I’m already 50% of the time on my ship to the seven seas. Do they want me permanently at sea? Same goes with the media companies like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon. They push it any further, I’m pushing off to seas for good.
They *literally, figured out how to beat piracy. The unbeatable problem. And then they had to go and blow it with their greed.
Meh. Capcom games just became $0 for me, because I’ll swear an oath before you to pirate every one of their games, from here on out.
I'm from a third world country. I still buy games as often as I can, but I also get that these price hikes are stretching people thin. A $70 game is like a third of our monthly minimum wage, it's a huge chunk of money that people need to live, and most companies don't bother to adjust it proportionally to our financial situation, even though there is no reason not to do so when it comes to digital media.
That person just said in another comment that they have the money. Before you even get to piracy, there's also the option of purchasing and playing the games that you feel are priced fairly, because that incentivizes more of that to be made at those prices, and those games typically need your money more anyway. As for adjusting prices for different territories, I'm no expert on it, but I understand it might be related to people in stronger economies buying games from cheaper regions with something as simple as a VPN to get a game for a fraction of the price, which at any kind of scale means that that game needs to sell substantially more copies to break even.
Some companies still manage to offer regional prices. It's more of a matter of poor implementation or even plain indifference. The latter especially when the platform offers that option but the publisher maintains the prices high.
Eh, I won't speak for that person's habits but for me piracy was not the last possible resort but rather the entry point that allowed me to develop enough interest that I do buy them today.
And when today the "free" options peddle gambling to children, I cannot take the moral argument seriously even for a second. I would much sooner have people pirate than develop gambling addictions, the publishers be damned.
That’s just it. First off, I rarely am interested in Capcom games, think the last one I bought was in maybe 2016? (RE7). So this person you are responding to really is going off the handle over a nothing burger, I assure you.
But you’ve hit on an important point, that’s important to discuss. These price hikes are disproportionate to the growth of household earnings, and more importantly, digital media was supposed to drive costs down, and not up for the end consumer. We don’t actually own these games, we more or less lease them. There’s nothing physical anymore. Which is a problem. Not that I don’t like the ease of digital purchases, it’s the fact that at any moment I can be stripped of access to the product. Which makes it a lease or rental, not full ownership. Yet they keep wanting to drive the costs up up up, in light of that fact. It’s getting to be gross behaviour. The products are declining in quality, the costs keep going up, actual ownership of the end product comes into question, and the profits keep going to a smaller and smaller circle of people, some of whom are among the most vile of people alive today.
Nope. I only pirate when media companies can’t stop gorging themselves on billions of dollars in profit and shovelling shares and dollar bills down their greedy little throats.
It’s not that I don’t have the money, I’ve just had enough. When you had one of two streaming services and a Spotify and good prices on steam and whatnot, that worked.
Today we have preorders that eclipse 100 dollars, my streaming service bills are more than the cable bills they were supposed to be replacing, and now it’s just more more more. We want more more more
Two streaming services is less competitive than the 5 or 6 major ones we have right now, you can choose them a la carte in a way you never could with cable, and even if you felt compelled to have all of them at the ad free tier, you're paying less than cable and getting no commercials. Video game prices have lagged behind inflation, not even kept up with them, and the game you want will probably have a substantial sale 3 months after release anyway. It just seems like an incredibly thin premise to justify piracy.
I don’t need to justify piracy to you. You are the one that’s morally outraged here. Again, I have the money, it’s not a poverty thing. It’s a perception thing. When people act gross, I act gross in response. Plain and simple. You can try to defend these companies, some of which have larger profits than the GDP outputs of some countries, all you want. That’s your prerogative. When companies put greed before the goodwill of the customers, which this is by the way, then I act shitty in response. That’s my prerogative.
You were morally outraged enough to decide that this justifies piracy, but this is Capcom we're talking about, not EA. From what I can see, they're not making their money off of gambling mechanics like Ultimate Team. They're talking about raising prices on products that are generally seen as quality and charging what they believe those products to be worth, even saying that this will allow them to raise staff salaries to retain talent. I don't condone piracy, but I was asking you what line you believed they crossed when price increases are just inevitable for anything that costs money, and I personally don't really see any scummy business practices attached to this. Beyond that, I'd also argue that you have a greater effect on the market when you just don't pirate or play those games that offend you at all and instead direct your time and money to a game that could use it more. That means they make more of the latter and the former is less successful for doing something you didn't like. Word of mouth of the games you played and the lack of word of mouth for the ones you didn't has an effect on the market as well.
I agree you don’t have to justify it, but I also feel like you don’t need to glorify it either. I’m not morally opposed to it and jah knows I’ve don’t some piracy in my day, but people who have to make a big statement about it as you’ve done above invite the arguments from people who are morally opposed.
Having 5 streaming services instead of 2 when they each have exclusive content isn’t competition, it’s just separate small monopolies. They hold the content hostage and you can’t actually choose when you want to watch something specific.
It’d only be competitive if they all had the same catalogue or you didn’t care at all what you watch, which I suspect just isn’t a reality for most people.
They're all trying to have enough to watch to keep you subscribed all the time, which means they have an incentive to keep making more good shows. But there's no world where 5 streaming services will have something I'll want to watch every month, so it's pretty easy to just cancel until you've got a handful of shows to go through on that service. Then you subscribe for a month or two and come back later. That's way, way better than a local television monopoly like cable typically had, with channels you couldn't opt out of for a cheaper bill, that still forced commercials on you regardless of your exorbitant bill.
That’s so convoluted that at that point I can just torrent the show. It’s easier, faster, free and I don’t have to wait for it or try to figure out which streaming service has it.
That's not convoluted in the least bit, nor is it faster or easier to torrent. If you somehow found out about a show but not which service it was on, there's justwatch.com.
I didn’t decide to pirate when games went from $70 to $80 (CAD). I didn’t decide to when they went from $80 to $90. I decided to when, on top of that price, I also am encouraged via predatory tactics (such as matchmaking intentionally matching you up with players who have all of this nonsense so you can “see what you’re missing”) to buy a deluxe edition, season pass, monthly battlepass, “cosmetic only” microtransactions, second season pass, additional DLC not part of any season pass, and whatever other crap they want to nickel and dime their playerbase into buying. All just to actually get the full content of the game. Remember when games had the full game when you bought it? Maybe an expansion pack that had a substantial amount of content that was developed and released after the game was released?
You're free to do as you please, but if the game wasn't worth it enough to pay for, pirating it still does them more of a solid than if you had bought and played something else. Let's say the game is Starfield. Sure, they didn't get your $90 if you pirated it, but if you're contributing to discussions about it, it keeps people thinking about it, and especially if you have positive things to say about it, you end up encouraging other people to buy it, which means that their business strategy of selling the game at $90 CAD (or any other strategy you decided justified piracy) is still that much more effective, and they'll do it again, because the game sold at that price. But maybe Broken Roads comes out for cheaper and you get your RPG fix there instead. They could use your dollar more, and each sale counts way more toward a future where that team gets to make another game after this one. If your word of mouth instead convinces someone to pick up Broken Roads (which you also hypothetically paid for), you're contributing toward encouraging more games to come out at that price point. Both games are going to take up your finite time, so both your time and your money influence what survives in the market.
Godot is an open source game engine that is incredibly trending among the “hipster” developers community and fanatics of FOSS.
It’s absolutely not even close to the features offered by Unreal Engine or Unity but people that are barely informed are all excited because now an open source project with some serious bugs and limitations “will show them”.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines. And with the fact that it had been recently heavily rewritten to be updated to v4, it is really improbable that it will happen soon.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines
How so? I’ve seen complaints about the C# API and some similar challenges, but nothing show-stopping. Obviously you won’t be making a AAA game in it, but for indies it looks like a decent option.
The dirty secret of software is that any given user-facing OSS application is about 15 years behind the closed-source competitors, but the fact is that most software was good-enough 15 years ago and the industry has spent the last 15 years on cloudifying and A-B testing and GUI revamping and other stuff that isn’t basic functionality.
The thing is, even Indies can look and feel like AAA games (well, the good ones) with something unreal engine for example.
I’m not a fan of Epic by any means but all I’m saying is that they asinine aren’t in the same league while with Unity they could at least be close.
Unity have done a real shitty moves but all this “We’ll do even better without it” attitude that I’m seeing around is either coming from people that just think “shitty move” or really really really naive developers.
I guess that since Epic owns Unreal Engine that bad news for Epic means good news for Godot?
I don’t think that Epic is going to want to divest from Unreal considering how much money it makes.
I also don’t think that it’s a zero-sum game. As a developer I want Unreal (and Unity) to be great so it creates more competition. Unreal has led the way in a lot of cool gaming tech that Godot is picking up.
Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.
Epic also gave money to Lutris, while Epic’s CEO was smearing Linux users on twitter, so I wouldn’t count on Epic’s stance on things and where some of Epic’s money going aligning any time soon. Those megagrants feel very disingenuous to me (doesn’t mean that those money do not help those “underdog” projects, though).
Almost like crying about Steam “exclusives”, creating an actual exclusivity PC war, and handing out free games to prop up a shitty marketplace and launcher wasn’t such a good financial decision…
Well, competition for Valve might not be the worst thing.
On the other Hand I’m not sure if we would have gotten vive or steam deck if valve didn’t have a money printing machine with steam.
I’m rather certain that most companies would be worse for consumers, with the level of monopoly (/market dominance) that steam enjoys
@TheYang@Fazoo
Really like your perspective on it. Watching Disney and EA scoop up multiple IPs than misuse them like they are really puts Valve into perspective lol. At least Valve has the Steam Sales which is the most consumer friendly i've ever seen in recent history lol. Next to Sega promoting us to scream at our teachers and parents lmao.
It went to Songtradr, who are mostly a music licencing company. So I’m guessing that at least initially things are going to stay the same but that musicians are going to get nagged into letting Songtradr put their stuff up on their big licencing store. And then enshittification, because that’s how absolutely everything is going.
Superstonk mods have been compromised for a long time, silencing discussion of various topics and derailing discourse. Not to mention thousands of bot accounts manipulating what gets seen. The original members have partially moved to other forums and lemmy
Wanna know which game I last broke my “no pre-orders” rule for?
