Nah in this case this is real. The board is investigating the executive leadership, two separate entities. It’s like corporate investigating stores management, in a way. This could mean executives getting fired
I mean the industry is already a cesspool. The consolidation is troubling from a failure of regulators. The games Industry deserves what it gets here though.
Microsoft still support AoE2 after all these years, while Activision more or less fucked the SC2 proscene so hard it’s amazing it’s still going as strong as it is.
Not to mention what they did to the classic WotLK launch. It couldn’t get any worse than that.
The servers were essentially 95-99% of either faction, and they locked migration several times seemingly on random. A lot of people got stuck on servers that were nigh unplayable because of the other faction dominating everything.
It even included paid server transfers on some servers for some weird reason. I got hardlocked on 98% alliance server while playing a tauren resto druid. Their customer service told me to “level another character on a server of my choosing”. Leveled to 80 out of sheer spite and then quit when my game time ran out.
Truly one of the biggest disappointments in my entire life. I know it’s just a game, but I had looked forward to getting to redo wrath since they first announced classic in general, and they completely ruined it.
Damn! That sounds horrible, I remember when WoW’s customer service was seemingly top notch, how far they have fallen. I guess it’s not surprising with how disappointing Diablo 4 was.
I would argue that the Steam Deck's emulation capabilities surpass the Xbox. It might not play the latest games at amazing quality and performance, but it covers a wide breadth of games, far wider than what Xbox supports.
Compete in terms of value, not price. The series S gets you Xbox’s current gen game library and a selection of 360 games, and if you’re willing to use dev mode a powerful emulation suite. Deck gets a huge percentage of Steam’s 20-year catalog as one-click installs, most other PC games that don’t use anticheat as slightly more involved installs, every PC game if you want to install windows, and also a powerful emulation suite. Plus it’s a dockable handheld instead of something that needs a monitor and controller.
The series S has better media apps and can be woken up from the couch, though.
the steam deck is also just a regular ol’ PC so you can use it for non-gaming stuff like making a lil’ drawing on the go, or plug in some peripherals and just… use it like an honestly pretty okay performance desktop.
I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we're getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that's definitely not a constant; some people aren't going to care much about openness.
That said, if I were trying to compare Valve's offering and Microsoft's offering, I'd probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they're more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn't have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.
I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I'd bet that it'd be more-limited than a Series S.
That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:
As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there's ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.
The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it's still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.
We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately -- that's why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that's to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.
If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.
Now, all that being said, I don't have a Series S or a Series X, and I'm not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I'd rather have, you're preaching to the choir. I'm just saying that I don't think that I'd agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.
Shade aside, I do think more developers should make their own engine. Yes it takes time and resources, but those are spent on exactly what you need instead of on getting what you want out of an engine that was made to do everything but focused on nothing.
I mean I sort of agree, but I’ve both used custom engines and seen people trying use custom engines and you have this problem where the engine was designed for a game, rather than for any game. So if the original game didn’t have a particular feature the engine has no capacity to do that thing, so every time you want to make a new game in that engine, you basically have to rewrite the engine.
It works if you build an engine to be an engine, but as you say that’s extremely expensive and time consuming and you probably am not going to get any benefit out of it. You could try selling the engine, but you’re unlikely to make much progress unless there is a significant improvement over the other options already available.
It’s definitely much more polished than the first installment. I’ve played for around 40 hours so far and can probably count the bugs I’ve encountered so far on one hand.
Is it the same combat system as the first? No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t click for me. Ended up modding myself invincible in order to beat the game…
I’ll do it again too if I need to because I love everything else about the game, but I’d prefer not to
It gets too easy too fast IMO. I haven’t done much of the main quest yet but I’m already a invincible human tank and killing armored enemies with single hits. I might swap my sword with a lower tier weapon to get a bit of the challenge back.
I remember the game director saying he doesnt want to make the same game twice (when they made eternal focus on using the right weapons and not just shotgun everythign) so this likely a new spin on doom formula again
I know all the best words, okay, people are saying that I know the most beautiful words, okay, no one knows more about words than I do, big beautiful words, the WORDIST even.
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