I’ve never found sex scenes in games appealing. First of all, there’s rarely any build up to them. If there is, it’s just sitting there, listening to an NPC talking about themseves for 10 minutes and selecting the “good” answer to gain “affinity points” and proceed with the dialogue.
Then you get to the sex scene, and it’s either fade to black immediately (hopefully), or two uncanny valley dolls touching each other for a few seconds.
After the sex scene, the partner becomes another NPC, sitting there doing nothing, having completed their purpose. So inspiring.
That’s a damn bummer. Game plays great, and with the microtransactions they’re gonna make bank. I’m curious where the decision came from to do this, rather than hiring voice talent.
Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
Correct me if I’m wrong but lots of game developers simply do bootcamps or short courses where they learn Unity. They don’t have background in software development and switching tools/languages will require lot of learning from them. They will only switch when using Unity will actually become unaffordable. Bigger studios that can afford to retrain people/hire new experts can change tools like that, smaller studios will just keep using Unity.
Sounds like those game developers are about to become unemployable without further education
Also, I don’t really know how one can be a good developer without that necessary foundation. Maybe you can use a tool, but how would you know what to do with it…?
I think the game “development” industry is run by people who don’t understand the difference between a game designer and a game developer. As such there’s lots of people who only know as much about game design as the average developer does being tasked to do game design work and vice versa.
Not a surprise. Anything this company touches is sinking. These giant gaming conglomerates don’t make an iota of business sense. The whole point of a conglomerate buying a whole bunch of similar businesses, aka horizontal integration, is so these businesses can share the same knowledge, infrastructure and supply lines and benefit from economies of scale to lower costs. Like an oil conglomerate using their own tankers to transport oil for all their subsidiaries. But in the gaming industry there is barely any overlap between two studios where synergy can happen. Except for the business admin, promotion and advertising side. But that is a tiny fraction of the costs of big budget production. The biggest cost is on the production side and every studio needs their own set of directors, producers, designers, artists, programmers etc. Another goal of horizontal integration is capturing market share, but with games you run the risk of cannibalizing your own sales especially how Embracer is doing it since most studios in their portfolio are from the same region in the world making games for similar markets.
EA and Ubisoft tried this before and failed miserably and they sold or shuttered almost every studio they bought. The only one who does a good job at it is Sony, but even they don’t have as many studios as Embracer and they rely on Chinese digital asset sweatshops.
Don’t forget their spectacular Arkham Knight port that was so good, it was delisted from Steam and Rocksteady had to come back and start the port over.
I hope the take away from this is that no matter if a game is live service or not it needs to run, not nickel dime players, and be good. Or it will bust.
If they wanted to focus on live service, I’m surprised they made a trilogy of games. In the meantime a bunch of other devs just kept adding content to the one game their players play.
Not good for Payday’s fans to compete within their trilogy for attention.
I’ll get a steam deck as soon as I can detache the controller and put it on my TV like the Switch. While the Deck is probably amazing, it’s what I need to get one, additional to the gaming PC. I always feel chained in, when my controller is made from one part only.
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