Hot take: mtx are a good thing as long as they don’t cause a significant imbalance in gameplay. There’s a reason the price of a AAA game has remained roughly $60 for nearly two decades in spite of increasing development costs and inflation.
People who purchase in game add-ons subsidize those who don’t.
Didn’t we also learn this from Tears of the Kingdom, or God of War, or Horizon Zero Dawn, or Dark Souls, or indeed hundreds of great selling AAA single player games?
But we also learn from the repeated success of Call of Duty, FIFA, Fortnite or any successful multiplayer games that people fucking love microtransactions.
Different players? Maybe, but I’d suggest there’s also a lot of overlap. I know lots of people that play both. People consume. Some games support the microtransaction model better than others, and those are typically the ones designed to be played in fits and starts all year, rather than completed and shelved.
I’m gonna say yes, different people, just based on my own play habits. I’ve played and enjoyed most of the big single-player franchises, but the multiplayer games don’t appeal to me much. I gave Overwatch a try because a bunch of my coworkers were raving about it, but the experience just felt shallow and hollow. They might be great if I was playing with friends in the same room (like back when I was in college), but playing with a bunch of strangers is no fun for me.
I mean I stay away from the mtx games as well. But then I was raised in an age where you paid the price on the box and that was it.
New gamers don’t know better. And kids especially have all the time and hardly any of the money, they’re happy to throw $10 pocket money at a “free” game they already enjoy for an outfit now, rather than save $70 for a new game they might not like in a few months.
I mean tears of the kingdom make $700 million + and Diablo Immortal made 525 million in it’s first year despite being almost universally rebuked online. Really seems like micro transactions have a really solid, if maybe not top tier return. Lots of companies try to make something like Horizon Zero Dawn and it totally flops instead.
There’s a lot of games that go with the free with mtx model that flop as well. eFootball comes to mind. They had decades of experience with Pro Evo Soccer, their only real competitor costs $70 and is still laden with microtransactions, and it still couldn’t get off the ground.
None of these games are cheap to make, and they’re certainly not cheap to market.
I have not heard of it yet. Sounded intriguing. But a quick search of “eFootball” took me to a mobile game, with in-app purchases - not looking good and I am staying the fuck away. If they really don’t have mtx then they are doing something very wrong.
or indeed hundreds of great selling AAA single player games?
It’s important to note that the amount of single player AAA games has greatly diminished overtime. Most of those “hundreds” you’re referring to are not in the last 10 years, and the big bucks have been in live service. So yeah BG3 did great but it was a huge, 6+ year gamble ultimately. I WANT those gambles, but businesses would rather push out cheaper games at a faster clip because they make money. People still buy them and they still pay for DLC/MTX like crazy. It’s hard to compete against that.
Honestly, it’s kind of on the developer. If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves. I think Microsoft are right to stick to their guns. It will seriously piss off their consumers if they can’t land good quality versions of equivalent games on PS5.
I actually think it could be more beneficial for players across both console platforms to encourage developers to build games which scale reasonably, and at the low end target a 30 FPS minimum frame rate whilst the Series S/PS5 get 60 FPS+ or improved image quality, or both. Instead of it just being a race to the bottom on performance just so we can have a little bit of ray tracing.
Also, as far as I’m aware, Baldurs Gate 3 hasn’t released on PS5 and is not due until September. I will be very interested to see how that goes, because I think the conclusion of this article is premature until we see that.
I find it hard to believe BG3 would run that poorly at that low quality but I guess time will tell. It’s up to Larian how much they want to release on Xbox
Going back to the article, I think whether it hurts MS more to keep this promise over features or not depends a great deal on what the split is between Series S and Series X consoles. I would suggest it’s worse to sacrifice the Series S audience as there’s less sunk cost there compared to the Series X audience, who we might assume have more of an investment in the Xbox ecosystem from the previous generation, and therefore it’s harder for them to make the switch to PS5.
If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves.
The problem is that the baseline is actually the PS5. It outsells both versions of the Xbox by a factor of 2. So the Xbox Series S is an afterthought, and always will be.
It would be to Microsoft’s advantage to change that perspective, which would reinforce why they might maintain their hard line of feature equivalence. I agree though, it appears to be the status quo.
Except that they can't. The only thing they can do is to give up on the Series S. Sure, that is a disaster as it means millions of Series S buyers are basically on a dead console. But they're headed in that direction anyways.
that doesn’t mean we get better games on the xss, but that we get worse games on xsx and ps5. I paid for that power, I want my games to use it. I don’t care that it doesn’t run as well on a lesser console I deliberately chose not to buy because of its lesser power
The issue here isn’t frame rate or graphics, it’s that with the memory issues on the series S, they can’t get split screen to run. It runs just fine on X, but won’t on S. Because Xbox demands parity, they can’t just disable the feature like they did for Steamdeck.
