With the best workers wanting remote work, not sure what they expect to get from opening an office in Austin. Traffic is terrible, office space costs a ton, and Noone will apply to work in their office.
As someone who became mostly very suddenly disabled, and an avid gamer who has been forced to give up most games, including some of my favorites, I have to say that this is the best article I've read on the topic so far. Thank you for sharing. Hopefully people will actually read it and think about it.
And giving all of that up, or I guess we should say losing all of that, has dramatically deteriorated my ability to socialize. It's just lose lose lose if you are a gamer who can no longer use your hands properly.
Fun tip for iPhone users: the Photos app lifts this neatly out of the background so you can turn it into a sticker. Just save the image and hold your finger on it to get the menu. For extra jazziness, you can add a glittery effect.
I think what starfield is missing is full body animations that go along with conversations, seeing NPCs pick stuff up or pace around while talking and communicating through body language
I know this isn’t a popular opinion but I’m actually pretty optimistic about this. Blizzard has been shit for a while and this will at least change things, even if it might be for the worse. Also give me their entire catalogue on gamepass pls.
No, I think they’re going to continue adding massive value to the Gamepass system to keep it afloat and competitive. Maybe a WoW sub is a bit of a stretch, but basically all other games will thrive on the platform. StarCraft 2 is still the benchmark RTS for competitive play. Overwatch and Diablo are not my cups of tea but they would also make great offerings on the platform. Most of Blizzard’s core franchises outside of WoW itself are heavily MTX’d out the ass, battle passes, cosmetics, whatever - even if it’s included in the gamepass sub, the theoretical higher volume of players will likely compensate for unit sales through the aforementioned MTX.
They are going to play classic Microsoft and destroy their competition in this way, then they will do what they want when they have a stranglehold on the market.
I don’t think Sony is going to give up that easily, nor is Nintendo or Valve.
Microsoft has tried, with sheer force of capital to buy out these players and couldn’t understand when they were denied. In tech you can do big mergers and acquisitions with sheer capital but Nintendo is a pride and joy crown jewel of Japanese industry, and no amount of money would allow MS to buy them.
MS’ big push for accessibility and cloud gaming makes them ultimately platform agnostic over time, because they are leveraging the cloud technology to deploy their catalogue on any machine with an internet connection and a screen.
“Classic” Microsoft, the EEE (envelop, extend, extinguish) strategy that made them assholes through the 90s and early aughts hasn’t been nearly as prevalent in the current Nadella era. More often than not MS has been forking open source projects or simply contributing to them in their own ways rather than building proprietary systems.
This would be dope for all the WoWheads being adopted by MS (I’m one). If I’m bored with everything I just revert to WoW. If my subscription included Gamepass, I may be more inclined to check out titles I wouldn’t otherwise play.
It’s funny that I lead with this because I had a minute to think about it and honestly I kind of just don’t care. Dragonflight did not renew my hopes for retail, although it had some neat mechanic changes. Classic will be over for me probably by the end of January, unless they announce basically Classic+ based around the WOTLK talents. I am going to get my Shadowmourne, kill Arthas on heroic, and then go play FFXIV.
I mean some people would rather play their games on the move than be sat down at a console or pc. Its just the hardware is completely outdated, hell even their flagship games struggle with it a bit like BOTW and TOTK do have some frame dropping problems.
Not even talking about the switch portability but I think there must be people out there who only have a Nintendo switch to play game and if they wanted to play mk (and not buy a PS5/Xbox) then there was only one option left… Sad thing is that they didn’t even release it to the PS4/Xone gens console.
I love my switch and most of what I got for it. But I try to get stuff I know will run well, and to this day I still can’t understand people who played Bloodstained switch and consider it “fine”.
Even with all patches, it’s still an unstable mess with terrible input lag, second-long freezes and constant loading that sucks all the fun out of it. I don’t care much about compromises in the graphics area, but that shit is practically unplayable.
When I backed that game, it was supposed to run on Wii U, what a joke. I am still convinced the reason they delayed the switch version one week at launch was just so it would not tarnish their glowing reviews.
