Thanks for posting this OP, it actually means a lot to see someone talking about this.
I’ve been very lucky in that my pain has responded really well to medication, but I’ll never forget how absolutely awful it felt to be physically unable to play the games I love. I hope we continue to push for accessible features in games more and more, this is a great hobby and when you’re trapped at home it can have an enormous impact on your quality of life. Even just the social aspect of gaming is a huge benefit.
Seriously, it’s a product for sale. Don’t like the price, vote with your wallet and don’t buy it. What’s with the manufactured outrage for every topic nowadays
Its not an old game, MK1 is the latest release. The people getting served this are running it on hardware that was weak last generation. At a certain point you simply cannot push these devices any further. MK1 for Switch was never going to look beautiful, the current gen Switch can’t do it. I’m okay with devs making their games available, I mean at least you can play it. Theres a reason a Switch 2 is in the works.
Because you have the full choice to not buy and support it, if you think the price is unreasonable. It’s not a vital need, and nobody’s forcing customers to buy it. Housing, food, healthcare, we don’t have a choice. Buy or die. A video game? Not so much. The issue is not game publishers overcharging, it’s players who moan and whine… AND THEN BUY IT ANYWAY, thus ensuring the publishers will continue the practice
Others have already replied with this info but I’m just spelling it out for anyone who is not familiar like me:
They fucking named the brand new game mk1. Is it a remaster? No. It’s not a remaster. Is it a recreation of mk1? No. It’s an alternate timeline game given the worst name in the history of naming things. It’s genuinely a brand new game.
Sometimes I wish I could have a job where companies just say “hey should we make this decision” and I tell them “that’s so fucking stupid no one will actually like that” and get paid well for it.
I've had some similar roles before, but more often than not companies just do it anyway, even if you have a lot of data to the contrary. It's stupidly easy for someone in management to push some of this through despite the data, choose an arbitrary metric to define their success, get their bonus, and then bail for another company. Meanwhile, folks left at the company have to then try and fix all of the nonsense. It blows that we value failing forward. I've seen a few decent products just tanked this way.
Which is bullshit. It reminds me of when web email services offered ridiculously small inbox sizes, such as 25MB or 50MB. Then in came Google and offered 1GB, and all of a sudden all those companies found the way to match Google’s offering.
But I guess if people are willing to pay for those ridiculous prices, and deal with in-game payments… shrug.
People are complaining because they don’t like a thing, that’s fine. Same as you’re complaining in this post. Call companies out on their bullshit. Also don’t buy bullshit, that’s a good point too.
Because it doesn’t qualify as bullshit. Company made a product, set a price. Either you find it worth the price or not, but either way what’s the reason to kick up a fuss over an optional good
Company also sold pre-orders for a product, which means people can’t really decide whether the product is exactly what they want until they get it. At which point they complain, because they trusted the company not to sell a sub-par product. What is your issue?
My guy, the complaint is about the price because of the quality. Or, as you are asking, are you saying people didn’t know the price when they bought it?
On a side note, preorders are a scam. If you’re dumb enough to preorder a game in unlimited supply, that’s on you.
I agree that pre-orders are a scam, but it’s shitty to say “you knew what you bought!” when some people literally couldn’t.
I’m not saying they knew what they bought, I’m saying it’s on them for choosing to buy before they knew what they were buying. Seriously, people need to take responsibility for their choices already.
Company made a product, set a price. Either you find it worth the price or not, but either way what’s the reason to kick up a fuss over an optional good
Now you’re saying it’s on people who pre-order. Can’t we stop pushing this on the consumer and start demanding better from the manufacturers? Why can they sell shitty products, instead of being held to higher standards?
In this particular case, it’s not on the publisher. The switch is an old console, and there’s only so much they can do with the hardware. It’s not a particularly big surprise to anybody familiar with the technology.
