Meh. A competitive monopoly has a better outcome than the near monopoly PS4 got when it came to exclusives. Yeah a lot of existing IP will be for one or the other. But for third party studios, they will be much less likely to make exclusive games if the console market is more balanced between the two. Nintendo is kind of in a world of its own. And with the steam deck helping push PC into a base level standard, I think we might see some opening up of high quality third party stuff.
Honestly I’m okay with this one, but it’s mostly because Activision Blizzard has great IP with some seriously awful management … and Microsoft actually has been doing much better in that department for games.
Yeah… In practice, every time a company gets anything that even slightly resembles a captured market, they stop investing in quality and starting shafting consumers.
Make no mistake, that is Microsoft’s end game. And that’s why they’re buying Blizzard.
Luckily, Activision Blizzard already stopped investing in quality and started shafting customers quite a while back, so worst case scenario (in this particular case, your criticism is still valid for most others) nothing changes, best case scenario Microsoft actually cleans house and the market becomes slightly less anti-consumer with one of the worst offenders gone…
Microsoft even with Activision Blizzard would not have a captured market. Valve, Crytek, Sony (which now holds Bungie), Epic, Electronic Arts, CD Projekt Red, Take-Two, and Ubisoft are all still quite potent AAA capable studio just in the PC space … along with tons of independent studios (e.g., Ghost Ship Games, Shiro Games, Hello Games, Re-Logic).
The Microsoft internal doc leak said they’re mostly after King Games (mobile games) anyways. I’d wager at worst Microsoft will let the traditionally Activision & Blizzard studios do their things… at best they’ll clean up the executive teams and let the devs “play” a bit more with the IPs.
The enshitification of Mojang has begun. Ridiculous privacy policies and bans in singleplayer. And the biggest introduction under MS was the engine rewrite, which was already underway when they were acquired.
I mean, it’s had plenty of success with its own IP… Heard of Starfield? Minecraft … and it’s nth successful Spinoff? Forza Horizon 5? Sea of Thieves? Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition? Age of Empires IV? Age of Empires XYZ DE? Fallout 76?
The only major “flop” I can think of that wasn’t corrected (at least so far) is Halo Infinite and … that largely seems to be a 343 issue. There’s also Redfall, but that was a new IP in an over saturated space … it’s not like they’ve stopped developing IPs, fixing games, and trying new things.
Go look at Fallout 76’s reviews, it was unpopular at launch (IIRC) but it’s doing very well now … and that’s the point, they kept the lights on until the majority of players were happy.
Minecraft has had several games derived from it, that were entirely different games set in the Minecraft universe.
Microsoft bought Bethesda 3 years ago. To say that they had no ability to influence and/or didn’t take a risk on Starfield is … lazy at best.
And yes, they own Redfall as well, time will tell if they fix that one or it’s just a straight up failure.
How many games game out this year? Thousands. There is absolutely zero possibility that MS or anyone else is anywhere near holding monopoly status on the production of entertainment software. Even if they bought EVERYTHING new creators would enter the space the very next day.
My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes. He’s the reason EA is the way it is.
This isn’t the first company he’s ruined the reputation of.
Granted, the board that elected him is still there. That’s an issue that will persist for a while.
My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes.
…which could be because he has offered this service to many boards in the past.
When $40 is half price, I will generally pass as if it were $80. There is a glut of amazing content out there for $40 or less, and much of it is truly inspired indie work. When your half-price game is competing with great full-price indie titles, I will continue to ignore your overpriced corporate muck.
Borderlands 3 is in a free giveaway after a year or so on Epic Games. The sales must be abysmal to give a flagship franchise away for free, because of Randy being a bitch and insist exclusive is good. This will hopefully bite them back like last time.
What is "feminist propaganda" and what would COVID-19 have anything to do with the game? What would either of those have to do with the game? Isn't it based on the legend of the monkey king? Are they afraid they'll make a meme of him spreading COVID to kill his enemies or something?
In the conspiracy theories groups China is a hot topic, and I believe this is them telling influencers (who they give a free copy) to stick to the game instead of talking about the country they happen to live in. And I would assume if people stuck to the game few of these topics would be relevant.
Now if an influencer had an issue with say, allegations misogyny at the studio, I would expect them to -
not accept the game from the studio
maybe create content on why they refused the offer of a free game and things they think would need to change to allow them to work with the studio in the future.
You would have thought that by now they would have realized that explicitly banning people from talking about a subject is basically a method to guarantee that they do.
