Also too many mouths to feed. When you’ve got so many people (including admin) to keep paying, then you can’t “afford” to make a cute little experiment. You’ve got to go huge production, latest fads, cutting edge, and super broad appeal.
What kind of identity can a game like that even hope to have?
I think that is the main point of the lawsuit, if developers sell their game on Steam they can’t sell it cheaper somewhere else. If Value gets 30% the developer has to raise the price a bit to compensate and they have to raise it everywhere. Outside of sales I don’t think most games that are not on Steam are much cheaper elsewhere, so not sure how this plays out.
If you have a point to make about why Valves is not abusing it’s monopoly position make it. Otherwise no one wants to hear your dumb ‘but the free market is always right’ statement.
As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam
I don’t think there’s ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you’re not selling those freely generated Steam keys
This suit seems to just be vaguely, “30% is too high”, along with requiring that DLC for a game bought on Steam also be bought on Steam, it was the Wolfire case back in 2021 that alleged they’re not allowed to sell their game for cheaper on other platforms
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
This is true and public knowledge though as I said (details seen here in the “Steam Key Rules and Guidelines” section), if anything Valve is giving devs a lot of leeway by allowing them to do that at all, not only are they giving up their 30% cut but are also then distributing and committing to updating those copies of the game for free
That’s exactly what they’re trying to say. It could have been cheaper if Valve didn’t have pricing clauses that doesn’t allow developers to price things cheaper elsewhere.
Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.
You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.
Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.
The only thing that doesn’t sit right with me is developers stating Steam threatened to delist the game when they expressed wanting to sell elsewhere. I haven’t seen any proof except just the statements, but it would be weird for a developer to lie about that stuff. If anyone has any more sources on that, it would be appreciated
The one example I can think of is the Remnant games, at least for Remnant 2 on release it was cheaper on Epic Store than on Steam, by like 10 USD if I recall correctly
They don’t really though. They’re talking about selling steam keys in a different platform, not selling the game on a different platform (like Epic Games for instance). You can sell the game for cheaper on Epic or GOG if you want to.
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results. But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
They don’t. The thing most people who have never published a game on steam don’t know is that valve gives you infinite steam keys (for free) that you can give or sell as you wish. This is to allow studios/publishers to give keys to whoever they want, and also allows them to sell those keys on their own or third-party websites. This is a HUGE deal, Valve is letting studios/publishers sell games on a separate site without charging anything while hosting the game themselves. The only condition to those keys is that they can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam.
That’s a completely different thing from what you’re claiming. This means that games can be cheaper on GoG, Epic, etc as long as they don’t give you a steam key together (which they could, for free).
Disagree. The fact that I’m only hearing about it now that it’s flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it’s EA.
I just hope that companies that aren’t EA don’t take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.
But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, “oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore”, when gamers really just don’t like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.
Don't work at Bethesda. Not going to claim this is in anyway accurate. Maybe the reason they left was because they weren't allowed to design interesting quests and thus were tired of being railroaded. I say this because any quest designer is essentially a storyteller so for quests to be so bland to lack character has to be intentional.
Agreed and much like skyrim this game is better enjoyed with minimal fast traveling, the problem is that fast travel is just too convenient and people will complain that it’s just talking and loading screens without actually enjoying the exploration.
I’m intrigued, how the hell do you explore in this game? I thought the only way to get from system to system and planet to planet is to click through menus. The only choice seems to be whether I’ll go back to the ship and click through menus or stay where I am and click through menus.
Within a system you can bring up the "scanner tool" view in the ship to then point yourself to a planet and travel that way.
But to to travel to various systems, yes you'll need to use a menu. But then I'm not sure how you would expect to fly between systems without some form of menu to select where you want to go.
Use the scanner tool, I find I have the opposite experience most people have while exploring. Many people say there’s nothing to do, I hate it when I pick a random ass moon in some god forsaken system and keep fining structures littered all over the damn place. I just wanna be the first person on this planet and find animals and shit, yet there’s always a solar farm, mining rig or small lab in the middle of fucking nowhere.
when i first played skyrim i fast travelled everywhere. then years later i did a no fast travel playthrough and wow, the sheer amount of quests i had never seen before was astounding
That’s what I’m saying. Almost all of the main quests are some of Bethesdas best ever. I really don’t get all the hate for this game. It’s not perfect by any means but to say it’s garbage is just wrong. I’m pretty new to Lemmy and I can’t help but compare it to what I see back over at reddit. More hive mind bull. The Internet told me I need to hate this thing so I hate it.
yep exactly, everything about bethesda has been shit on ever since fo4 release, and 76 made it much worse. its like nobody actually enjoys gaming anymore, its just a side picking insult throwing cult
Yes, it is a lifeless game in its current state. The framework is there, but everything has the feel of a shopping mall that’s going to be torn down in couple months EDIT: a screenshot of New Atlantis
The writing is the strongest part of the game in my opinion. But the writing almost NEVER translates to interesting gameplay.
