A year ago Ubisoft exec gave an interview where he said that the next leap in gaming industry should be fueled by gaming subscriptions, and that gamers should get comfortable playing by subscription as opposed to buying and owning game licenses.
He then proceeded to give an example on how players got comfortable switching from physical media and full ownership to digital licenses.
This caused a massive player backlash on the wave of protests against the migration from ownership to subscriptions (aka “You’ll own nothing and be happy”). Ubisoft has got a financial dent as sales and subscriptions dropped, and is now facing a problematic financial future.
That’s what happens with DRM and digital licensing, which was considered by the exec to have most players already onboard.
Here, he was talking about gaming subscriptions, i.e. paying a monthly fee to have access to a library of games. Once you stop paying, games become unavailable, and games outside the subscription are not available either. His idea is to make more gamers comfortable with the subscription model despite it taking away any possibility to play when you stop paying.
It is difficult to know where to start, since there have been a lot of unpopular actions. A lot of these are pretty standard for the triple A studios unfortunately. Think DRM with always online and authentication server issues, toxic workplace, decommissioned games by removing the servers for them and not giving ways for people to self host, rehashing existing properties to milk success, having their own launcher so having double layers of authentication, microtransactions, subscription based model pushing, game variants locking out certain content unless more money is payed etc.
I do not care at all about any Marvel stuff and don’t know many chars but my friend who does wanted to play. I gotta say… it’s a BLAST. I like that I can be a furry.
It actually is pretty fun. I can see this quickly going sour, but currently it is a much better game than Overwatch. No idea what the future holds, but hopefully NetEase can pull through. I loved Super Mecha Champions (2021-2025 RIP, you were gone too soon- Alborada my beloved), so hopefully they keep things going and don’t end this one like some of their other ones (DBD Mobile, for example).
It does a good job of onboarding people. The general tutorial is relatively short and sweet, and character specific tutorials are even shorter. It also gives each character a rank (in stars) for how complex that character is to use effectively.
The game itself is pretty chaotic, so it’s easy to convince yourself that your deaths are incidental, and your victories are a result of you playing well. And as long as you’re having fun you’ll be okay with that. But if at any point you start feeling like someone has your foil, just change characters mid-match and try a new tactic. There’s so many characters you can experiment until you find theirs.
The box comes with 9 different missions, and there are expansions with more missions and player characters. I’ve only played just this once so far though.
That was definitely a bold design decision, but I’m glad it paid off for Gearbox. Never before had I played a first person shooter from the perspective of an underpaid pumpkin.
I played around with upscaling PS1 games in retroarch last night and I was pleasantly surprised. There are some YouTube videos that talk through the process m.youtube.com/watch?v=6yDWYeuQ2pI
It can breathe new life into some dated looking games. Highly recommend giving it a try
IMO, that’s the wrong direction. The right direction is to apply some good CRT shaders. Those games were designed for CRT and low resolutions and they can never look great when rendered at higher res. Upscaling works much better for PS2 generation and up.
I didn’t think to experiment with the shaders much, so I’ll give that a shot. I briefly tried the cell shading shader, but that looked way too unnatural for me – but it is neat.
(As an aside, I have my original PlayStation 1 and I really want to snag a real CRT at some point for some true nostalgia.)
I have two real CRTs (a 4" JVC radio TV and a 27" Sylvania), and while none of the existing shaders perfectly capture it, a guy who calls himself “Retro Crisis” on YouTube and Github has some modified CRT shaders that come really, really close.
My only gripe is that he has different shaders per system, rather than a single “this is your CRT so all games will correctly render through this one” shader.
Yeah, and it’s a nightmare to use with Steam link. The last epic exclusive I bought was The Expanse, but adding it as a non-Steam game to play with the link app completely screwed up the license check and locked you out of everything but the first episode.
Both are horrible mess, I don’t really understand this deepthroating of steam their ui is horrible, they do behave like a monopoly, games by them have drm by default. Same can be said about epic.
As evidenced by this post, they are not a monopoly. So what does this statement actually mean?
This post gives evidence of the contrary, game that dared not to be published on platform that has 70-80% of pc market share ( geekwire.com/…/gaming-giant-valve-hit-with-anothe… ) shouldn’t even exist and even stating otherwise is a blasphemy, lol. As for more anecdotical examples, games that are published on steam only, are majority most don’t even list other platforms on their web sites, in cases when they can be bought elsewhere. Even more, updates and patches often do not reach other marketplaces. So yeah steam is a shitty marketplace with horrible ui and captured fanatical clients.
Lawsuits are cheap and meaningless. Unless actually ruled on, they don’t mean crap (and even then, sometimes it’s just clear evidence of jury / judge bias, like the infamous patent trolls of East Texas).
70-80% of pc market share
This source puts their market share at ~20% of the PC gaming market. Your source is for ‘85% market share in multi-publisher PC game stores’, which is not the same thing, and it’s based on a random tweet by their competitor CEO attacking them, which should carry approximately 0 credibility.
You keep using the word monopoly. It does not mean what you seem to think it means.
Your “source” is an image that doesn’t even differentiate between various stores and lists everything as blue, with text that says “steam revenue is probabaly x billion”. I couldn’t find anything except other similar images when looking up Pelham Smithers reports. In reports from previous years steam is not mentioned. I will rephrase it then if you dislike the word I am using: Steam has a dominant position in the pc gaming market and uses it to their benefit which doesn’t (in my opinion) coincide with consumer benefit, also their app is shit.
Also, Steam’s estimated revenue and the PC gaming market are numbers available from various sources. I’ve pointed out why your source is nonsense, and provided more accurate figures.
uses it to their benefit which doesn’t (in my opinion) coincide with consumer benefit
That’s changed from your original ‘behave like a monopoly’ comment, and which I’m still waiting for clarification on. How exactly do they behave like a monopoly supposedly does?
You post the same data now with article that doesn’t even have word “steam” in it. Your various sources weren’t linked. I think that clears why your source is “nonsense”.
Yes my words are changed because, you somehow read me saying multiple times of steam being monopoly in single use of phrase, steam behaves like a monopoly. I repeat, not liking one store doesn’t make me a fan of another, they both are horrible.
As for examples of anti-competitive behaviour, price matching that is being discussed in comments here is a big one, don’t you think?
No, Steam games do not have DRM by default. By default Steam is a mere download manager. For Steam DRM to be applied, the publisher has to run the drm_wrap command: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm
Ok, sorry I was wrong. So I can filter out drmed games on steam, right?
Steamcmd looks unrelated, why would I need to use it? Also the wiki page only confirms my earlier thought about steam ui being horrible, whole article is avout how to install it and what kinds of problems exist, not telling how to do some basic things with it.
I just never buy those games. Epic released with exclusives but couldn't process payments in a number of country leaving gamers there SOL. That and some of the higher-ups there just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Anything that also releases as a timed exclusive there doesn't get a purchase from me until years later when it's more than half off (and I think I've only bought one game like that). A Steam monopoly is bad, but Epic are not the solution to that.
Graphics: See image render quality Team: Small group of people, probably friends Story: Reasonable length, linear, like a book Budget: Probably no real budget, just however much time everybody can put in, so empty wallet Gameplay: Sweaty - old games do tend to be difficult and frustrating Soundtrack: Actually fire
The book is another layer. It references the image format of two books next to eachother, one being labeled as a long story and the other labeled as the same story, but with some twist that makes the story much shorter or non-existant.
So it’s saying that it has short or non-existant story.
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