just “We are your friends. Talk to us. If you form a union it is you saying we failed”. That is kind of just the nature of the game.
What matters is what happens when the workforce decides to unionize anyway. You can either respect it or do everything you can to slaughter your workforce.
Am I the only one who is already utterly bored of GTA in America? I know this is where the series is based, but I am so over my interest of that country and would love to see a GTA in a new country. GTA Bangkok would be amazing for instance.
In the meantime, Rockstar better get it together and treat their employees with respect and stop being greedy assholes. Either way, I am not buying GTA 6.
Sleeping Dogs (aka “Sleepy Dogs”) is basically GTA in Hong Kong but inspired by HK crime dramas rather than tarantino stealing his ideas from them. And it was REALLY good and shockingly holds up (did another run late last year). Arkham Batman style combat on foot but you also have guns and cars (with Total Overdose style shenanigans to leap from car to car). Technically a sequel to True Crime LA but nobody cares about that.
Also… Emma Stone is in it for reasons nobody understands. And it is still unclear if she actually knows she was in it either.
But it also highlights the issue. Taking GTA and moving it to another country would, by and large, lose the purpose of the game. Modern day Rockstar is very much an American company and all of their points of reference are American cinema (or what few foreign films take off here). That was very noticeable any time Nico began referring to “the old country”. To transplant that to Russia or Thailand would just be an American movie set in Russia or Thailand.
Whereas… if you enjoy HK crime dramas than you will LOVE Sleepy Dogs because it 100% understood the assignment. United Front clearly worshipped the movies and it very much showed… while also making sure Wei Shen had spent most of his life in the US to account for any weirdness there.
And if you’ve ever spent time in Hong Kong? Okay, it isn’t quite as good as RGG and Kabukicho or Yokohama. But you very much get all the right vibes in a way that the GTAs often fail at with LA and NYC. You aren’t going to be able to navigate Wan Chai just because you beat up some fools there (unlike how you can 100% navigate Kabukicho after any modern Yakuza…) but you are going to feel “at home” on the streets in either form.
Americans had a social contract? This is hell culture perpetuated by living demons that keep people as slave workers masked by false ideas of freewill and freedoms. When in reality every avenue they offer a person leads to the same fucked up false living. Haven’t American success doesn’t mean you’re free, or worth respecting, it just means you were most likely willing to live a cunt to humanity to get “yours”.
Buggy releases that are horrifically overpriced, go in completely wonky directions, and in general are so generic and repetitive and yet continue to push all other potential competition from the market.
My only thing with this is the claim is a glass cannon if its true. If no company resources were given out in this ordeal, if I was one of the 40 employees involved I would be leaking the forum messages publicly to show how there wasn’t any inside information involved. Make the entire case fall apart because if it’s shown no public info was involved, the claim it wasn’t over unionization becomes harder to fight. But I guess that is a better situation for in a court scenario.
While I enjoyed it, it was also very stressful. I think we just played wrong. We covered every millimeter of the plot with farms or other useful stuff and then proceeded to be busy for more than half the day with just maintenance. At some point this meant that we never got to explore and often barely had time to go to the stores or talk to the people in the village.
Apart from overcooked it was probably the most stressful game Is ever played and it’s not supposed to be like that
Some people have a money anxiety built in that translates into the game. The funny thing is they bring it all themselves, the game makes absolutely no fuzz at all about making money.
The very first scene is the main character running away from the ratrace to a farm. Yet the very first thing some players do is bring in the ratrace with them. Everything in the game makes money and no money at all is ever required by the game from the player, except to advance the farming itself. It doesn’t even have banks or debts like animal crossing.
It’s bizarre how people, when left to their own devices, simply reproduce the worse habits of real life.
No the game has a much, much worse anxiety time crunch in trying to 100% it before the end of year… 2 ( I think) when grandpa shrine first measures progress.
You don’t find out what that means unless you made it to year two and it immediately tells you that you can keep trying anytime you want.
It’s not a one and done, you can literally retry the test infinitely. There is no crunch period at all, this anxiety comes from players misunderstanding things the game says in plain English.
