They are both irrelevant. They don’t sell bespoke hardware, they don’t sell bespoke software, they just sell you locked down schlock. The era of consoles is over. With the ubiquitous nature of HDMI, 4K huge format TVs, and universal peripherals, there only thing consoles offer you is LESS choice.
You have to be in charge to be a fascist you dumb motherfucker.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
I fucking WISH we had ecofascism. Maybe then I’d get a winter again.
No you don’t, what kind of alternative facts shit is this? It’s absurd to suggest one can only be a supporter of an ideology if said ideology is in power for any ideology.
I fucking wish we had fascism. Maybe then I’d get a winter again.
The only winter you need is a Siberian one, with a paid-for stay at a Gulag :)
When reading opinion pieces, especially ones on topics that I am passionate about, I try and keep a level head and not let the fact that it’s written in a publication I enjoy inform my opinion too much. That being said, I thought this was a well done look back at so many of the things the Xbox brand has gotten wrong over the years.
In today’s fast paced world I think it can be easy to forget stuff like lionhead’s closure and especially the PR releases that were said at that time. The similarities in the pr releases to the recent closures and lionhead’s closure were interesting to see.
I find myself overall agreeing with this piece and it’s conclusions. I do feel the author’s idea of why entertainment companies exist to perhaps be a little idealistic (although I am admittedly pretty jaded on the industry and capitalism as a whole at this point in my life). They claim that entertainment companies exist “to provide that entertainment.” Sure I think creative leads and the devs (especially in the games industry) are there to provide entertainment that they are passionate about. But idk if I can ever see a period where the publisher was in it for the art, despite what they may say. My jaded view is it’s always been for profits. That being said, while reading this and having that view in the back of my head, I did start to question myself a bit. Why is Xbox struggling so hard? I mean if every publisher is in it for the same reason, (profit in my mind) why is Xbox struggling so much with having a clear path. Sure the industry as a whole has been struggling this past year or so, but Xbox seemingly has been struggling for a lot longer. While not a huge Sony fan, they have provided a large list of really excellent games. Sony is of course in it for profits, but they seem to have had more success in getting quality games out the door.
Idk the piece made me think about the whole thing more and I’m not really sure where my thoughts are going to settle. I do know that I really think this shouldn’t have happened. Despite the state of the industry, Microsoft had $20 billion in profit last quarter. I see no reason why this needed to happen.
They claim that entertainment companies exist “to provide that entertainment.” Sure I think creative leads and the devs (especially in the games industry) are there to provide entertainment that they are passionate about. But idk if I can ever see a period where the publisher was in it for the art, despite what they may say.
I agree with you, except that up until the early-to-mid aughts, before Fortnight, and skinner box mobile games, and the promise of persistent revenue capitalizing on addictive tendencies and FOMO, publishers believed that the best path to profit was good games. Konami, to pick the (previously) worst example, published one of the weirdest, most cinematic, ambitious, influential games of all time with Metal Gear Solid. And then, eventually, they saw a straighter, shorter path to profit.
I am…way more personally upset about the Arkane closure than I usually get about these things. I have so much respect for what that studio created. This article is great though and gives the holistic perspective I’ve been looking for the past few days:
The point here, ultimately, is that this cycle has been repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and it does not show any sign of coming to an end. Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush. Xbox’s leadership clearly knows it’s a problem…they have to step behind this first, surface-level layer of justification for closing studios, and get to the real cause - not the decisions themselves, but the principles that inform them. The principles that say expertise, creativity and talent are less valuable than the cost to let them flourish.
It is so damning that the entire industry has reacted that way. It’s not that they closed a studio, that cod have been ignored. It’s how brazenly they closed successful studios for being successful while talking out the other side of their mouth to the press.
It feels gross in a much more palpable way. And with everything else going on in tech it feels so wrong coming from one of the biggest companies in earth.
I’m 100% over Xbox. I hope their next console is the worst release since ET on Atari.
I think in this business you can survive a generation in the wilderness. Nintendo had it with the Wii U. Arguably Sony had one with the PS3.
Two in a row? Well you’re out. Saturn followed by Dreamcast. MS are in their second, and tbh, it looks like they’re pivoting towards being a cross platform publisher and subscription provider. They can certainly afford to keep throwing money at the issue, but if there’s no results, there’s only so long they’ll be allowed to continue doing that before the boss pulls the rug on it. He does not seem like a man who is excited by his gaming division.
Xbox buys talent, mismanages it in search of impossible scale, and cuts it loose - be that the 20-year experts of Fable, or the battle-scarred makers of Dishonored, or the invigorating new generation behind Hi-Fi Rush.
