The Homeworld 3 demo is impressive and I'm really enjoying Lightyear Frontier as well. Definitely going to buy both when they come out in March. I've been hooked on the Homeworld universe since I started playing it in the 90's (25 years ago! lol I'm old) so it's been quite a long wait but it looks like BBI have done a great job. I've loved them since Hardspace Shipbreaker so I knew this would be something special.
If you're the type who wants to unwind from the hyper-realistic art style of most mainstream games nowadays, while also exploring modern Filipino life and culture through the eyes of a young adult student, the Until Then demo might be up your alley. Aside from the pixelated art style coming from the devs themselves, who are also wholly Filipino themselves, there's quite a substantial attention to detail when it comes to the greater Metro Manila and the suburban locations around, including our local circuses. Oh, and there's also quite a bit of mysteriousness and some philospophy to it, as vaguely evidenced by its Playstation 5 trailer.
Doom's shareware sold Doom for me. Most recently the Tekken 8 demo sold itself. In between there have been a ton of games where the demo was helpful in deciding whether or not to play something.
I'm just surprised that in all that time there wasn't a single one that at a minimum confirmed a game was what you were expecting if you were on the fence.
Nah, demos largely disappeared because they not only took a bunch of resources to make but also had a far better chance of convincing you not to buy a game than to buy it, especially if you had other means of marketing it. Many people even enjoyed the demo but felt that they got their fill and therefore didn't want to keep playing, or maybe they didn't want anything out of the game beyond what the demo offered.
Note what kinds of games populate the Next Fest. Mostly games without any other form of marketing. Anecdotally, I found four demos that interested me, and all four convinced me not to to bother keeping up with the game as it gets closer to release. EEDAR, later absorbed by NPD, the combined entity of which is now known as Circana, works with lots of big developers and publishers and found a correlation with demos losing sales. In later analysis of demos, devs found that you could (a) convince someone to buy the game, (b) convince someone that they don't like the game, (c) give someone everything they wanted from the game, where they don't want to play any more, or (d) give someone everything that they wanted from the game, where they don't need any more than what the demo provides. Note that 3 out of those 4 don't result in a sale. A trailer tended to be much better marketing material. Of course, your mileage may vary if the game's loop or selling point is hard to articulate, but in most cases, seeing someone else have a good time with a game is going to be more likely to convince you to buy a game than if you had a demo where you might not understand its appeal. It's why games are built around how well they present on Twitch these days.
Code Veronica’s controls felt outdated when it came out! I love that game but it was so painful dying because of control issues. Id love to replay it without that pain.
They are, but five of them? It seems like they’re ready and willing to kill current goodwill in respect to their games by stepping on the gas instead of realizing why people suddenly liked the games again.
Considering the glacial pace of modern AAA game development, I don’t think it’s odd that they want multiple games in development at the same time to ensure a steady release schedule.
We don’t really know what these five games are (if they really exist at all), but if they diversify the offer with a mix of first person, third person, remakes of old titles and maybe yet-another-attempt-at-bad-online-RE-that-nobody-wants, which is what they’ve done so far (RE7, RE2make, RE3make, Resistance, RE8, RE4make), I think it’s a good thing.
The past few years have had at least four reaident evil games in development at the same time.
Re3make, 4make, village, that weird multiplayer one all going at the same time. It’s really not as unusual as you are making it seem. People like resident evil more than ever right now.
I imagine the situation is similar to this, but maybe mobile or switch games involved.
The Yakuza team, to release games so frequently (like 1-2 a year) has small teams work on multiple games at once. So like the minigame team may be building games for all of them in a year.
Capcom are making the same mistake with RE as Ubisoft did with Assassin’s Creed in my opinion. Focus the whole giant studio on making games for one IP, then when that stops selling the whole ship will sink.
I remember the hint books for Sierra’s games (e.g. King’s Quest). Each hint would be a question or sentence with multiple boxes underneath. The boxes were blank and you used a special highlighter pen to reveal the content of the box, with each subsequent box being more and more specific. It was an interesting way to get hints.
I remember waiting a month at a time hoping to see a hint for whatever game I was stuck on, only for it not to be featured - or perhaps even worse; to see a hint for that very game but one I’d already figured out myself! Urgh! Gaming in the 80s / 90s was a challenging affair!
This article also skips over the other option we had back then - premium rate phone numbers that…slowly… read …out …some …barely …relevant …facts …about …the … game …at …£1 …a …minute …with …maybe …the …hint …you …wanted …after …costing …your …parents …a …£12 …phonebill.
That’s news? If I spend that many billions of more people to fire, I damn well expect that my monthly revenue goes up. They’ve got to have some dedicated whales paying for lootboxes, after all.
I mean at least they’re also removing managers at Blizzard and Activision with the layoffs. That it hits workers, too - sadly utterly expected 😑 - but at least MS isn’t above letting useless and redundant managers go.
(edit) Ugh, sorry. I should have added an explicit /s, it’s not as obvious as I thought it’d be. 😔
I'm not cheering for the layoffs, of course, nor am I necessarily in favour of monopolies and the consolidation of the gaming industry (although, in this instance, I think it's probably a positive thing for fans of Blizzard IPs). But layoffs during this kind of merger/buyout are expected. Microsoft has its own legal departments, payroll departments, marketing departments, etc, and while they might need expanding slightly as the company grows/absorbs new companies, they don't need an entire second company's worth of those departments.
These layoffs were about cutting redundancy rather than just chasing short-term profits. It sucks for the people who were laid off either way, but I think it's good to be realistic about why they happened.
So you’re saying that if Microsoft hadn’t hoovered up another company due to being creatively bankrupt, almost two thousand people would still have a job?
What you say is true but if you followed the reports you’ll know they fired the whole of the blizzard survival team, a good chunk of the Overwatch team and writers/story people from WoW. Very much not only the redundancies.
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