I get a feeling MS doesn’t want to be in the game production/publishing space anymore. They see bigger growth opportunities elsewhere. I personally believe that it’s a big mistake and the ai bubble will cost them dearly, but chasing very short term profitability has never hurt an executive.
It’s a shame that Microsoft owns id Software and Bethesda now. They’ll fuck that up too along with all the major IPs they own. Coz they are stupid too large corporate bullshit that only looks at numbers and nothing else.
I hate that they tried to blame the developers here. I feel like they are just as exploited as the consumers. Many times have I tried to be passionate about my own work only to have it crushed and expunged by greedy upper management. I’d hate to be them working years on a passion project only to have it degraded by corporate grifters sending it into microtransaction hell
This entire argument is nonsense. With enough advance notification, all future games can be built with these rules in mind. If you are developing it in that way to begin with it’s not going to require any extra work.
So tone deaf, and clearly they’re just trying to steer the narrative.
They call out that it’s never taken lightly and it has to happen. We know. Stop killing games just says you have to do something when you turn off the servers. Either release the server source code so it can be engineered by the community, release a self hostage server alternative, even just documents or guides on how to get started.
But they’re going to try to make it about the mean old gamers want them to go broke
As a bad person, I will warn people about pirating softwares. There are really virus, malwares and many sophisticated malicious codes within those programmes.
They are objectively less popular with the newer stuff.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderland is at 25% for recent reviews, 70% overall. That’s not glowing. And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott. I don’t think Borderlands has the pull it once did.
Tiny Tina is a spin-off, and I doubt the EULA changes will result in much more than the Modern Warfare 2 boycott. Borderlands 3 still sold multiple millions of copies before it even had its first discount, and over 15 million copies total. It was still in high enough demand after an Epic exclusivity period to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players when it eventually launched on Steam. It’s one of very few multi-billion dollar franchises in video games.
Also Tiny Tina was actually a fuckin blast to play through. It doesn’t drag like some of the main games do, the humor is actually fun because you’re basically playing a game within a game and it works as far as D&D stuff goes imo.
Also I actually liked being able to customize my character for once. I don’t know about the other voices, but I actually really liked the douchey/cocky voice I ended up going with. There are some fun lines for different quests and such.
That’s a fair call on Tiny Tina being a spin off, but with it and the movie kinda tarnishing the name it seems like a bit of an uphill battle.
3 did well, but the game before and after it didn’t. Add in people having less money to throw at this stuff and it being “a real fans” price, possible exclusive deals, etc. I just think it’s putting up it’s own road blocks constantly. The franchise isn’t hot and it’s fresh off the Borderlands movie joke.
IMO They should fire this wide and fast, keep the price low and sell it everywhere, earn back that trust and good will. Make people fall in love with BL again.
Fresh off the Borderlands movie, they sold tons of their Pandora collection, and concurrent players shot up. It may not have been the movie they wanted it to be, but it mostly achieved the same goal.
And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott.
I hope so, but i was expecting more people to boycott Nintendo, and yet the switch 2 was the fastest selling console of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone does the old “I’m sure it’s fine if I get a copy”
I think people on the internet vastly overestimate the support these boycott movements actually have. For every person here or wherever else saying they’re not buying a switch, there’s 10,000 parents buying one for their kids, or people that just wanna play mario kart with their friends.
And typically the boycotters weren’t even the sort of people who were buying a switch 2 to begin with. Maybe there’s a subsection of them that will result in some loss of sales but it would be in the fraction of a percent. There’s no surprise to me when gamer boycotts fail.
With that said, the sales were unexpectedly high. Maybe people trying to get ahead of potential future tariffs were the reason. I thought cost of living was fucked and nobody could afford anything.
I’ll be waiting for the inevitable OLED refresh anyway.
There’s also just a substantial number of people that were just astroturfers, I think.
There’s been a LOT of crazy attacks on the switch 2 to try to ‘justify’ a boycott. I think my two favorite was that the gamechat button noise when you hit is actually saying saying a slur, or maybe that the rumble turns off after a while not to protect your hands from the rumble (which has been found to be bad for you), but because Nintendo cheaped out on a rumble motor that overheated too easily.
The switch 2 joycons don’t have a rumble motor. Like, it’s a whole thing they’re super proud of, because it’s so precise they just use the rumble really fast to play music instead of having a speaker.
Honestly, the whole idea of trying to boycott nintendo has pretty much always been over astroturfed bullshit, or just outright bullshit.
Nintendo gives us so many legitimate reasons to not want to give them money. Who do you think would be behind astroturfing? To my knowledge, it doesn’t usually come in the form of being against one company but in being against a piece of legislation or regulation. People on Lemmy are probably just predisposed to being willing to go against the mainstream when it starts turning shit, or else we’d still be on reddit.
They put their money towards suing the shit out of emulation projects and removing ROM sites.
This is compounded by the fact that they won’t even sell you those ROMs anymore. They only make them available to rent in perpetuity. People are rightly skeptical of a future where Microsoft only makes their games available via Game Pass rather than it just being an economical option, but Nintendo is already doing the thing that people are afraid of.
They’re the last holdout that won’t put their games on PC in an era where console exclusivity doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no reason to play Zelda at 20 FPS and 360p when, at the time of release, my PC was already quite capable of running the game at acceptable resolutions and frame rates. This is just willfully selling people an inferior product when they have the ability to deliver a better one. Then they have the gall to charge their customers, who already paid $70, even more for an upgrade to finally run those games at acceptable performance on their next console. And in case you think this is me justifying piracy, I didn’t pirate the game; I didn’t play it at all.
I’m a competitive fighting game player, and the way they fight against their own fans for trying to compete in Smash Bros. is atrocious.
They sue and go after emulation projects/ROM sites for modern content just as much as Microsoft and Sony do, MS/Sony just get a pass for some reason. Probably because people try to pirate current-gen content less for them, but they do the exact same thing every time it happens. Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part. Also, it must be said that several times that emu/ROM sites were shut down and Nintendo was blamed it turned out it wasn’t actually Nintendo. Same thing with that whole streaming copystrike issue- turns out it was some random company taking down gameplay videos, not Nintendo.
Sony already does this too, yet again they pretty much universally get a pass for making you permanently lose almost all (if not all) your stuff if you let your sub lapse. Even if you resub, you don’t get it back.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Entirely fair. My understanding is that they’re getting better at this, but after the shitshow that was brawl that’s a low fucking bar. I could point out that smash bros isn’t actually Nintendo (it was HAL, then Sora, then Bandai) but like… lets be real here, it’s Sakurai running the show, and Sakurai basically is working for Nintendo even if he isn’t employed there lol.
Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part.
They absolutely do. And again, I probably wouldn’t mind if all of the sites they shut down were hosting games that could be legally purchased in a consumer friendly way, but they can’t. Shutting down the Switch emulator built on ill-gotten code is one thing; buying out the legitimate Switch emulator is a super dick move.
Sony already does this too
Thanks for reminding me. I don’t think of Sony much at all, honestly, but they do tend to lock their retro games behind a subscription, some of which can only be played that way. I think they tend to be time-limited and eventually return to sale in most cases? So not quite as bad as what Nintendo does, but still not admirable. I know you went in a different direction with this, but their subscription incentives are theirs to decide; I just hate it when something is only available via subscription when it doesn’t have to be.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Boycott is a strong word. All of the other reasons I don’t buy their stuff is because of what they do with the revenue that I would give them, but in this case in particular, it’s because I don’t buy bad products when I can instead buy good products. I’m certainly not about to spend $530 plus sales tax to play Tears of the Kingdom at acceptable frame rates on a machine that’s going to sit under my TV collecting dust when I’m done with the game. I already have a PC that could run it if they made it available there, and it would still run it better than Switch 2. Of course they’re doing what they’re doing because it’s more lucrative for them, but if that’s not aligned with what matters to me, then I’m not inclined to give them my money. There are so many other games out there worth playing instead that respect me more as a customer.
No, it’s a sad tale that would be amusing if it wasn’t real people, and has occupied a lot of brain time at 4chan and among gamergate-involved persons. If you want to know more, knowyourmeme has a reasonably objective article.
My understanding is the drama from resulted in him leaving before BL3 was written
Borderlands 3 sold over 20 million, that’s pretty significant even if it is less than 2. The overall quality has certainly gone downhill, but sales is all the companies care about. In my experience boycotts by people who know what’s going on behind the scenes never amount to anything - it’s always the potential buyers who don’t know or care about that stuff that ultimately determine whether a game’s successful or not.
Ok let me Sheldon it for you: Yes, deals existed “back in the day” as the saying goes, but fans were not aware of (or reactive to) the business aspects of gaming enough for the deals to be the subject of headlines or controversy.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, just pointing out your example was a bit wild. I fully agree with your other point. Although I would also point out that the early exclusives were that simply because it just didn’t occur to devs to release a game on more than one console.
Gamers who get mad having to wait for company logos to show while games boot: They have to disclose every piece of software they use to make every game! I want my games 100% hand crafted and bespoke. I want to sense the life people spent meticulously crafting mudsplat_texture_1 - mudsplat_texture_500. Also no crunch (and no bugs, obviously)
It’s just reality. Selecting a bunch of textures nobody has seen before through AI but hand crafting the rest of the game would force them to wear the scarlet letters on their front, and open them up to brigading by the brainwashed NeoLuddite mob. That move by steam to appease the pitchfork masses is pretty heavy handed.
even if I accept your premise of a “brainwashed NeoLuddite mob,” you’re still wrong on the simple principle of arguing against a company properly labeling what their product is or how it was made.
When a company makes a product completely by hand, but uses AI for a few translations it gets the same label as a game pumped out of Grok and uploaded untouched. That label is misleading and punitive, not informative.
Showing that even a small non-issue use of AI will be detected is a pretty strong incentive for other games to disclose that willingly. Otherwise, why would they admit to it if no one can tell? Morals??? 😂😂😂
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection https://amzn.to/40kncwB. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Me and the boys being worried for our jobs as automation stretches onwards and just wanting some level of guarantee that good paying jobs will still be available 😭
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne