note: this is just a patent
patents usually don’t mean shit, sony (?iirc) has a patent for an ad system that requires users to say the name of the brand to continue, but we’re not seeing it around yet eh?
I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.
So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.
BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.
Same. It bugs me that people think larian only existed when making BG3. When DoS2 released on steam that game hit overwhelmingly positive in no time and I bought it day one with no idea what it was because the reviews were so good. Larian will be fine because they stick to what they’re great at and they’ve been around a long time.
I feel like this was part of their plan though. Get the limelight with dnd and show the kind of games that they make to people that wouldn’t have known beforehand. Now their next fully owned game is going to make them absolute bank in both money and good faith I think.
This. If you like the mechanics of bg3, go play Divinity Original Sin 2. It has a lot of the same enhancements that Larian added to dnd for BG3. Including more comprehensive elemental fields and height mechanics.
And it has a great modding community.
The sad part about Larian and BG3 is I was hoping for a definitive edition that gave Karlach her good ending.
Nah, that's her kinda bad ending. They cut the good good ending.
There is another ending for her involving the upper city(cut at the last minute due to performance issues) and I suspect the purified metal you get at the factory that involves her staying.
I don't think we're going to get the dos2 level of tools, simply because it would become a competitor to wotc's fabulous virtual tabletop microtransaction simulator.
DOS2’s fatal flaw for me is that you really can’t have an optimal mixed-damage party because you have spell shield and armor, which each block one of two kinds of damage. If you go all physical, you can just blast through armor and then kill people that way. All magical and you can do the same thing for people with shield. Mixed damage parties just kinda suck by comparison because you’re effectively splitting your damage output.
It’s true, you should go either full magic, or full physical within a specific character, however a 2magic/2physical party is great as well since almost all the combat encounters will have a mix of heavy physical armor guys and heavy magic armor guys.
But really once you learn how the action economy works, as long as you don’t gimp your characters by putting dex on a mage or whatever, you can blow up most encounters regardless of the magic/physical make up of the party.
And of course you can also go lone-wolf archer and single handedly win all encounters on your own ;)
Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer
This is probably true, but how can executives be so stupid? Every review I read praised Larian specifically and how the made a huge game with no microtransactions and tons of little loving touches. You have to be willfully ignorant to think it was the IP and not the developer and their work that people were responding to.
Jack Welch is seen as MBA-Jesus and they all strive for similar stockholder returns as to what happened under him with GE. If you want a good read, GE under Welch is the OG enshitification story. He took a juggernaut of a company and completely destroyed it for short term shareholder gain.
Now it’s just a shell of its former self, but those guys at the top sure made alot of money.
Screw Hitler. If I invent a time machine, Jack Welch will get a tommy gun to the back of the head before he can lay off one worker, or gut a single workers protection.
I think it’s probably more a situation where they are not a good fit for each other anymore. The D&D license has value and Hasbro rightly wants to capitalize on that. Larian is a hot commodity right now and they don’t need to borrow the credibility that comes with a big license like D&D. There’s also a timing issue. BG4 is unnecessary when BG3 will continue to sell for years to come. Larian will put out at least a couple more games before BG4 makes sense.
Larian is in a position where they can make whatever game they want and it will sell like hotcakes. Why the hell would they want to pay enormous royalties again when they can bring the writing in house? Sure, Hasbro could reduce their fee, but they can’t reduce it to the point where it’s worthwhile for both them and Larian.
If I’m running Larian, there’s no way I’m making another D&D game. The lore is great, but the rule set sucks. There are better systems in the tabletop space and there’s no reason to even be limited to that after you’ve already made the decision to not make D&D. Wizards isn’t exactly a paragon of reliability and stability either so there’s risk there. Not to mention, it was Larian who helped pull Hasbro’s asses out of the fire. They were facing massive backlash from their core customers until a kick ass movie and BG3 made everyone forget about it.
In short, Larian is riding high and Hasbro is not. There’s a lot more money for Larian doing something else and probably good money for Hasbro licensing to another developer.
I think it’s more that executives think the average consumer is stupid and cares too much about IP branding. And I feel they are not completelly wrong. Though I think the OGL fiasco showed the D&D fanbase might be smarter than that …hopefully.
There was a really interesting interview on The Verge with the CEO of Telly. Basically, TVs are so cheap now because they make all of their profit selling your data. His pitch is “why pay for a TV and then also have your data mined. They should at least give you the TV for free.”
It’s frustrating because even if we buy a “premium” devices like an LG C3 or one of the nice Samsung TVs, they’re still going to spy on us. (PiHole FTW).
He’s right, but I don’t like the framing of TV companies are going to spy on you anyway so we’re the best option since you get a free TV. I would like the option to not be spied on. In fact I’m choosing that by not having a TV to begin with.
That’s one of the reasons i’ve stayed with a TV from 2009 for so long. It was just before they started doing all that Internet TV bullshit, so no spying possible.
You can still do that and get a TV (for now), you just have to not connect it to the internet. Mine has never seen Ethernet cable nor my wifi password and gives me zero problems. I don’t even use the TV interface since I have an HDMI switcher that auto switches to the most recently powered device.
isnt that why if you value privacy (or customization) youre supposed to not plug the tv to the internet and use your prefered streaming setup connected over hdmi. its ultimately a self inflicted problem of people using the built in stuff rather than take the time and setup an actual setup (that would stay the same between tvs as long as said device doesnt die on you)
then convenience is sold, especially if its free, then your data is going to be sold with it.
which is why ones better off with a modified Nvidia Shield or Apple TV to minimize data collection, if you arent using an HTPC for a streaming server. Not a binary system, its a game of whose doing it the least, and the TV companies have a huge incentive to collect money off the integrated stuff vs companies whose cost is moreso on the hardware, and make money off their intended subscription services (Apple One for Apple TV, Nvidia Geforce Now for gaming on the Shield)
Should be able to with Roku since they are also Android based. I’ve found a bunch of things to side load or modify any TV running on Android or based on Android… Which only sucks because I was looking for that kind of stuff for my shit-ass Samsung TV which isn’t Android based 😩
As far as I’m aware they can only be used on Android. I did a search for APK on Roku and I all found were some articles erroneously calling custom channels APKs. Roku does let you side load custom channels in developer mode, but you can remove software like you can on an android box, so you’re always stuck with Roku’s ad riddled home page and whatever injects ads into HDMI
Cars have cell radios now and transfer data about you using those.