Why SHOULDN’T we hold consumers to task for their bad decisions? They are arguably making things worse for the rest of us, by repeatedly rewarding bad behaviour from companies. There is no good reason for them to preorder, they just had to be the first instead of waiting a day for reviews to appear. Well, if you’re going to be impatient, guess what? The risk is on you.
In this particular case, it’s not on the publisher. The switch is an old console, and there’s only so much they can do with the hardware. It’s not a particularly big surprise to anybody familiar with the technology.
Then they should be open about this before and during release.
Why SHOULDN’T we hold consumers to task for their bad decisions?
Because it doesn’t work. One side of the equation spends lots of money to make sure as many consumers as possible make bad decisions, because it makes them even more money. You can’t fix this only by changing the other side.
I didn’t suggest fixing it. I said the consumers consciously made a bad decision, and they should take responsibility for it. I’m tired of grown ups acting like kids.
Let’s be honest. It’s not about the 5v5. It’s not about the CC. It’s not about the balance changes. It’s not about the cancelled single player.
It’s about the free stuff. Blizzard took away the free stuff, and everybody’s angry about it. Now you have to pay for a decent amount of cosmetics, and getting a new hero requires a grind (a big grind for current-season hero, small grind for past ones) unless you want to pay.
There are two viable business models for service-based games (and running servers and paying moderators is service, that’s why they’re called servers):
Sell a game and then support it right up until everybody’s already bought the game, then sell the sequel and repeat. Otherwise how do you fund development when nobody is paying you anymore?
Sell a game and then harass your players into giving you recurring payments.
don’t make the game a service. The game is a product and not a service, the service is the bare minimum to keep the master server up. Players run dedicated servers, make the expansions through modding, etc. This is how it used to be for everything before Xbox Live.
I get that it’s disappointing, but when you get angry about not getting enough post-release content you’re asking for 1 or 2. And the industry has pretty much moved away from type 3 – I can’t think of a modern popular game that isn’t a decades-old institution like Minecraft Java that fit into that category.
It was pretty generous for people who weren’t buying loot, but selling loot crates in a slot machine was far worse, imho. You just know how bad that must’ve been for people with gambling addictions – “here, buy 100 random pulls and hope you get the skin you want”.
The difference being that it was a skin and you didnt need to buy them. I had almost every skin in ow1 just by playing and i didnt even have a silver banner thingy around my character portrait.
In ow2 you are buying characters which you actually need to play effectively.
I wholey agree that gambling mechanics have no place in games, and that cosmetics can have as much pull to addicts and people susceptible to fomo as things that affect gameplay but when the thing you are gambling on can be bought for coins (which you earn tons of by playing the game and pulling items you already have) and the chances of pulling items you dont already have are stacked in the players favour then it does beg the question of wheres the fomo?
The characters are very easy to unlock in game for free. Obviously it’s not as good as getting them at the start of the season, but it’s not p2w. They’re at the end of the free battle pass in their launch season, and have an easy achievement challenge to unlock them in following seasons. I’d say the preferred weapons in tf2 were harder to get.
45 level grind isnt easy for people that have limited time to play. And i needed to win 35 games as a support character to unlock lifeweaver, which as a solo queue player with enough time to play 2 to 3 games on average a night when i actually get to play, is not easy.
I know im not the only person playing the game but i also know im not alone in my situation.
The fact is its not the game it used to be but its pretending that it is.
If they hadnt cancelled the co-op rpg element that was the original reason we all had to abandon ow1 th3n maybe that wouldnt be much of an issue. But they said its too much to develop it so its gone. And now to replace it they want more money for something else that used to be free.
Its all just a cash grab. Its not balanced towards player, if you think its fair then you have been fooled by capitalism too.
It is a lie that they cant provide the resources to make the rpg part of ow2. They have several thousand employess and are one of the richest game companies in the world. Larian have 400 employees and managed to make bg3 in 6 years… so its absolute bollocks. Blizzard spent 3 years developing wat ended up being ow1 witha reskin.
Well that’s a good sign then. That should mean the masterserver is cheap to run, and good chance that the game can be hacked to be fully p2p in the event the masterserver gets taken down. P2p means far less server side code that has to be reverse-engineered.
