Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.
What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.
Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.
That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.
Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.
It’s the same bullshit as return2office, management has its interests which include armies of fungible resources they can track effectively via closure velocity.
It’s why big organizations are less efficient but they’re what we have because of marketing inertia (people assume big companies produce better product).
What do you mean “dont turn it into a weapon,” i have a dedicated spot on my action wheel specifically for turning things into weapons. My barbarian buddy can do it as a bonus action
I mean one studio makes a great game and a bunch of other studios make shitty games… then gamers like the game which is better and want more games to be like that. Traditionally that’s called market forces, not a weapon.
The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.
There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn't need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.
And lots of opportunities for them to be ignored or fired. Devs can complain all they want but at the end of the day we have to do what our bosses order us to do.
If it wasn't on their minds before Diablo IV, I'll bet "defending our patch notes on a live stream" is going to be a difficult position to staff in the future for a company that's already had issues retaining talent.
I'm not sure anyone is having an issue retaining employees. Top employees, perhaps, but for a lot of businesses you don't need very many brilliant (and expensive) employees. Any competent soul will do. On that score, I can assure you that the game industry has no shortage of folks looking to get in to the industry.
I know a handful of developers (read: far too many) who have been fired for vocally disagreeing with management.
Sure, but if you want to see what happens when you have a lot of employee turnover from people not agreeing with the direction of a game, look no further than Redfall. Often times that top talent you're talking about will form their own studios and bring colleagues with them.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, BlahajEnjoyer, but for anyone else reading this, this is why it's important to also not play these sorts of games in addition to not spending money on them, if stopping any of this is important to you.
Enough people have left Overwatch 2 that they've resorted to putting it on Steam. Perhaps it's not happening on the timeline we would like, but people do seem to be tiring of live service nonsense.
It hasn't stopped the game from being in the top 25 most played on Steam though. And I'll bet that number is disappointing to Blizzard too, but I'm going to guess a large number of those people leaving negative reviews are still playing the game, which doesn't help.
Actually, you're right. I take that back. I let my personal dislike for the game override my thought processes. There are plenty of people who like the game, as odd as I find that fact.
Why can’t we get a law going that if you stop supporting some software product, game or otherwise, you should open source it and hand over control to the public?
Oh yeah I agree. It’s got to be a challenge to bring all his characters and plot lines together. Sadly, I think the show is the only ending we are going to get.
I think it is the Lost problem. He’s got all these hints and foreshadowing going and no idea where they’re actually going. Disappointing and evidence of lazy writing, so I’ve stopped reading his works overall
Yeah but if someone wants to write their own sequel to a first book, before the series is done, that’s fine. Still not canon, just fanfic that can make a profit, and that sounds fine to me.
The above was advocating for a 25-year period between publishing and public domain. They’ll have to somehow pay that mortgage with a quarter of a century of profit somehow.
New books get new protections anyway, so a 25-year-old series only loses book 1 to public domain. They can also release new editions of book 1 with new (canon) content, and those new things get new protections, too.
I think at a minimum if you stop publishing and supporting your own work you shouldn’t get to cry copyright whem somebody else does. For that context 10 certainly seems plenty long…
While the variety, quality and especially scope isn't great, I wouldn't call it abandoned. Especially BeamNG BallisticNG has been one of the more successful ones and Redout 1 was also fairly well received. There generally hasn't been a big presence for this genre on the PC unfortunately.
BallisticNG is awesome, and so is Redout. FYI Redout and all DLC tracks is part of Fanatical’s Build Your Own Play on the Go Bundle right now, get it and two other games for 5 $/£/€: fanatical.com/…/build-your-own-play-on-the-go-bun…
Damn that’s a very good deal. From the price I suspected that it was just another grey market key seller, but from all that I can find it’s actually legit. Thanks for sharing!
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Aktywne