These are the stories that just make me give up on humanity. It’s like anyone with the tiniest amount of power is an absolute shit heap and nobody can be trusted.
well, that’s a big bummer. AbleGamers has clearly done an outsized amount of advocacy work in the industry, and it’s awesome that we have stuff like the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Way less cool if the entire org was rotten at the top. Some of these incidents make me wonder if Barlet even cared all that much about disabled folks.
The industry still struggles with basic accessibility options in a lot of games - many studios will implement a wide array of accessibility options, but they do the absolute bare minimum for each disability, such that it looks like they are being inclusive to the gamers that don’t actually use those options. Colorblind options are a common culprit. Basic color filters over the entire screen are insufficient for most colorblind gamers.
One wonders if Able Gamers would be tackling issues like this more directly if their founder had his eye on the ball (instead of having his eye on his coworkers’ breasts)
Yeah, goes back a ways! I feel like it has a knack for resurfacing after I’ve completely forgotten about it. I like what I’m seeing here with the gameplay.
Tbf, Microsoft is an American company that is probably looking for ways to address their own rising expenses. Japan is struggling economically as well, so I imagine Ninty & Sony are looking at international markets to offset their own struggles as well.
Their games almost never go on sale and the switch 2 has set off the $80 trend. Nintendo was already expensive, no reason to believe they aren’t going to keep themselves from being more expensive despite the billions.
Oh sorry, I wasn’t defending them. Haha yeah I agree with you completely. They are absolutely going to jack up costs. I just meant I don’t think Nintendo is generally struggling. They seem like a standout in the market
zero competitors are forced to raise prices 10% in europe, though
it’s a console launched 5 years ago with no new revision, it was unattractive for €500 in 2020 and it’s even more unattractive for €600 in 2025, if they want to move more units they should lower the prices, not increase them. With this price people can get a real PC with better performance, where you don’t need to pay a subscription to play online. And there are no cool “must have” exclusives like the ps5 or the switch, so the premium is not justified.
This depends on the markets. For example, if prices in the US raised 50% due to Tariffs, then they might lose one of their largest markets, but if they can raise them 10% globally, then they can potentially limit that loss and still have a chance (as much as possible anyway) in all of their markets.
Either way, they need to raise prices because their costs have gone up. It’s a question of where that money is coming from, and how they can reduce its impact on them as much as possible.
Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.
When you tariff them by over 100% of their value, they tend to cost more to import.
My whole comment was on the tariffs specifically, and there is a 100% chance they affect sales in the US. Even with cost reductions in manufacturing over the total lifetime of the console, there’s no chance they cut costs enough to keep up with the tariffs, and there is no chance they planned for the tariffs to be this high in their planning.
Outside the US? These tariffs aren’t applied, but raising the prices globally limits the impact of them on one of their largest markets since they can amortize the cost across all their markets instead of just one.
Do you guys think these companies will retroactively raise game prices for older titles?
There’s a couple of Nintendo games that never go on sale that I’ve been waiting on. I have a gift card, so I’m thinking maybe I should snag em now before things get stupid expensive
I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.
Ahh, that’s something I didn’t consider. EA did that recently with the Sims 1&2. Something like that at least. I hate that. At the very least, both options should be available.
In the case with the Sims, they didn’t include regional variants of the game, and they also were missing an ikea dlc due to licensing
New Stadium is kinda ass. Matchmaker for it is absolutely horrendous and it keeps making teams where one is a stack of Top500 players and the other is bunch of randoms who only played Quick Play before.
I’ve only played 3 games of it, but they’ve all been close so far. I suspect the window for fun has already passed.
Overwatch is fun every time there’s a new completely game-changing shift. At its core it’s an incredibly fun game, it’s only because its so competitive that it loses all the joy. As soon as a new iteration is “solved” it stops being fun.
Yep, just like TF2, that they copied, game is not fun if everyone starts taking it too seriously. I feel like Valve understood that and that’s why they never really pushed the competitive scene.
Can’t say I know either. It’s definitely tongue-in-cheek and I don’t believe ActiBlizzard has managed to make their game fun on purpose for a second. That said, patching out the fun would imply they know what they’re doing when I’m unconvinced they’re good enough at game to purposely make a game tedious.
I had the original Xbox all the way through the last series and sold it to get the last 100€. I hadn’t bought a game on the Xbox since No Man’s Sky and just didn’t see anything appealing about it anymore, it was just a steaming box until it was gone (and is at a friend’s, who is using it as a streaming box, lol)
Did they ever apologise properly for what they did to that player that said free Hong Kong and allow him to play again or have we all just forgotten that?
That was when Blitzchung, in his post-tournament win interview, uttered a brief sentence in support of Hong Kong (and implicitly in support of human rights). Blizzard responded by revoking his prize money, banning him from tournaments, and terminating the interviewers who happened to be on camera with him at the time.
This action took place late at night (well outside of US business hours) and was accompanied by a letter that some analysts pointed out had peculiar phrasing patterns that one might expect from native-Chinese speakers writing in English. The excuse given was a tournament rule prohibiting any act that “brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.”
To answer your question: No.
At the subsequent BlizzCon, Blizzard president Allen Brack gave a speech in which he “apologized” for the vague act of failing to live up to the high standards they set for themselves. He didn’t mention Blitzchung at all. This was a typical, predictable, corporate non-apology, allowing them to say “I’m sorry” for something other than the harm they inflicted or the position they took. Neither Brack nor Blizzard apologized for the actions taken against Blitzchung and the interview hosts. The punishments were not reversed. (I think Blizzard eventually responded to massive public pressure by somewhat reducing the duration of Blitzchung’s ban, but never lifted it entirely, awarded his prize money, or restored the interview hosts’ contracts.)
A few years later, Activision Blizzard was bought by Microsoft. Bobby Kotick, the CEO at the time of the Blitzchung decision, is no longer there. We don’t know who else participated, so we don’t know if they are are still making decisions at Blizzard.
This is the incident that made me cancel my WoW sub, and close my Battle.net account. Never again trusting them, even under Microsoft (or rather, especially now under MS).
ign.com
Aktywne