It’s a Chinese game developer. These are the things they’re sensitive to. COVID started in China and I guess feminist is a big fucking red flag for women in China?
It’s a Chinese game developer. These are the things they’re sensitive to. COVID started in China and I guess feminist is a big fucking red flag for women in China?
The Black Myth: Wukong sexism controversy stems from employee reports that developers at Game Science have been making sexist comments for many years, and there’s a suggestion the company doesn’t want women playing its games.
I wonder if any of this has been corroborated. I feel more conflicted about this kind of stuff recently because for every one asshole saying awful shit there are hundreds of other people that poured years of their life into making a game like this.
It’s Chinese developer so I wouldn’t be that surprised that their sexist it just seems to be a very common viewpoint in China.
They obviously know it’s unacceptable because they don’t want to be brought up on it. But rather than improved they’re just going to ban discussion of it or at least try to it won’t work of course. We’re talking about it after all.
It is kinda funny how people have no issue paying for it all together as bundle, but separate it so people can pay for things individually is silly and everyone is suddenly offended?
I would rather have a story for $10 and $1 outfits I can ignore, than to spend $30 on a story and bunch of cosmetics that don’t add to the game.
This is just marketing, nothing more. They make more money forcing you to buy everything than letting you pick what you want.
Eh… It’s more than just paying, but that a lot of the stuff which is now a standard microtransaction used to be integrated into the total experience, so you’d unlock outfits and such for finding secrets or completing challenges. That sort of content was integral to the over all experience, not just an extra to tack on as an afterthought.
That’s also just an affect on the market of people wanting more choice and not wanting to be forced to pay for stuff they don’t want.
Of course it can be swung in a negative light too, because it affects developers bottom lines, and they always want the most money possible. CDPR is no different.
The outcome of splitting the content is that there are a lot of people who want to have everything and they will end up paying far more for a la carte than for an expansion. The people who wouldn’t have bought the expansion still buy nothing, and pretty much nobody just buys a couple of things to save money.
Microtransactions is a system designed to prey on completionist whales. Barely anyone only buys a couple of things and doesn’t end up spending more than $30 over time as the content is drip fed and the new hotness comes along to replace the old hotness. Those that don’t spend anything, or just buy one thing before catching on, weren’t going to spend the $30 anyway.
It is false choice that negatively impacts the game experience.
The outcome of splitting the content is that there are a lot of people who want to have everything and they will end up paying far more for a la carte than for an expansion
So if they want the content, they can support the devs so they make more.
The people who wouldn’t have bought the expansion still buy nothing, and pretty much nobody just buys a couple of things to save money.
So no lose there, but they could buy an outfit if they liked it and want to support the dev.
…… that’s actually the majority of gamers…… 2% of the player base accounts for most of the purchases, that means the other 98% is still buying stuff, just not everything. So that’s not even remotely close to reality, most people pick and choose the content, which is literally why this because a thing, because the market wanted it….
just like the market wants nothing but superhero movies? This doesn't work anything like a free market. people would buy full games if they where available, devs just figured out they could drip feed the content and make significantly more money at the expense of a good product so you don't get to choose the good product because it doesn't exist. That's not the market choosing crap it's the market makers only providing crap.
They still buy full games though, using old as seats to make new content for an “old” game is a great way to have more income come in. Most would probably prefer to make a new game, but that takes longer as well.
So if it’s a dlc a year at $15 for 4 years, or a game every 4 years for $60… what’s the difference in the end? Other than what you think is going on inside your head? It’s the same content, same price, same everything, you just get content yearly instead of every 4 years. Bonus for everyone since they can than use that money after the first year to maybe make the other better.
I can’t possibly roll my eyes any harder at this statement, with gaming companies practically competing to go under as fast as possible over the past decade.
What…? Most people want more content more often with more options, not everyone wants a release every 4 years that’s the same content and story rehashed.
Unless the entire game is developed by an independent studio and is entirely funded on microtransactions, buying micro transactions is just there for more company profit on top of the regular game sales by stripping content out of a full release. It isn’t supporting the development.
People did have issues paying for it all together, back when they were called “expansion packs.”
I don’t mind paying for more of the game. I do mind paying for fixes to a broken game. I don’t mind optional cosmetic upgrades, but I don’t like pay-to-win, even in single player (looking at you, Nintendo amiibos).
But regardless, people are going to complain, and many of their complaints will be valid.
