Marketing is far from dead. Larian themselves used it to great effect with BG3. Does no one remember the announcement trailer released for BG3 well in advance of any gameplay footage? That’s marketing, though and through. And yes, it worked plenty well on me. A D&D game based around Mind Flayers, made by the folks behind Divinity Original Sin? Shut up and take my money. Also, when I noticed the outline of a Nautiloid ship in the background, I may have needed a change of shorts.
The difference with BG3 was that Larian didn’t just pull an Edward Bernays style marketing as a con. They delivered a good product, worked with players to fix any issues and have gone above and beyond supporting the game after release. They have done everything right to build long term customer relationships. Maybe they don’t reach the same level of profits some other companies might, by stuffing microtransactions in every orifice. But, I suspect they are profitable and seem to be better built be continue long term and not have to tear the company up and saddle one of those pieces with insane amounts of debt.
While I can’t promise that I’ll buy their next game, I’ll undoubtedly keep an eye out for it. Larian puts out a quality product and doesn’t fuck their customers. That’s what makes their brand of marketing work.
It’s a shame, but people are asking for it when they buy, and therefore support, these kind of games. If people simply refused to buy always-online games, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Well, there's the other route. If they are forced legally to comply, which is what Ross is trying to get done, and is the far better option alongside being more expensive and difficult, because a company's reaction to finances can be reversed as soon as it doesn't matter or the public forgets.
The biggest reason I never bought this game. I didn’t know they’d go to this length, but knew that they’d be shutting off servers at some point and the game would be worthless. All that money anyone spent on it and the in-game items is now gone. All in Ubisoft’s pocket and all you’re left with is memories of playing the game. Wanna go back for some nostalgia? lol, no, fuck you. Just wait and hope a sequel will get released so they can continue the cycle.
Wonderful news! I have never played and don’t intend to, but I’m happy for everybody involved.
Let’s hope the team will lead with example and that this event opens up for the possibility for other online games to be preserved in a similar fashion.
CS2 is infintely worse imo than CS:GO. Yes, the maps got updated but local multiplayer works way worse and the bots are a laughable mess. Took me days to get working properly on debian too.
This is only using on-screen information, but making it more visible? Why is this a cheat, exactly? Was that one guy cheating in the shooter game where his cat would paw at the screen when it noticed invisible people moving with a Predator-like shimmer effect?
This article didn’t research the VR bits…Gabe has said multiple times, even recently, that they are working steadily on VR and it’s hardware. Their next headset even has a codename, Deckard.
Also, I don’t think most people realize Valve doesn’t have much of an internal structure. It more resembles a community of people working together because they want to.
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn’t suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?
I think it’s just priorities, those other companies weren’t interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.
Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.
At this point it’s actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don’t understand, but also the stuff most people don’t see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they’ve done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.
Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they’re simply not going to be able to.
IMO my favorite launcher to use out of all is probably Battle.net, even over Steam. This is probably mostly because Steam is terrible unresponsive and its startup is still kinda ass (I just tested the start and noticed its 3 fucking loading screens: Verifying installtion, Logging in and finally loading the page. All as separate windows).
If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.
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