As an example, there's a quest where you're tasked with tracking some bad guys through a labyrinthine canyon, then you need to search for clues to find out where they came from, who hired them, etc. The gameplay for the quest is about the least imaginative way to interpret that story - the tracking is just following waypoint markers on your screen; the combat is just shooting four basic enemies; and finally the "search for clues" is just looting one item from the enemy leader's corpse. Then you fast travel back to the quest giver and get some credits as a reward.
Nearly every quest is like this. They present an interesting story via the dialogue, but then the actual gameplay for the quest is always just travel to a location, shoot some bad guys and/or pick up an item and/or talk to a person, then fast travel back and get some credits.
I’m more trying to be realistic, It’s difficult to imagine how you would hire a lead anything and not give them any agency into what they are doing. That’s the whole point of lead, to lead the others in the goal of whatever that thing is.
I think that you can be marginalised and restricted, but it’s pretty unlikely this person, as a lead, had no agency about quest design
That also does not mean that they couldn’t do something better elsewhere. Just that assuming that they were locked down by bethesda into writing boring one note quests seems… like a reach.
The game is fine. It’s on Gamepass so I’d play it through that, I wouldn’t pay the full retail for it.
Mostly I was referencing that the quests are fairly flat and uninspiring.
For what it’s worth, game quality-wise, I finished one playthrough in about 80 hrs and while there’s a NG+ mechanic that many seem to be enjoying, I wasn’t too interested in that. I really liked the ship building mechanic, and I had a lotta fun leveling up to see all the new ship parts and play with em.
Maybe after the modding scene develops more (though it looks like it’ll get there) I’ll come back to it if it’s still on Gamepass
It’s atmospheric and good, but player choice during many missions is lacking. Choices often boil down to “Yes” or “Not yet.” But you’ll go the way the mission wants you to go or you won’t finish it.
You also have options that change depending on your skills and progress.
You can choose to bribe, persuade, manipulate, flex your muscles, or do them a favor. Sometimes you can choose to kill them if they’re not cooperating. If a task is related to one of your skills, you can show off your knowledge.
The whole no choice paradigm was much more true for FO4 than for Starfield.
Yep, no legitimate criticism to be found. None whatsoever. Just wait for mods, they'll fix a game for free. The multi-million dollar studio did nothing wrong.
There is legitimate criticism, but there’s a lot of complete shit. I’ve heard people complain about procedurally generated planets that you have to go out of your way to interact with. There’s complaints of bullet sponge enemies from people who insisted on going to level 40 areas at level 20. Both of those complaints are bullshit
Agreed. I often spend 30-60 min in an area trying to find an ideal outpost location. The limuts on how far you can go on planets are already huge. From what I recall, the total area is comparable to Skyrim, though I’ll have to double check that
The thing about them is that they are loud, directed, and often affect the first impression a game gets. If this wasn’t with The Witcher fame, the effect would be more notable, and oftentimes they don’t admit why they really have a problem with the game directly.
Apple announced a game without securing distribution rights first? Seems a bit shady on Bungie’s part for letting them, and negligent on Apple’s.
Also, if we want to paint the narrative that a potential future of Apple in gaming was stolen by Microsoft, wouldn’t that put Apple in the perfect position now to hit back? They’ve been toying with the idea of bringing gaming to macOS, but they seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting. On Linux you have Proton, and on macOS we had Whisky, but the guy threw in the towel when he realised another company was making a commercial product out of it, he didn’t want to take away from the work they were doing. (To be fair, they had been at it longer.) But it seems like if Apple wants to be serious about gaming, they need to build something like Proton. Maybe they should buy Crossover and make it part of macOS. Let just any Mac user run games made for Windows. But I’m also not saying non-gamer Mac users should bear any part of the cost of gaming, but something gotta give somewhere.
