If Nintendo being “one generation behind once again” means I get more games like Breath of the Wilds, Mario Odyssey, Metroid Dread, and Tears of the Kingdom (just to name a few of the incredible first-party games this generation), then I’m fine with that!
But how will I know I’m better than everyone if everything isn’t shiny and I can’t see the reflection of my hot pink leopard striped assault rifle in every sweat drop on my enemy’s forehead?!
Granted, Nintendo does know how to make their sub par hardware seem better than it is. But can you imagine what they could do with actual up to date hardware? Might not be as easy a sell at $400-500 though like PS/Xbox. So if they can keep sub $300 system it’s an easier sell as a secondary system to the others or pc.
what they could do with actual up to date hardware?
It’s honestly hard to tell, given their history. When they first got 3D hardware, their first attempts resulted in a literal revolution in game design, with Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time changing how 3D games would look and control from that point onwards.
Their first time getting access to HD hardware? They didn’t have the experience and tools to design HD assets, which delayed pretty much all internal projects and resulted in several drought periods that helped kill the Wii U.
So if the Switch 2 suddenly had much better hardware… Would Nintendo make the most beautiful game you’ve ever seen, or would they stumble around and ship yet another booster pack to Mario Kart 8 with barely improved graphics? Would they struggle with balancing realistic ray tracing with their cartoony look? Hard to tell.
The switch is like 1/4th the steamdeck and much more comfortable as a handheld
I still use the steamdeck more due to a larger library, but for the games that switch does support it's usually much more comfortable. There's definite tradeoffs to top of the line hardware on a handheld, and Nintendo has known that since that beat out the game gear with the Gameboy, mainly due to battery life back then.
I feel like people downplay the size factor either because they don't use it for it's handheld properties or for them personally they have issues making it comfortable.
And honestly I don't see the issue with it being a gen behind. Games will still be made for it, and if it's a top of the line turbo graphics game I'm just going to use my Desktop. I probably wouldn't have used the Steamdeck anyway because if Switch is low range, steamdeck is midrange, and still not where my desktop is.
But the idea of great hardware and great software is still a mixed bag. And Nintendo's titles show that it's not so much the hardware holding them back but that companies won't make their games with the switch in mind, which is both fair but also gives expected results (such as the recent MK game)
That’s true, but using older, less expensive hardware had almost always been part of Nintendo’s business model. A cheaper console allows them to invest in game development–time, talent, and just money. If they used cutting-edge tech, they would have thinner margins (or even lose money on the console at first as Sony and Microsoft have done in the past), which would give them less to invest into game development. Nintendo spent an entire (extra) year just tweaking and polishing TotK; if they had thinner margins from the Switch, there would probably have been more pressure to release it earlier, which would have given us a less refined game.
I’d love it if we could have both great games and cutting-edge graphics, but at the end of the day, I’ll still take good games every time.
If they used cutting edge, you’d be able to not just play all 5 great Nintendo first party releases but the hundreds of other AAA and great titles that release each year on every other platform but which no one wants to back port to the Switch.
Frankly, comparing the PS5/XSX exclusives to the Switch’s latest releases I think Nintendo is doing better than the others. We are hitting diminishing returns as far as gaming hardware advancement goes. The PS4 was already capable of outputting great visuals in large screens, and even as far as 2023 very few games really needed more than that. The Switch as it is can even handle most indie and double-A games.
This is not even bringing up that higher definition games necessitate additional work and therefore have longer development times.
To me, a new Switch that is as capable as the PS4 sounds pretty good.
It is amazing how out of touch someone can be with reality.
Also, classic blaming the guy that just left. Maybe he contributed to some of the issues, but I guarantee there was a mountain of other issues unrelated to this guy.
Most of the execs never tried their hands on a game including this one. They genuinely have no idea about the industry and thought they had a hit game on their hands based on a trailer or something. It‘s truly baffling yet so typical.
When I was getting my engineering degree in the senior year we had some question and answer sessions with people from industry. The guy in class who thought he was way smarter than he was asked about going directly into an MBA program after graduation.
The industry guy said it was a terrible idea. Your engineering knowledge would be 2 years out of date and who knows if you would be a good manager. He said to get a job and get some experience. If you show promise as a leader a good company will offer to put you through a MBA program and you well have the real world experience to make the best of it.
So I think there is a real use for an MBA degree but only after some real world experience in your field and showing basic team leadership. People who go straight for an MBA tend to be the those who just want to boss people around and can’t handle real work.
