I literally could not care less. Thanks to their relentless pursuit of emulator developers and fans who mod their games, Nintendo is dead to me. I’ll never understand why they choose to sue their biggest, most dedicated fans into oblivion. It’s pure evil.
I’m not saying they’re doing the right thing but this is always such an overreaction. Among all the evil in the world today nintendo’s actions are relatively minor, and widespread piracy gives them a plausible legal basis for doing it
You don’t think corporate greed is evil? Not as evil as the shit going down in Israel and the current state of US politics (amongst so many other things), but still evil nonetheless.
I could in some ways understand their pursuit of emulators when they’re monetizing those same games currently (even if I disagree with their pricing structure on them). What really got my goat was when they went after Garry’s Mod animations, a medium that has promoted their visibility and never conflicted with their software sales in the slightest.
Yeah, they’re jerks who happen to produce good games from time to time and build consoles out of parts that are 4 years old at launch.
I believe Nintendo went after Switch emulators because the new Switch shares enough with the original to make it a cake walk to emulate Switch 2 games with better performance.
That’s what pisses me off so much. Instead of releasing a console with decent performance, they rather sue their fans into oblivion, just because they want to run their games @ 4K 120Hz. I wouldn’t need a Switch emulator if their god damn console wasn’t so weak. It can’t even handle 30 FPS in many titles, let alone 120+. It’s not like these are demanding titles, either. I’ve played mobile games with better graphics. There’s no excuse.
Nintendo has had such terrible quality control when it comes to performance on Switch. First party Nintendo games even suffer from unacceptable framerate drops. So many Switch games struggle to perform well on the Switch; we need a Switch 2 just to get all the Switch 1 games to play at the intended performance level.
Yeah the studio put out nothing but nice games. Sure, Ghostwire in particular wasn’t stellar, but it was also enjoyable and pretty well done. Evil Within was dorky, but in just the right way. Hi-Fi was phenomenal, and that alone should have seen them physically behead every single higher manager at Bethesda before they tough anyone at Tango.
But alas, apparently if it ain’t Fallout: Ghostwire or Fallout: Hi-Fi, then it doesn’t matter. Manager bonuses ain’t going to pay themselves (hrm… come to think of it, they do?), line has to go up!
Very few third-party games remain exclusive to one platform forever, so in those cases I’m usually content to just wait it out until the exclusivity deal is over then pick the game up on a platform I own. Sometimes the wait can be pretty long but I really don’t have much of a sense of FOMO most of the time.
You let companies review your game when you want fans outside your bubble to hear how good your game is. You don’t let companies review your game when you don’t want fans inside your bubble to fund out how bad your game is.
It’s fucking ridiculous that CEO’s make decisions that make players dislike a game or product yet the workers are the ones getting laid off. I doubt any of the regular employees had a say in the shitty DLC decisions.
I don’t mind someone going after Valve but I think the arguments presented are bullshit.
The price parity argument is an argument on paper but in reality we’re not going to see different pricing, except maybe on the super rare occasion a company has their own storefront they want to build up with their first party games while also keeping the game on Steam for extra sales. Realistically that first party game is going to be exclusive to the store (see Alan Wake 2). And 3rd party publishers have no incentive to sell for cheaper on a different storefront because a lower cut by the platform holder would just mean they get to make more money per unit sold. I guess maybe if the storefront pays the 3rd party publisher extra so the storefront itself could set a lower price on the games, but I fear that might end up having the opposite effect where money-rich competitors (like Epic) can end up taking away market from smaller storefronts like GOG or Itch because despite selling games for less it’s still not competing with Steam in terms of features so the market has to grow from somewhere. But I’ll happily be wrong here.
The same way the 30% cut being too much is an argument on paper, but in reality if the cut does go lower the customer, the people actually buying the game, won’t see it. One could argue that it has already gone down for AAA because Steam brings it’s down to 25% after certain threshold and I think once more to 20% after the next threshold. Meanwhile AAA pricing has only gone up in the form heavier focus on MTX alongside an actual price increase from $60 to $70. The cut going down is just going to put that money in the publishers pocket. It would be a win for the publisher but not really a win for the customer.
