And they better sty that way for a while. More acquisitions will bring debt that will probably be gambled on, instead of trying to stabilize their portfolio.
The only ones who won with Embracer buying spree were studio owners and execs with their bonuses.
I played when it first came out, then again around 2018. Felt like a huge waste of potential to me. Unless there’s some legal reason, I absolutely cannot comprehend why a normal pokemon battling system wasn’t included.
Unless doing something besides just reskinning their other game (Ingress?) was too much work.
I’m not surprised that something carrying the Pokémon brand is somehow both extremely lucrative but also unwilling to dedicate the minimal effort necessary to add obvious features
I absolutely cannot comprehend why a normal pokemon battling system wasn’t included.
Because it doesn’t fit the design of the game.
Pokemon Go is meant to be played while walking around outside. This means you can’t have a lot of text because glare from the sun will make it too hard to read. The real battle system also requires more congnitive load than most people can handle while walking and takes too long which will lead to people stopping for extended periods of time at which point you’re no longer playing a pedometer game.
Embracer thinks that by buying studios, it could somehow magically make money. Embracer has no sense of the gaming market or who to sell what games? It has no sense about what projects to greenlight or not. It had already failed once, and it will fail again, most probably.
I liked it when it was first a thing and you’d see huge crowds of people in their early twenties out in parks and things … but I don’t think I ever really liked the game itself.
FUCKING STOP. Pieces of shit gambled with several studios to get themselves bought and it blew in their faces ruining several of said studios losing many many people their jobs.
I’m not a huge gamer anymore, at least not of newer games… aren’t microtransactions a bigger problem in multiplayer games because it gives player willing to spend money an unfair advantage over skilled players?
Sure, not necessarily… but in practice? Again, this is not something I have personal experience, but based on what I’ve read about it, it generally is about giving someone an advantage, isn’t it?
Some of the older COD games had guns you could only get with real money, and they were overpowered. Nowadays it seems even free to play games have mostly cosmetic micro transactions.
Imo they shouldn’t do Witcher 4, you should stop when it’s best. They won’t be able to meet the expectations and only disappoint when people compare it to W3.
what really bugs me are fighting games with dlc characters. i know fighting games arent as profitable, but twenty years ago you could unlock every character by actually playing the game. locking content behind paywalls are a slap to poor gamers. that’s on top of a $60 price tag
This has been disproven and was called out at the time of the increase. Games cost less to develop now than ever. Microtransactions and recurrent subscription transaction1s like battlepasses mean a shit game gets to live longer than it would deserve. People have careers in the field and languages common to the industry - this isn’t a “new and groundbreaking” industry - its one of the largest on the planet.
Studios are absolutely not passing any of that $10 to lower level staff. It was to see if the market would bear it, and no other reason - and corporate defenders came out of the woodwork to pretend BILLION dollar corporations need more money. If videogames were too expensive to make, they’d not be spending so much, now would they?
It’s interesting actually. There are both games with insane budgets that cost more that than triple A games in years past and incredible tooling and assets available for very modest amounts of money + incredibly powerful computers very little. It’s possible for some games to be made for less than ever before AND some to be made for more.
Has the distribution gone up though? If the quantity of games being sold has increased the companies are making just as much even though games are “cheaper.”
Imo. That’s the big argument in this debate that doesn’t get discussed. The reach has increased so prices could come down as more units are sold and the company would get the same amount of money.
20 years ago, they sold every Street Fighter three times with more characters in each new iteration. Microtransactions suck, but simple DLC is a less shitty than what used to be normal.
They did milk the fuck out of that, I’ll grant you.
But at the same time you couldn’t take them online and end up playing somebody who’d got the latest one and have to fight new characters you’d have no access to.
Fighting games started in coin operated arcade cabinets that were intentionally designed to be such a pain in the ass to beat that people would dump heaps of money into them just to keep playing. Same deal with games that were released in the days that youd rent them for a week. The difficulty was set so high that it was very unlikely that you could beat the game in that week so you would end up renting them another week or two.
The gaming industry has been filled with greedy fuck policies from the beginning and the only thing that has changed is how they are greedy fucks.
Yeah, I noticed this with mortal Kombat on snes. Every time I played the single player campaign, I’d win one fairly easily, then I’d lose to the next guy. Then I’d use a continue and beat that guy fairly easily and lose to the next one. Repeat until I run out of continues, with the occasional upset of the pattern (extra win or loss).
What people don’t say is often more important than what they do. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the The Witcher 4 is an always online multiplayer game with mtx.
Give it twenty years and CDPR will also succumb. Ubisoft, EA and Activision were kings until they got greedy. All companies eventually enshittify because it is all about money at the end of the day in this capitalist culture we live in.
But they see a place for broken games that are sold by lying to their customers and maybe fixed two years later. Fuck off, CDPR. Are you sure you are the right people to do the moral?
Crunch is only necessary if something has already gone pretty seriously wrong, either it was feature creep or the time scales were unrealistic, or you pull a Bethesda and try to build a game that’s way outside the scope of your own ancient game engine.
I still love that company. The witcher 3 was amazing, easily one of my favourite games of all time. Cyberpunk had some issues sure, I got it a year or so after release and had fun with it. I really like gog and how everything has no drm and I spend a lot of money there. Compare that to almost every other major competitor and these people are saints.
“Some issues” is a very kind way of putting it. The game was unplayable and had frequent crashes and game breaking bugs. Even now, it’s never really been fixed for old gen (the gen it was marketed for and sold in a console bundle with), they just turned it into a ghost town, reducing NPC spawn rate and turning off environmental lights to reduce the stress on the system.
And worse of all, they knew all of that, and still sold a broken product, and to ensure that people would buy it, they didn’t allow journalists to record their play sessions, only allowing them to use CDPR’s marketing videos in their reviews. I could still forgive them for releasing a broken product on the market and fixing it at a later date, if they were at least sincere with their fanbase, but they chose to lie through their teeth because money was more important than integrity.
The fact that they eventually fixed the game on another generation is not enough for me.
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Aktywne