Exactly. I would say an MBA is only useful if your undergrad degree was in something other than business. It is meant to add management skills to an already skilled individual. If you don’t have any other skills it’s just an expensive piece of paper that, at least to me, signifies essentially the same thing as being the boss’s son would. You probably aren’t very good at anything but always think you’re the smartest person in the room.
And the worst is, the C-suites get to fuck shit up, reap massive bonuses, and never suffer any con-S-quences when inevitable their way of running the company causes shit like this to happen.
What reality though? Companies are trying now more than ever to release the shittest cheapest games they can for massive gains. We see more and more trash making insane money. The reality is the average person will play a shitty game for something to do especially if it’s within their interests. In this case it just happened to fail so WB will fire a bunch of people and try something again. It’s a learning experience in the sense that they know they gotta raise the bar for the next release but it won’t be anything substantial.
I legit wonder what would happen if this argument is used ( in a professional way by a professional lawyer ) in a court of law. Like, could this legit be argued to be the same?
NAL but technically speaking Ubisoft would lose because they would be unable to prove that they were deprived of anything or anything was appropriated from them with their current stance. Realistically they would just pivot and find some other nonsense to try, like claiming a theft of their computer server’s processing power everytime a pirated game accessed their lobby or some other nonsense that would barely fly, but fly none the less.
What if the game was purely offline? Also, how can a pirated game access online lobbies? The last time I pirated a game was because Epic had a BL3 exclusive. And I couldn’t matchmake.
I wonder who would have to prove what. Ubi, that they missed profit (because you’d want to buy the game and didn’t) or the player (who’d argue he wouldn’t ever buy it anyway).
Well the moving party has to prove their allegations, aka Ubisoft moving to sue you means they have to prove everything they say. Since their stated public position is that they are sole owner at all times irregardless of circumstances, they would be legally barred (estoppel) from arguing that any one could hurt their possessory interest (rights and share of ownership). They essentially would have to shift the argument over, similar to a theft of service argument (not paying a train fare is a crime but you didn’t steal a train or turnstile). The question then becomes what service does ubisoft provide? Online servers that do content distribution seem to be the only thing. If you got it on the high seas you never hit their network, so all I see left with my hypothetical napkin math is all that random network traffic ubisoft games seem to always have (even offline).
There’s a number of cracked games now with online play enabled, you just need to make a burner Steam (etc) account to use it so your main one with purchases doesn’t get nuked if they catch on.
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
Forgery usually involves submitting what you faked to some other entity in order to do something. Maybe if you illegally copied and sold that music. Regardless the penalties are similar anyway.
Incorrect. Last I checked, theft is depriving the original owner of their product or service. When it comes down to it, piracy is essentially making an illegal copy, meaning the original is still there.
The only reason they are going to New Vegas for season 2, is to lay down a whole bunch of Bethesda-fied revisionist history about the whole Nevada area.
They would want to torch the playing field, and make creating a New Vegas 2 that is worth a damn impossible, in anticipation of the possibility Microsoft might put Obsidian on Fallout too, after Outer Worlds 2.
After the studio closures Microsoft just did? Todd is probably, and absolutely justifiably, scared shitless with Obsidian and MGM Amazon’s ‘friendly’ competition.
Over the past 5-7 years, the AAA publishers have tried to use production scale as their new moat. Very few companies can afford to spend the $200M an Activision or Take 2 spend to put a title like Call of Duty or Red Dead Redemption on the shelf. These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year. The issue these publishers have run into is these same production scale/cost approach hurts their ability to create new IP. The hurdle rate on new IP at these high production levels have led to risk aversion by big publishers on new IP. You’ve seen a rise of AAA publishers using rented IP to try to offset the risk (Star Wars with EA, Spiderman with Sony, Avatar with Ubisoft etc). This same dynamic has obviously played out in Hollywood as well with Netflix creating more new IP than any of the movie studios.
Specifically, the AAA game publishers, starting from a position of strength driven from physical retail have failed to create any real platform effect for themselves. They effectively continue to build their scale through aggregated per game P&Ls hoping to maximize each new release of their existing IP.
In the new world where a AAA publisher don’t have real distribution leverage with consumers, they don’t have production efficiencies and their new IP hit rate is not disproportionately higher than the industry average we see that the top franchises today were mostly not created by AAA game publishers. Games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Candy Crush, Clash Royale, DOTA2 etc. were all created by independent studios with full access to distribution. Overall this, imo, is a good thing for the industry but does put AAA publishers, in a precarious spot moving forward. AAA publishers are milking their top franchises but struggling to refill their portfolio of hit franchises, most AAA publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago.
It’s like all we heard about the PS5 was that it was super hard to get when it came out and then it kind of disappeared from our collective consciousness
XBox has always been a weird console. It never really competes with Nintendo because NIntendo always does its own general thing and also slides neatly into the kids and family market. So it competes with Playstation by default. Except Playstation actually has contracts with good studios to make exclusive games. What’s a non-Halo exclusive for the XBox? Back in the day, you’d play games like Gears of War, Halo (obviously), Fallout 3, Psychonauts, KOTOR, COD, etc. I can’t think of a single meaningful game on the most recent generation for the XBox.
I’ve seen them stocked in my local stores for the past year. The Xbox series X/S as well. I kinda thought it was like that everywhere now? Are they really still sold out and being scalped for crazy mark up prices where you live?
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.
“I’ve often thought ‘I wish I could give these folks another $10 or $20 because it was worth more than my initial $70 and they didn’t try to nickel and dime me every second,’”
You know what, I could agree with that opinion if the irony wasn't lost to folks
No. One. Would tip for a blizzard game.
Blizzard DOES nickel and dime you at every second. Literally.
Blizzard has not produced a good game since Overwatch 2.
Blizzard made 8.71 Billion in 2023. They can afford to pay their developers without relying on public donations.
Because it was made as an excuse to fully transition to a f2p business model. It wasn’t a game anyone was asking for and the only way they could get people to use it over the first one was by shutting the first one down. It was their way of pushing enshitification.
Not really true. While there are lots of factors in how profitable a game is, the biggest one is marketing. Regardless of how good it is. Brand name recognition. Like any other industry. It’s why games like CoD and Assassin’s Creed are ridden the fuck to death despite continuously getting worse.
I don’t think he’s saying to tip for a Blizzard game. He’s not at Blizzard anymore (probably still has stock though).
I basically agree, I mean, I’d tip for a game I really like. Actually I do, indirectly. I buy other things from companies like FromSoft. I would go further than you and admit I agree with him despite the irony.
Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.
There’s something special about a game like red dead 2 or ghost of tsushima that makes you stop and just enjoy the scenery. Games with good graphics have their place, it’s just that they need to also have all the other elements to be any good.
Red dead redemption 2 didn’t stop at being pretty. If it did I don’t think we would all talk about it so fondly. Totally agree that it’s a great looking game though.
thing is, games aren’t pretty because they model every cell in every lifeform and have 5 gigabyte textures for each individual leaf, they’re pretty because they have good graphical design.
Just lighting alone is like 50% of making a scene look nice, you can literally just slap together a low-poly flat-colour scene in blender and set up nice lighting and people will call you talented.
A prime example of this is valheim: ps2-style models and textures and yet the lighting and general graphical design makes it look lovely and atmospheric, especially combined with the music.
it annoys me to no end that people think minecraft looks terrible and attribute that to the textures, it’s literally just pixel art! Other games are praised for having pixel art! aurgh!
Minecraft might be considered ugly, but in that case it’s probably moreso because its lighting is… rudimentary… or that person specifically just doesn’t like the artstyle.
Also something that almost no one ever talks about is render distance! Games with a gargantuan render distance look SOOOOOO much more appealing and are easier to navigate, but people just don’t think about it!
I recently played Satisfactory and holy shit that render distance, when i called down the space elevator it’s the only time i can recall a game ever making me just sit there in awe, never before have i felt such a visceral sense of scale from something on a display!
Oh, don’t get me wrong, minecraft’s art style is absolutely charming and a perfect fit for the “blocky” nature of the gameplay. See how many of its imitators try to look more realistic and end up looking genuinely ugly. But to speak to the top comment’s point, when fancy shaders are added minecraft’s simple style gets elevated so much and it goes to show how simple and effective design paired with good-looking lighting can make even the lowest-poly games look absolutely gorgeous.
As graphics increase in quality, the desire for developers to fill spaces with clutter grows – which makes it harder to make meaningful levels with thoughtful design.
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.
Yeah, he is mainly a cheater on his wife. Not exactly great, but conversations on this sound like by people who never leave their basement and talk to people.
A pedophile predator is somebody who systematically texts underage people, and fishes out the vulnerable ones to exploit their weaknesses for their own satisfaction and exerts control over them. Speaking to a single, depending on the jurisdiction (±1 year), consenting adult (17 is young, but not completely stupid), with slightly flirty messages is absolutely not that. it isn’t even toxic. in fact, it devalues this tag for behaviour which is not cool due to the cheating and a bit skittish because of the age difference, but is otherwise kind of okay. See, next time somebody tells me about a pedophile predator I will be thinking about a conversation between two adults, or almost adult and not nasty abuse scarring people for life.
Have you talked to 17 year olds? They are far from developed in most cases. Anyone even in their late 20s should notice the difference in development and stay clear.
It is reprehensible and disgusting behavior, but it doesn’t mean we should universally apply labels across vast swaths of different issues, as it devalues said label and poisons future discussion.
Simple labels simplify discussion of course, but that runs the risk of losing nuance for the specific way someone was a disgusting creep.
Yeah I do. I disagree with most of their posts, but I agree with the motion that using the same labels indiscriminately is a problem in online discourse.
For example, far as I know so far, I’d call him a pedo, but I am unsure whether I’d call him a predator (of course, language differences apply, too). That’s just because I need words to express the predatory nature of people like Maxwell who prey on teens and YA.
That’s kinda what I meant, there’s too few words to just use the same label across the board sometimes. Doesn’t make something someone does less reprehensible. Rather i prefer to sometimes use full sentences instead of quick labels because it more accurately expresses the matter.
but I am unsure whether I’d call him a predator (of course, language differences apply, too). That’s just because I need words to express the predatory nature of people like Maxwell who prey on teens and YA.
What do you mean by this? Beahm was preying on a minor by sexting that minor and asking to meetup at twitch con. Are you specifically referring to people operating child sex rings? In either case, I don’t think anyone else uses your ultra-specific definition. For myself, and I assume most others, pedophiles are merely a type of predator. For example, the show, to catch a predator, was about creeps sexting kids online. This is precisely what Beahm was doing so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call him a predator.
Not in the jurisdiction he was in, and that’s all that matters.
Also, while sending sexually explicit texts (using only words) is not illegal, I’m pretty sure we can correlate what his intent was. What, do you think he’s going to come out and fully admit he’s a pedophile? No.
Also, nowhere in any of his statement has he clarified that he didn’t know they were underage. If it were the case that he didn’t know, that’s a pretty fucking big deal and he should know how important it is to explain that. He didn’t though.
I hate to get so semantical but using the word pedophile incorrectly just desensitizes the word. Pedophilia means being attracted to children, primarily meaning before or in the early stages of puberty, usually younger than 13. In fact, many pedophiles would not be attracted to someone aged 15+ because they are typically exclusively or primarily interested in prepubescent bodies.
That doesn’t mean this guy isn’t a total asshole, but he’s not a pedophile, and I think anyone can understand an adult sexting an older teen, while still absolutely horrid, is quite different from sexting a child.
Once again, absolutely not defending this guy, I don’t even know who he is… but I think it’s important not to desensitize the word.
Yeah I would totally agree with this if the word wasn’t already desensitized a very long time ago. The language has changed. (I’m assuming people were ever differentiating, I don’t really know/remember the history.) Colloquially it means interested in teens unless it’s clarified to be worse than that.
I recommend not trying to make this argument, anywhere. It will not change the way people use words, even if it could there would not be a point (attraction to pre-teens is so egregious that it will always be clarified), and a lot of people will assume that someone who doesn’t accept the colloquial usage is themselves interested in teens and in denial about how the public actually views that to the point where they think only interest in prepubescent children is problematic and handwave everything else away as a language issue.
Colloquially, it’s a catch-all nowadays. Like I said in another reply, we don’t need to differentiate between lowest common denominators. That gets into sounding sympathetic to these fucks, and anyone who sympathizes might as well be one themselves.
I’ve attended a seminar for child protection before that was delivered by a former cop (that worked in the sex crimes division) and they said the exact same thing - in the context of correctly making the distinction between paedophile and sex offender.
They should just collectively say no. My company tried to bring everyone back to the office two years ago and people just didn’t show up. They’re not going to fire everyone. Now we have 100% remote as an official option for those who want it.
The smaller the company the easier this is to organize but sometimes that’s not even necessary. No one told us to do that but enough of us decided to on our own that it might as well have been organized. We’re talking thousands of employees here. That collective response instilled more company pride in me than any corporate initiative ever has.
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