I agree, I was of the mindset that I wasn’t going to buy it at launch because too many games are broken at launch, but then I the reviews were all great, and I learned that there would be no microtranactions and I realized that this is the type of game I want to reward by buying early and paying full price. I’ve not been disappointed.
Okay? I already said I am going to buy it but it would be great if it was on Game Pass which I already pay for, which apparently is downvote worthy that I am a bit poor at the moment.
apparently is downvote worthy that I am a bit poor at the moment.
Nah, you didn’t mention anything related to you only being able to afford gaming via GamePass in your current situation, so it can’t be that. Maybe your comment just didn’t jive with people on its own merit, completely unrelated to your financial situation. (I don’t have any particular feelings about your comment in either direction, so I’m just speculating.)
It’ll get it on Steam later, the implication was there. Odd, though. I was considering console until I saw how the frame rate is: “frame-rates are in the low 30s in performance mode (with some screen-tearing) and a nearly locked 30fps in quality mode” (Eurogamer). Definitely getting it on PC, eventually.
Games reach Game Pass via deals similar to those offered by Epic. Microsoft pay the publisher a fixed amount, so if it is believed that it beats the proceeds from the projected sales for the given period, there’s no reason not to agree to it. In other words, it’s all about how much they would offer and how long it would have been since the game release.
I work in architecture, a field that is also notorious for long hours, excessive crunch time, and mediocre pay. Real-time 3D graphics have started to become important to the design process over the last several years, and at a previous firm I met a 3D vis guy who’d transitioned into my industry from a job at a game developer, “because the hours and pay are so much better.” It boggled my mind that conditions could be so much worse in game dev that my own field would be an improvement.
It’s also, imo, because it’s a relatively newer career. Nurses, teachers, mechanics all existed as industries before he decline of labor. I work in biotech, and people have these oblivious conversations on reddit that are like, “I have a masters but can’t find a job with any stability or a living wage in my city. What am I doing wrong?”
And each time I explain that what they’re doing wrong is trying to get paid under late stage capitalism in a high risk-high reward casino industry filled with foreign visa-holding indentured servants and no one who has ever heard of collective bargaining.
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.
But those unions are negotiating against employers who have immense market power. State governments essentially have the last word on teachers’ salaries, and a lot of the country has consolidated to the point where there are only 1-3 major hospital networks in any area.
Without the ability to switch employers for better pay, the unions are the only way that those professions have to improve their pay and working conditions. (This may explain why travel nurses get much better pay than most nurses.)
Yeah, lab work has the cultural cachet of STEM and knowledge work, but looks a lot more like manual labor in practice. One of the lab planners at my current employer switched careers after getting her master’s because pipetting thousands upon thousands of well plates for her research gave her severe repetitive stress injuries that made it unbearable to continue working in the lab.
Biotech has another problem, in that the VC money --and therefore the job market – is concentrated in a small number of HCOL metros. A friend of mine founded a startup out here in the Midwest, and he struggles to attract enough funding to retain staff who are constantly being lured away to the coasts by better-funded firms offering better pay, even though that money wouldn’t go nearly as far in a place like SF or Boston compared to Kansas City.
“After” profits tumble? We haven’t even had a chance to buy FF16 or Rebirth yet, and if they’re like Remake there’ll still be a year to wait for it to get off Epic and onto Steam. Just sell us the damn game if you want money.
Imagine Japanese board execs as you do republicans. They can only understand what they can physically see or physically happens to them. Aka. Everything outside of Japan is inconceivable.
Some of Starfield’s planets are meant to be empty by design — but that's not boring. “When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." The intention of Starfield's exploration is to evoke a feeling of smallness in players and make you feel overwhelmed.
Starfield, the epitome of scientifically correcty simulations. Why would I expcet my Starship Travel Simulator 2000 to be a fun-focused game after all, durr.
It really evoked a feeling of smallness in me. Namely how small and devoid of content the universe feels.
This is made worse because every inhabited planet I go to has some elaborate situation just waiting for me to solve it. For example: I land on the landing pad, walk 30 meters through a gate and am greeted by a hostage situation in a bank where the hostage negotiator is going to let me, some random, go do his job instead of him, trusting me with the lives of everyone involved without even blinking.
But this was a dying business years ago, it was propped up by a few people who made a shit ton of money and a whole bunch of idiots they convinced to hold the bag.
GameStop was never going to last long, it was just delayed
It could if they were willing to modify their business model. They could have leaned into the game merchandise more but relying on used game sales was never going to be sustainable.
It should have ended years ago, it’s a crap company who were annoying to do business with, it became a meme and got to live a few extra years. But I say good riddance
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn’t on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
I don’t really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn’t be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren’t.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I’m a developer. It’s work to do anything, code doesn’t grow on the LLM tree yet. That’s a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is ‘let us figure it out, just don’t sue us’. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
You might wait at least a few weeks before throwing everything down - There’s been a lot of backlash, so much that Unity might walk this back or change it entirely.
The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
It doesn’t seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I’m guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It's really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There's no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it's at your (in this case Unity's) own discretion.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don’t have the option to pick a different vendor for what you’ve already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn’t agree to if you weren’t forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don’t doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
add this to the list of games that flopped before I even knew they existed, You really do have to put down real money to market games if you want people to purchase them
Seriously. If they were changing the terms going forward, that’d at least be defensible, but trying to make it apply to everything that’s ever been made is just nonsensical.
Even then it would be pretty bad for a lot of devs. If you’ve been developing a game in unity for years, you can’t just easily change engines just because they’ve changed the rules of using their engine.
I agree with you; they’d have to give plenty of notice that the changes were coming and maybe even offer exemptions for developers who can show they were working on something significantly before the announcement… I don’t think there’s any way they could reasonably do it that would avoid all backlash, but this just seems like the absolute worst way to handle it.
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.
If they can change the terms of games already released and ask for a % per install, what’s stopping them from just asking for 100% and saying suck it bitches.
It’s not a scam if you buy it and enjoy it for what it is, but it’s a scam if you keep putting money into it for features and content that is promised but not delivered.
But that’s an obvious scam. I don’t already have space-themed PC games stored in my fridge that I can readily shove up my butt.
So you’re saying that I shouldn’t buy Star Citizen and stick eggs in my butt instead? I don’t like your ideas, but you seem like a reasonable person and I can’t argue with your logic.
Because based on the amount of sales they’ve made and the combined player numbers between those and gamepass players, lots of people don’t care.
I started gaming on an Amstrad in the late 80s, I’ve lived though multiple groundbreaking leaps in graphical quality since then and now and frankly, it doesn’t impress me anymore, especially with how incremental it’s become. I’m more impressed by the scale and world building of Starfield and how all its systems come together than how it’s character models look.
The sad part is that this sets the standard (again) that companies can market the hell out of an unfinished game, release it buggy as hell, and still make an amazing profit. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
Eh, I dunno about the rest of you, but after 2077 I feel pretty good. Tuned out Starfield and the initial craze and feel…no fomo. I wait for games like BG3 to come out of early access before playing, and only play the games in early access that are actually worth it, like Sons of The Forest, which was pretty decent even at launch (when the fun bugs are still in, and weapons have not been balanced in the slightest!)
I’m hitting the now old classics, Battlefield 1 is excellent, Inscryption is awesome, and the AA and AAA games I do play are quite polished.
If you can count on games just being shitty at launch, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll play the last of us in a few years. I played Days Gone recently and loved it. There’s enough good games these days to have a packed steam library.
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