If you want a shockingly good local multiplayer arcade volleyball game check out Super Volley Blast (seriously how is this game so good, it is just volleyball??)
it looks like the same indie devs have an arcade tennis local multiplayer game too calledSuper Tennis Blastbut I haven’t personally tried it yet like I have the rest of these games
Lastly, check out the airhockey meets top down action team based hero game Omega Strikers. This game isn’t pay-to-win and it really deserves a lot of love! Don’t pass it over just because it looks like it could be another live-service casino disguised as a game.
edit 2 - does Rock Of Ages count as a sports game? It certainly has lots of balls, a clear goal for those balls to go in and a set of sensible and logical rules to how those balls get there which leads to mythical stories about heroes, sounds like a sportball game to me so what if the sportball is made of living sheep
I can confidently tell you your impulse isn’t brash here, Mutant Football League is exactly what you think it is, has splitscreen and is fucking awesome.
I honestly don’t even give a shit about 'murican football, it doesn’t even matter (though make no mistake, this game has good arcade football gameplay, it isn’t “just a joke game”), Mutant Football League is a journey on a road paved with footballs but it is about the experience along the way not what type of sportsball the road was paved with that you walked your pilgrimage on.
Fuck that! Do the work and design fake companies and products. Thats half the fun walking around a store in any video game. Seeing the funny names and references they come up with.
I don’t want to see fucking ads for anything that’s a real product being pushed in my face in ANY MANNER in video games!
Cyberpunk games would be fine, these rules are about forcing players to watch an ad to experience parts of the game, like when a mobile game makes you watch an ad before you can continue playing after beating a level or when you can watch an ad to get more coins/gems or whatever. Having ads in the game itself isn’t being banned.
Sold to consumers as “immersion” but likely makes money on the back end from advertising.
I also imagine it creates a game preservation issue if there was some sort of disagreement or failure to extend contract. I believe that’s what happened with music licenses so I’m imagining it may be similar with in game advertising?
Full disclosure this is mostly speculation, I’m not entirely sure how all of it truly works.
Yup. I don’t play the sports games anymore but I have friends that have mentioned ads for things that are time of year based at least. Shoulda had them fuck with their consoles date to see if that was locally controlled or not lol
If you read the article, it’s targeting things like “ads you must watch to progress” and “rewards for watching ads”. So literally targeting the very worst of the mobile game ad industry.
valve would basically have to become an ‘advertising company’ and require these types of games to use the ‘valve ad network’, in addition to the storefront for in-game sales, in order for valve to profit from them.
i don’t think valve is necessarily ‘against’ the business model, as it has proven to be rather profitable for the big hits and big players… and valve is in the business of making lots of money. rather, it’s that valve doesn’t want to become that advertising company. at least, not at the present time.
Haven’t seen a game that uses ads like this, but very good that it’s strictly prohibited now. That shit should never have taken off on mobile, but alas. At least we can prevent it on PC.
If you see Google launch a “free game only” store for PC, get worried.
I would be astonished if there was anything good on it though. If you are going to make a microtransaction game you probably don’t want to put a lot of effort into it because people won’t play it for more than about a week. This stuff’s only profitable if you can shovel new games out of the door on a regular basis.
Oh there wouldn’t need to be anything actually good on it.
You just need Superbowl advert money and suddenly you’ve got millions of users with no money.
I suspect the only reason this hasn’t happened already is that those millions of users are already on mobile, being flashed with garish noisy adverts every two minutes of gameplay, and moving them to PC some of the time wouldn’t really increase ad revenue…
valve so far took tremendous care of the people using their product. They have outclassed afaik every other billion dollar company in the world in terms of listening to their customers and not exploiting them to hell (as others do).
billionaire companies are cancer. If gabe ever gives up valve (through death or whatever), we are at the mercy of a monopolist that can extract as much as they want.
My conclusion: force companies to behave like valve does now, but forever. Let them make money without exploiting people. And in case if valve: break any monopoly.
There’s a very good bill for achieving this result by a senator from my state, which requires companies to elect their board members through employees.
That would be a great solution. Another would be to put quotas of employees, customers, owners and the community (people living around a plant for example) in there. Just an idea though.
There’s an alternative, to make it popular with the American people. Republicans look bad to their constituents each time they vote against policies that would relieve the American people as a whole, such as net neutrality and healthcare for all.
Make some noise about it! Make it known that Democrats fight for everyone, and that a certain sect is very vocally rejecting that fight.
If the “win for everyone” includes shipping a game as microtransaction-based instead of ad-based, I doubt it’s really a win. Microtransactions usually come with dark patterns and rely on techniques from the gambling industry.
Lootboxes are at least a conscious action you must take. They definitely have the same problems as gambling (because that’s what they are), but you can also choose not to engage with them. Ads however, are forced upon you, and do things that you cannot see (track you) and cannot turn off.
There two big differences to me are scale and value. A ccg has rare cards, but they aren’t actually that rare compared to loot boxes. Loot boxes tend to have both lower drop rates and pollute their drops with lots of garbage, even for rare drops. Secondly, physical cards have value, you can sell or trade them, you can buy singles of cards you want. You can use them for things other than the game as well.
Aside from drop rates everything you said applies to Valve too. Counter Strike skins can be traded or sold for real cash (tied to steam wallet, but still), and you can purchase singles of what you want.
I know other games loot boxes dont follow this, but its interesting for the sake of comparison.
Well apart from anything else rare cards actually are worth real money. But there’s no legitimate way to sell loop boxes if you decide you want to get out of it.
Rare cards are only worth real money because there is a secondary market for them.
As I understand it, the same is true for lootbox drops. The only difference is in how rare an item actually is, but that is also reflected in price, since the resale is entirely market driven.
You could say that Valve rigs the drop rate, but you could say the same thing for Magic. It’s all manufactured shortage.
You could say that Magic items are tangible…but honestly I don’t see how that’s an argument in the modern digital-first era.
I’m not trying to defend lootboxes…not directly, at least. Just trying to understand the hypocrisy in the gaming community comparing these two.
But trading cards are real physical things that you can sell loot boxes and virtual goods that will disappear if the game developers ever decide that they’ll go and you also can’t sell them.
The problem with the CS go gambling site was that that was an extra thing on top of the skins. The gambling was added by a third party.
From my POV, there isn’t a difference, other than a CCG gives you physical objects so wotc can’t just up and decide that they don’t want to run magic anymore and make all of that loot disappear.
But from the gambling perspective, it’s exactly the same. Oh, actually one other difference, electronic gambling can fuck with the odds in real time while physical cards need to be determined when the pack is assembled. But it’s still based on false scarcity.
gamingonlinux.com
Najstarsze