Microsoft is screwing up by running people off of Windows when PC building costs are at record highs and the economy is so low, and running up the price of the Xbox due to a situation they had a hand in creating (the AI bubble). While Linux will be a better target for people with perfectly good computers who don’t want to build a whole new one to satisfy Windows 11’s requirements, anyone looking at the end of the life of their gaming PC should be looking at the M4 Mac mini at $500 and at least considering it. And Apple can help them make that decision by appealing to gamers and actually being serious about it. Because if fucking Apple of all companies starts taking gaming seriously, maybe Microsoft will again, too.
Apple had a handshake deal with Bungie, until Microsoft bought Bungie and made the Mac exclusive an Xbox exclusive.
It came full circle when Halo CE SE was released as a Mac exclusive on Mac & PC. And it is arguably the best version of the original game on any platform (higher resolution textures without a complete remake, exclusive multiplayer weapons, etc.).
Can you elaborate on CE SE? Is this different from the 2003 Mac port? As far as I’m aware, the port to Mac had lower resolution textures on top of certain rendering issues, poorer AI behaviour etc.
I was not aware of any of those problems. And I played the Mac version. When I had an Xbox, I spent a lot of time looking at textures up close cause the quality was amazing to me. Once I played it on the Mac I instantly noticed how much cleaner and sharper everything was.
It was released during the PowerPC era, and the internet says it works on Intel Mac through Rosetta emulation. That might result in the graphical issues you mentioned. Having to run through Rosetta means Microsoft (or Macport) never issued a patch for native Intel compatibility.
I was wrong about it being Mac exclusive. I though the Windows PC version was a straight port from Xbox, but it’s the same “enhanced” version of the game that Macs got.
Bungie made games for Mac originally. The 2003 Mac version isn’t a port, It’s the original game. The PC and Xbox versions are the port. That’s why it feels like it’s behind those. Because it literally did have less development time despite coming out later.
They released another Halo for Mac a few years later that I think is the one the other commenter is talking about. It came out around the time of the MacBook Air and as a result is the only game I know of that has an official no-cd patch.
this is factually incorrect. the first builds shown at macworld were not a full build of the game by any stretch. they were tech demos, essentially. once the deal was done afaik no work was done on the mac platform for years.
If I recall right, the only exlusive weapon was the Flamethrower, but they also added the missile Warthog. Might be forgetting some other weapons though, as I never had the Xbox version.
I had some fun when I was younger modding the demo. The only content stripped out of it were the levels, so there were all these custom versions of the Blood Gulch map floating around with Ghosts and Scorpion tanks, etc.
I liked messing with weapon properties. Had my own temu/wish.com “cursed halo at home” long before it was a real thing.
Sniper rifle fired plasma grenades, and you could do fun stuff like stacking two so the first would throw the second into the air and the trail and explosion made it like a flare.
Shotgun fired a spread of frag grenades instead of bullets, and pushed you backwards a bit.
Pistol was more accurate, slightly faster, much less damage, and pushed whoever got hit back a ton. You could easily juggle someone up into the skybox with it. It pushed vehicles too.
Rocket launcher fired a massive ball of rockets that would lag everything.
Flamethrower fired rockets instead of flames, with a much higher ammo pool, but no other changes. So rocket sprinkler.
Fully charged plasma pistol fired a Scorpion Tank shot. I think the non charged ones homed in to a stupid extent.
Chaingun Warthog fired needler rounds with an increased lifetime.
Assault rifle worked as area denial, setting an area in an orb shape around you on fire.
The plasma cannon thing would spawn a Scorpion tank over your head, crushing you.
I think I turned the needler into a shotgun blast thing, but it still fired needles.
I think I changed the elites’ plasma smg thing to start firing slowly but “rev up” to stupid fast speeds, and then the cooldown hurt your shields?
There was something that would call down a larger version of the plasma cannon projectile from the sky, with a larger explosion radius and a stupid big/strong pushback effect.
Vehicle crashes called the same kind of system as a projectile hitting, so you were effectively “shot” with a vehicle impact “bullet” as a rider if you crashed too hard. Congrats that’s now a frag grenade explosion. That one was shamelessly stolen from a tutorial.
It’s a popular misconception that Halo was intended to be a Mac exclusive when it was revealed. It was going to be released on Mac and PC.