If we take the series s as the baseline in development, we’ll get games that don’t take full advantage of the better hardware. They shouldn’t have to make their game run on potato grade hardware. I think they hit a great balance, it runs great on most modern gaming pc’s, and the series x and ps5 will have no issues running it either.
Well this is concerning. I’ve got a PS5 and was going to buy a XSX this week so I could pre-order Starfield, now I might wait and see how this plays out. What’s going to happen with Starfield & Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever it’s released)? The Series S is going to fuck up everything.
There’s a difference between targeting 3-4 console SKUs and targeting 2. If you know what’s going to be your baseline from day 1, you test against that and scale up rather than the other way around. With a first party studio, this is a given.
The thing about the series s is that it’s a phenomenal 1080p game console. Anything higher than that and it’s going to struggle without some kind of upscaling technology. I bought one because I don’t have a 4k tv and it just made sense. I also have a PS5, it gets more attention but I mean come on, it’s a PlayStation and it’s a damn good one, but I can’t express how impressive it is that Microsoft packed so much power into that tiny box.
It isn’t clear why here. I presume performance, in which case drop some polygons, reduce some particles, limit lighting bounces. It’s an RPG - gfx are secondary!
I’ll bet bandwidth more. Dynamic loading of assets isn’t an old technique - it’s ancient, but the more detailed everything becomes, the harder it is. Some of the textures are incredibly large in modern games dev now too. But shipping lower res versions can be prohibitive also with SSD space at a premium.
But essentially if you want to target the current generation. Build it for the S first!
Split screen open world games effectively have to be able to run two copies of the game at the same time. This isn’t a traditional split screen coop where two players are always within one “level” together, and thus all the game code can run just once for that “level”. All the physics, ai, memory, textures, all thr subsystems are running just once.
If two people can be on oppsite ends of a world, that’s two totally different sets of physics, ai, memory, textures. Everything has to happen, twice.
Basically, believe the smart person who made the game instead of dreaming up reasons you think they are wrong when they literally made the game and told you the problem.
Wow, I’ve never had such a condescending reply - even on Reddit!
The article is clearly lacking in details like you described. But did you know that we used to have open world RPGs like Balders Gate 2 run on what are now potatoes?
Here’s another hint. World state will be measured in 100s of MB. Twice means there’s still loads of gigs left to play with. The S has loads of CPU too. This will be almost entirely a look problem
You think split screen is new? You think this hasn’t been done before? You think this is the first generation of consoles to bitch about one of them?
Whinging about the S is a small brain reply to Microsoft who aren’t willing to compromise. And good for them. There is plenty of hardware in an S and devs if they want to sell more need to target it first. No use crying about a design decisions made years ago wrt the hardware envelope. Drop some shit, make it work, run some flamecharts, optimise some more
surprised how successful this was since it barely got a mention all the time it was in early access so thought it would have a relatively mild release but no the g*mers heard bear sex and everyone flooded in to buy it.
I think it’s more so that “bear sex” was just joke-worthy enough that people talked about the game that otherwise wouldn’t talk about it and news of the game spread beyond its usual corners of the internet. So more people heard of the game and I guess the openness that “bear sex” entails is pretty appealing for a CRPG.
Could it be that the hard core Baldur’s Gate fans are OG/serious Gamers and have learned to not pre-order? BG 1 & 2 were released way before gaming was mainstream. Most of the casual gamers probably only care about BG3 due to hype from other gamers who would also be “Never Pre-order” folk.
My wife found out BG was out. Saw it was a full release price and was kind of like, "meh I can wait". I joked about everyone playing just wanted to edit their character's genitals and she immediately put it on top of her Wishlist.
Completely agree. Remember when people lost their shit over horse armor in Oblivion? That would be seen as reasonable now. They just kept forcing these things until it was normalized, and now we’ve had an entire generation grow up with MTX as the norm.
It was interesting how quickly people fell in line with finding paying for online multiplayer normal too on the console side. Although some do try to hand wave it away by saying they aren’t paying for online, but to subscribe to game rentals.
But, yeah lot of these things people complain about eventually become the norm, and those who complain about it get seen as cranky entitled gamers over the long run.
Games that sell things like XP boosts always swear the game is balanced around not requiring them but there is always some grindy shit. Just play all this boring filler content for 90 hours.
I'll agree with that. Guild Wars 2 still has a slight amount of "pay for convenience" stuff that makes me twinge considering how much I've already paid for the games and expansions, and I really wish you could unlock mount skins in more ways than just gems, but considering you can farm gold and swap it for gems it's acceptable enough.
Especially because I wouldn't even play an MMO with a sub fee, so for that alone I respect GW2's approach.
For full price games on release? No, they really aren't.