People had different issues with those, that was because online was a portion of it, and people thought devs were holding content back just to make more money. Obviously some did that, but they started painting every dev with that brush and they needed to adjust to save their bottom line from being affected.
Every change has been a reactionary effort to adjust for the market changes and people suddenly not wanting what they just wanted a few years ago, and using it to their marketing advantage. Of course not everyone is going to be happy, it’s just funny that certain devs get defended for doing what everyone else does since their marketing gets eating up.
I think some people like to know when it ends. Microtransactions can make it seem endless. Once you’ve done that a few times it makes you want to know about as much as you can upfront.
You know, the way you phrase it I’d be fine. Only in your example, instead of 60 for it all, it is now 60 for 80% of the story, another 2x15 for the remainder, and 10 per Outfit.
Oblivion had a LOT of post release paid content, most of which was decent value per $ spent, including a full on expansion. So while horse armour was a warning sign for things to come, Oblivion ALSO showcased the good side of paid post release content
Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.
I mostly watch YouTube streamers. Once in a while they’ll do a Twitch stream and holy shit it’s night and day. 0 ads on YouTube and 30 second and even sometimes 1 minute unskippable ads constantly interrupting the stream on Twitch. I honestly have no idea how people put up with it. I cancelled cable because I didn’t want to watch ads, I’m not going to a site that does the same.
My adblock blocks the ads, but I still get that stupid purple screen. What really annoys me is that it’s a minute and a half long. Twitch really wants me to disable ad block so I look at an ad on a Livestream for almost two fucking minutes.
I minimize and do something else until then but that’s asinine.
hold on, you mean to tell me a platform that exists and is known purely for LIVE streaming content has put ads OVER the livestream interrupting your view? what kind of idiot would have approved such a service killing move?
As a mod, you can postpone an ad by 5 minutes 3 times. You can’t postpone it by 1 minute, you can’t choose to play them during downtime, you can’t do shit but pray an interesting moment doesn’t happen during the 1 minute.
Citing it as “an injustice to domestic publishers”, Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development “will die” if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games…
Yeah! It’s so unfair that one person can put their heart and soul into making a game on their own, self publish, and be successful! No way anyone else could possibly do that!
Can the lawyers on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown take the other party to court for a frivolous suit? I thought one of the problems was that there is no recourse for those on the receiving end of a bad DMCA takedown?
What I think would happen is the modders send a DMCA takedown, and EA either does take it down, or they file a “we’re not violating copyright, promise” form and then that’s the end of the DMCA. If they file the “we’re not violating copyright” form, then from there the modders can file a normal copyright violation suit if they choose.
Right, EA would file a counter-notice. Then the modder would have to get lawyers involved and file an actual legal complaint, and EA would respond with their lawyers.
But once they file the counter-notice, you could just stop there. They could sue you for filing in bad faith, but I’ve never heard of that happening.
Nothing. Modders suddenly feeling they should be paid is really entitled and kind of crazy. Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
Modding isn’t a job, and you can’t make money off of someone else’s game
It’s not work . I’m currently modding a game, it’s a hobby. And I’d be entitled as hell to think I should be paid for it.
This “pay the modders” thing will just lead to more micro transactions. You want to download that created wrestler in the new game? It was made by so and so, you now owe. $9.99. fuck that
It’s not about pay the modders so much as if the developer of the game took your mod, put it in the game proper, claimed it was their work, and charged people for it.
I found several definitions where this meets the definition of “work”, but I’m interested to hear your argument about how “time and effort spent doing a task” is not work.
This is the wrong comparison. If you painted a modified version of an existing painting, the original painter can’t take your work and sell it against your will.
No it’s not. The modder didn’t sell anything. Wanting to be compensated if somebody else makes a profit from your work that you put out for free is not the same thing as selling it.
No, because they weren’t even offering it for sale. But they also weren’t offering it to be taken to be sold by somebody else for a profit. Which is what the studio did anyway. So now, after the fact, they can either pay a compensation and credit the modder, or they can remove their stuff from the game.
They’re still taking something they didn’t make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don’t charge them for it. That doesn’t give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It’s still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.
There’s a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it’s blatantly illegal.
But the rub is, under fair use you can’t profit from it though, so as soon as you accept payment, now they can sue you. So in the end, they win and get it for free regardless.
If the rights holders enter into a contract and pay you for your work, I don’t think they can turn around and sue you for making a profit off of it. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think the law is that far gone.