Honestly this seems a bit much. I recently started playing again after years and am generally enjoying it. I guess I already have most of the skins I want from OW1, so I don’t really think about the cosmetics of it. But the gameplay is still just as fun as far as I can remember, the balance seems fine.
But I think lets take off the rose-tinted glasses on OW1. You know what I don’t miss? Needing to buy tons of loot boxes during a specific period in order to get one skin that you particularly wanted. At least now it seems you can just buy what you want, if you care.
Not a fan of Blizzard, although their customer service has been great. And while I think that Overwatch is more deserving of criticism than most, I really get the impression that people at the moment just seem to default to ‘outraged’ unless proven otherwise when it comes to game companies. I don’t know, I just kinda feel like people need to chill just a little, because this is basically all about a slightly different way of selling cosmetics.
I think what’s more important is a real shift towards your ‘type 3’ games. Overwatch is a competitive FPS where users expect new content, which is a big part of the issue. My favourite game to play in the last few years has been Pavlov VR. I bought it for like £15 2 years ago. Since then it’s had a major update, more like an expansion pack that many companies would sell as a new game, and has more recently had a large overhaul. Tons of community maps, content and gamemodes, and just a blast. Before the recent update, the devs were getting lots of hate because the game was ‘dead’. I was like, mate, the game is finished. What more do you want? What more do you think you deserve, did you not get your money’s worth? Why does a game need to constantly change to not be ‘dead’?
Anyway, Overwatch is always going to be that kind of game, but what I’d love to see is more of a move towards the type 3 model for games where that makes sense, that’s what will actually make a difference, it’s what’s actually important. Not wanting microtransactions to be structured slightly differently.
I miss proper expansion packs. The whole 'you liked game? We’ve basically made another game on the same engine and using lots of the same assets as the game you liked, so you can play more game. It has about as much content as game, and is like 50% of the price.
Define “harass”. LoL and Fortnite don’t “harass” you into giving recurring payments. You can make f2p-friendly games, especially on pc, if you want. Blizzard just doesn’t want.
I loved WarCraft 2, but it came much earlier so it wouldn’t fit the “peak Blizzard” timeline. For all those years to this day I’ve been humming music from that game.
IDK, I think Diablo 2 was peak Blizzard. We had StarCraft and Warcraft 2, and imo World of Warcraft was kind of the sign of the end, at least when it seemed they would keep doubling down on expansions instead of new games. I thought StarCraft 2 was just alright (bought Wings of Liberty on launch), and I didn’t bother with Diablo 3 due to it being always online.
So for me, peak Blizzard was around 2001. Granted, I never played Warcraft 3 (was just too different from the earlier Warcraft games), nor did I play World of Warcraft (didn’t have stable Internet, stable income, or stable time), so maybe the peak should be pushed out a few years.
Personally I think of StarCraft 2 as Blizzard’s last good game. It was the last time they made something new and didn’t cut it up to sell to you in pieces.
They were the GOAT for SC:BW, D2:LOD, and the first couple years of WoW.
SC2 has done well over the years but I remember being really disappointed when it came out. The original’s campaign was so gritty. Playing each race, you felt like you were in this strange scifi world. It was brilliant.
The SC2 campaign was so bad. Cartoonish, one dimensional characters. They made zerg and protoss more human like and boring. They were already focused on making their games sports, so single player was not their focus at all. I was fine with the esport focus but not at the cost of making it more cartoonish.
I was so excited to play the SC2 campaign when the game came out. Starcraft and Brood War was my life for years.
I was so disappointed by SC2 that, to this day, I haven’t even read the wikipedia summary of the expansion campaigns. Never bought either of them. I stopped playing around the time they introduced paid maps (in 2010 or something). Playing competitive was good, but UMS was botched just as bad as the campaign when the game was new. That was my most anticipated thing after the campaign. Even now people mostly only play the same 3 UMS maps.
