But… the defenders of multi billion dollar corporations told me that I was a crybaby for not wanting to create an account at a company who has had several outages and security incidents over the years. I can’t believe they were wrong.
Yeah, some of the Steam reviews on God of War Ragnarok were almost exactly like this.
“Oh, no! You have to use a third-party login to play your game! Get over it, it’s a great game, who cares about you having to go out of your way to arbitrarily create an account for a platform you’ve never used before!” - essentially.
Didn’t they lift the PSN account requirement on PC just a few days ago? Imagine if they could not play the game during the outage, if Sony didn’t lift the requirements. I kinda would have loved to see this, because it could mean a huge shift in gaming based on real world proof.
Well, we already have the proof, because it was broken on PS5.
If Sony had held firm on a PSN sign-in for Helldivers 2, it would have been just as borked on PC as it was on console. Ditto for if Sony had retained its log-in requirement for singleplayer games: You could effectively play God of War Ragnarok offline after creating or logging into a PSN account (unless you opted for a handy mod), but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
I want to address this section by the author. Should any old disc drive work offline? Yes. Do PlayStation’s? No.
In the interest of saving money, Sony doesn’t pre-pay for the Blu-Ray Disc Association License, so they use the internet to know when to pay the license fee on behalf of the user. So from a legal standpoint by an entity which does not want to get sued, their course of action to save money requires this.
I read an article testing the same disc drive in multiple PlayStations and they continued to work. My guess is that Sony pays for console X to be able to use a disc drive when one is inserted, and then pays for console Y when one is inserted. They probably can check the ID of the disc drive, but they also probably don’t care that much.
It looks real good, but I’m still playing Aginst thr Storm, and will probably give Farthest Frontier a try before goong into this one. Still, it’s on my list!
I honestly loved it almost instantly, especially with the aspect that each settlement is a short time investment of a gaming session with semi randomized goals and build orders to get to those. While there are still overarching goals for the game as a whole.
Yeah, it’s pretty okay and all, but the hype made it out to be cooler than it was, in my opinion. I’ve been playing Foundation the last day or two and I find it way more addictive, satisfying, and unique, so far. Maybe I just need to revisit Manor Lords. The trailers made the combat out to be Mount and Blade-esque, so I think that’s what really underwhelmed me. It felt more like Civilization-style “throw a bunch of units at the bad guy” combat.
after you hit the 10-15 hours mark you are just looking around like Travolta, that’s it? yep that’s it… no more content. Potential is there but will the devs deliver it? not so sure. Atm the game is overpriced.
A great game for sure. Probably my most awaited game release.
Only issue is that I need to finish factorio before that release and I wasn’t expecting the factorio DLC to extend the game by like 3x…
Anyway Manor lords was my most played single player game for 2024 in its rather barebone build and it was already a blast. Something that brings back when I was playing Settlers as a kid but with modern graphics.
It is advanced access, however Firaxis did an announcement shortly after release, addressing the rocky release and promising to fix things, where they (accidentally) called it early access. It seems they changed that now, still, it was there (and was made fun of) in forums and other Lemmy like communities.
I just checked and nearly choked. I’ve played every single Civ game ever made. As much as I love the series, there’s no way in hell I’m paying AU$160 for a base game.
It does include the first two expansions that will come out and leader packs and shit. I have sunk far more hours into civ than any other game. I very rarely buy a game, maybe twice a year. So it was worth it to me. I’ll play it for 500+ hours and at that point it’s 30 cents an hour of entertainment.
Veilgaurd was a perfectly good game. It’s not a 10/10, but despite some flaws, I’ve had a great time playing it. Too bad some business suit says it’s not “successful” enough to warrant a follow-up.
I’d like to see how they measured success. Was it to break even? Well from what point? Including the time that it was supposed to be a live service game? Through the committees and executives shutting down ideas? It was in the top 10 for games on Steam that week and had generally favorable reviews. If that didn’t match their plan, that’s on them.
Ordered merch from Bioware mid-November for an xmas present. It arrived Jan 4th; they shipped the wrong product.
Contacted them 3 seprate times through their ‘contact us’ page and got ignored for 3 weeks. It wasn’t until I filed a chargeback with my cc that they finally emailed me (4 days after submission).
I had asked for my money back in my various emails; but they didn’t respond to that at all and just shipped me a new package.
Still haven’t gotten that, so no idea if they actually shipped the right item this time. It’s not listed on their site anymore; so they likely don’t have inventory to ship.
We’ll see what’s in the box whenever it gets here.
Yeah, the silver lining of the whole gaming industry fallout is that the indie game scene has never been better. I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t had a good top-down zeldalike in a long time, echoes of wisdom notwithstanding even though the formula is pretty altered. Someone pointed me in the direction of Master Key and it was an incredibly satisfying time. Almost like it would have fit in perfectly between LoZ 1 and Link’s Awakening.
You can’t build a game studio without funding, and that is where the problem lies…
Publishers have become very risk-averse ever since Embracer went downhill. They basically only invest in <literally the same game as some previously successful title>…
It isn’t that easy to go indie though, unless you do gamedev as a hobby and have another source of income.
I am working at what was a small studio (about 10 persons) when I joined, and has meanwhile grown to more than 50 employees.
I am a coder, and therefore don’t have direct insight into our finances, so please take everything below with a grain of salt. It is also intentionally vague because I don’t want to violate any NDAs.
Over the years we have started two indie projects, that both were completed and released, but both in the end had a publisher funding a part of the development. So, while they were indie initially, the released products cannot be called indie any more… The reason why we went for publisher contracts for those two projects were manyfold, but an important part was simply that we needed a way to cover our running costs. We are doing gamedev as a day-job, after all, so it needs to pay for our rent, food, etc… (Other important reason for going with a publisher were marketing, customer support,… All the things that we as developers have no experience in.)
Now that we have grown to medium studio size, we are hoping that we can at some point fund an indie project by making enough profit with other, publisher-funded projects. We have several projects running in parallel anyhow, and if 3 of them would yield enough money to pay a 4th project that would be fully our own, we would definitely go for it.
However, the market situation is tough, and we currently cannot afford to do that. Almost all profit we make goes into developing prototypes that we need in order to have a realistic chance to get the next publisher-funded project…
Two years ago it was a lot easier to get publisher contracts. Back then we were quite optimistic about being able to fund a fully independent project, but then the market changed, getting new publisher-funded projects has become a lot more difficult, and right now doing an indie project is (for us) not financially possible…
So, what we are doing now is that we are taking our game ideas and presenting them to publishers. The prottypes I mentioned? Most of them are for our own ideas. Having something the people at the publisher can play goes a long way in convincing them that a game-idea is fun. That’s not indie, but it is as close as we can get to making the games we want to make. While the last year has been tough, with publishers being very, very, very cautious about new ideas, the situation seems to slowly change, and we might eventually get funding for one of our own ideas. Maybe. If we are lucky.
There are also going to be lots of talent who permanently leave the industry because there are no longer any stable decent paying jobs at larger studios.
pcgamer.com
Najnowsze