To be fair I couldn’t tell you either. Destiny has been rehashing the same shit for years now but for some reason this year people finally got fed up. I can’t believe it’s just because they released a completely filler expansion but most of the other issues have been around from previous years.
What devs see is “all those other devs are too lazy to make a good game”.
What players mean is “all those other games are full of micro transactions and sell missing content and features as dlc”, which is not the same thing.
What players want to be addressed is the bad influence investors have on the products. Publishers aren’t interested in publishing good games, they only care about money.
Devs don’t go about making a game only for the money. Most of them would rather do it the same way Larian does it, focus on quality and provide a good gaming experience, but their hands are tied.
So the message gamers try to get out goes to the wrong recipients, and it’s obviously being taken the wrong way.
And that’s why I generally prefer indie games. Many indie games are made with passion, with money being down the list of priorities. AAA games are made with money first, though there is certainly passion as well, it’s just not the top on the list. As studios and budgets get bigger, so will their expectation of profits.
So if you want better games, buy from smaller studios. Show them that you value passion over high budget.
But when a game like BG3 comes out, with all the stuff no indie studio can afford to do and it has this level of passion without sticking its hand in your pocket, it absolutely reminds us that AAA doesn’t have to be like it is.
As good as indie RPGs are, Disco Elysium was only able to afford voice acting after being a giant commercial success. No small budget team is going to be able to have mocap work on the level of BG3. These things cost a lot of money and involve paying a lot of workers. BG3’s Kickstarter got to be carried by the name recognition of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons in general, following a huge popularity surge for the latter thanks to the rise of real-play podcasts and such.
Do games need hundreds of voice actors and incredible mocap to be good? No. But it’s something that only AAA studios have the ability to add, and it’s a shame that it’s all going into the next fifa/COD/whatever other money pit GAAS the industry is shitting out.
Agreed. But I’d much rather sacrifice AAA features like mocap, voice acting, and RTX if it means a higher chance of playing a game with a lot of passion put in. Those are nice to have, but not the reason I pick a game.
Yup. And I wish more AAA titles took more risks in gameplay and storytelling, but those seem to be few and far between.
Starfield is a fantastic example. If you asked me to describe a Bethesda game set in space, it would look a lot like Starfield (but I probably would’ve missed the procedural generation). Usually AAA games are pretty much as expected, with one or two surprises on the side, and that’s it.
BG3 basically delivers on Cyberpunk’s promises (branching storylines, mocap, great visuals, etc), and it did so on launch, which is really rare.
Initially I had some hope when Embracer bought a bunch of studios from Square Enix, because Square Enix sucks and it could only get better, but once their funding dried up it turned out Emberacer sucks just as much as them.
I get what you’re saying, but in the case of the games in question, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, don’t you agree? Get them while they’re young and impressionable?
Oh, I completely agree. There is no single thing that is the “magic cure”. There are a bunch of factors that add up to a fetishization of guns and gun culture / violence in the US. And the incredible availability of guns makes gun violence inevitable.
Other countries also have Call of Duty, but not such a big problem with mass shootings. So I don’t think its that easy. I think it is more interesting, what the NRA is doing. Such a big and powerful lobby organization should have way more influence, than a video game series.
As I mentioned to the other replier, other countries don’t have the mass promotion of gun violence coupled with the ready access to an incredible variety of firearms.
You mean the organization that is basically bankrupt and at it’s peak spent 5million dollars over a year lobbying? You think they have more influence then a “video game series” that is owned by a company that has around 25billion in assets?
That, and probably a lot of untreated and undiagnosed mental health issues. Honestly, I think guns are pretty cool (from a mechanical standpoint) but I would never even want to own one irl or kill anything with one. 'Cause, you know, I’m somewhat sane.
For those on Unity Personal or Unity Plus licenses, the fee will kick in after a project crosses both $200,000 in revenue over 12 months and 200,000 total installs.
It has to cross both the revenue and installs not just not 1.
Yeah, but when they reach that limit, it says it’s gonna cost $0.20 per install. So can I reinstal the game 1 000 000 times to accumulate $200 000 of costs?
Even so, after they hit the limit, if the game costs $20 I can reinstall the game just 100 times so the developer doesn’t get any profit from that sale.
I guess that when they hit it. Reinstalling the game will generate costs so the revenue is now lower than $200 000, so it doesn’t work. But that just means that we can effectively limit the developer to $200 000 revenue.
It’d be some API call regardless, if you can figure it out you don’t even have to actually reinstall it, just call the endpoint correctly. Use a botnet to do it so it’s harder to detect as fake (there are already preexisting solutions for that) and bam, you can probably make at least a dent in their revenue.
We need devs, like the maker of the Falcon 4 game to “leak” source code. Its the only reason the worlds premier combat flight sim run on a game released in the 90’s.
Should I be talking about a game that released the same year I was born? No. I’m so glad someone kept it all.
Let's be honest, was anyone expecting any different outcome from Embracer's hasty growth with cheap money? There was no way this would have worked out.
My expectation was that they were spending money that they mostly already had, but I was very excited to see a company picking up the pieces that the biggest publishers left behind. No one was going to make a new Outcast game before this, for instance. Game publishers used to put out dozens of games of all types per year, and now they might put out 5. They hinged it all on debt that they couldn’t afford though, so they’re ruining the chances of us returning to sustainable normalcy instead of what AAA has been doing for a decade.
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can’t even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera’s website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
That makes me think that if it wasn’t for Godot and maybe the Unity fiasco they might never have done this. Competition is good and this is probably a practical example of it.
I genuinely want to hear what he thinks the cause of this issue is. Surely he is intelligent enough to put one and two together.
If you continuously underdeliver, repeatedly ignore community feedback, gaslight people into thinking something other than what they believe, and then top it off with mtx of way higher quality than the game itself - that’s all we need to know.
Make a good fucking game, and people won’t have “waning interest”. Even the most die-hard fans within my friend circles have refunded TFS, and I fully understand why
I like to think of CEOs as defense attorneys. They aren’t saying what they believe or know to be true, they are saying what their job requires them to do.
Funny how they praise success these studios achieved before suddenly slamming the door shut and firing those people, but 343 has literally been fucking the corpse of Halo for 12 years now and you still funnel then millions of dollars to keep ruining everything.
Spencer revealed the figure during an interview with Windows Central and stated that Xbox Game Pass is “financially viable, meaning it makes money,” despite that outlay.
There’s a difference between “profitable” and “how much money Microsoft wants to make after investing billions in something” and I’d wager it’s a big one
I get what you’re saying and I’m sure all the MBAs at Microsoft are shitting bricks, but I never fully understand why a company would be disappointed with a service like this one even doing only slightly better than breaking even.
Not everything needs to have infinite growth and gigantic margins as long as $-in > $-out.
I get what you saying, but I think (when it comes to video games) MS is in not position (and hasn’t been for a while) to spend in something that doesn’t gives them a solid profit. I like Game Pass, but since 2021 I subscribe only any other month or so, the novelty wore off and I have a big enough backlog to keep me occupied. MS needs (hear me out lol) some strong first party AA line up to make GP attractive.
Last year they reported 25 million subscribers. Even if every single one of those was the $10 plan, that equates to $3 Billion. Seems like they are doing okay.
That was correct about maybe 5 + years ago. However, particularly the latest 4.x builds, the 3d is top shelf. It won’t beat unreal, but it’s 3d capabilities are better than most people’s ability to use them.
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