You may know that, but a lot of people think that it was revealed at Macworld because it was exclusive. But it was just a headliner in a statement of “hey, we can play games too!” In fact the literal game they were running on stage was actually running backstage on a PC.
macOS we had Whisky, but the guy threw in the towel when he realised another company was making a commercial product out of it, he didn’t want to take away from the work they were doing.
I misunderstood what happened with whiskey, I thought he was making a free version of a paid product.
No, he wasn’t making a free version of Crossover, but it did the same thing as Crossover. They both use free software made by WINE. The Whisky dev was not stealing from Crossover. However, Crossover gives some of its proceeds to the WINE community, so the Whisky developer felt that users using Whisky were indirectly cheating the WINE community by getting a free ride. Note that Proton and WINE are free. Crossover is the outlier being paid, but Crossover also gives back.
There are no assholes in this situation whatsoever. Not the Whisky dev for giving us a free alternative and not the Whisky users not paying for Crossover. Not even Crossover since they contribute to WINE. If there are any assholes, it’s developers who make games for Switch but not Mac (since they’re both ARM64 platforms; obviously not counting first-party Nintendo developers), people who pirated Crossover, and developers not developing at all for ARM64. But that’s a stretch and I’m not after any of those people, I’m just saying, if someone has to be an asshole, that’s where I’d look, not at Whisky/its dev/its users, and not at Crossover/its dev/its users.
Hard to imagine but back in the day it wasn’t up to your operating system to distribute software. They were just a platform and you had open choice to obtain software.
Apple showcasing what their hardware and software was capable of was normal. I don’t think this was negligent but maybe naive seeing how things are run now. It was much better and we got better products and competition.
Budgie was an apple developer before with Marathon which was exclusive not because of any distribution rights but just preference for the platform.
There have been exclusives for a long time, even before Halo. Mostly console, because Windows hasn’t really faced competition. Macs could never decide on a chipset. First it was Motorola, then PowerPC, then Intel, and now Apple Silicon. It’s a moving target. Apple Silicon may not be forever either. If Apple wants to get into gaming, I can see them working with AMD, but not soon.
Apple can’t even be arsed to support games that were released on their own platform like 5 years ago. Why would they suddenly start bothering to support games released for other platforms?
To be fair they did move to a completely different CPU architecture and ARM is a hit or miss in gaming. Some games are fine, but then there are ones like Minecraft that ran better on my 10 year old Intel than on a top of the line M processor
Someone else said that Apple want everyone to use Metal on MacOS, and don’t properly support OpenGL. Which seems like a bigger problem than absence of some variants of Wine.
It’s not they don’t properly support opengl, is that they intentionally chose to stop any kind of development on opengl 8 years ago, so devs are forced to choose between using an ancient version of opengl or make a native “metal” build.
Their idea is that once devs spent thousands of hours on their “metal” engine, then they will focus exclusively or primarily on apple devices
Maybe they should buy Crossover and make it part of macOS
Absolutely no! Previous acquisition prove that they’ll stop any kind of work on Linux (that means backports on Wine, codeweawer is a massive sponsor) and for almost nothing.
And the end result will be like Rosetta, introduce a perfect interpreter but discontinue and remove it from the operating system a few years later because you want to push developers to make native builds and push consumers to throw their perfectly working PowerPC and buy an Intel Mac
Wait, of all the tech companies in the world, you specifically chose Apple for the “don’t want to throw perfectly good computers” line? The same Apple that every single year is routinely removing perfectly good computers from the newest MacOS compatibility list using same bullshit/fake requirements as Microsoft did with Windows 11?
“Don’t want to throw your 8 years old 7th gen Intel PC because Windows 10 is EOL? Buy a new Mac and throw it after 6-7 years when MacOS is EOL for your device!”
Yeah, but Apple has a history of doing that. They dropped support for Motorola chips in the PowerPC era. They dropped support for PowerPC chips in the Intel era. And they’ve started dropping Intel chips in the Apple Silicon era. They keep reinventing the Mac to stay current. Meanwhile, Windows supports stuff going way back regardless of it being updated to support the newest stuff. Except Microsoft decided to try a similar thing, but also kinda not really? I mean, you can run Windows 11 on 7th gen Intel (I was running it on a 4th gen Xeon), they just don’t want you to.
At least with Apple you know what you’re getting, and it’s a lot more secure and stable for it.
