The worst thing is none of the executives are getting fired (in a proper more manner, no golden parachutes and clawbacks on any stock based compensation).
Yeah? The executives are firing people, to lower costs, make the numbers look better…? Which makes the owners of the business money?
Why wouldn’t the executives get bonuses or golden parachutes if let go? They are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Executives don’t make products, provide services, or add any productive value. They are just the face of the owners, and will do the “hard” things for them.
Executives are responsible for the direction of the company. They aren’t just there to cut costs (at least, not usually). They’re there to see what opportunities the company to move into, and guide them to success.
This is the opposite of what most executives at these gaming companies have done lately. They’ve driven up budgets and pushed them in a direction that makes people not want to purchase their games, causing them to fail.
If a company has to fire employees then that’s the fault of the executives. They should be taking cuts first, not the people who were doing their job well but were just pointed in the wrong direction.
I’ve worked closely with the people that do reverse engineering and such for FromSoft games and I can damn near guarantee that any PSN requirement would be ripped out pretty quickly. At worst they might tie it to online features. My real worry is exclusivity, timed or otherwise.
Sony: Thanks for letting us know! The next FromSoft game will have zero modding support. Make sure to login using your PSN account. Remember, we love you!
Oh, make no mistake; prior FS games have no modding support. In fact, they encrypt the all game files with RSA nowadays (which is awful for read speeds because RSA is slow but whatever). Current modding support is based off of a robust reverse engineering community that’s documented most of the file formats and a significant portion of the important code. And that’s while contending with Arxan which, while not as awful as Denuvo, still impedes RE. They’d basically have to implement something as draconian as Denuvo to make things more difficult than they are.
Honestly, I am probably in the minority, but I don’t understand the hate for console exclusivity. In today’s world there is almost no reason to stick with a console outside some small stuff like pick up and go and knowing a game will just work. I say let them hold rights to games if it gets people to invest in getting one. I am not really sure why this is such a negative thing for some. It’s also odd that Sony gets the biggest blame when you have Nintendo that has zero games playable on other platforms outside emulation. At least these days 8 months after release it gets a PC release as well.
Yeah, gamers Nexus was saying that the stream deck guys were telling them that they were waiting for the tech to get good enough to be able to call the device steam deck 2, but that’s probably a couple of years out.
Activision Blizzard has become such a huge pile of disgusting shit that people are quite tempted to see what would happen if the devil Microsoft buys it.
Yeah, never thought I’d live the day to see it but here we are. Blizzard use to be the darling of all gamers, only one who did things right and released games when they were actually done. Then money hungry shitheads took over.
I’m just happy to potentially see Bobby Kotick, Ion Hazzikostas, Mike Ybarra, etc ousted.
Don’t get me wrong. Fifteen years ago I would have flipped if Microsoft put in a bid to buy Vivendi and get their paws on Blizzard, after seeing how badly they ruined Rare. Activision tanked the brand so bad that I’m actually rooting for Microsoft.
I don’t think Kotick is at all certain to be kicked out. As easily as I can see MS letting him go with an enormous golden parachute, I can just as easily imagine them keeping him onboard because all they care about is Activision’s ability to make money.
In all likelihood Blizzard isn’t going to be managed any differently. Microsoft’s modus operandi with gaming acquisitions is to leave the leadership in place and let the dev/publisher run itself. Why is everyone expecting different here? The most likely outcome is MS does nothing to Blizzard and Blizzard continues on more or less the same trajectory as before.
Tell that fucknut Tsujimoto to take a fuckin pay cut if he’s concerned about increasing wages. I’m not paying $80-$90 for a fucking game. Hell, I’m still not completely cool with paying $70
The last triple A game I bought at launch was ‘Watchdogs Legion’, to comemorate my new PC. I figured I just build a new computer, so why not celebrate by buying an expensive game. It was a stupid impulse buy.
I’m still not cool with them raising PC games from $50 to $60 almost 20 years ago just because they could and used the console parity excuse due to their licensing fees. I don’t think I’ve bought a AAA game since EA’s stunts around 2012/2013.
Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright prevents you from progressing past level three unless you invite at least one friend - and by the time the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn’t enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you did invite, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of anything players they invited made, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto reached a high of $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that peak.
Virtual pyramid schemes for monopoly money, lovely.
The problem is the monopoly money is being used in a confidence game that’s being permitted by governments because all they see are more potentially taxable transactions and don’t give a shit about what this means for the longterm health of our societies.
What a shit article. There’s a massive amount of context missing.
7DTD is a game created by The Fun Pimps. Telltale Games bought the rights to produce a console port of the game from TFP. Telltale Games then contracted with Iron Galaxy to produce the port. Telltale Games went bankrupt and it’s assets were liquidated, one of those assets was the rights to produce the console port. TFP managed to buy back the rights to the console port, but were unable to get any of the source code for the console port. It took years to get the rights sorted out, and it wasn’t cheap.
It’s a messed up situation, but console players bought a Playstation 4/XBox One game from Telltale Games, a company that went bankrupt and is defunct, and that sucks. TFP is now starting from scratch to produce a console port for the current generation of consoles and that costs money.
E3 has had a foot in the grave for the last ten years. The availability of the internet kinda invalidated any need for expensive physical conventions. When they changed their rules to allow the general public to attend, that was a pretty clear death rattle, imo. And the Big 3 all pretty much pulling out entirely and doing their own streamed announcement events didn't help matters. Covid also ended up killing whatever momentum E3 had left. Basically everything was stacked against E3 for a long while now.
Super disappointing, but also super expected, honestly. See you in the next life, giant enemy crabs.
I honestly think it’s all the in-house directs now that really killed it. The sad thing is now they all get to control their narratives and put on a pretty, but tightly produced/curated show and we all lose the little snipes back and forth and comparisons that happen at events like E3. It felt more…gladiatorial, I guess?
The sad thing was that CoD Mobile was the last decent game in the series. Just think about that for a moment: a freaking cell phone game is better than any CoD title to come out on actual gaming systems in practically a decade.
I agree that it’s probably mostly children / teens that play those games, but I’m sure a non-insignificant portion of their player base is the type of person who is A-OK with listening to nothing but pop music.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but they are either afraid of trying something new or they aren’t interested in discovering what they may end up enjoying more than the same derivative time-wasters.
While this headline is true, I don’t think it’s the fundamental reason for the game’s success. Having characters that feel alive is awesome, and part of what elevates BG3 over D:OS 1 and 2 for me. But what makes it great is the amount of control you have over the narrative; how the game responds to your choices. There is nuance. There are permutations. It ain’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any rpg Bethesda ever put out (fite me).
A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.
Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.
Yeah, this is true. I think Bethesda games have just felt really empty and lifeless to me for a long time. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot. Oblivion I played for a while, but never finished the story. Don’t even remember if I ever finished Skyrim, which was obviously massively popular. Same with their Fallout games, it’s just been diminishing returns for me. Different strokes, and all that, obviously, they just don’t have that secret sauce I crave.
I think part of it is that your character doesn’t have any personality; you’re some total cipher of a Chosen One, which makes it difficult to form an emotional connection to them, and by extension to any of the NPC’s. Some of their NPC’s have well-written dialogue, but I sure don’t remember any of them.
Bethesda's "good stories" have always been moreso the player's stories of cobbled together mechanics as a a result of their playstyle/current abilities, gear, and motivation.
Most of the time it might be rote open world questing with some enjoyable grind loop, but there are a lot of particular memories I love, like robbing the Red Diamond jewelry store in Oblivion's Imperial City, "casing" the place by day as a customer and purchasing a necklace, purely to experience the joy of breaking in at 3 AM and robbing it blind.
The joy and hilarity I felt when I came back the day after I'll always remember. Entering the store to see the shopkeep, beaming at his new customer, all of his shelves and cases completely fucking empty, as he vacantly grinned at me, buck naked as id stolen the clothes right out of his sleeping pockets.