I might be remembering wrong, but I think it is entirely possible to develop relationships with the town characters and see almost all of the cutscenes without ever upgrading any of those.
Then you don’t engage with over 60% of the game anyways. Sounds to me like a balanced game that has something to offer to a variety of players, and anxieties, overfixation and stress with some gameplay and not other seems to be something the player brings in and is not caused by the game.
To open the community center (the primary goal for the first year+) specifically takes quite a lot of money actually, and outside of talking with NPC’s once a day, money is necessary to get every other advancement I can think of. I agree that many players probably go too hard into trying to min/max things, but the game isn’t as loosey-goosey with costs as you suggest.
I never understand why anyone puts together those massive farms. Personally, I always end up leaving the vast majority of the space unused. My farms only ever occupy the space directly in front of the house, and even that needs sprinklers asap.
I guess it’s just a mindset difference. I’d say me and my friends are all pretty competitive gamers (as opposed to more creative gamers). We tend to play games mostly for the challenge. Also didn’t help that we had just finished our Facorio playthrough. So in our mind we still had “the factory must grow”. So our minds were like “if space -> use space”.
Sorry, I probably could have been more clear that I was referring more to people that play SD for irl years and have crops spread all across their farm. I can definitely sympathize with new players that spread out too much without the experience to know what that entails. Hell, I’m pretty sure did the same my first time playing. It seems petty natural to make that choice.
Fwiw, if you end up trying the game again, I found QOL mods really enhanced my enjoyment of the game, particularly the one that provided the option to change how long days were. Even just a 20% change really helped make the game less stressful for me.
I find it funny, because it is not required at all. You could be the most casual lazy ass gamer, and still see and accomplish every piece of content inside the game. The game doesn’t penalize you, and instead goes out of the way to reward the player for everything they do, even if it is just loitering around and barely progressing stuff at random and by chance.
It doesn’t feel like that though. For example, trying to earn money and progress by going into the cave or whatever to fight nets you almost no money gains and eventually your gear can’t keep up.
As someone who doesn’t enjoy farming sims because they feel like work, it just doesn’t feel like the game cares if you progress in other ways. And it may not penalize you, but a lot of the other options feel tedious because of the drastically lower rewards you get from trying to earn money through those activities.
Thing is, that’s ok. The game just isn’t for me and I am fine having moved on.
Personally I’d say that “always striving for the maximum and stressing myself out” is a personality trait that’s not only a problem in Stardew Valley for me haha. I’m o it’s not a great mindset to have, but unfortunately it’s a subconscious drive that’s hard to eliminate.
There are probably games or other media that you love that the average Stardew Valley fan wouldn’t click with. You’re not missing out, you’ve just got other stuff you enjoy.
Very true, but then again most Overwhelmingly Positive games I find amazing. I do have a long list of games I love and a selection I actually always keep installed, some of which are mediocre by many people’s standards ;)
Can’t agree with this. I got dozens of hours out of Portal 2, simply from replaying it so many times (which is an amazing feat in of itself because I never finish games).
Meanwhile I was bored of Stardew Valley after two hours of wandering around and not being able to find anything to do. From what I’ve gathered, the game expects you to figure out how play it on your own. I’m in my late 30s and I have bills to pay. I don’t have the time nor the patience for a game like that anymore.
Edit: Point I forgot to make is that I feel like for a game to be considered the highest rated among them all, it should have universal appeal. But that’s just my 2¢.
I preface this with the caveat that all grants are subjective and you can like what you like.
Stardew Valley is a love letter to the harvest Moon games(and I guess rune factory as well). If you have ever encountered those games you immediately know what to do in Stardew.
I think where Stardew is different is that it came later and benefited massively from the “cozy game” popularity.
While I played harvest Moon on a super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, and Gameboy my girl friend who did not have that exposure growing up loves Stardew. This generational and gender Crossing game has tapped markets that were not available back then. Couple that with the fact that at this point you can play that game on basically any platform from phone to console, new and old and it’s totally understandable why this headline might be true.