Talking up the demerits of capitalism in the massive gaming industry has been more common as of late (perhaps especially so on Lemmy), and I do think there is nuance in that conversation.
There’s no reasonable nuance here. Microsoft clearly wants insane return on investment from their studios, and I don’t see how that leaves room for the art of video game design.
I think Nintendo is dancing into dangerous territory here. I have a feeling this thing is going to be loaded with anti-features here specifically designed to curtail modding, piracy, and even unlicensed peripherals. The games themselves are going to get HD re-re-eleases and Nintendo will charge you full price again for the moderate upgrade.
I’ll never understand people jumping to play unfinished games. There’s no way most of those 100k people are actually going to participate in the ea feedback / qa process, so all they’re achieving by playing early is spoiling the game for themselves with an inferior version. It’s not like this is made by an inexperienced studio that might keep it in ea indefinitely neither, you literally just need to wait a year to play it when it’s released. /r
The first game was amazing. This one really doesn’t feel unfinished as-is though. There’s likely to be tons of balance changes, and I’m sure there will be bug fixes and more performance optimization updates to come… It’s still super fun, why wait
When I was younger and had more time to not worry about merely existing, I used to enjoy chasing the updates and trying to find every glitch and exploit and do as much silly shit as possible before patches went live.
Guess the first one was even worse than this one at this stage of development, but nobody knew about the game yet. I’m still waiting for the finished product (as I did with the first one), I don’t want to spoil me.
Some art will probably be replaced too. I remember Charon in the original hades had his generic robed character portrait replaced with a better one. Zagreus even complimented him on his new look when it was added to the game, which was a nice touch.
Yes, it’s unfinished, but my experience with the original Hades is that Supergiant knows how to make sure their product is at a certain level of polish before making EA available. I haven’t played much, but they seemed to hit the mark again.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree. The first game is one of my most played on Steam and I was invited to the technical test for the second. But I probably won’t be buying it any time soon. I absolutely hate the trend of buying unfinished products. While this developer is most likely not taking advantage, so many others do. Why should we pay money to beta test your game???
I’ve purchased a fair number of early access games from indie developers.
For me the benefit is that it’s often cheaper during EA, so I get it at a discount, and it already feels like a complete game worth the price I’m paying. I know they are actively working on adding more to it, and having more things added to the game for me to explore extends its lifespan for me. So I get more enjoyment out of it than I would waiting for 1.0, at a cheaper price.
For small developers it gives them the funds to continue development, and feedback that helps with game balance.
Because they get to play it early. That’s it. I played BG3 early and still had a lot of fun replaying Act 1 when it came out.
The studio gets a number of things, as well. While direct feedback is small, that is still valuable as they could never test that many hardware and software variants. They also get automated data from the software phoning home on crashes if that’s enabled. And they get an influx of cash in the last few months of development as their sales spike gets a bit flattened. It’s a winning strategy if you don’t have the funds for a huge marketing blitz to drive initial sales.
I understand the sentiment and I generally agree with you but I think I can make a case for Hades as an exception.
I picked up the first one in ea because I was thirsty for a new roguelike and some friends raved about it enough to me, and it was already a great game. The changes that came over the period I played were additive in the sense that they just opened more options in a game that already felt complete to me (mostly anyways, but more on that in a sec). But to defend it I can’t just say “oh well it felt like a finished game” there also needs to be a tangible benefit to playing it in early access. And there was! The early access versions of the game included meta banter between the narrator and Zagreus, little jokes about new things appearing or things that should be there but aren’t, references to the fact that pieces of the story’s scaffold were still being set up. It sounds small but it was just more of the wonderful character charm that oozes from every corner of that game and I actually kind of missed it a little bit once the full release came. Anyways I haven’t picked up Hades 2 yet (been making more of an effort to clear my backlog lately), but I’m thinking about it. And as far as the ostensible “point” of early access—community feedback and income to support development—Supergiant has given me ample reason to trust that they’ll make it worth it for me as a player if I don’t want to wait for the polished final product.
A Supergiant game in Early Access is more finished than most fully-released triple-A titles.
Plus, as with the first Hades, they work the continued development into the narrative of the game.
What made you think I want people to quit having fun? If anything it would be more fun to play once it’s finished, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of games to play in the meanwhile.
Edit: I just want people to give more thought into the games they play than “whatever’s on top of steam today”. Just because it became available now doesn’t mean you have to play it right away.
I understand your point but you can also be satisfied with an early access game for what it had when you played regardless of later improvements. Valheim is a great example of this: you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that wasn’t satisfied with it, despite being unfinished.
