FR. I hate this app so much, and how necessary it has become for multiplayer gaming. I'm glad it'll get worse and hopefully give people a strong reason to move.
A friend of mine had Nitro silently activated on her account. No payment method attached, no transactions, just Nitro. They emailed support who replied with “Oh it’s our new promotion! You get to try it for free, no need to pay or add your card. We’ll ask for your money once it’s done.”
Which is absolute batshit evil drug dealer energy. I bet they rolled that promo out while the CFPB’s corpse was still warm.
Discord was great for chatting with friends during games.
It was shit for everything else, so hopefully this move kills it off and we can stop having to join a discord to find information on topics in temporary chat logs.
The amount of people who spam messages in the boards is absolutely fucking insane. They’ll do that thing where they make it seem like they’re taking pauses or whatever when they’re putting breaks. Example:
Did you guys know?
That when you need to refill your characters ammo
You can reload by pressing R?
And other shit like that, but way worse and even shorter messages each time. I only use discord to keep up to date with early access games, or some communities that I’m a part of (YouTubers, and multiplayer communities like Project Zomboid servers). My job also uses discord to communicate (we’re a small company but with people around the country).
You’ve renewed my idea for setting up a Discord server that literally bans zero-effort Twitch style chat messages. Each time someone hits enter, they must be conveying a human thought. Exceptions provided for reactions, which are a specific feature, but that’s it.
IMO the industry as a whole has breached the “trust thermocline” by consistently releasing broken unfinished games. There aren’t as many people that will buy a game at release, and would rather wait for the bugs to fixed and buy it at a discount a year or so later; or, it’s realized the bugs will never be fixed and no one buys it.
Also with the realization that digital copies (that aren’t installed on your own HDD) can be taken from you at a whim. I think most people are fed up with it, and are sticking to games they already have or just not playing at all.
Quality reference. Also, in reverse, companies such as Larian prove that trust works.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the buggiest messes I’ve ever played. In that, it gives me warm fuzzy memories of the originals, which were similarly buggy monstrosities.
Despite the bugginess, the deep involvement of Larian with the community at every step of the games development and release proves that trust can get you nothing but accolades, even when your game is a buggy mess for six months post-release.
I’m okay with the post-release bugginess because I can trust that Larian actually cares about resolving those things.
I’ve also stopped buying early access games. They may not be bad, but they’re not finished, and I don’t want to be bored with a game before I even get to see its finished form.
I noticed yesterday on Steam that a game I was interested in had a much higher percentage of negative reviews from its Early Access days. Since there weren’t enough votes overall to offset these negatives, it really hurt the game’s overall score.
It’s obviously not great for the type of community that’s about knowledge sharing and learning, and it does suck that a lot of communities went there.
But it’s a great platform for simple social servers that are just about communicating. It’s super easy to sign up and set up a server. A lot of it just works well for chat.
Them going public probably puts a timer on the service though, so if it happens Discord probably just will get worse.
Lame. Discord has already been dipping their toes into the enshitification pond the last few years, so I imagine it’s going to get worse as they move closer to going public and moreso afterwards.
Mumble, or maybe TeamSpeak 6 (they skipped 4, had 5 in beta, which now is 6 in beta, oh well).
Depends on what you want. We’ve been using a TeamSpeak (3) server I’m hosting for years, it works as well as ever (they added a couple of QoL features to the TeamSpeak 3 client during the pandemic as well).
TeamSpeak 6 supports persistent chat via the Matrix protocol and you can register to any server and use that to login to any server using federation (as it uses Matrix under the hood). They now added screen sharing so you got the features covered that most users would want. They unfortunately didn’t release self-hostable TS6 server yet (but they say they’re working on it) so you can either use an experimental TS5 server (uses Matrix but doesn’t support screen sharing) or TS3 server, which doesn’t support any of the new stuff. The TS6 client is backwards compatible though.
I just don’t think they actually know where they want to go with it yet. They seem to be advertising the whole decentralized thing as that’s clearly a differentiating factor from Discord, but on the other hand they didn’t exactly prioritize putting out easy-to-setup server software yet. The TS6 client pretty much fully supports TS3 servers including administration, but as far as I know TS6 servers are quite a bit different. There’s also “communities” that work with TS6 servers in some way. So it’s all a bit of a messy mix between legacy support and their attempt at creating a decentralized Discord.
I hope they get it together and release TS6 server software, find a good way to monetize their efforts and get people to use it.