The only argument that actually could be beneficial to the customer is the add-on argument. I’m not entirely sure what they mean by add-ons. If they mean Steams own made up marketplace of trading cards and stickers and all that shit what is the solution here? Have Steam close it down because there’s no way in world other storefronts would ever make something like that and if they did it would never be made in a way where it could be interchangeable with Steams implementation. I hope by add-ons they mean DLC-s and I would 100% love it if I could buy a game on one platform and DLC-s from a different platform and just have them work together. That would actually be beneficial to the customer. But I don’t see anyone codifying that as a regulation and if it were to happen it would be pretty big strain either on the storefronts or the publishers, because it would be a huge mess to track purchase across platforms to make sure what combination of games + DLCs any particular account has. I would love to see it happen, I just don’t see it actually happening.
The arguments are there on paper but even if Steam did anything about them it probably would have little to no effect on the customers so the lawsuit doesn’t really feel like someone is fighting for the consumer, it just feel like someone trying to take Steam down a peg. It’s fine but it’s unlikely to have an impact on the market, Steam will still stay the biggest seller because Steam offers features to the consumer that no other storefront offers.
There’s nothing that says game developers can’t allow add-ons to be installed from third party stores. Already works that way with games like Gratuitous Space Battles. I’ve bought the expansions on third party stores and simply put the zips or whatever in the relevant game folder.
I don’t know if something has changed since that game, but I don’t see addons sold by 3rd parties as a popular avenue for consumers simply because you have to then manually manage it.
Will say it would be nice to own games on one platform and be able to buy and manage the game via steam. Select the platform you bought it from / the install folder and let steam automagically update the DLCs in there for you.
We don’t really know what the add-on argument is because the article doesn’t really say much about it. I didn’t mean Steam prohibits modifying game files, which is pretty much what you did to add the expansions. I meant it more like you describe in the last paragraph where your purchases are platform agnostic, you buy where you want to and you play where you want to.
I’m pretty sure the dlc thing is already possible. Guild wars 2 at least works this way, you can buy the game/dlcs either via steam or via their own store and then you can install and run the game either via steam or via their own launcher (although IIRC the steam way still has the launcher).
It’s probably more of a case of steam providing a convenient way for developers to not need their own account system, so rather than them creating their own solution that integrates with steam and other sources, they just straight up use Steam’s way.
To be honest I’d love it if they forced a way for steam and other shops to allow migrating your games between them, so I could take all the free games from epic but never use it. Currently my compromise is to just never use it and skip the free games.
This is a great write up to which I can only add that I know that in the ongoing US case, Valve has been arguing that not only is the 30% cut not particularly onerous, and is actually pretty close to the industry norm…
… they also make the argument that Steam provides much, much more to both the consumer and the prospective game seller that…well they just do actually offer many more features and services than existing comparable platforms.
The DLC thing is an interesting idea, but… oh god, basically, is my database manager brain’s response to that.
You’d have to construct like a shared standard of game key liscenses across all digital platforms, you know, the not unlike the kind of thing every single idiot a few years back claimed would be possible with their NFT games.
This is… an interesting idea, but I don’t see how you could actually implement this in practice without basically creating a government agency to manage it.
… Which would then also probably mean that said government would now directly know every game you own.
And then you’d have to think about how that would play with things like game key selling sites…
Yeah. This would be a nightmare to try to actually implement.
Now the government would be directly involved in DRM. Like uh, potentially, verify your actual identity with face scan to log in to your game library of any kinds of games… that kind of involved.
There are many other complexities and problems than that.
Out of what? Like 5 extraction shooters? I don't get the popularity, it's pretty damn bland and shoves MTX in your face like crazy, but I have been pretty out of touch with the mainstream market for a while now.
I don’t think I would call HD2 an extraction shooter. I mean sure, you shoot things and try to extract, but for the same reason HD2 isn’t a RPG just because you can roleplay or an RTS just because you need to make strategic decisions in real time, there’s a lot more to these genres that HD2 doesn’t include. Hell, technically you don’t even need to extract, as the only thing successfully extracting gives you is any samples you find… completing the mission counts as a win regardless.
ARC has the exact same system by the way. It’s the battle pass thing where you choose the things you want each tier, and that includes the credits (Raider Tokens I think is what they’re called here). You can also buy them. They’re used to unlock other battle passes (no others available at the moment besides the one free one) and also cosmetics.
Some of us actually understand that the quality of assets has significantly risen since the 00s and it takes artists significantly more time and effort to make high quality cosmetics. We’re talking about going from assets taking days to assets taking weeks. Is the cost of the game supposed to eat all that extra development time? Are artists supposed to work for free? The realistic alternative to paid cosmetics is no extra cosmetics because quality cosmetic items are too expensive to make for free. Is that what you want?
You’re free to be the old man yelling at the cloud but at least acknowledge that that is what you are.
No need to start throwing insults. It takes away from your argument. If you want to pay for cosmetics, sure go for it, but that's how we got in this mess.
Artists get paid either way, they are not paid on commission of skin sales. Any extra profit goes to the executives anyway, not to the artists. So that entire point is null.
Games existed before with no paid cosmetics, they would exist again without them. This used to be the free-to-play model, but now they realise they can charge you for the game and then again and again for skins. These types of games are designed to extract as much money from you as possible, that's their entire purpose. They are not giving you extra skins to be nice and then paying the artists more from it. A skin is made one time and sold a potentially infinite amount of times for ridiculous prices.
As I said:
It's so ingrained it's actually crazy.
Why would you ever want to advocate for a worse experience? It blows my mind, but that's the situation we got ourselves into.
No need to start throwing insults. It takes away from your argument
Pretty ironic considering you’re implying people who think it’s okay to pay for cosmetics are crazy.
Artists get paid either way, they are not paid on commission of skin sales. Any extra profit goes to the executives anyway, not to the artists. So that entire point is null.
Like I said before, the realistic alternative to paid cosmetics is no extra cosmetics. Artists get paid anyway but if their work is freely given away how does it justify them working on it? And if you strip away the capitalist BS it becomes even more apparent that the artists making the assets deserve to be compensated for their labor.
A skin is made one time and sold a potentially infinite amount of times for ridiculous prices.
A game is also made once and sold infinite amount of times. Why aren’t you complaining about having to pay for games?
Why would you ever want to advocate for a worse experience? It blows my mind, but that’s the situation we got ourselves into
I’m not, which is why I’m advocating for cosmetic items to be reasonably priced. You’re advocating for a worse experience where cosmetic items get made with minimal effort (if they even get made at all) because the labor is not going to pay off.
I said the situation is crazy, not a specific person. I dont blame any individual, the strategies used over the years by these companies to sell skins and make consumers complacent are all very manipulative and effective. The people designing the systems and the ones doing the marketing have done a very, very good job.
You seem stuck on artists all being freelance, getting paid on some sort of commission. They are almost always salaried employees like anyone else at the development company.
Weird analogy, paying for a game, something usually worked on for years, is a lot different than paying for a cosmetic change to something. It's like going to the movies and paying the price of the ticket again to sit in a green chair instead of a red one and being told that's completely normal and something you should do.
I agree, if skins were sold for $0.50, $1.00, max $5, then I would have less issue with them. I'd still have issue with the predatory practices used to sell them though. Some people are more susceptible to this than others, so I would rather it didnt exist at all.
You buy a game once, have all the content and are not pressured again to spend anything, that's the ideal scenario, why would I compromise on that?
Games should be a sustainable art form, not gross corporate projects to extract as much money as possible from consumers.
I said the situation is crazy, not a specific person. I dont blame any individual, the strategies used over the years by these companies to sell skins and make consumers complacent are all very manipulative and effective. The people designing the systems and the ones doing the marketing have done a very, very good job.
