I really wish gamers could unite in a way that they buy out sufficient ownership stakes in these terrible publishers that they force them to treat development studios better, and not push out half-finished slop filled to the brim with predatory monetisation.
EA, Konami, Ubisoft would all be ripe for a renaissance if that were to pass.
Konami is an entirely different beast. The Japanese industry is so ingrained in a different ethos altogether, I just don’t see any public-backed push for change working the way it would with a Western publisher.
Just look at the direction Nintendo is heading. Do we have any actual chance of stopping that train?
Its capitalism. Individuals will not change this. Systemic problems need systemic solutions. First step is outlawing centralization of capital and putting back legislation against large corporations. But good luck doing that in the US.
I’ve been hearing it for years, the same as outright boycotts. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that not enough people care for it to make a difference. For every person pissed about getting burned on a $60+ purchase for a dogshit game, there are 99 more who’ll eat it and move on without caring all that much. You’ve got to improve the content at home, where it counts without worrying about the drek getting turned out by large companies/studios. Invest in indie, or shop around is the best bet IMO.
I’m sure we all (at least those old enough) to remember that Boycott Modern Warfare II Steam group screenshot.
Idealistically, imagine that for every release - instead of giving EA that $80 dollars, 10% of gamers put that money towards a share instead.
So that would work out to be ~$200m in lost upfront sales, and up to $540m in lost recurring spend (microtransactions, battle passes etc.).
That would only be enough for gamers to own 0.5% of the company after the first year, but keeping this up for multiple years could have a downward pressure on EA’s stock price long-term as they miss their financial forecasts - increasing gamer’s buying power on shares.
Within a few years, these “Gamers United” would begin to have sufficient stake to influence board decisions (for the better).
The best part being that, the entire time, EA would continue to pay dividends to them (currently at a rate of ~$3.10 per share, per year), while they still technically own that money - almost like a corporate savings account.
*Edit: out of the three companies I randomly picked, Ubisoft would actually be the softest target - as their market cap is only $1.38b, so gamers would only need to acquire ~$700m of shares to wrestle control of the company!
I don’t want the current iteration of EA to succeed; but I do want them to return to form and help* nurture quality releases of Command and Conquer, Mass Effect, Dead Space, Burn Out, Need for Speed, Road Rash, Theme X, Sim City and about a dozen other dormant (or mismanaged) franchises.
Could I get similar experiences from other publishers and developers? Absolutely — but I’d much rather we as gamers have a broader choice in the future of our hobby, rather than continually whittling down our options as quality developers get swallowed up and spat out by the current industrial machine.
To clarify, I’ve been told the layoffs are more than just Respawn and are similar to last year’s February layoff where 670 people were cut. I don’t know the exact number.
But yeah, I’m sure continuing to chase live service as though you’ll ever get Apex Legends to be as successful as it once was will totally work out.
EDIT: furthermore, he says:
Apex Legends and EA Sports FC both missed harder than people realize. Dragon Age barely registers in this.
They'd gotten especially cash grabby since I had started playing and then they disabled Linux and Steam Deck compatibility using them as the scapegoats for their inability to fix their shitty anti-cheat. News flash, there's still a bunch of cheaters because the cheats are made for Windows players.
The decline of a live service game is so inevitable that it seems silly to me to ascribe a reason to it. Eventually, people just want something newer than regular content updates can provide.
Afaik they’re still using awful third-party servers, lag compensation is still aggressive as fuck, they tried to “fix” visibility by slapping a bandaid in the form of healthbars, and the anticheat thing was another bandaid instead of a surgery. Overall it’s kinda stuck, all of the old issues are still there.
They have a shitload of new cosmetics though, if that’s your jam. Funnily enough, they were so greedy even esport orgs didn’t want to keep working with them. Rspn offered a one-time payment, orgs wanted a percentage of sales. Mind you, it’s a fairly big esport that advertises the game for them (btw played on better servers than available in-game).
I’m still playing it and it’s still pretty fun. Seems to be a controversial take but I do like that they’re constantly changing mechanics since I don’t really take the game seriously.
Controller aim assist is too much of an aimbot which made all the russians turn their hacks on and it’s just controllers vs cheaters and some nolifers in this game these days, not fun at all for most casual players
Exactly, it’s an awful treadmill. EA as a whole was at nearly 60% profit last year. Coupled with layoffs, it seems they’re trying to keep that infinite spend as potential as possible lol
I just hope something good comes out of recent ex-rspn teams.
Not to be too much of a bummer, but the gaming industry seemingly grew too fast, and the end result is going to be that there just aren’t as many jobs in the industry to be filled by any team once the layoffs are done. Maybe a handful of the people laid off here go on to work together again.
Recently, Clair Obscur told another story of ex-publisher success. So far, we only know of the review success and I don’t actually know if it’s a financial success.
If it is, I can only hope it leads to some investor understanding in just how done the world is of lottery-planning in the game world; seeing one victory, and having every single publisher chase it.
Players will be able to toggle between the new and previously existing visuals of Minecraft with the simple press of a button, meaning a classic look can be maintained by those who desire it.
thank goodness, shaders are pretty but I am massively suspect to nostalgia bias and I do not want to dedicate performance to shaders if my computer cannot handle it
I have to say, I was pretty neutral on this coming in, but reading all the people posturing anger while clearly not having any awareness of what the game is supposed to be or even reading the article is getting kind of annoying.
“In terms of the Final Fantasy that I think is the ‘most complete’; I believe Final Fantasy 6 comes close, and does stand out above the other Final Fantasies, especially because it was the last Final Fantasy to use pixel art in all of its visual expression,” Sakaguchi said.
I’ve got a 1660Ti, and it’s not perfect but smooth enough to play med settings on 1080p. The biggest thing holding me back was VRAM, so I’m interested how they address that on the older consoles, with an eye toward better performance for me.
Sounds like you just didn’t notice/remember the problems in that case. There was/is performance issues that will show up regardless of your hardware setup. “Runs fine on my pc” is simply not true, unless your pc runs on magic.
I mean if you want to invalidate my lived experience, sure. Played on release on a 5600X, RTX3070 and 32GB of RAM, 1080p, almost everything maxed out. Open areas on Koboh saw a drop to mid-40 fps, but other than that, I had one hard crash and no bugs I noticed.
I had the same experience with pretty much the same hardware. I played right after launch and had one or two crashes and a few stutters here and there, but otherwise I found it to be a surprisingly stable game, especially considering the wildly negative press it was getting at the time.
Nothing wrong with not noticing stutters, on the contrary you’re probably lucky to not notice that kind of stuff. However when the problems are documented to be hardware independent and shows up on far more powerful hardware than your own, it’s not a case of “works fine on my computer”.
Something like shader compilation stutter will still cause issues for the top end CPU in 10 years time for old poorly designed UE5 games.
People don’t like being confronted and told they’re objectively wrong. It’s not a new phenomenon that people report not experiencing problems that we know all systems, regardless of computing power, encounter when playing a given problematic game. And people get defensive when told they just didn’t notice it.
Some stranger’s 5600x doesn’t randomly have the hardware to compile shaders at 10x the speed of top of the line CPUs. A game that suffers from shader compilation stutters will do so on all systems. To say it didn’t stutter for you means either that:
The game never compiled the shaders
You already had the shaders pre-compiled, which isn’t a thing on normals PCs
You never noticed
You’re lying
It’s impossible to avoid for games that suffer from it.
I suppose I’m somewhat fortunate to have been a poor bastard for most of my life. 25fps with moldy potato settings was just fine, as long as the game didn’t crash or deep fry the CPU, so I’m not as sensitive to the occasional drop below 60fps and don’t feel slighted when I have to turn some settings down. Though I can understand being incensed when you’ve poured thousands into a bleeding-edge gaming rig that’s supposed to handle anything at 4k, maxed out and a stable 120fps and it’s the game itself dragging your experience down.
But the stutters weren’t the only problem people reported early on. There were cries of the game being unplayable, on account of endless bugs, visual glitches and repeated hard crashes. Worst I got was the normal mapping on Cal’s face getting real weird in certain lighting conditions. That’s hardly game-breaking.
I’m somewhat insensitive to it myself but shader compilation stutter is something that is measurable and reproducible so there aren’t any room for arguments around it.
Other problems, yeah they may be system dependent although something like animation rubber banding I suspect would be the same across systems, though hard to identify if you aren’t experienced.
I played it on my RTX 3070 shortly after launch, and while there were certainly some stutters here and there and the very occasional crash, for the most part it actually ran fine. I think the poor quality of the PC port has been seriously overblown. Granted I don’t care much about sustaining insanely high frame rates, but the game itself was amazing on its own, and even better having played and enjoyed the first one. Well worth any remaining technical glitches.
Well there are still a decent amount of games that comes out as closed beta before going public so there’s definitely a market for it but reading irdeta anywhere always stings a little
I don’t follow. Some games do come out as irreparable buggy garbage, get terrible reviews, and nobody of sound mind buys them. Other games come out with a genuinely fun product, and as a result of player engagement, the developer decides to add more - and nobody of sound mind is then claiming they “released it half finished”. Meanwhile, early leaks are always buggy because the bugfixing and polish phases come late in development.
So what does any of that have to do with justifying leaking?
The titular arguments about game leaks: that would crush our sales as it shows the version of our product not on par with our quality standards and our vision. When we see how games from Ubi\EA\Beth\etc got released this raw and untested, this argument gets rekt. Digital releases and updates, forever-beta products, raw indies and many other things enabled AAA studios to do the same and get no repercussions, but they’d still bitch if their game is leaked earlier even if they ship undercooked product.
It’s rational to assume if you play leaked pre-release, you have a deficient product on your own terms. Like Diablo 2 remaster that still has LAN play before this P2P solution was killed. It’s on gamers to be that stupid to review-bomb games based on alpha, beta versions. It’s fair if it’s a contemporary comment, but not a final judgement with a youtube title GAMENAME FUCKING FLOPS - MY FIRST UGLY MOMENTS WITH THE GAMENAME. Clickbaity, unfair and tastes like piss.
You expand this conversation to games-as-a-service mode, that is a very different beast. I like seasons and regular updates to a polished games. I dislike games who defacto employed first players as beta-testers who paid money for that.
And I like leaks, not for me being a pirate, but for seeing what’s under the hood and how things changed for my favorite titles like Stalker, the game that has a very weird development cycle and had many traces of feautures devs either couldn’t realise or didn’t have time to do right.
I’m tired of every game being spoiled if you happen to engage with any amount of social media because of leakers. I’m okay with that not happening anymore. You can wait a week.
I doubt that’s got much to do with anything. Palworld is a pretty standard survival early access thing whose only distinguishing feature is that they’ve somehow evaded Nintendo’s lawyers until after the release window.
Maybe they sent the cease and desist to the wrong address, like there’s an 87 year old Japanese woman wondering what this strange letter is she received and what she’s done wrong.
This fuck up is entirely of Rocksteady’s own making. It might review amazing, but gamers have utterly soured on live service bullshit. The Arkham games were gamer’s games. They can’t just fob this off on us like they can with CoD or FIFA.
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