But how can they make a contract? Signing it would violate fair use exemption before that could be argued.
Corps are abusing a conflict within the laws, it’s not even a loophole, it’s just the unfortunate way the laws that protect each person/industry don’t agree.
Contracting someone to use an artwork they made of your character would implicitly grant a license for them to make commercial profit off of that transaction.
That isn’t what a DMCA is for. Someone being compensated for the work they’ve done is unrelated to suing a company for using your art/code/work without permission or reference. Weirdly aggressive to modders though.
Edit: for your edit, you can’t monetise a mod for someone’s else’s game directly but you can absolutely make money modding. And even if their EULA enables them to do so, taking a modders code without at least a reference is pretty dogshit. Literally a million dollar studio ripping off people who did it out of passion knowing full well they wouldn’t get compensated. I’m surprised a EULA can protect them legally for doing it tbh.
The dev has a storied past^[1] of sexism and misogyny, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The COVID stuff is amusing but unsurprising considering it’s a Chinese studio.
Reading through that made me feel gross. It does seem to be acknowledged by women in China as a cultural issue (as well as globally online).
Sexism is, and continues to be, a global problem. But the difference, as both Zhong and Monica F. pointed out, is that the Chinese government and overall cultural attitudes continue to actively discourage women and their allies from fighting back. There’s no one telling harassers “no.”
This feels like the second round of this going around as the AI articles / lazy sites pick it up.
It’s a doc ‘sent’ to one guy who had 12 followers on medium before this started blowing up. It was edited after it was sent out to be the real marketing email of the company instead of a gmail address. The doc is still owned by that gmail account, which isn’t typically how companies operate.
I guess they’re getting their viral moment so good for them for generating content?
Or you could reward CDPR for maintaining support and releasing a wonderful DLC for it with a purchase on a platform that lets you own your games (and is incidentally owned by CDPR too)
While I agree that one should support developers of games they enjoy if they are able, I recently tried another playthrough of this game and it reminded me how unpolished it is.
Things like
Quest NPCs taking very robot-like paths while walking (walk straight for 10 steps, turn right 90 degrees instantly, walk straight 5 steps…) instead of something more natural
Needing to wait 5 minutes for an NPC to get to a specific spot and/or complete actions before being able to continue conversation. Typically on the fight missions, you’d win the fight, they’d take 30 s to get up, then saunter over (using an unnatural path) to the designated spot, which then took another 10 seconds to activate the speech option finally.
Pedestrians diving into the road in front of your car instead of away.
Perhaps games like GTA spoiled us, but I just found these too annoying to continue.
Sometimes adding the installer as a non-Steam game and running it through Proton works, otherwise I use Lutris. You can find tutorials online for setting it up to use with FitGirl’s installers.
Although specifically for Cyberpunk 2077 I had issues with the install, so I found a no-install version, I believe from DODI.
Does Nintendo let you play content that you accidentally downloaded from the high seas? And do you need to worry about Nintendo killing your account for doing such a thing?
no, they don’t. but the game has been out for 5 years at this point.
articles like these seem quite pointless to anyone who doesn’t already own a switch 2. and possibly pointless even to people who own a switch 2, but have already played cyberpunk on better or similar hardware.
this article is an attempt to pat a multi billion dollar company on the back so it doesn’t feel as bad that people aren’t racing out to buy their 5-year-late, overpriced attempts to dominate the handheld market again.
Possibly the dumbest take I've ever seen on this site, are you saying an article objectively comparing the performance of two handhelds is "an attempt to pat a multi billion dollar company on the back"?
articles like these seem quite pointless to anyone who doesn't already own a switch 2.
"Performance comparisons are pointless if the results aren't what I like", I'm sure if the steam deck performed a lot better you would be in the comments singing praises for it. Digital foundry have been comparing performance for many years but suddenly now their findings are worthless.
They disclosed it many times and have talked about that video often, it doesn't affect their content. I didn't like it either but acting like they're not trustworthy because of one time they were sponsored is dumb
Well, at least for the physical edition, they have to account for the cost of the 64 GB game card they are using. Wasn’t that rumored to cost like $16 a piece?
In theory it makes sense but in the past buying digitally as opposed to physically hasn’t netted anyone any savings. And with the new system where the card doesn’t even hold the actual game, it’s an even worse offering.
Buying on PC is a lot cheaper than buying on consoles typically, especially after a year or two, and PC sales are mostly (all?) digital now.
