Blame the gray resellers. If the world courts had found those sites illegal, then devs could likely still set regional prices without having 90% of them getting resold to the outside world.
On the one hand, happy to get the opportunity… on the other hand, this kind of just increases the testing overhead needed to finalise the preview version and ship the final version to more devices. Win some, lose some.
Yeah, but let’s be real here, it would totally be just like Valve to make a GPU and somehow be like one of the best ones at the time and never make another one again.
Yup, Intel is struggling to enter the market, and they’ve been building similar chips for years. This just isn’t an area for someone like Valve to break into.
Maybe they could make a good cooler design or something, but they’re going to be using off the shelf chips, or maybe slightly altered custom chips like they did with the Steam Deck.
That’s not damning. That’s how franchises work. Sequels come with an audience built-in, so they can pull a bigger budget on expected sales and spend less of it on marketing.
How recently was this not true?
Seriously. Ten-ish years ago, the big releases were Halo, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Xcom, Zelda. If not all ten years old at that point - spiritual successors to much older games. Twenty years ago, the big releases were Tony Hawk, Mario Kart, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Sonic… Elder Scrolls, GTA, Zelda. Thirty years ago, when home video games were just barely fifteen years old, half the big names were either direct sequels or media adaptations, and most would become long-running franchises. Shockingly, one title was already a decade-old franchise: Super Bomberman.
Now consider the games he’s talking about, today. Halo’s not on that list anymore. It’s there. But it’s not big. Deus Ex is dead again. The specific aforementioned Tony Hawk game killed Tony Hawk games. Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden came and went. GTA and the Elder Scrolls haven’t released a game since, technically speaking.
Meanwhile the last two Zelda games are a more radical departure than anything since that awkward NES sidescroller. FromSoft keeps doing FromSoft stuff, but that’s more of a genre than a franchise. Baldur’s Gate III is a sequel twenty-three years later, in a genre that was niche then and niche-er since. There’s big-budget remakes of stuff from the PS1 / PS2 era, but they’re practically brand-new games. Tony Hawk, ironically, less so.
Some of the big-ass games ten years from now will be surprise hits and slow-burn successes from the last few years. Some games will get a quality-bump sequel that takes off, and then if we’re being brutally honest, a publisher like Microsoft will squeeze the life out of the studio by forcing them to crank out more of that until they hate everything. And people in 2033 will complain on probably-not-Lemmy that Sea Of Stars V is such a tired rehash after the highs of IV, and why does nothing new ever come along?
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