Besides, I wouldn’t expect someone with a perfectly good PC to throw it out and get a Mac. I’d suggest they run Linux instead. It’ll run better than Windows, too. But if your computer is dead, dying, or on its way there, I do suggest Mac as a perfectly good alternative.
No one’s really running computers for 20+ years, except the government. For whatever dumb ass reason.
My 3rd generation iPad became functionally useless after only 6-7 years even though the hardware was pristine. Almost half of the apps on it, including some major ones like YouTube, started refusing to run because they had a mandatory Update, and the App Store wouldn’t provide updates for the newest iOS version that the 3rd gen could support.
Meanwhile my Windows laptop that I bought at the same time is still in service after 12 years. Windows going out of support just means you don’t get the security updates; Apple going out of support means they’ll brick your machine.
It is exactly why I’m an apple hater, as an owner of an iPad mini and Intel iMac. Both are basically bricks.
The iPad can’t even be used to browse websites because Apple it’s so magnanimous to tie browser updates to the operating system. Once the os is EOL, the browser is EOL, and all the third party browsers too, as Apple forces devs to use the system browser as engine (= Firefox, Chrome for iOS basically are glorified Safari skins). Apps for iOS almost all require the latest version and you can’t download a previous version unless you have a Time machine and you press download before the cutoff. Imagine on Android if apps required Android 15 and greater. Instead most of them can still run on Android 10 and even earlier.
The iMac, despite being a 4th gen Intel with dedicated AMD GPU, it’s also a brick. Every app (including Firefox, Chrome, etc) requires a recent MacOS version (here devs aren’t targeting latest and greatest, but still is annoying). Of course Apple still ties Safari updates on the operating system. Imagine on PC if apps required Windows 11 24H1. Because newer versions of MacOS don’t have the driver for my dedicated GPU, they can’t be tricked to install a newer version (I tried, it’s unbearable to use MacOS without GPU acceleration, with all that eye candy it’s a must have)
At least the iMac could run a different operating system… Debian shows a black screen and I would need an external monitor, Arch somehow turns off the USB ports on the back and I can’t use keyboard and mouse… I have to use Windows 10…
Because if fucking Apple of all companies starts taking gaming seriously, maybe Microsoft will again, too.
You can’t expect large megacorps to “do the right thing”, no matter how you define that. Linux is the only path towards open-source software and promotion.
Apple is dipping their toes in the gaming water. Like couple of weeks ago they had a livestream, outside the WWDC schedule, about porting pc games to MacOs. They have even made plugins for Unity and put them on GitHub. So at least they take gaming a bit more seriously than they did under Steve Jobs.
Apple already has the Game Porting Toolkit which is made by CodeWeavers - D3DMetal can run a lot of Windows games like Proton’s DXVK/VKD3D. MoltenVK is a little behind to fully empower VKD3D on macOS; it’s not as smooth sailing as Proton.
The biggest issue is that Apple are still hoping developers spend the time to work on converting shaders to Metal, implement Game Center, UI and Accessibility features etc so the game feels like a native app.
Which is dumb. As was Metal (they should have just made Metal as a Vulkan abstraction layer).
Valve took the smart route and while they love developers using the Steam SDK, at least with the Steam Overlay they can still offer a native-like feeling experience.
Here’s hoping Steam Machine etc is incredibly disruptive as if it’s a decent workstation too, there’s a dwindling number of reasons to not use Linux (Adobe / Affinity / Office / AutoCAD / MinecraftBE / Fortnite).
That’s pretty much been the landscape of major commercial gaming since I’ve been alive. Just replace Fortnite and Overwatch with the current popular game. Doom, Diablo, Minecraft, etc.
Nearly everything is a derivative of something from before. Occasionally something new comes up though. I don’t remember anything like Getting Over It seems to have created the Foddian game genre for example. And while Balatro uses relatively normal cards for its base, the gameplay itself is unique.
The MOBA genre as we know it today simply took Warcraft 3 and tweaked the gameplay a bit with the original DOTA mod. But then stuff started ripping it off and we got League of Legends which, from what I could tell when these were rerelatively new, was the same thing as Dota but with different characters.
Palworld gets a lot of attention for duplicating some elements of Pokemon, but the whole game is basically a reskinned Ark, which itself is just Rust with more gimmicks.