I've stolen a lot of shit in that game, but that one was good. It's incredibly rare for me to remember Bethesda's actual character moments that fondly, as they've always come off plastic and rehearsed in some combination of writing, voice acting, and rigid animation. Sometimes they almost reach a good story, like some popular side quest chains, or Paladin Danse's personal quests.
So, I think these two games tell their best culminational "stories" in different fundamental ways, and I think it's neat how each one's best potential narrative, whether written or otherwise, is a marriage of the game's possibilities and the player's motivation and intent. But you're probably right, BG3 can tell a lot more, better stories than my idiotic repetitive Bethesda adventures, but I do like some pulp.
Yeah, I think you’re right, and maybe my waning enjoyment of that style of rpg says as much about my lack of imagination as anything else. I’m just a sucker for a story I can get caught up in, with characters that I can somehow relate to, and I’ve nearly always felt let down by Bethesda games in that regard.
This sucks hard. They likely knew they could not overcome Nintendo’s infinite money for legal proceedings, and if they lost they could have been on the hook for far more than this settlement amount.
The upside is this has no legal impact, but the downside is they were the best-positioned group to take this to trial.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
The plus side is Ryujinx is Free Open Source Software so a million forks can begun being made right now. Yuzu had closed source aspects, which was its downfall in replication from this point forward. Ryujinx will likely have thousands of clone repositories made after today alone.
People need to make sure they pull the code off of github and put it up on other sites, preferably private repos. Github has already dealt with other ‘banned’ projects by going through all forks and even re-uploads of them and cleaning house.
They did not make that claim. The article is just wrong. The devs said they’re removing in-game monitization and only having DLC on the store page. It’s functionally identical I assume, but there’s less pressure on players playing the game.
But… Like… Did we ask for that? If you cant afford to keep developing a game after shipping it… Dont?
Just make the game, wrap it up finished, and let me buy it. It doesnt need to be a subscription, I dont need to play it for 6 years, you can move on with your life and design a different game.
Ill pay cash, just give me the whole game for crying out loud
Most of the gaming community did, yes. Players want servers that last forever and updates that never stop, and they’ll throw a hissy fit if it costs them a cent more up front than it did 30 years ago. I’m not a fan of it either, but it’s where the industry is right now.
More importantly people don’t want to buy into closed game environments. They promise of ongoing development attracts players that want that type of scale, and also allows devs to continue to eat. It’s a win/win.
This is the right choice by devs. I haven’t played it and honestly I probably never will, but I respect the decision.
Do you not remember when a title would get released and stay in a buggy state forever rendering the game useless?
Have you never enjoyed a game so much that you wanted more content for it
I don’t want a product that’s going to go stale the second I buy it, I want a game I can play for 10 years with new content being added to keep it fresh.
Let me guess, you think movies should just be perma running live streams?
Calling a game “stale” for not having an unending stream of spectacle creep is a wild opinion. Its a game, not a lifestyle. Not ending is why so many games are shit now. Because they dont stop when theyre good, they stop when its become too bad to play, and everyone leaves.
Enjoying a game so much you want more content was, and still is, filled just fine from dlc and sequels. The best part? They dont require permanently altering what you thought was good, so if theyre trash you still have the original.
Well games used to not have Servers and be peer to peer they did not have season where New content got Put in or if they got New content they Split the Player Base Because they Sold the New maps, classes etc. So selling cosmetics and giving away the New classes maps etc is actually great. So that way the person not spending much gets New content and the person that love the game can Support them more. At the Same time Yes time is spend on Those skins etc and not New stuff but What would you like. A game being shut down and not being play able like battleborn? Or a game that gets New stuff but also New cosmetics?
Yeah, the headline is just awful. The Inkbound Dev notes that they’re removing all in-game microtransactions. The goal is to move away from pressuring you to spend money on microtransactions as you play, and keep them where they belong: on the store page.
The devs are doing exactly what they said. The headline is either click-bait, or a result of awful reading comprehension.
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