I would imagine that as long as it can generate enough of a return for it to make financial sense, manufacturers of other devices might start doing so at some point.
Did you reply to the correct comment? I’m not sure what that has to do with mine?
Edit: oh, you mean we might not have a choice about it connecting soon? I hadn’t thought about that because that is not a current reality. But, that is a terrifyingly possible future
Home entertainment is such a closed system that all these companies are just beta testing shitty ideas for each other. Eventually they all do the same thing as long as any backlash was neither too destructive to revenue nor sustained. See endless streaming services price hikes, account sharing lockdowns, or the fact that you just can’t buy dumb TVs anymore.
This particular idea probbaly has technical limitations.
A device can only monitor and analyze and modify what a user is viewing if it’s being used as a pass-through device in a daisy chain of devices.
As long as there is any device out there that can take multiple video signals from different inputs, let the user choose which they want to use, they can just not daisy-chain them, have them connected in parallel to different inputs. And even if one could try to get manufacturers colluding on creating a world where daisy-chaining is the only option, they have no incentive to do so on this point – in doing this, they’re trying to steal eyeball time from each other.
Now, that being said, I suppose that device manufacturers may not care, if 95% of users are going to just daisy-chain their devices. If it’s only a few privacy nuts out there who are constantly keeping on top of the latest shennanigans and figuring out how to avoid them, if the Roku manual says “daisy chain” and most users just follow the pictures there…shrugs
Currently playing TW3, so yeah. Other games in my library are Terraria, Stardew Valley, the Portal duology, and Minecraft. Only newish game is Hyperbolica.
On the one hand, there is definitely a part of me that thinks it’s kinda neat that a f2p game with not super predatory monetization has gotten so much support for so many years. I’m well aware that around Lemmy people think any monetization is bad but tbh fortnite really doesn’t do it that bad. It’s all cosmetic, you can earn most of the currency by playing and advancing the battle pass. It’s not the worst example out there. The game is very accessible and can be totally free if you want it to be
At the same time I have 0 interest in fortnite or any other live service game. I hate that live service games have a tendency to remove old content over time. Give me a live service game that’s fun, doesn’t have fomo, and isn’t predatory with micro transactions… I guess that’s kinda helldivers rn which I am enjoying but we’ll see how it shapes up as time goes on.
Overall, it’s bleh news because it just reinforces companies continuing down this path of a model that encourages lost media and nickel and diming you for everything…
Live service games have always kinda rubbed me the wrong way, and that’s past just the obviously predatory stuff. I like to hop around from game to game to game. But the live service games are all like “what about the daily log in bonuses and weekly challenges?” I can ignore that, but it still bothers me how much they try to badger you into being obligated to play. Give me a regular old single player game any day of the week.
That being said, I suspect that as time goes on, AAA single player games are going to be harder and harder to find. Multiplayer is simply where the money is(and where the players are), and in this stupid “perpetual growth no matter what” economy, that’s all the suits will pay money for. Thankfully, we still have indies making great stuff.
Totally agree. Everything else aside, the fomo aspect of these games really irritate me. When destiny 2 completely ripped out their original campaign the game launched with I was baffled. Destiny’s moment to moment gameplay is bluntly, really damn good. The gun play feels great. But when you have to dedicate all your time to 1 game to get everything out of it? Nah, not for me. With stuff like halo infinite and helldivers, I do love that the battle pass which are normally timed things, are always available. You never get locked out of anything by not playing on a certain day, or month, or year.
Don’t even get me started on the new hitman games and their elusive contracts. That’s the stuff that grind my gears. Game is great and fun. But you want to play these special missions we made? Well you better be on and playing during this 1 week, and then they’re never there again!
If they want to do this kind of thing they should always least either leave them to be played whenever but offer some kind of double xp or whatever while the event is actually on, or run the event as an annual thing so you can experience it every year and you don’t feel like you’re missing out because you didn’t get the game at release for whatever reason
It’s been a while since I played so idk if it’s been happening recently, but they have re-run the events a few times over in the past, but I just wish they’d make it a permanent thing. I get the point of it is to make it limited so it’s harder to look it up ahead of time, and you can’t save during it so you have to do it in one shot. It’s a glorified daily run in a rogue like game. Except instead of being randomly generated they actually created whole new scenarios around it with new voice acting and briefs and everything. Let them have their timed event where you have to do it in one shot, and give the people a trophy or something. But make the content available to play whenever you want after that…
Also, like, with every game with private servers, the private servers are pretty much universally better than the public ones. Someone close to the server has to care enough to put the thing up, which goes a long way past some company opening a few hundred for money.
Yeah… I largely live under a rock and vastly prefer indie games (and older/abandoned big-name games) to most of the usual AAA games and live-service games.
Which makes it quite funny when I see so many Gamers complaining about how “gaming is dying” due to the enshittification of mainstream games, when I’m quite happy under my rock and sheltered from all that 😅
My biggest gripe is that fortnite(along with a lot of games that feature battlepasses and rotating stores) preys on FOMO. If they didn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t mind nearly as much
kotaku.com
Aktywne