There’s no way most of those 100k people are actually going to participate in the ea feedback / qa process
On first launch it asks if you’re willing to have your play data submitted. So even if people don’t actively send feedback they are still providing data about what systems/weapons/upgrades they engage with more or less, how successful their run is with any given weapon or upgrade, how frequently they win or lose in a given fight, etc.
Nice. Won’t be playing it till the full release, I still have Hades 1 after all, but all this attention will probably make the game even better than the original
i bought it immediately after work monday and have been playing nonstop in all my spare time. no bugs/glitches whatsoever. the only “placeholder” things i’ve seen are copy/paste images for the keepsakes in the display case
Microsoft and Google really aren’t too dissimilar, in a lot of ways. The only reason why Xbox still exists isn’t because they’re so incredibly passionate about it. There was a niche for them to make money, and they’ve created a product in it, that has the minimum viable qualities to complete. Issue is that just as Google does, they stopped caring about it entirely, after the initial pitch
How is that tradition? It happened one time. Successor name suffixes and prefixes used: super, color, advance, mini, 64, i, 3, new, u. It could be anything.
Edit: ah no, there was also super game boy, I guess that’s the only one they repeated. But that was specifically for super NES compatibility.
Do “i”, “mini” and “new” really count as new consoles? i and new were just upgrades to the same console, I believe, and I’m not sure what “Mini” was even for…
I mean, they were direct successors. I imagine the next console won’t be something completely different than the switch, so I imagine I will be some sort of switch 2.
How about the Swiitch? You get the roman numeral 2 in there and the name’s similar enough to the original Switch, so customers will be confused as to whether this is a new console or an iteration of the current one. Just like the Wii U!
A message from Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, posted this morning to social media platform X, confirms we’ll hear of Switch 2 “this fiscal year” - before the end of March 2025.
But the message also damps down any expectation we’ll hear about Switch 2 in the next few months - as Furukawa rules out any further details being shared in an upcoming Nintendo Direct scheduled for June.
Furukawa wrote. "We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year. It will have been over nine years since we announced the existence of Nintendo Switch back in March 2015.
“We will be holding a Nintendo Direct this June regarding the Nintendo Switch software lineup for the latter half of 2024, but please be aware that there will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during that presentation.”
That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone now. They could likely grab a bunch of sales by coming out with a higher-powered system alongside a cheaper version, because many people would like to play games at higher than 25 fps.
And yet it was one of the best gaming experiences ever, no matter the framerate and resolution.
Been a long time since fidelity was interesting to notice, tbh. Don’t get me wrong, all else being equal I’d take 165Hz and 4k over 24Hz and 720p. But all else isn’t equal. And the better game easily wins.
Felt like it was doing just fine to me for how advanced the systems were on a console that was six years old. I do wish you were able to play it, it's an awesome game, it indeed has ambitions that surpass the hardware, but I do think they managed to pull it off, if only by the skin of their teeth.
While I disagree that the game was unplayable, I first played the game emulated at 4K@60K with AutoHDR (surprisingly decent) and it’s almost criminal how poor it looks on native hardware by comparison. The game scales really well.
Maybe with a new Nvidia kit we’ll get DLSS and Frame Gen. And I expect ToTK to get a new port.
I read all the time that TotK has terrible performance, but i never noticed in all the time I played it. I guess growing up playing on old pc hardware made me tolerate shitty framerates.
I fucking care when I only play docked and games like xenoblade chronicles 3 fucking lag in places. The switch is used least for me between an s, ps5 and a midrange pc despite it having “fun games”
Can also confirm excessive lag with XC3. Also, when jumping into the depths in TotK, game would freeze off and on. These Nintendo apologists are wild. The Switch was utilizing outdated hardware when it dropped. I’ll be impressed if the Switch 2 has at least PS4 level hardware.
Keep in mind, underpowered hardware means lower price, which means more sales. It worked with the Wii, it worked with the Switch. I fully expect people to bitch about the Switch2 being underpowered, using “ancient” stuff from 2020-21
“Lateral thinking with withered technology.” Nintendo gave up on competing technologically with its competitors after the GameCube, and it proved to be a good decision.
It is! You can go to the Steam store > New & Noteworthy > Most Played to see current player counts for the top 100 games. Hades II is currently #6, ahead of Helldivers even!
Maybe they’ll actually upgrade the hardware to be half decent on this thing, if they want to discourage piracy, make better shit. If I want to play any switch games currently, I’ll just pirate them and play it on the steam deck.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne