How are people still hyped like this for video games? I personally haven’t been for a very long time because most of them are just money-grabbing shit.
There's so few instances of corporations doing actually good things so opinions tend to skew negative. Epic hasn't been thought of fondly since they started doing those exclusivity deals to try and bring people to their platform rather than making their platform a worthy competitor to Steam.
It’s very rare that those who hate Epic also hate Valve though, so it’s not about standing against a corporation. People just defend what they are used to and Epic disrupts that.
I'll be the first to say that I only begrudgingly accept Steam exists. However, I avoid using it and vastly prefer GOG due to the DRM-free nature of their store and the offline installers.
Just because the hate on Epic is vocal does not mean that everyone likes the Steam status quo.
You’re presuming the contributors to Lemmy are just the same in their choices of gaming as the broader market.
It doesn’t take that much reading of posts in Lemmy to conclude that it’s heavilly biased towards adults, techies and lefties.
In Statistics you can only make presumptions about a subset of subjects from statistical distribution data from the whole universe of subjects if the subset has been randomly selected, which this one most definitelly hasn’t - if only because of the “Reddit migration” Lemmy is filled with people with a certain kind of mindset (the ones for whom the actions of the Reddit CEO were displeasing enough to make them want to move and who actually had the will to do so) which isn’t at all the average person’s behaviour (the “average” just stayed there) plus even the Reddit population was already not representative of gamers generally (older in general).
The general market share of GOG might give you a hint that here too it’s likely going to have fewer customers than something like Steam, but judging by comments I’ve read here it’s probably more than 2%, at least amongst commenters (no idea about lurkers).
epic is a lawful good with epic mega grants, but their partial owner tencent is lawful evil. if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them, I’m likely done with them for good.
if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
It's getting pretty tiring on Reddit. You'd think Sweeney were Hitler. I get that Epic's exclusives were annoying, but they also give us free games every week. The hate is far past justification.
Opposing it? EOS supports Linux, EAC works on the Deck, and Epic regularly invest in things like Lutris. Sure, there are no native Linux ports on the Epic store, but that’s not been the general direction of the industry either. Proton/Wine can still be used to run the games sold by Epic.
Rocket League also dropped Mac support, which would be perfectly compatible with the store, so you can’t argue it was about Linux. The actual reason was the need to upgrade to DX11.
Payday 2 has no connection to Epic, but it’s common for developers to revisit and update games when releasing on a new platform. For example, the upcoming Steam port of THPS 1+2 even has a new developer behind it, and set to include achievements and potentially other perks.
There are also games like Rust that have dropped native Linux support without any ties to Epic.
Why do people always say this as if these forums are some niche group and not a huge spread of the general population?
If you’re seeing multiple communities with a general opinion, maybe it’s “people hate them” instead of “why do all these different groups hate the same thing?”
Well I don’t know how long the GTAV script is, but A Girl Who Chants Love At the Bound Of This World: YU-NO came out in like, 1996 and its script has ~1,300,000 words in it.
That’s more words than Mass Effect 1-3’s scripts combined.
That’s about 100,000 words less than the combined scripts of the entire Metal Gear Solid series excluding MGS5.
And YUNO was made by like, 25 or less people I think. At a time when making computer games was not so easy. They didn’t have the tools that make game development easy like we do these days, they mostly had to write their own software and had to deal with a lot of hardware limitations.
Effort to make good games these days has actually gone down a lot. There is really no excuse to have such a massive budget and still release a bug ridden, unfinished mess.
Even if it does, thats still too much money. How much money did Hollow Knight spend on marketing? Or what about Terraria? Or Minecraft pre-buyout? How much was spent on marketing for games like Deep Rock Galactic? I can guess probably less than $100 million each. Maybe even less than $10 million.
You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.
The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.
And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).
For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).
Seriously, I worked in media creation and like looking at movie budgets is painful for me cause so much of it is to pay people already at the top and overpaid more than enough.
Production and material costs haven’t grown as much as marvel movies would make you think so it is all going to executives lawyers and heads of the sweat shops of special effects houses.
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.
We don’t need super high quality graphics for every AAA production. Sometimes, Just good enough graphics, but with better interactivity with the environment like ToTK and Baldurs Gate 3. I mean , I love RDR2, but honestly, shrinking horse testicles is a bit too much attention to detail.
As an example, cell shading of ToTK still looks amazing and far more enduring as a graphics style. Also, Elden Ring, arguably has worse graphics than RDR2 or the latest CoD. But, because of it’s amazing art direction it will age pretty well.
I’m done giving developers a pass for not even putting in the minimum. Larian and Bethesda didn’t even put horses in their games because they’re so afraid of rendering the sack.
Everyone says Phantom Liberty will finally redeem Cyberpunk, so I can only assume CD Projekt has spent the past three years creating a perfect horse with the most dazzling balls we’ve ever seen. Can’t wait for those RTX and DLSS 3.5 rendered oysters.
They can still have similar production value and not be open world games that take 80 hours to finish. It just makes far more sense to me to bet small with tons of projects than to bet big with only a few, because then you'll find the PUBGs and the DOTAs that Phil is talking about eventually.
That really applies on both sides. This is such a nothing issue - it defaults to what you’d expect for a cis character, so you can literally ignore it if you aren’t going to play a character whose pronouns and body type do not align.
But, someone modding their game doesn’t effect anyone else playing it, whether that’s removing the pronoun selector in Starfield, adding a pronoun selector to Skyrim (even supporting multiple pronouns with different frequencies for each), turning every hold banner in Skyrim into a pride flag, removing pride flags from Spiderman, turning Skyrim dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine, or adding the ability to fuck Skyrim dragons. All of those are mods that exist, BTW.
And this only makes the claims that “this is not a political statement” more absurd. There may be room to argue that the original decision to let players select their pronouns is not political, but both the mod that removes it and the removal of that mod from Nexus are just pathetic attempts to get back at the other side. Can’t get more political than that.
Of course this is political - because bigots made trans people’s existence a target of their politics. Defending them against that hatred and abuse is not somehow equally wrong, compared to that hatred… and abuse.
Art is “political.” It’s not being “made political” if the game brings up a heavy topic and then blinks. The game made itself “political” by making slavery an element of the world.
If you don’t want to engage with political issues, don’t bring up political topics. Using oppression for flavor text instead of confronting it as a major issue in your story is tacky. Star Wars suffers from the same problem.
I don't know how a Final Fantasy game of all things is not going to be political. I don't think I have played a single one that wasn't profoundly political. They are always dealing with war, oppression, exploitation, power struggles and often use metaphors for other issues.
The beloved Final Fantasy 7 is blatant with its environmentalist and anti-corporate themes. All the Ivalice games (FF12, FFT and Vagrant Story) pretty much breathe politics, and while I didn't go too far into Final Fantasy 14, that also seemed pretty political.
I’ve not played enough of the other FF games since 7 to say with certainty, but FF7,12,14, and 15 were extremely explicit political dramas. That was their entire plots
Redout is a bit closer to F-Zero, BeamNG is definitely a full blown Wipeout clone. It got even the pixel look from the first game.
Still not the greatest presence on the PC for this genre, unfortunately.
This is more of a preservation thing, I think. The guy is clearly not interested in the theft or harm of the game. He’s doing this because he thinks this old-ass game is so good that more people should play it.
I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.
Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.
‘American gamers must return to buying American for their gaming needs. That’s why I have talked to Microsoft and they will lower their prices considerably. You are welcome, nerds.’ -DT, probably soon
Yet another reason for me to never play this game. It’s full of contextless characters, appropriated and stolen dances/animations, microtransactions and now this rubbish.
Sadly, it remains a great game to play with friends bc even casual gamers understand the appeal. So alas…it continues to take up 60gb on my games drive.
I hope this person tries out real games. Like counter strike 3, halo 1, battlefield 3, call of duty 4 or something like that. Current games kinda suck.
Why is Fortnite not a real game? It’s fine to not like things, and good to criticize Epic for their terrible practices in and out of Fortnite, but saying it isn’t a real game smells gatekeepy to me.
…they ruined Roland and Tina, JB, though I love him, is a terrible choice for Claptrap, not really butthurt about the lack of guns (are they supposed to just have a billion guns in every shot or something?), Curtis doesn’t give me Tanniss vibes either, though…man, why is Krieg so quiet? Fuck…
are they supposed to just have a billion guns in every shot or something
a variety of different gun designs would at least be something to look at as the main characters expressionlessly shoot towards their off-screen enemies
are they supposed to just have a billion guns in every shot or something?
Fucking. Yes.
I mean, not every shot, but the variety of firearms should absolutely be a big part of every action scene at least. It’s Borderlands, and that was it’s original claim to fame: countless combinations of procedurally generated guns.
Have your prop department whip them up as different parts that they can stick together, like how the games do it. Firing effects can be added in post.
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