The BR genre started as an Arma mod, then became a stand alone game, which Fortnite shifted gears from some kind of PvE game to add the BR that is dominating now, and everyone is trying to copy that. As a 40 year old gamer, it really is starting to feel like there is nothing new under the sun.
Depends on how you define new. Battle Royale could be viewed as just an evolution of the arena shooter genre where you expand the map and the player count to the maximum with the “arena pickups” being randomized. Or it could be viewed as something new because it fundamentally plays differently. IMO taking things that have been done before and combining them into something that hasn’t been done before is still creating something new.
And if you want really fresh ideas, there’s always the indie scene. I will always point my finger at Noita and the absolutely insane wand/spellcrafting system which is probably the most wizarding experience you can have. You can literally create a wand that (and I’m significantly simplifying the process because honestly I have no idea how that actually works) summons a deer into a parallel world and then swaps your location with the deer making you teleport into a parallel world. And no, that is most likely not the intended use of any of the spells that go into that wand. The devs themselves were probably trying to figure out if that’s a feature or a bug.
Even DotA itself was inspired by Aeon of Strife which was a StarCraft map. There were a few AOS-like maps at the time but DotA became the most popular. Then Riot came along and approached an ex DotA designer to help them make a successor. They also approached the owner of dota-allstars.com which at the time was the main site for DotA. Discussions, hero suggestions, fan art, pretty much anything dota related was there. Then, the owner, Fuck Pendragon, took the entire site down and replaced it with a LoL ad. Ofc all those hero suggestions were taken and implemented into LoL without crediting the creators. A few years later he also tried to use blizzard to sue valve for the dota rights but blizz and valve settled it out of court without him.
to be fair there are many games that are like Getting Over it or Balatro or even Vampire Survivors it’s just many of them aren’t as successful or known as those games.
This is the asshole who presided over a significant portion of the enshittification of both Xbox and Blizzard, so we know exactly what his opinion is worth
I would argue that this actually makes his opinion more relevant, as executive management is more likely to think like Ybarra, as opposed to someone that regrets the decline of Blizzard.
I realise i must be an edge case but i think my steam account of 10+ years is positive money wise. Got thousands of hours in the same few games and sold my old €100 CS inventory for about €500 PayPal when the market boomed.
The amount of money I’ve spent on my system to play those few games at more fps tho, lets not calculate.
Lmao. I mostly play the free games. I also have the heroic launcher and I’m signed into gog, epic and prime on it and so far, they’ve given me 85 free games. I have a lifetime supply of games.
20 million divided by 1.7 is about $11 per person, which isnt really that high.
I also think theres a distinction to be made between microtransactions in f2p titles and microtransactions in AAA premium titles. I logged something like 4000 hours in Mechwarrior online and I bought mech packs because I wanted to support the devs.
I feel like a lot of the microtransaction revenue is DLC as well. But like someone else said, there are the rare games that are free to play and don’t have super predatory mtx like Path of Exile or The Finals.
I think this is pretty normal as you grow up. You get kind of bored of playing games that use the same gameplay mechanisms and you just look for a change. Even if the mechanisms in these indie games aren’t as good, just being different makes the game more interesting.
Nowadays I’d much rather play a short indie games that a big budget game.
I fully agree! This is a perfect example of how true the cliche “variety is the spice of life” can be. Novel experiences are abundant when you’re young, but when you’ve “seen/done it all” life can become boring or perhaps feel like the movie Groundhog Day…every day the same routine, no change in schedule or behavior, no change in outcome or expectation. There’s certainly comfort in routine but i find learning and trying new things to be one of the most rewarding experiences as i get older.
For real, I don’t consider myself a car lover/enthusiast, but it is a genre that has really grown on me, more like arcade racing, I think Burnout Legends and Domination for the PSP propelled this feeling lol.
Now I play Asphalt 8 regularly on my Android phone whenever I get the chance… But I really need a better alternative because I hate ads (and not seeking for emulation).
I don’t really do racing games, but Distance is the best one I’ve played.
You get community maps from the workshop.
There are some very cool jumps to do.
You can also train your gripfly skills. Basically, it’s where you flip your car and use the thrusters to fly. Gripfly is a useful technique, but hard to master.
Nice, I didn’t know about this game, I am gonna check it out.
For the curious, I found a nice mod project about Asphalt 8 called Asphalt 8 Retry it basically is an offline mod of the game with updated tracks, graphics and cards, I have been having a blast with it, definitely the ads killed the momentum for me with this one.
