I kind of want Larian to start making a bunch of promotional videos mimicking Valve’s “Meet the…” series from Team Fortress 2, but for the origin characters.
I kind of never cared for the Overwatch hero videos, they were too serious. The TF2 videos were always absurd and hilarious. (Massively disappointed to this day that Adult Swim never picked up the TF2 show for a full series.)
While the game is very serious, there’s a lot of funny stuff in it (and I don’t just mean Karlach dancing at hilariously inappropriate times). I think Larian has the humorous abilities to pull this kind of thing off, and it will continue to highlight how important the characters and character development are to this game.
EDIT: Yes, this is also so we can get some modern, high-quality video of the absurd shit Minsc got up to before BG3. BG and BG2 callbacks, yeah!
Yeah, it is interesting that with the exception of GPUs, PC parts like SSDs, hard drives, CPUs, and so on actually have felt like they haven’t increased in price in comparison to phones. If anything prices have dropped and capacities increased and speeds gotten faster for SSDs for example. Same with televisions and monitors where stuff like resolution and hz has seen improvements while being cheaper than in the past.
To an extent, motherboards, too, and even before the GPU prices went ballistic. I bought a Z87 mobo back in the day for 80 or 90€ and the most expensive mobos were around 300€ or so. The X570 mobos in 2019 started at 250€ and 550 mobos didn't even get released until at the end of 3000 series Ryzen. Who in their right mind would pair a 200€ R5 3600 CPU with a 250€ mobo?
I bet most of the budget-minded people who bought a R5 3600 CPU never got to use PCIe 4.0. And to add insult to injury, budget GPU-s started using PCIe 4.0 x8 (or even x4) instead of x16, effectively gimping them on budget mobos.
It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?
Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.
This. I genuinely believe that in the near future indie games will be the sole torch-bearer for what I would call “traditional gaming”. Tighter, more focused experiences with no microtransactions or sanitized, inoffensive bloat. Games that are offline and don’t require any server handshake to function. And as the technology available to them advances, it will enable indie devs to be more and more ambitious with their vision.
I feel like this is already the case, and has been for years. Few AAA games interest me these days, especially the ones coming out of the biggest studios like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, etc. The only recent one was Baldur’s Gate 3, but that by itself is an exception to the norm.
Most AAA games are just complete soulless profit generators. It often feels as if any fun and experimental things get taken out because it would involve too much “risk”, and stand in the way of earning money, instead of trying to make a good or fun or unique game. Instead they are just being made for as wide of a mass appeal as possible, allergic to anything that could make the game a little more interesting and niche.
Things got very dire in the '10s, but there’s been a bit of a course correction in recent years, at least with EA. It Takes Two and the Star Wars Jedi games were microtransaction free and wonderful experiences. Only It Takes Two could really be considered weird and quirky, but it was phenomenal. First party games are also typically exceptions to the modern AAA paradigm.
I wonder how long EA will put out more interesting stuff for given Wild Hearts and Immortals if Avenum both flopped. Star Wars will always be a guaranteed seller though.
My understanding is that Immortals of Aveum was the first output from a pivot of the genuinely terrific EA originals brand that gave us the likes of It Takes Two, A Way out, Unraveled, and lots more. It used to be a program that helped indie devs publish their games with EA only recouping their costs. Immortals of Aveum, ironically, had none of that magic. It was basically a Marvel story baked into a CoD campaign with magic instead of bullets.
Ideally, this will tell the suits that this pivot was a mistake and they’ll go back to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But they’re much more likely to overmonetize everything into oblivion while laying off massive chunks of their workforce.
It seems most artforms reach the point where the tools are available for the indie efforts to be as good as the corporate stuff.
Games seem to be rapidly reaching the tipping point, and then all the big players have to offer is throwing more money at projects with no guarantee they’ll be as enjoyable.
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a “lower” graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn’t age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
Borderlands is another good example of this. Cartoony but fun gunplay and fun dialogue made the games (mostly) good.
I think games in that sort of style that don’t aim for realism typically have the best long term play. Jet Set Radio is another series with that sort of non-realism style and has aged fantastically.
Borderlands even looks great on potato settings, , graphics are nice and all but being able to tell what I’m looking at is more important and sometimes that said gets lost in the highest graphics range.