No Man’s Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It’s become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven’t bought a game since then.
It’s kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you’ll develop and when (if ever) you’ll release it
I say big budget games are too large in scope. Too much going on, too ambitious, too much emphasis on certain aspects that I feel developers value more than consumers. Not every game needs to be the biggest baddest game of the year blah blah blah.
For real, I think it’s rather telling that there are people who exclusively play some triple a games for the mini games.
It’s also interesting seeing indie take larger and larger chunks from the triple a market. Remember when harvest moon and simcity were big corporate endeavors, now it’s indie titles like city skylines and stardew Valley.
I would like to see some smaller projects from triple a studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
studios targeting genres other than open world action-rpg.
With the corporate culture that’s developed in the industry I don’t think anyone should want that. Indie has the small project space covered & they make far better games than EA or Activision ever could in those genres. Corporate sellouts cannot beat passion, but they can make games so large in scope that small studios just cannot compete with that.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Starfield is the sloppiest Bethasda game ever, cutting corners to save cost is not how I would describe its development at all.
I agree with what you are saying though. Spending 40% of the budget on voice acting and cinematographic dialog is extremely wasteful. As long as the gameplay is good and graphics are pretty gamers will like the product.
I’d say its about on par with their past games. It’s clearly their game engine, modified to do space stuff.
If you come at it with the mindset that not every game has to get bigger and more expansive and have more and more realism/mechanics that don’t serve the core gameplay, it achieves it’s goal.
Not saying its game of the year material or anything, but if I was doing an employee review, I’d give it a meets expectations grade.
Starfield is by far their cleanest release. It’s honestly the first game I have played from them that hasn’t crashed in 100+ hours.
There are aspects I wish had received a bit more attention, sure. But to date, Skyrim and Fallout 4 both have stability mods that are basically requirements to reduce crashing.
And I’m saying this as somebody with near 2k hours in Skyrim. So I definitely enjoy that game.
I played Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim at release. Compared to Starfield they were far more polished to me. Yes crashes & the odd broken quest happened, but overall they were playable, people without an internet connection could buy the games in a shop & then finish them. Also Oblivion had the best graphics for an open world rpg when it came out, while also running pretty well on the shit tier GPUs of the time. In my mind, Starfield is not pretty on ultra, runs like shit on decent hardware even at relatively low settings and the list of broken things is endless.
I’m honestly not experiencing the same. I’m running on ultra with an RTX 3080 and rarely even see a stutter and the only consistent bug I see is just comical. When I sprint for a bit and enter a door, my companion will be sprinting into a wall for a bit.
I actually do find Starfield to be a pretty game, as well. They have learned better lighting strategies from previous games and the trees look much much better. I wish the facial and running animations were better, but that’s not so bad as to be too skewer the game.
As far as Oblivion having the best graphics of it’s time, sure. But 2006 basically every game that was going for good graphics achieved the best at release. That was a pivotal period for graphics in games.
Honestly, I’d rather have stellar voice acting and okay graphics (not good, just not bad enough to turn it off after it makes me dizzy) than the other way around. Graphics lose their appeal after a short while in-game.
Imagine if people could buy a background music only -subtitle dialog- edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 for €40. How would the sale distribution go? I think this is a rather interesting thought experiment, I would personally opt to buy the cheaper version for sure, even though I do know the voice acting in BG3 is a landmark in gaming.
I would definitely buy that. I usually keep my game volumes on low and click through the dialogue because I already read the subtitle, why wait around to finish having the line delivered verbally? (Interestingly enough I’ve never ever thought “hurry up, speak faster” in an in real life conversation, this impatience only exists in video games.) Because of the value of voice acting, but for me personally voice acting is just not a priority.
I dunno, company that sells digital content for young people buys company that sells other digital content for young people. I can see the synergy there. Epic Games Store and Bandcamp aren’t that far apart.
And there’s like 300 of them. With Steam, I had to buy my way into a Buridan’s donkey position where I don’t play anything because I have too much. My man Sweeney made me jaded for free.
A good reason would have been potential “synergies” with Harmonix, which they also own, but I don’t recall ever seeing anything about that. Collaboration between the company that sells music and the company that makes music games seems like a no-brainer to me.
They wanted to use it to sell music licences for games and media production and the like. But it never really worked out, so they’ve sold it to a company that already actually knows how to do that.
The Bandcamp sale is hopefully good news. Songtradr looks like they’re just in the music business and don’t (from their Wikipedia page) have any obviously dodgy investors.
They also bought 7digital.com this year, which is a site I sometimes buy MP3s from since they have a better selection of mainstream record-label stuff than Bandcamp (no Amazon MP3s here in Canada).
Interestingly enough, if the games industry had kept the $60 price point that they fixed back ~2005 up with inflation, games would be costing around $95 today.
Unfortunately people's wages haven't kept up with inflation either, so that would just be a double whammy of making people who already struggling to pay for essentials pay more for entertainment as well, and at that point I'd think some people would just decide they can keep playing their old games.
kotaku.com
Aktywne