People always says "cosmetics are fine". They aren't. Cosmetics are gameplay. Humans love looking cool. They NEED it a lot of the time. The entire fashion industry wouldn't exist if looking cool wasn't a major part of human psyche. These MTX wouldn't sell if it wasn't. Locking all or most of the interesting looks behind additional paywalls is bullshit. And it's not OK. I don't engage with games that do that. There's plenty to play that don't abuse their customers.
Some microtransactions are fine for free-to-play games and MMOs; I don't really like seeing them in full-priced games, especially if I feel it's engineered in a way to make me pay to play. It's why I avoid mobile games in general, playing them feels very predatory.
They could turn the Xboxss into a streaming console, some games aren’t available on it but you can stream those games if you want for a cost of course.
It’s a big middle finger to people who bought the xboxss, but they are gonna need to get their cloud streaming numbers up to justify the expense at some point, and people are too addicted to the ms office subsidized gamepass service to switch to anything else, as long as it stays cheap.
I don't know, you may as well say the same thing about the Switch and every port it gets. The S has its strengths and shockingly few weaknesses given those strengths.
The switch is a handheld and the ports it gets are for that reason. It wouldn't have sold enough to get basically anything third party if it was the same device without portability (see BOTW as a system seller when it literally already existed), and it still doesn't really get that many current gen demanding ports.
The fact that there's a worse Xbox you're required to support when the Xbox already lacks some of the asset loading tricks of the PS5 and has less units sold on top of it isn't something developers can just ignore. BG3 really isn't all that demanding for a next gen open world game, and compromising your vision to force it onto a worse console isn't something people want to do.
The Xbox Series S is a cheap lower-resolution Xbox, and the ports it gets are for that reason. The parity scales well for most games and reduces consumer confusion.
BG3 really isn't all that demanding for a next gen open world game
Most games these days, regrettably, don't bother with split-screen multiplayer, and definitely not with the worst-case scenarios of how far apart the two players can be in that world, which is their hurdle right now.
Parity here isn't on a scale. It's a binary trait. Either they are the same or one is worse than the other. The shitty XBOX does not have CPU parity with the real one, and it's a serious limitation that effectively means that the "good" Xbox also has that worse CPU in terms of game design. It will obviously still get some games, but it's losing games that it would otherwise get because it has nothing in common with a next gen system.
Split screen being the specific thing that BG3 is struggling to do isn't the point. It's merely a symptom. For a next gen open world game, split screen BG3 is still not that demanding. The fact that all the real action is turn based makes it far easier to make run than a similarly dense real time game with real time physics demands, and the fact that the Xbox S can't handle it is a very strong example that it's a piece of shit.
Microsoft wouldn't have nearly the install base without the Series S, and developers can either target that platform or not, just like the Switch, because people bought it for its own strengths. If they want to scale their games up to a spec such that it runs on PlayStation but not Xbox, they're welcome to, but they lose access to a large pool of customers, like those who can stomach paying $300 for a console but not $500. There are plenty of other next gen open world games that work on Xbox.
Also, your analysis on how it should perform isn't really based in reality. We can go to interviews where the Swen Vincke calls out the way their game does split-screen specifically. And besides, at this point, Xbox engineers are involved, and BG3 will run on Xbox, though likely just next year.
It has no strengths, and the install base is shit.
The switch only gets away with being a last gen console because it's a handheld. The Series S has all the performance benefits of a last gen console with the install base of one that released 5 minutes ago.
There is no "the way they do split screen". BG3 while running split screen is not a game that should make a current gen console struggle in any way. It makes the S struggle because it's not a current gen worth of hardware.
Its not the CPU that is the issue anyway. Its the memory both size and bandwidth. Microsoft addressed the size somewhat by making some more RAM available but that doesn't address the bandwidth. The issue is developers are hitting limits in shifting assets around as compared to the X. Its why you see significant texture differences and skipped RT in titles.
I don't have a crystal ball for how it will play out in the second half of the generation but you would have to think it is more likely to become a bigger issue than not. Its also imho another reason why there won't be a Pro series console. More likely they sunset the generation faster instead and just go with a whole new generation that trumps the PS5 pro. Because at least they know that the existence of a PS5 pro extends out the Sony generation enough to give them a window to do this. Or, and this would be a massive shame, this is the last Xbox hardware generation. I don't think its likely but maybe enough generations of trailing marketshare means the bean counters give up on that aspect of it.
We already saw through court documents that Pro-or-similar consoles are expected. The difference with Microsoft is if they stick to generations like they implied they wouldn't. You could get creative with you how you count Xbox consoles and say, "Here's the Xbox 6X and Xbox 6S", where 6 is a larger number than the PlayStation's 5, which we know is a strategy that works. Out of the gate, very few games would require that larger hardware, and unlike PlayStation, purchasing an Xbox game once gets you the upgraded version on new hardware. I imagined this is the direction they were headed in when this generation was designed, but 2020 sure did change the trajectory of all sorts of things even if I'm right. I also seriously doubt they're interested in leaving the console space given the acquisitions they've made in the past few years.
maybe enough generations of trailing marketshare
The 360/PS3 generation was extremely close, and they had the lead for most of it.