Some people will say that you could just use Matrix directly instead, but if they manage to make TS6 easy to use and understand, allow easy creation of a server (as a service) and also allow full-featured self-hosting it could turn out well. Plus they have the brand recognition, at least with folks that aren’t that young anymore. This might help with adoption. Sure, it’s proprietary still, but it’s decentralized and uses open protocols (Matrix). You can apparently already join TeamSpeak community chats from your own Matrix server, so they aren’t artificially blocking “vanilla” Matrix servers from federating.
The rising costs of developing blockbuster games has also raised the stakes. “When you’re talking about a budget that’s $100mn plus, even for a big company, if you miss with two or three of those then commercially you’re on the ropes,” Harding-Rolls said.
Oh boo hoo, is the only type of game you can think of to release is a"blockbuster" type game?
Because last I checked, small titles regularly do quite well, like Hi-Fi Rush did so well compared to the fucking bomb that is Starfield. Same company, small game vs. big game. Small game did well, big game tanked.
Hi Fi Rush had 3 million players, including Game Pass. Starfield had over 12 million players, including Game Pass. It was one of the most successful releases last year, the single best selling game in the US the month it came out. That’s not what tanking looks like.
Did Starfield only cost 4x as much to make as HiFi? Doubt it. I'd bet the marketing budget of Starfield alone dwarfed the lifetime cost of HiFi. I agree that "bombed" is maybe too harsh but the problem that the article is talking about is ROI. As I continues to balloon, R needs to keep up and it's not.
Is this is the reason why game companies are charging $70 and add microtransactions and battle passes to every game. If you’re shitting on it and still buying it, you’re part of the problem.
Best thing to do, is not buy the game at all. Whales don’t like spending money in empty games, they have no one to show off to. Simply avoiding the mtx isn’t good enough.
The big two are whales, which they actively target and exploit the addiction to the games, and kids. A surprisingly high amount of parents just leave their credit cards in the console and let the kids buy.
Funny, everything is about protect the kids now but nothing is being done about predatory micro transactions
I’m saddened by the phenomenon because there’s plenty of evidence that the audiences for these most of these games hate the experience, but they can’t stop playing because they’ve become victims of predatory psychological tactics designed to keep them addicted and their wallets wide open. These publishers and studios literally hire psychologists who specialize in generating this addiction, using models optimized to prey on their own users as much as humanly possible. It’s sickening. The sports games are especially shameless about this. Ruining people’s finances and their core sense of financial responsibility to fatten their pockets. I don’t know how they sleep at night. Sociopaths, the lot of them.
So nothing backing up your claim. 1 lawyer claimed psychologist had been hired but with zero proof. I think you are taking rumors and running with them.
Psychs don’t have anything specific to add to gambling. Gambling is easy enough to replicate without any special traits psychs could add.
Try to refrain from calling into disrepute the psychological profession. It’s bad enough without this shit
This is such an absurd distortion of the evidence I have provided that you surely have a vested interest in trying to gaslight people about a standard business operation.
Spoiler: The gaslighting isn’t working. That was actually pretty embarrassing.
Fuck are you on about. Is gaslighting when you can’t back up your claims so you spout nonsense.
Neither of your claims example 1 nor 2 show psychologist have been employed.
Example 2 is a statement from a lawyer claiming they have been used. That’s the same as you saying psychologist have been used. It’s a rumour at best it’s slander at worst. Hop off
I mean, gaming exploded over the pandemic. Anyone who thought that was going to become some kind of norm was an idiot. Have we shrunk below pre-pandemic levels? Or is this just idiots who thought they could keep skimming free oil off the surface once the leak was fixed?
Also, I disagree with the idea that AAA games are performing poorly. Bad ideas in AAA games and chasing “easy money” in AAA is performing poorly. Helldivers 2 seems to be doing well, whereas Suicide Squad isn’t. Baldir’s Gate 3 killed it while Starfield kind of flopped. Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet expectations, but we know Square Enix regularly sets expectations too high anyway.
Are people tired of the same Call of Duty games over and over? Are people full up on live service games and looter shooters? Yes and yes. But are people crazy excited for the new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? From the communities I’m in, very much yes. Did Alan Wake 2 release and sell faster than any other game from that studio? Pretty sure I saw that headline recently, yeah.
So when Diablo 4 dies on impact, was that the fault of the gaming landscape? Or was it because Blizzard execs pushed the team to maximize systems and balance they thought would bring in easy money but actually ended up alienating their core audience and reviewers?
