I’m happy to say that I was one of them. Beat the game this past weekend, and have really been enjoying trophy hunting in the endgame. Without the pressure of the main story I’ve actually started to feel a little more freedom to take chances and be less concerned about damage and loss of resources.
All in all, Pacific Drive has been an absolute highlight this year.
Microsoft convinced hardware manufacturers to support UEFI and TPM overnight. If they just said next Windows is going to be ARM only software manufacturers would have to follow.
I’m not sure what games do work, but I’m surprised over half of what they’ve tested are in a good state considering it’s running on an emulation layer with immature drivers. Additionally, anti-cheat can’t really be helped, that’s an issue we’ve been dealing with on Linux for ages as well. I don’t think anyone was really expecting it arm on windows to overtake x86 instantaneously, but from a technical standpoint it’s not a bad start. Of course, things could be better, but they could be much worse.
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.
What the fuck are you on about? They’re talking about using AI to replace the incredibly talented human labour at studios they own. Y’know, like the people who made Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, the new Tomb Raider titles, Metro Exodus…
Embracer are shit, but what makes them shit is that they’re fucking murdering a lot of genuinely talented studios that produce great work.
Listen, if AI was replacing executives instead of hardworking creative types, I’d be all for it.
Christ, with how limited the brainpower of your average c-suite is, you wouldn’t need “AI”. I could probably replace most of them with an excel spreadsheet.
Ignore the thousands of employees we’ve laid off, we have AI that is going to QUADRUPLE our productivity. I’m talking AAAA-AAAA games here, folks. The best is yet to come, it’s going to be fantastic.
They’ve gotten drunk on the hype of AI (LLM in disguise); I can’t wait for them to make a costly mistake that wakes them the fuck up. Or dissolve into a formless mass of corporate sludge.
In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn't know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that's been over hyped. A few choice hits like:
Crypto
Blockchain
Quantum
Cloud
WS-I
LAMP
XML
P2P
WORA
OOP
Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There's just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.
I mean, at least it's been this way since I've been in the industry.
Yeah, there is always new Kool-Aid for executives to consume. I just wish more research, discourse, and testing were done before these concepts became either a scam or a true innovation. Of all the things that you’ve mentioned, there are only a few things of which I have no knowledge of; as a lay person, my familiarity with some of these tech developments is due to the major media coverage some got. I’ll have to look into the unfamiliar tech innovations.
Nintendo: Actively standing against game preservation and ownership in an attempt to rent you their back catalog forever; their outdated hardware exclusivity model also stands in the way of future-proofing preservation. They hate their fans, and don’t forget it. They’ll sue you for playing Super Smash Bros.
Riot: They normalized rootkit anti-cheats, and for something that extreme, it had better render cheating impossible, but it doesn’t. Purveyors of live service games, which also stand in the way of preservation and ownership by putting an expiration date on the game. For the sake of brevity, I won’t expand on the live service concept again in later bullet points.
EA: Making billions of dollars off of legalized gambling for children. Always-online DRM on games that otherwise never even need to touch the internet.
From here, you can put most companies that have reduced their library down to live service games for similar reasons as the above.
These companies piss me off, but…:
Sony: Clinging slightly less to the outdated hardware exclusivity model and pivoted largely to live service games, but the writing is on the wall, so they may abandon one or both of those things in the not-too-distant future. Their new shenanigans with requiring PSN accounts on PC shakes my faith in that though.
Microsoft: Layoffs to rival Embracer, and not even a successful, acclaimed game will save the developer. Purveyors of live service games, not just from classic Microsoft studios but also from Activision, Blizzard, Bethesda, etc. Still, they eventually bent to the whims of the market rejecting their Windows storefront for anything outside of Game Pass, and they did a ton to make PC gaming as good as it is today, including standardizing a good controller for it.
Epic: Exclusivity that’s actively hostile to what customers really want, purveyors of live service games, removing their classic games from sale from other stores and their own for basically no reason. But Tim Sweeney, in pursuing his own self interest to become king of the world, sometimes cries loudly enough to score a win for consumers, and Epic is going to be instrumental in any kind of change, in any country, for destroying walled gardens in tech.
Valve: Making untold amounts of money off of legalized gambling for children, purveyors of live service games, but they’re also basically the only ones creating open ecosystems and allowing them to flourish.
Embracer’s pretty low on the “piss me off, but…” list. They made a horrible gambler’s bet and were surprised to have to pay the bill later, and they do have a few live service games in the bunch too, but outside of that, what they were going for is something I really wanted to see succeed. The big publishers stopped making a lot of types of games that they used to make as they honed in on a select few money makers, and Embracer was picking up old, discarded, forgotten properties or subgenres and trying to show that there can still be a market for those. The fact that the bet has failed could be up to their execution, since as Keighley reminded us at SGF, customers do in fact respond when the right games show up outside of those AAA publishers, and Embracer had a vision. They pursued that vision irresponsibly.
That was a really excellent write up, thank you for elaborating. It’s helpful to know the truth of how these companies are acting, and important for consumers to try not to forget. They will continue to take advantage, if we allow it.
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