The original game still holds up too. We got robbed of a good sequel. And don’t even get me started about diablo 3 lol. RIP blizzard.
Edit: did some googling and it turns out they announced, but did not implement paid maps in 2009. Map micro translation did eventually get implemented though.
I watched SC2 on YouTube on and off over the years. UThermal is worth checking out, he’s a great player and super positive self-conmentator. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched SC2 a lot more than I’ve played it. Which is sort of weird for a game…
A long time member of our community passed suddenly a little more than a year ago. Her father appended her steam name with “Rest in peace.” He arranged for an online memorial for her online friends and encouraged everyone to DM good memories to her accounts. Her account’s sat there in my friends list, offline, ever since. It was a great way to honor her, I think she’d have loved it.
I just had the unsettling realization that, over time, our friends lists will literally become virtual graveyards.
I’ve got a few of those. I’m planning to backup my friend’s Twitter page and all our interactions since his account is private and I don’t want to login ever again (after archiving)
I was wondering what “feminist propaganda” was and apparently it’s talking about misogyny.
Another forbidden topic seemed to be targeted at criticism of misogyny at Game Science. The company has come under fire for lewd and sexist comments attributed in media reports to its founders as well as recruiting materials from 2015 replete with sexual innuendos. Those original job postings and comments were deleted, and the company has not commented.nytimes.com/…/chinese-videogame-wukong-censorship…
But this anti feminism attitude is not limited to this 1 gaming company, but government policy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule: www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/…/100165360
so, you have gigabytesper second of disk io, and the game relies on the couple of megaBITS of internet bandwidth most people have to stream textures? As opposed to downloading and installing them once as an update…
Man I miss the early days of lan parties. Struggling to figure out how to plug my friends computer into mine via BNC cables (didn’t know we needed terminators) when we got our first ever network cards. Then later the big lan games of blood, duke 3d, quake, even starcraft.
Your comment unlocked repressed memories of having to rewire ethernet cables for direct connection between PCs. And to make my father take me and my desktop+CRT monitor to my friend’s house for a weekend of HL+mods, AoE, and whatever new game one of us had found that month…
Fun times, online matches are great, but the feeling of a Lan party is something that I think it’s mostly lost.
Same. It was a good read though. Getting old sucks for everyone, but I can’t help but feel like we grew up in a particularly magical time where you can remember dial phones all the way through smart phones. It kind of set the wow factor baseline a little high. I don’t know if other people in history have had a similar experience, but I kinda doubt it.
Maybe, or maybe in another 30 years people will just be commenting how nice it was to be alive during the birth of the metaverse and giant corporations.
My first memories of “LAN” parties was playing Doom, OMF2097 and other DOS IPX games over a null-modem cable (which I made myself by hacking up a regular serial cable - was so proud of myself when I got it to work lol). Of course, it was only limited to two PCs, but still fun nonetheless. After the DOS era, my first “proper” LAN party was over 10BASE-T (Cat3) during the Win 9x era, and then we quickly moved into the Cat5/100Mbps world. So somehow I completely skipped over coax LANs, even though I started with MSDOS, RS232 and BBS door games. Or maybe I used them unknowingly at school or something. But it feels really strange to hear others reminisce “fondly” about T-connectors and terminators, when even though I’m from the same era, I never even saw them. Or maybe I’m from an alternate timelime where they didn’t exist at all…
If you’re buying this (or anything other than Nintendo exclusive games) for your switch, it’s because you don’t have any other options and likely only own a switch
If you had a PC or a PS5, you’d buy it on that.
So switch only owners would pay whatever for it, but the rest of us wouldnt
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
Not always true; some games work really well on handheld/portable devices and the Switch is really good for that. The Binding of Isaac springs to mind.
I own a ton of games on my switch that aren’t switch exclusives. I travel a lot and use it like a Gameboy on planes, in hotels etc. Anyone using a switch entirely as a home console experience, ya silly to not buy games on PC etc instead.
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