I’ve seen this before when working in mobile. Execs want to chase the whales so badly that they don’t allow designers and devs to make the game actually fun to play. Doesn’t matter how “well” you monetize your shitty game if nobody wants to stick around to play it.
Yes. They thought they could keep skimming. The problem is that their (and everyones, really) business model is predicated on YOY growth and when it doesn’t happen, they fire people to try and recapture funds.
AAA is a title that is applied to studios not games. Larian is an independent studio, a big independent studio but still no where near the big giant companies. Compare them to insomniac, who is behind spiderman 2. Their budget was 3x larians, they are also part of a much larger conglomerate (sony), and they usually are creating several games with the scope of spiderman at once, leading to a release schedule every 1-2 years. Larian is releasing on a much longer schedule closer to 3-6yrs, they are less able to multitask. Larian studios have only produced 9 games across 2 franchises (baulders gate and divinity) while insomniac has ~40 games across 4+ franchises. BG3 was also a much riskier project than spiderman2, it was larian really betting the farm on something big compared to a pretty typical cash in from insomniac. They also don’t waste money on stuff like buying a kpop group (like blizzard, epic or riot), running cons etc etc.
I think larian fits in with CD project red and other AA studios than with AAA studios like activision and insomniac. At the end of the day it’s a fuzzy term though without a strict definition.
And to be clear this is not at all a knock on larian studios, or BG3.
CD Projekt Red is owned by a public parent company, and their last game was probably in the top 50 of most expensive ever made, with some of the highest production values we've ever seen, at least with the latest 2.0 update. Valve wouldn't count as a AAA developer by your definition, but it's difficult to call Half-Life: Alyx anything but a AAA game. I don't think most people would follow your definition.
Problem with games as a service is that it’s really difficult to make a working model out of it. Many have tried, but few have succeeded. Even SE failed with Avengers. For every Fortnite there are also multiple failures. It’s a risky model.
Those few who succeed usually make these large sums of money.
The big problem is that a company will look at something like World of Warcraft/Destiny at the height of their popularity and think "We want that!"
Then they'll put out a (we're being optimistic here) serviceable, good game with a respectable amount of content... but it won't be able to hold a candle to something that: already has that much content + more AND players who are already 'stuck' with the game (sunk cost, friends/family/community, etc).
So you put out a game, get a brief spurt of attention from people who are a bit bored of the same ol' same ol', but then once they breakneck through all the content you have in less than a month they turn around and head back to their comfort food game and never look back. Congratulations, you can now put out a master class on how to waste millions of dollars.
In order to make a game as a service now you need either an extremely good hook, or you need to not only be comparable to an existing game but also EXCEED what that game offers and continue to provide content at a staggering speed until you've coerced people to have invested enough in the game to then be their comfort food/sunk cost game of choice.
Bad idea. Matrix is incredibly costly to run by design. The eventual consistency model replicates everything to all servers which is wasteful, slow, & isn’t going to scale. Many medium-sized servers have shut down for storage & CPU+RAM costs—which causes refugees to seek more centralized nodes. Hell, we saw it a couple weeks ago Matrix begging for money since they can’t even afford to run their own servers anymore. You should put your money into a protocol that doesn’t treat chat like a blockchain & is efficient enough to reasonably self-host.
For the chat part: IRCv3, XMPP, Jami, maybe SimpleX.
As it stands for VoIP: Mumble, Jitsi (XMPP), Jami, maybe Movim (XMPP) in the near-ish future.
IRC & Mumble is centralized but super lightweight so you can spin up a server on any old hardware & can be fine for ‘clans’. Clients are efficient too. They aren’t encrypted other than TLS but are good enough for its largely-room-based goals.
XMPP is a generalized, decentralized protocol for presence & messaging. It has multiple FOSS servers that require a potato for hardware that you can spin up in a bedroom to join other bedroom servers where you can control your own data (same as Matrix, but a lot less resources & more mature). Chat can be encrypted (most clients support PGP & OMEMO). Some clients can do voice/video calls, many are working on multi-user call at present. It is the protocol behind WhatsApps, Zoom, Fortnite, League of Legends, & more.
Jami is P2P IIRC, but I haven’t used it—so I won’t comment.
If you data wasn’t being stolen and sold up until now, it 100% will be after this lol. I wonder how much worse they can make discord. Speed run anyone?
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