Not until Helldivers 2 dies too. I was tricked into thinking it was healing, and then that game exploded.
EDIT: The truth hurts, but that’s still a live service game that’s actively working against the interests of consumers and preservationists. The more money and playtime people give it, the worse this situation gets.
I still don’t think the enemy is “all live service games” exactly. A lot of us have a style of gameplay we enjoy that makes us go “That was fun! I want some more of it.”
Just that Rocksteady made singleplayer games well, and their poor shift just informs us that not all games need to be live service, especially when the gameplay shifts to something no one likes in order to achieve Number Go Up (similar situation with Gotham Knights)
Number can go up without being tied to a server you don’t and can’t control. Those games still get made, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. Nothing about the gameplay loop of Helldivers offends me; the totally unnecessary forced obsolescence does. The thing that makes it a live service game is the thing that makes it incompatible with surviving for more than a few years without an Act of God, like Knockout City. I also hate that people have been trained into differentiating “single player” and “live service”, as though multiplayer must inherently be this way when it doesn’t have to be. A live service game is just an inferior version of a game they could have made that would survive offline, because it’s tied to their servers. Do you think Sony could have mandated a PSN account after the point of sale if it was available DRM-free and allowed you to run your own servers?
There is some hope for these games. For example Shadow of War works perfectly fine now and doesn’t have any of it’s “battle pass” stuff in it anymore. It can happen.
Rarely.
That’s the kinda forward thinking that I like to hear! Here‘s your 200m, you have 2 years, I expect a prototype of the ingame shop by the end of next week
I mean if it actually had good diverse gameplay per character and allowed us to obliterate our surroundings I could see it having a player base for a bit. Trying to balance it would be a nightmare for whatever team was tackling it.
The last time this happened was when Anonymous hacked PSN and took them down for a month after they went after Geohotz(cant remember the spelling) for jailbreaking/reverse engineering the ps3.
Radio silence like before as well. I hope they weren’t breached again.
Why would you want them to be breached? The only people that are going to be negatively affected by that are the users who was involved in the breach.
Yes and no. Sony would face repercussions for lax security, and while it would indeed affect the consumers, Sony would be at the epicenter. Forgive me for not giving a shit to what happens to Sony, and if they did in fact get breached I'll be there with some popcorn enjoying some Shadenfreude.
What I’m saying is that you have to look at the bigger picture. Not only Sony would be affected by that, back in 2011 when they were breached consumers were charged in the estimated tens of millions of dollars range. A figure that Sony only ended up having to repay about 15 million in settlement fees for after a solid year and a half.
Additionally, Sony still managed to go up in profit that year, despite the PR nightmare out of it. Going up from 1.2 billion after operating costs in 2010 to 1.4 billion after operational costs in 2011 and still made 1.1 billion in 2012 ( after the 172 million in damages was done)
I understand hating big business and their practices as much as the next guy, but I have a hard time getting a sense of satisfaction knowing that at the end of the day the company itself isn’t going to be impacted by the hack more than a small itch, while fucking over the everyday consumer significantly more
…You want their security to be bad enough that they get hacked, so that they’d have to face repercussions for having bad security? What?
How about they just don’t have bad security and people don’t risk having their private data stolen?
Nice to know you’d sit there with popcorn watching people who just want to play video games suffer, a small price to pay for you to hurt Sony it seems, who I guess you hate for some reason.
They never pretended it was going to run literally everything. It’s a handheld.
The fact that there are still very few games it can’t run (excluding the publishers actively blocking Linux) is impressive, but it was always expected that some games would leave it behind.
Hell, the whole reason for “deck verified” is because their default assumption is that a game won’t work.
Can’t wait for them to try this, it flops, half the staff gets laid off, the CEO steps down with a golden parachute, the CEO trades places with the CEO of another tech company, that new CEO makes an even worse decision, another half of the staff gets laid off, the new CEO gets a raise, Microsoft buys both companies, Google makes a competing game studio that gets killed before their first game release, and Apple releases their first video game for $3000 that only runs on M2 and above.
Apple releases “iTetris” for $3000. Their fans claim it’s way better than the original. It’s the same game with only 8 levels, but you can pay extra for more.
Personally I’ll avoid sending any Western money to the Russian economy that I can. BSG has been able to weasel out of political controversy thus far…but it’s a milsim, the devs are probably more pro-Russia than not, they’re just smart enough to keep their mouths shut and keep accepting Western patronage.
Blue beret item references the VDV, airborne russian troops, in the description. Also one of the armbands has the russian flag on it.
Although because the game is shown through the lens of PMCs (you’re not fighting as or against Russian/UN/NATO troops), most of the russian military references are minimal (unless you count the descriptions of weapons detailing their design/usage histories).
This also makes me curious how it was even possible for them to bring it to Steam in the first place, logically speaking, with Russia being under international sanctions and all major payment processors no longer accepting business from there?
Did they like make this happen with a shell company or something elsewhere? Lol
This involved a wild situation where someone was giving the pros hacks like aimbots and wallhacks as they were playing in the Finals event, effectively ruining the entire thing without anyone actually attempting to cheat.
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.
I’ve often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it’s very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.
This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous ‘story’
I also have less time to game, but I sure as hell don’t want to play shorter games. I like to play games with good stories, who are engaging and with fun play. Witcher 3 is a prime example of how even the majority of the side quests can be meaningful and not feeling too generic. I also enjoyed the last of us part 2. And I usually feel sorry when I finish a good game.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price which isn’t always the case.
It is debatable, but would you pay 70$ for a 2-hours game and another 10x70$ for DLCs and expansions that would extend the original content?
But this also doesn’t mean that you should feel your game with generic content in order to make it longer either. It is a fine line but I know that I would have a real problem justifying 70€ for 2 hours of game content without replayability, even if the game is amazing.
And shorter games should naturally command a lower price
This is exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It’s half the length of The Last of Us 2
forbes.com
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