Maybe you should’ve been clearer on what you meant considering your passive aggressive tone towards the consumer like “consumers keep sucking it up” (I don’t think this one need explaining) or calling them complacent (indirectly criticizing people for being too passive or indifferent) or saying we forgot cosmetics used to be free (implies we used to know better and now don’t).
You seem stuck on artists all being freelance, getting paid on some sort of commission. They are almost always salaried employees like anyone else at the development company.
First of all, whether they’re freelance or not shouldn’t matter to you considering you’re claiming they shouldn’t get paid either. And secondly I don’t think you understand how companies operate. People at companies work to generate revenue. Free cosmetics do not generate revenue and if they’re packaged with the game their contribution to the pricing is marginal thus the labor cost of making these assets would be disproportionate to their value and they don’t get made. The artists will get paid by they won’t be working of cosmetics. For artists to work on cosmetics there needs to be an incentive to work on them.
Weird analogy, paying for a game, something usually worked on for years, is a lot different than paying for a cosmetic change to something. It’s like going to the movies and paying the price of the ticket again to sit in a green chair instead of a red one and being told that’s completely normal and something you should do.
Is it? Last time I checked money goes off my account and I get something that costs no extra for the company (outside of making the thing).
Or are you drawing the difference at the amount of time it takes to make something? So a game made within a month should be free? A cosmetic that for some reasons took years to make should be paid? Or is it a matter of respect? That you respect game devs and their labor but you don’t respect artists and their labor?
As for your cinema analogy, some cinemas have higher quality chairs in the same theater and as a matter of fact, you do pay extra for them.
I agree, if skins were sold for $0.50, $1.00, max $5, then I would have less issue with them.
Are we starting to move the goal post here? Cosmetics costing less shouldn’t matter to you at all because your issue is that you have pay ANY amount for them.
I’d still have issue with the predatory practices used to sell them though. Some people are more susceptible to this than others, so I would rather it didnt exist at all.
Which is a completely different issue. I also have issues with predatory practices but the existence of predatory practices doesn’t mean cosmetics should be free.
You buy a game once, have all the content and are not pressured again to spend anything, that’s the ideal scenario, why would I compromise on that?
And if the game releases a DLC with new content are you not pressured to buy the DLC? Are you going to argue that DLC should also be free or are you going to draw another arbitrary line in the sand stating that game devs deserve the money but artists don’t?
Games should be a sustainable art form, not gross corporate projects to extract as much money as possible from consumers.
And how exactly is something sustainable when you give it away for free?
You are very confused. My point is very simple and understandable, yet you will purposefully misinterpret everything I say, just to fit your agenda for the sake of argument.
I already said, if you want to buy skins, go for it. It's your money. You dont need to get so defensive over that. It's okay.
Because you are so hellbent on going in circles as an argument strategy, I wont discuss further. Good luck out there.
Your point is very simple and understandable, but that doesn’t make it right. If your point was right it should be able to withstand the criticism I’m giving it, but it can’t. That’s why you think I’m confused and misinterpreting what you’re saying, because you don’t like me poking holes in your misguided belief.
We are certainly not playing the same game, then. All good.
Edit: so, finally back home and started the game. Main screen, after game loads has 0 references to MTX. Zero. Only and only when you go to STORE tab do you get to see anything. Or if you click on RAIDER TOKENS section in the top right. Nothing else, anywhere.
So while I love shitting on game devs, I prefer to do it for a good reason, and not based on lies. You might not like the prices and that’s perfectly ok, noone likes them.
But that does not equal “shoving MTX in your face”.
I’ll agree with the other comment; ARC does not shove then in your face. The only time you see that stuff can be purchased is when you go to the customization menu. That’s it. You also get some of the premium currency for free.
I’m pretty confident theyll handle it well because in The Finals I’ve been playing for about ~2 years and have purchased most of the battle passes and some outfit stuff, all with putting no money into the game. This is a $40 game. I suspect it will be handled well.
You can purchase extra stuff, but you can’t say it’s shoved in your face. It definitely is not. It’s just a way to get extra money from whales. I think it’s probably not smart for a game to ship without some MTX at this point. You can make the game cheaper for most people by having the whales fund it. It’s practical.
It’s bland? You can not like it if you want. That’s fine (if you’ve played it). Don’t make shit up though. In the realm of modern shooters, it definitely isn’t bland. It’s pretty unique. It’s got a style you don’t see anywhere else (though still based in realism), and the gameplay isn’t like many other games.
The enemies in particular are incredible though. That’s where it stands out. They’re actually physically based, and if you shoot out a leg or motor then they adjust to compensate. They used some machine learning to have them run in simulations where they learned how to move with different pieces missing. It’s really special how they feel.
It's bland. That's my opinion. If you don't think so that's fine, but that is literally what an opinion is. The style is very similar to their old Frostbite games. You can see the EA Star Wars Battlefront in it.
The drones just being physics based isnt all that impressive that it makes the game for me, it's not exactly revolutionary, similar things have existed before anyway. The gameplay is like you see in a lot of other games, that's why I think it's bland. It's your run-of-the-mill 3rd person shooter, with some basic extraction shooter elements added.
If you enjoy it, fantastic go have fun, doesn't mean I have to like it and you don't have to defend the game or your position at all.
I was largely being sarcastic. Yeah, Outer Wilds might be the only game that pretty much does it’s own thing I’ve played in many years.
I’ve been playing The Finals a lot for quite a while now. I would say it’s incredibly innovative and unique. However, it’s still a first person shooter based on capturing an objective point. At its core, it’s derivative. The way everything fits together is unlike anything else though. Just listing features that are shared by other games does not mean it isn’t doing something different.
The reality is you made a game that few will play for several years. You could have made a game that could be playable on most contemporary machines. You didn’t and will now have to suffer from shitty sales due to your inability to understand that the majority of us don’t have the money to spend like you do you out of touch clueless ballsack.
Anyone that remembers Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever knows that Randy Pitchford is garbage. He also ran off most of the talent behind BL1 and BL2, which is why BL3 writing was shitty.
What are you talking about you can buy the PC for less than the price of a PS5 and it will be better than the PS5. The advantage of gaming consoles has always been that it’s plug and play. You just turn it on and there you go.
Sony aren’t going to create a revolutionary GPU that’s only available in the PS6. They might try and charge $1,000 for it but they will always be other options. Where do you think they get their components from? They don’t have their own fab.
Look, I am still using a GTX 1080 Ti (GOATED GPU btw, best dollar per performance value probably ever) because GPUs are too expensive. $700 USD for a low-mid tier card, or $1000+ for a card that should (and usually does) give good lasting value. I don’t see where anyone is buying a PC for less than $500 and it has better performance than a PS5, but I suppose it is possible this is a result of Price Discrimination, since I am in California.
NVidia is showing what PlayStation will look like when it feels there is actually zero competition. Xbox, so long as its hardware exists, is a constant threat to PlayStation keeping a lot of things in check. Once Xbox completely disappears, PlayStation will have no competition. Then Sony can set the prices however they want and nobody can do anything about it except pay up, or don’t.
I built my SO gaming rig for about 550 bucks. 5600x ryzen and rx580. Idk if it’s “more powerful” than a console or not but it plays games fine. Yes I know the 580 is dated and only pci3.0 vs board supporting 4.0, but she didn’t have money to spend. I have a 6600xt I got used for a hair over 200 when GPU prices were nuts and it plays all I ask it to at 1080p. You CERTAINLY don’t need to shell out 500 on a GPU that’s ridiculous. I will never understand the dick waving in the PC community about needing the best greatest top of the line and latest hardware to be able to game, when u can spend half the money to get 85% of the performance or something. I am confident for the cost of a PS5 u can rival PS5 performance in a PC build, and even if it’s not “better” the difference in cost of games is enough that a couple game purchases puts you into another class of GPU anyways!
AMD cards are so much cheaper right now, it makes a big difference. Second hand market cuts prices in half too. Places do certified refurbished as well.
I 100% agree with prices having bloated over the last decade. The first card I bought was a 380 for $80, but $700 for a mid-low tier card is an extreme exaggeration
Nah, I’ll just keep gaming on a cheap Linux PC and fuck ever buying a console again. Honestly at this point a 5 year old GPU gives you access to 99% of all games ever made, why spend so much to play 4 shitty ‘AAAA’ games a year?
Yeah I absolutely do not care about that. I also won’t bother to get a 4k TV until I get some banger clearance deal or something because it does not fucking matter. I grew up on tube tvs dude, anything that isn’t fuzzy is golden. Most of what I’m playing is either indie or ancient, and seeing giant pixels in perfect clarity does nothing to improve the experience.
There was an old HP touchsmart that my partner had laying around. It’s terrible. Pentium Processor, standard HDD, with no dedicated graphics so running much of anything on it is out. No wireless AC, so it has to be a 2.4ghz network, and I don’t have a hardwire in the bedroom. So I just threw Mint on it installed RustDesk because I didn’t have a wireless mouse and keyboard or anywhere to put them if I had them. About a week into realizing it had some troubles playing larger movies (even mp4s from the machine no matter the player) I moved to 720. I couldn’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080p from across the room on a 22" screen anyways. Now all the streams work fine. Starting to realize the last time I bought a monitor was 2009. Anyways, 4K on my TV in the living looks great, but it really isn’t needed for standard enjoyment. Especially if I’m only half ass paying attention.
PS XBOX and Nintendo are all in the same market, along with Steam, Epic, GOG, etc. The video gaming market. MS will probably still sell an “XBOX”, it just won’t be locked down to the XBOX game store anymore. This is a win for everyone.
Yes it has a higher initial cost, but it will be lower in the long run. Finance that shit through Klarna or some shit and you’ll still come out on top.
Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember offhand.
So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It’s up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft’s stewardship of the game, given how hard they’ve tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.
I wonder how much of this is network effects? I cannot describe how many times I have fired up Minecraft all over again after not touching it for awhile because oh, a friend made a server and my other friends are playing too! At least in my experience, it seems to just be a thing that if a social circle contains mostly people who happen to enjoy video games, even if we formed around liking to sing or something and not our love of video games, it will try to make a Minecraft server.
Mojang’s “stealing” started from at least the pistons in 2011, 3 years before the acquisition. Credit was given to the original mod author under “Additional programming”, and they did reuse the actual code from the mod
I don’t think it’s fair to call that stealing, for multiple reason:
copyright of game mechanics should never be supported, if we serioussly consider this stealing then a lot of innovation will be completely hampered, and videogames will be subject to abuses worse than what exists in other creative industries. Copyright on game concepts would be akin to copyright on camera angles, special effects, etc…
mods are only available on PC. Taking ideas from the community and incorporating them into the base game makes the content available for everyone, even vanilla PC players
Mojang’s has been very decent with OG mod authors, often being assisted by said authors to incorporate their content into the game, see how they worked with the author of Mo’ Creatures, a mod for animals, to add the horse into the game
Japan is incredibly prideful. They innovate fucking hard but refuse to copy each other’s homework, which leads to random “what the fuck is happening, why is this code 20 years out of date?” situations.
I recall an interview back during the wii/ds era where someone at Nintendo was asked how they felt their online service compared to psn and xbl at the time and their response was that they had never used them.
i just find it funny because the fix for it was use the playstations developer version of vsync, but fromsoft decided that they wanted to redo whats already done. thats why the stutter is almost present on all fromsoft games of that console generation.
I’ve beat Bloodborne around 3 or 4 times but I always dread that framerate. It’d be my favourite souls game hands down if it wasn’t for that framerate.
I would and will throw any amount of money at a re-release that changes nothing except for that stupid framerate.
Idk what Sony is doing but it seems like they’re doing anything but releasing an updated Bloodborne even though everyone wants one. We have people almost completing a PS4 emulator just to play BB at 60fps before they’ve re-released the damn game.
It really feels like Sony is just leaving money out on the table
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