And the thing about cartridges not holding the game is limited to specific games, devs still have the option of putting the full game on a cartridge instead of the license option. All that happened here is that devs got another option on how to sell their game, so if you want to gift someone a digital game but want a physical item to give to them, the license on cartridge option is perfect, and AFAIK it preserves the ability to resell the game (may be dependent on the game though).
I highly doubt it costs that much. You can buy 64GB SD cards for ~$10 retail, which includes:
margin for retailer
margin for company “making” it
margin for factory producing it
If each step is something like 50% markup (not unheard of), the cost to actually get these things from a factory is probably about $2. Make it a bit more expensive because the packaging is unique to Nintendo, and their quantities are probably a bit less than regular retail SD cards, so maybe it’s like $5 per card.
That’s a lot more than an optical disk, which are probably under $1, but nothing too crazy.
I have no special insight here, just some general understanding of how retail works.
There isn’t official pricing nor reliable sources out there so I’m going by rumors.
With your calculation you have to keep in mind that the Switch 2 cards have to somewhat match microSD Express speeds, so a more accurate comparison would be these, but they aren’t available in 64 GB sizes.
All I’ve heard is that they’re expensive and with the larger sizes often required for Switch 2 games it’s an even bigger problem than with Switch (1). These key cards exist for a reason. And I’d bet Nintendo takes a margin on these instead of only requiring the publisher to cover the manufacturing costs.
Yeah, I assume the key cards have a bit of margin, but they probably need to keep margins low on 64GB cards or devs won’t bother, and physical media does have value for Nintendo’s target market.
Normally, I would agree with you. In the case of game keys, even though I have a physical cartridge now I have to make sure that servers are still up and available for me to download a game. So the massive market for retro games is kind of null and void if you’ve got a cartridge with nothing but a transferable license agreement on it and no way to actually get the game.
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don't know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn’t just used by patent trolls and wasn’t just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
This is literally just whataboutism. You must be degenerate if you think that there’s a correlation between the research performance of the listed countries and their patent laws. There are dozens of more useful and much more relevant indicators for why these nations are disadvantaged in this regard. But just stick to your belief that North Korea is what it is because it doesn’t have patent laws lol.
Also, for you to better understand the harm that software patents caused and are causing, consider reading Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman.
There is literally a 1:1 correlation between protecting IP and R&D and innovation. Start ups that patent their ideas are genuinely more successful. You’re naive if you think IP only helps protect large companies.
My mistake, you're right. We should completely remove the incentive to innovate novel ideas and no longer protect them if they are created to allow theft.
I am a hypocrite thief that uses free software in my daily life.
I don’t know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you had at least a basic knowledge about software and software development.
I now see that that’s not the case.
Open source is an area where software patents don’t generally protect the product, and yet it’s the most innovative space out there. And in cases where patents are brought in (see the rust trademark incident) they are rejected by the community. And yet open source is still around, and powering most of the internet and present in most devices.
If what you said about patents were the case, that would not be so.
As someone who is in the field of intellectual property, Lemmy’s views on IP boil down to “I attended Marxism 101 and want to pirate games”. Most here don’t have a clue how much time, effort and money is spent on innovation. They couldn’t even begin to fathom why protecting intellectual property helps people actually helps people get paid for their work, which is ironic as they are all for people being rewarded for their actual labour.
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
I wish people who base their entire knowledge of intellectual property on video games would just stop attempting to have opinions on things they don’t really understand.
If you think it’s fine to have a world in which people aren’t protected for their fruits of their labour, then by all means advocate against IP. I would rather live in a world in which people are actually paid for the ideas they come up with and don’t have to excessively keep corporate secrets.
Open source software is different due to informed consent. When working on an OS project you are doing it out of altruism and/or fun, fully realising that you will never be compensated for this work. That doesn’t mean software devs should never be paid and work for free indefinitely on anything they do. Its still a skill that should be compensated for.
I cannot see how they can reasonably copyright the idea of having characters remember you which is basically all the nemesis system is. There are many ways to implement it that wouldn’t violate patent, of course it’s in WBs interest to not nose that one around too much
You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.
You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.
Everyone in this thread is downvoting me because they are trying to out Marxist each other. I have never once claimed the patent system is perfect, but the people in this thread clearly don’t actually understand what is required to even receive a patent.
It’s typical, people know what systems they are against but never know what they are actually for. People say patents are unfair but never propose viable alternatives. The political analysis on Lemmy is frankly juvenile and utopic. People base their opinions on what team they support rather than any sort of analysis of the problem. Populism is rife here and people gravitate toards populist narratives in lieu of thinking. I’m very glad the demography of Lemmy is not representative of society at large.
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
I said they’re wonderful, not that they’re perfect. Clearly you need to work on your reading comprehension. The alternative is giant corporations stealing everybody’s ideas without anybody trying to stop them in any way.
Fuck off corpo.
Cringe. One day you’ll have to grow up and get a real job. Then you’ll look back at how embarrassingly assured you were of having the answers to everything after real life smacks you in the face and makes you realise you don’t know shit.
Go on then. How do we replace the patent system whilst still acknowledging mental effort and research as being valued forms of work? Tell me all about it mate, I’m interested in your ideas as you’re so convinced it’s all a big con.
Now you’re all riled up and acting stupid. You are the oh so claimed expert who works at patents offices. No, you tell me what does your majestic and awesome field of expertise do to prevent corporate abuse and patent trolling? Tell me, evangelize to me, convince me that the patent system has safeguards to prevent theft of intellectual work, how does patent enforcing works? what do you do, that you work there, to make it a more ethical field? what are the practices and procedures in place to avoid a corporation from using patents to monopolize, bully industries and stifle creativity and innovation?
I’ve protected people who have been attempted to be bullied by a larger company into ceasing production of a product. That’s literally my job.
Patent attorneys are a highly regulated profession which have to adhere to strict ethical standards and rigorous training in the law. I serve the interests of my clients. It doesn’t matter if you’re a large or small enterprise, the law is interpreted exactly the same throughout the process.
I would suggest reducing official fees to make it easier to purchase a patent, but that just reduces the quality of examination. In reality there is a balance to be struck between affordable patents and quality of patents which isn’t always struck correctly. I would advocate for government funded organisations that provide pro bono legal support for small enterprises as a way to make the system a little fairer. In the US they have a tiered system which makes patents cheaper for smaller companies, which is also something I think that should be adopted as standard.
Overall there is no simple solution. Life is complicated and messy and anybody who claims it isn’t is and that there are simple solutions to very layered societal problems are snake oil salesmen with an agenda.
And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."
It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house, and that’s when devs decided we don’t get split screen anymore. Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn’t achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.
It’s not a question of capability. It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use.
Couch coop was a thing because there was no way for you to play from your own homes. Nowadays it’s a nice-to-have, because you can jump online any time and play together, anywhere in the world, without organizing everyone to show up at one house.
It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use
Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3
Goldeneye 007. Yeah seriously. The most famous multiplayer game of its generation very nearly didn’t have multiplayer. It was tacked on when they finished the game and had a little bit of extra time and ROM storage.
4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you’re looking at something sufficiently different than another player there’s going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game. Had they simply re-released the game that they already made, it wouldn’t be an issue. Us fans of the old games didn’t stop playing because the graphics got too bad. Even if we did, this weird half step towards updating the graphics doesn’t do anything for me. Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
My flatmates and I actually played through a galactic conquest campaign on the OG battlefront 2 like 2 months ago. It holds up.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.
How to tell me you’re not a gamedev without telling me you’re not a gamedev. You don’t just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.
Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.
So, different proposal: Don’t do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.
The general point still stands, though, you can’t do the same thing with a 2015 game. On the flipside you should be able to run the 2004 game in different VMs on the same box, no native support required.
Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It’s texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that’s bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can’t be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.
Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
I think a lot of the blame is erroneously placed on devs, or it’s used as a colloquialism. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment as a developer knows that the developers are not the ones making the decisions. You really think that developers want to create a game that is bad, to have their name attached to something that is bad and to also know that they created something that is bad? No, developers want to make a good game, but time constraints and horrible management prioritizing the wrong things (mostly, microtransactions, monetizing the hell out of games, etc) results in bad games being created. Also, game development is more complex since games are more complex, hardware is more complex, and developers are expected to produce results in less time than ever before - it’s not exactly easy, either.
It’s an annoyance of mine and I’m sure you meant no harm by it, but as a developer (and as someone who has done game development on the side and knows a lot about the game development industry), it’s something that bothers me when people blame bad games solely on devs, and not on the management who made decisions which ended up with games in a bad state.
With that said, I agree with your sentiments about modern hardware not being able to take advantage of long-forgotten cool features like four-screen splitscreen, offline modes (mostly in online games), arcade modes, etc. I really wish these features were prioritized.
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