Stardew lost 100% of it’s appeal to me once I learned that the events just repeat year after year and there are no consequences for doing nothing. I really want to get into the cozy vibe gaming space but I just can’t seem to do it.
I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.
In game time isn’t everyone’s metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.
I’ve watched some let’s plays of Starcraft Valley, and I’m glad I did because I probably wouldn’t like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.
I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.
And I’d say that it is 100% deserved. Stardew Valley is a once in a lifetime kind of game and has one of the best developers you could ask for. Free new content and updates for 10 years and it’s still like $20 and frequently on sale. The developer actually tweeted out once that if he ever charged for new content that he’d want everyone to publicly shame him.
“I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.”
Stardew Valley is the gaming industry at its best and one of the best indie games out there.
Hehe yeah. To celebrate the recent patch increasing multiplayer to 8 people. We basically started like a DnD group sessions style of playthrough. We would meet weekly and play for like 8 hours at a time. Was pretty great.
But at the same time there are plenty of indie devs that sell games for $30 and then have a few $15 DLC on top of that after a few years. Not throwing shade at those other devs, more just saying that the dev for Stardew Valley could have sold DLC and nobody would have questioned it but chose not to. You could be like Stardew Valley and keep the game cheap, free updates, and frequent sales or you could be like Factorio and refuse to ever put your game on sale and up the price every couple of years and come out with a $20 DLC. And I’d be shocked if Stardew Valley has made less money than Factorio in the long run, especially with it being the in number one place right now.
And yet those small studios are one flop away from bankruptcy. Stardew Valley is a one in a million success story and should not pose as a benchmark. Barone decided to continue as a more or less single dev, but you can‘t blame talented young designers to expand their team to realize more ambitious projects and sacrifice economic safety for that simply because they now employ people. Barone can do updates ten years later and postpone Haunted Chocolatier for that, you can‘t do that if multiple people depend on their salary.
I think it’s fair, and sometimes good. I’ve been playing Stationeers recently and it’s fantastic. It’s priced reasonably, and it’s an amazing game. They have a few DLCs, which are purely there to give support, not new content. It’s for you to pay the devs more if you have the money to give them and want to.
However, they’re also losing money on the game and have said they never expect it to be profitable*. Most games aren’t Stardew Valley, and they’re struggling to survive. Stardew doesn’t need to make more money. Most small/indie studios do.
*It’s the studio making Kitten Space Agency, which they’ve said they want to be free, with the option to donate. I think they’re allergic to making profit and only like making cool games. I’d highly recommend checking out their games, if only because they seem to be doing development for the sake of the games.
Idk Stardew Valley is a passion project if I’ve ever seen one. Sure, concernedape is making extraordinary profits, but it has to feel way better to have a decent size of the planet’s population playing and connecting with the project they poured their heart and soul into.
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
Mate, it’s one man, Self-published, pulling in the proceeds of a game that has sold 41 million copies. Even if he has made $5 per copy, that’s over $200 million dollars. The profit margin on his time even after 10 years is insane.
I didn’t realize it had sold quite that many. I knew he spent a lot of time working on it, like 70 hours per week for 4.5 years, but that still works out to at least an enormous $12,000 an hour! Even if he kept at 70 hours/week for all ten years, it’s still only half that number, far greater than you or I will likely ever see.
Steamcharts showed about 150,000 concurrent players playing the game when I saw a few days ago; I’m shocked at just how popular it is as well. I think he could basically just work on it 70 hours a week for the rest of his life and it would still be a great hourly rate.
My only issue has always been that I cannot throw more money at the ape. So I buy the game for gaming-adjacent friends and almost always ruin their lives convert them
That’s what I do too. I’ve bought it for all my friends or have convinced them to get it. Feels like I’m a drug dealer trying to push it on everyone I know lol.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve re-purchased the game for Switch and iOS after already having it on my PC for ages. I didn’t really want to play it on those platforms but just wanted to give more money to concerned ape.
The copy of Minecraft I bought back then no longer works (there was a bunch of buggy account change stuff that never worked for me). My copy of stardew valley still just works.
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