No offense but 100gb really isn’t that big in the year 2023… I keep seeing people complain about this and I just don’t get it. 5-7 years ago? Sure. That was unusual. Now? Nah.
I mean 4k HDR Remux files are often upwards of 80gb, and that’s just a 2-3 hour movie. Games can have hundreds of hours of content and also have high quality textures/HDR/HQ Audio/etc. Is it really that surprising that a bunch of games are 100+ gigs?
Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.
It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.
Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.
It’s true, game prices today are the same as they have been for the past 40 years for AAA titles.
I can’t think of an industry which hasn’t had a price raise in decades.
Gaming had managed to get by on this thanks to increasing market volume as gaming became more mainstream in addition to extra revenue streams like micro transactions. But it’s hitting saturation now and won’t keep counteracting inflation forever
Games have actually gotten cheaper over time adjusted for inflation even as production costs have risen, it's crazy. A NES game in today's money would be around $160.
Game industry is bigger than movies and music combined which was not the case back in the NES era. Game industry has become a juggernaut with a huge consumer target base, and lower barrier to entry that allows for even random people being able to publish games instead of a few larger companies. Rise in production costs has been one that has been self imposed the way some studios go for big special effects blockbusters because they are targeting billions. Meanwhile like with movies you get these indie 2D and last gen 3D looking games being hits right alongside these billion dollar company attempts.
I guess one area you can look at is how niche products get priced lower like mechanical keyboards, and then once productions starts ramping up and things go mainstream suddenly these niche expensive ventures with a few fans becomes more affordable as larger quantities are now being distributed.
You same thing with tech like SSDs and hard drives actually falling price over time while capacities offered grows. Lot of PC parts actually with the exception of GPUs.
The game industry did get that much larger, but that's on the backs of only a few (non-Capcom) games that sell to the type of person who only buys a couple of games per year at most. Hardly any company is selling as many copies as Call of Duty sells year after year.
That’s only true if you compare game sales to movie box office revenues, and music sales (which have shrunk considerably since they peaked in the 1990s). Once you account for home video sales, streaming, theme park revenues, and merchandise sales, the movie industry dwarfs the gaming industry. Once you account for artist tour and merchandise sales, the music industry dwarfs the gaming industry.
Yes, but the market has grown significantly and the cost of production and distribution is very low, lower than the age of cartridges. The development is the only cost.
Lots of industries have had relative price drops over that time. Mainly electronics. An mp3 player used to be $200 minimum.
I’d gladly agree to pay more in exchange for a legally binding agreement that higher prices mean video games free of predatory monetization and reasonable pay and job security for the people making the games. But we both know that they have no intention of doing the right thing, no matter how high the box price. They’re already raking in record profits while laying off huge chunks of their workforce and giving the c-suite ever-increasing annual bonuses.
They’ve perpetuated the lie that microtransactions were a necessity and the $60 price was unsustainable for such a long time that people actually believe it. Now they want to increase the box price while keeping the predatory monetization, having their cake and eating it too.
Prices definitely increased, over the last 20 years new AAA games price increased from 45-50 EUR to 70 EUR.
With inflation taken into account that would probably mean flat prices.
With the increase in the numbers of players, the spread of DLCs and micro transactions, I suspect revenue increased even with inflation taken into account.
Could it be the cost of creating game is rising faster than inflation? Or game studio just got more greedy?
What you said, but in video form youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8?si=Gj9AaniT3U46KlGF. And that came out 5 years ago. Even if we only kept up with inflation from when that video came out until now, videogames should cost $73
I’m sorry, we don’t acknowledge that query. It sounded like you said: “what’s wrong with the world”. Would you like lifelong, wistful depression or the psychopathy required for C-suite?
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.
First of all, consider how many hours of use you usually get out of such a AAA title, and you will see that it's actually quite cheap entertainment. And second, there are good games (to waste countless hours on) that are way cheaper.
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.
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.
I might be jaded, but I’d wager that whoever buys it, is going to be worse than having Epic as a rich daddy who is focused on and making money through his core business and doesn’t really know what to do with Bandcamp. Entities that buy it are almost certainly going to squeeze harder at the expense of user experience.
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).
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