Yeah, the series s was a great decision in the short term, but was always going to create a lot of problems as the current generation progressed. Because while it kept consoles on shelves during the initial launch and chip shortage, and pulled in people who would ordinarily balk at the cost, the promise of next Gen support for the series s was always going to come back and bite Microsoft in the ass when more games started to push the consoles limits.
In this regard, Sony was way smarter in just extending the ps4 lifespan since developers can just drop it any time without the existing user base feeling like the got scammed since the ps4 never had promises of running concurrent to the ps5 like the series s does.
The industry can’t learn this lesson from their customers, because they didn’t get the bad idea from their market. It’s a society-wide trend, a symptom of a whole economy under the control of a narrow coproate elite that knows little to nothing about the industries they control or the products they produce. They contribute nothing to the productive process. They only work to streamline the parasitism that infests our society.
I have experienced this on the production end, as well. I used to work in pest control. For a brief period of my career, I was lucky enough to work for a midsized regional company, grown from a small family business, that was focused on solving actual customer problems. We did tons of one shot work. We did do quarterly and bimonthly service, but there was no particular pressure to subscribe, or to cajole customers who wanted to cancel service (because we’d successfully dealt with the problem) into continuing service.
Then the elderly couple that owned the company sold us to a global megaconglomerate (one of the “Big Three”). Over the course of a year, our focus changed. “Recurring revenue” was now the watchword, which is a tough fit in an inherently seasonal industry. And the reason they do this, in pest control, in game development, in every industry that can potentially produce any kind of surplus wealth, is because the owners (“investors”) neither know nor care about any of the details of the industries they control. All they want is regular and ever-increasing revenues, in exchange for nothing at all. You can’t even say it’s in exchange for access to their savings, because though there is a little actual savings in the system, that’s chump change compared to the ever growing wealthy elite that controls our society and devours our productivity.
Beautifully written and entirely spot on. The question is whether we will do anything about it. We probably have 10-30 years before this elite will entrench themselves forever with some kind of robot police that truly can’t be overthrown. (And it’s not like anyone is rising up now, even though the power is clearly with the workers)
And then this elite will Habsburg-jaw themselves into oblivion and all that remains of humanity are machines built in the name of shareholder profits. What a sad way for things to end.
Or, alternatively, they’ll ruin the earth’s climate in their selfishness and greed and either find a way to leave the planet and abandon the plebs to die, or more likely, die right alongside us as the climate collapses and ecological disaster wipes out the human race.
I see a different future. The tendency of wealth to be drawn upwards as position comes to replace labor as the primary means of gaining wealth ultimately puts a cap on progress. It’s a soft cap, meaning it might happen sooner or happen later, but it will happen sooner or later. Eventually, the imbalance reaches a tipping point, where the slightest jolt to the system sends the entire thing crashing down. Maybe people get pissed enough that general rebellion breaks out. Maybe the population becomes sufficiently stressed and undernourished and, therefore, immunocompromised that a global pandemic goes well beyond COVID into Bubonic Plague territory. Maybe peoples faith in the system becomes so thoroughly damaged that law breaks down generally, forcing those ultra rich to devote so many resources to security the people providing the security become the new elite. Allowing “position” (in Classical Economic parlance, “Land”) to be in itself a source of private revenue sows the seeds of destruction for a progressing society.
Of course, once enough people die and enough capital is destroyed, society starts over again, going once again through an age where labor is in the drivers seat, until population and capital base recovers.
Earning revenue by caring for your customers and the industry takes strategic direction, time, money and effort, and the kind of effort needed is different between industries.
Earning revenue by sucking the living shit out of a company works (at least temporarily) for any industry and a multinational C-suite executive can employ it to any industry to give themselves the guise of success.
It’s like instead of cooking and following a recipe, just take all the ingredients and stick it into a blender and call the smoothie a meal. You’ll get sustenance but you ruined what made food interesting.
Isn’t the whole point of pest control to kill ‘em [the pests] dead? Like, to have recurring business from the same customer one would have to not actually solve their problem. Barring any reintroduction of pests with seasonality as you suggested, or otherwise.
BG3 is one of my favorite games, but there is nothing technologically groundbreaking about it. As hardware improves, studios often prefer to use the new leeway to neglect optimization, which is a nightmare scenario for consumers who are forced to upgrade endlessly for no reason. It’s understandable that smaller studios may need to make that sacrifice, but there should be SOME penalty for it or it will get out of hand. The series S parity requirements provides some small penalization that I hope continues for generations to come.
forbes.com
Aktywne