“Now, I understand why so few companies have attempted to develop a life simulation game. The challenge isn’t just additive the more you try to build—it’s exponential. At a certain point, finding bugs in this vast world we’ve created feels like playing tag with invisible ghosts.”
He’s not bragging; it’s honesty. I’m thankful he is sharing the experience. I know totally what he’s talking about. I remember trying to make a simulation of reality in the wc3 map editor in elementary school. Add the weather so the plants grow. Tie growth variables also in to deer eating them. wolves eat the deer. So everything needs hunger variables. But already we start having the ‘exponential growth’ he is talking about: because what about the Weather and the Deer? And the Weather and Wolves? Add aspect of the world for one type of object (weather for plants), and suddenly you have to figure out how or whether it relates to everything else you have (Deer and Wolves). Now let’s say we add villagers and Structures. Every time we add something, we have more nodes to consider the interrelations of.
It’s easy when there are few systems and few types of things (like a cardgame of creatures with atk and def), but it escalates quick and does exactly what he’s saying the more systems you try to accurately include and farther toward ‘full life sim’.
So im just a noob, but I see clearly this is what he is conveying to us. (probably cuz i tried a similar path in elementary school. if i remember correctly i ran in to this same issue, scale was too big too big project and i switched to something else. it exponentialed quick; just like he says)
edit: i bet he wasnt brave as much as did not forsee the exponentialness aspect and wanting to aim high caused him to fall in to it
Dwarf Fortress goes that deep. They once had to fix a problem where cats died from alcohol poisoning. Dwarfs in a bar would spill their drinks, the cats would walk through the puddles and subsequently lick their paws to clean themselves. It's crazy!
Yes that was the bug. After all it makes sense that cats would clean their paws and get a bit of alcohol in their bodies. Kind of bizarre to think though that the system was sophisticated enough to track grooming behavior but not quantity.
It really goes to show how stupid computers actually are. They just follow your instructions regardless of how insane they may be
Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.
Making a system like this one day is my dream. I'm not in game dev and I'm probably never going to make a playable game but I naively believe that if you organize this well enough in advance, the moment it starts clicking together would be amazing. If you define all the individual actors in a flexible enough way, eventually the simulation should just 'click' and start functioning on its own, right? :P
For example, you dont need to code the specific wolves+rain interaction - you just need to code "if vulnerable/tired - find shelter" and have rain affect the living creatures in that way. It doesn't matter if there are deer or sheep in the area, "if wolf hungry" logic should just say "find something with meat to eat nearby".
Then again I know enough about programming to know this is extremely naive and it'd probably be a million times more difficult if I ever got around to doing it. I don't even know where I fall on the dunner-kruger graph yet, but it's an interesting thing to think about for me.
Oh I empathize with that. I tried unity/godot and code part would always be fun and easy, I love that... models, assets, animations break my brain however. I wish I could just not bother with them but it's such an important part of the experience, arguably the most important one
I’ve read from a few people who’ve done similar sorts of things that the solution to this problem is to just have everything track everything to begin with. Hunger level, heart rate, mood, everything you can possibly think of to track, and then just have everything else inherit from that global class. A lot of the values will be zero for some objects, but that’s okay, after all a storage crate doesn’t need a mood, both at some point in the future maybe you want to add an emotional box, and your code will definitely handle it now. Otherwise you have to go back in and alter everything every time you make a slight change.
A more complicated but ultimately faster approach is using a structure like an Entity Component System. You build an entity (deer, person, plant) out of components that are just data (health, hunger, mood), and then each type of component has a corresponding system that updates all the components at once based on other values. It’s somewhat similar, but you save space on unnecessary components not being added, and it packs the data together in way that is faster for the computer to iterate through.
I made a tower defense map in the Starcraft map editor when I was a kid , but it was based off of anti air rather than anti ground like the other TD maps at the time. I got it working pretty damn well (at least IMO) but I didn’t have internet at the time and that was on my dads work laptop so it sadly got lost.
I don’t think I could recreate that now if I tried, crazy what you can do as a bored kid with too much time.
That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.
<3 both of u. I was Pixie_Tails on US east and west and in one of the big mapmaking guilds on east. I look back and think wc3 was the mentally healthiest part of my childhood. My most fun thing was a game like dota but with a huge natural map and a minute at the start for everyone to choose their castle locations. Like you could choose to be on a hill, along a river, etc. Then there were diff biomes to choose your hero from and the hero choices spawned like pkmn and there were rares. and choosing base unit types. then it became like dota where units spawned at castles and attackmoved to other castles. Was epic.
My weakness was unit and ability balancing since it didnt interest me so i never did it.
anyway, we thought up and made these as kids. i think that’s the coolest thing
That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.
God damn, that sounds awesome! Those map editors were seriously impressive for their time, so many cool things you could do with them. I also liked making “campaign” maps but with hero units and harder AI (SC base ai was too easy but you could set it to be harder through the map editor) or those “maze” maps where you have to keep the units you start out with alive through a bunch of different encounters.
For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅
So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.
This is the sexism that we saw come out during the election. We thought the country was getting better but they were just quietly simmering but connecting online.
I said that with an American slanted focus but sadly it’s worldwide too.
This is where my brain went, too. Even looking at this Lemmy thread. 6 of the 10 most upvoted top level comments (including THE most upvoted) are “not meee”, “not alllll men”, defensive crap or “well she should have just…” and “even men have to deal with it toooo” like damn. We ARE fucked.
It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.
If men had said they picked the bear it would have been framed as misogyny.
Case in point. Some dude just got murdered by the cops cuz the home invader was a woman and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.
Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.
It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.
Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.
Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.
Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.
and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.
Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.
Who the hell thought the country was getting better? No one I know. This is the same weak basket of deplorables excuse the DNC used for Hillary Clinton’s loss. Because they’ll blame anyone but themselves for their failures.
The Democrats fail because they’ve embraced grinding neoliberalism for an entire generation, because they abandoned the working class long ago. The DNC crushed Sanders—twice—because even a little social safety net, as a treat, is a bridge too far for them. Why the Democratic Party CANNOT and WILL NOT be Reformed
I said that with an American slanted focus but sadly it’s worldwide too.
Fascism isn’t on the rise in the US in particular and the West in general for no reason. The cause is ever-worsening neoliberalism, which is monopoly capitalism in decay. I wrote about this two months ago, but I’ll spare everyone the copypasta and just link to it.
i was around during the first lvl 200, fully support the player’s decision. ppl asking “why play then?” have never been in an abusive relationship. it’s a great game tbh, just filled with mtx & grinding to the brim. ima check out his latest vids @tniru to see his side of the story
Exactly. It is a really great game and the grinding can be very fun with the character skill explosions wiping out entire screens worth of mobs.
When the game released, the only micro transactions were clothing for your character and a pet that could pick up items automatically. Its really sad they didn’t just keep it that way.
A few months ago they got in deep shit because the gacha part apparently sometimes didn’t contain the low chance stuff at all. So you could pay a million dollars and you would never get it.
This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.
In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?
I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.
The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it’ll be fewer but larger DLC.
There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis
Yeah for an example of a series that has found a reasonable equilibrium there companies should be looking at Civ. By making every game significantly enough different moving to the next doesn’t feel like 20 downgrades to get a slight upgrade, but more like 5 has reached the conclusion of what it will ever be, 6 is now new and will have 2 major expansions and a variety of minor ones, but you only see a bit of how it’s incomplete until years later when you’re reminded that some feature came in rise and fall and you’ve just taken it for granted for several years.
I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.
Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)
The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.
So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.
I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.
I’ve been playing Sims since 2006. Sims 4 feels like an insult. I want to like it, and aesthetically it is pleasing, the build tools are nice. But game play wise I need so many mods to make it enjoyable. The packs don’t really integrate with each other and the relationships feel very shallow in vanilla experience. I have Sims 3 and Sims 2 and I love both of them, I used mods but I also it was a fun vanilla experience. I never felt robbed when I bought dlc for them, but at this point with sims 4 unless the dlc is on sale I will not buy it at all. Every sims 4 thing I have bought except base game has been sale. It didn’t even release with pools or toddlers.
I am interested in Life By You from paradox games just to see something different in the genre, it helps that Rob Humble is on the development team. I also keep an eye on Paralives to see how that grows. I just want something new in the life sim genre.
If not for mods, I would not play 4 at all. It’s just bland. It has no soul. And don’t get me started on how broken the few recent expansions were. Not just “egh, an occasional bug that would prompt a restart”, straight up irreparable damage to your save, and broken features that are still not fixed
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.
Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”
They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.
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