There’s games I wouldn’t even consider getting for the Switch. Like MK and Doom. They’re such graphical powerhouses and that’s not what the Switch is for. I play those on my PS5.
To be fair, I mostly use my switch for first party Nintendo games and like another user has said the Switch sometimes struggles even with those (I’m looking at you TotK).
Ugh. I can’t believe we waited all this time just for them to lie about local play, add a premium cash store where one skin can cost over the price of the game, and LOOTBOXES in a premium game. What a disappointment.
Imo the anger is a bit misdirected. Making a toned down version of the game takes equal the amount of resources, if not more compared to other ports. Performance wise the switch always has been a toaster, even compared to the last gen of consoles. There probably are now phones with more graphical power, so ports to hardware that is so far behind is difficult.
I’ve ported games to switch and there is a lot of extra loops to go through to make it even remotely run at decent frame rates.
The publisher could have made the switch version cheaper, but they probably invested more resources into it than porting it between xbox and playstation, so i can kind of understand why they didn’t.
The argument “it looks worse so it should be cheaper” is kind of questionable, when the console they are buying it for just doesn’t allow for much better considering the art direction. If the switch was as powerful as the ps5 or current xbox, they would have made the game look as good as it is on all the other platforms.
A valid question is if this needed a switch port at all, and considering the backlash, the publishers are probably asking themselves the same question.
Aren’t most Switch games still $60, though? Just flipping through the US E-store, the only game I saw at $70 was Tears of the Kingdom, and this version of Mortal Kombat is not going to compare favorably to that.
But typically publishers are not making the price on release based on what platform you run it on. It looks worse, but that isn’t really the game’s fault. It has the same amount of cost attached to it as any other port of the game, if not more. On the other hand, from the consumer perspective, I can 100% understand why someone wouldn’t want to spend $70 on this.
In the end, will it be worth the money they put in to port this game to less-than last gen? I have no idea.
The argument “it looks worse so it should be cheaper” is kind of questionable, when the console they are buying it for just doesn’t allow for much better considering the art direction.
I disagree.
When you have to pay the same or more for something less then that's simply not justified for the consumer. If the console can't handle anything better and is that expensive to port over, then you should simply not port your game over to it. If that's a general Switch problem, then the Switch maybe shouldn't be a thing either. I thought that's how markets are supposed to work, no?
But it’s not something less, it’s something less, in your device. That’s the distinction.
If the console can’t handle anything better and is that expensive to port over, then you should simply not port your game over to it
If enough people want to play it on the switch, the investment is worth it.
I thought that’s how markets are supposed to work, no?
Well, if it were up to you maybe, but if there’s enough people that will buy it just to play it on the switch, then the markets are working as intended.
The Switch is also a whole generation older than the PS5 and latest X1 Series X (or whatever it’s really called). Important thing to factor in when understanding why the Switch port is so compromised. They aren’t scaling games down from more powerful consoles of the same generation anymore, they’re porting games from much more powerful consoles of the next generation.
Apple engineer here, from what I understand most of Unity’s competitors in the we space are significantly better paying and performing. We keep hearing from developers that nobody wants to use Unity’s product because of that. AppLovin, the one named here, outperforms Unity Ads by as much as 800% in some titles, according to a contact of mine at a game studio. With a difference like that it’s hardly surprising nobody is choosing Unity Ads.
This reeks of desperation, but one wonders how effective it could be - because this demand to drop AppLovin is basically cutting off the revenue faucet for these same developers they’re now trying to extort. No Unity fees but no good income either…
There’s this one guy on youtube(www.youtube.com/), who said about business: [paraphrasing] “Sometimes things go well, and sometimes, you dry to get the change stuck between the couch cushions”. And you’re right, this pretty much does seem like a desperate move if you think about it.
Yeah, I love that analogy. When companies deviate from their core business model to try to increase revenue, it’s a symptom that the company is dying. If they’re having profit issues (which I doubt), a healthy company would innovate to attract customers, not to lock them in.
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