“I do think, though”, he concedes, “we have stumbled, and it feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before.”
“And a lot of this is very mystical because I’m trying to avoid to tell you what it’s like. But it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience”
I’m not really familiar with those games, only with the infamousness of molyneux, but wasn’t the player’s actions leaving behind a pretty clear effect on the world a common theme in those games? That may have been what he was referring too.
It may also be him naming those because those games were the heights that he wants to go back to. The games he had made when he was still relevant must be much more present in his mind than they are in ours.
it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience
Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…
In an actual free market all the corporations would act like this, because shit like this is what people want out of a business they patronize.
You will recall that there was a bit of a fuss a month or so ago when an undoubtedly-harried GameStop employee stapled some customer receipts directly to Nintendo Switch 2 boxes—and through the boxes, and into the Switch 2 units themselves. It was all quickly resolved, without lawsuits or fistfights, and with the ugliness now behind it GameStop is looking to make some proverbial lemonade by auctioning off the Switch 2 killer for charity.
No lawsuits, no fight required by affected consumers
The company made it right and turned a bad situation into a PR move that helps a charity.
I really thought we’d see some kind of ethical capitalism out of the whole GameStop thing but it never really spread.
Nintendo was able to sue palworld using a patent that didn’t exist before palworlds release. It’s not right, but they can do whatever they want regardless of what the law says.
People say this, but I believe it is mostly technically untrue. It’d be a relatively easy argument to say that a downloaded ROM that isn’t exactly the digital copy YOU purchased with a license would be seen as not legal.
However some people talk about literally ripping the game off the physical device themselves, hence copying their own copy of it. Now you are in grey territory of making copies of copyrighted materials, and in the case of more modern games like the last decade, they almost assuredly have language that specifies you don’t actually own the code and all that.
All I’m saying is be careful and probably refrain from repeating the fallacy that owning a game makes emulation of it legal, because that implies having the ROM is legal and that’s doubtful.
Copying your own game and materials for backup purposes is no grey area, and neither is development or use of emulators, and panicky, uninformed spewing of gut feelings are how public knowledge of your actual rights gets muddled into people with zero knowledge waxing poetic about how they THINK it works because they like games and think that makes their ramblings valuable.
/edit: I was WRONG. This is my memory failing me. I explain it further below, and apologize for wasting any time.
After the DMCA passed there was a case of a judge finding it legal to bypass DRM to make backup copies, but illegal to distribute the software used to do so. I have no idea if there was ever further clarification or new law about this. That was like 20 years ago. It was part of a case going after the company who was making the software, but the name slips my mind. I’ll try to look it up if anyone cares enough and wants to look for something more than hearsay on a forum.
I get you! I was bigger into copyright some 20-30 years ago myself when we would’ve all been on Slashdot.
To that end, I was WRONG in my post, I think I was conflating two things, and for that, I’m sorry. I was certainly thinking in part about Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley (2001). That was the case that decided that the software DeCSS was illegal, and you could distribute the software. I was thinking that while the court did agree with Universal over the software, that it did not find that breaking DRM on a product you owned was inherently illegal. (I legit think this was a “take” at the time. Probably wouldn’t hold up in court these days, sadly.) And I did find that years later the Library of Congress offered exemptions for breaking DRM on some hardware (vehicles, medical devices,) but I believe even those were temporary and have since lapsed.
Sorry I spoke so surely about something I was wrong about.
Not to be a stickler, but this does not say making copies is illegal - it makes circumvention of drm methods illegal. You can make drm’d copies as you like as long as you don’t circumvent the drm method. If your game isn’t encrypted, and the emulator doesn’t implement the drm, you haven’t circumvented drm - you are playing your legal copy on a device that does not implement the drm. It’s distinct from removing the drm from a device that implements it.
I do get that most consoles encrypt their software these days, but let’s be clear - it’s not as simple as “DRM means you have no rights.”
I don’t agree with any of that noise around the DMCA for the record. I feel like we effectively lost our right to archival copies.
On a PC, what you said about copying the DRM along with the data is largely true. It is possible sometimes to copy the DRM and reproduce the image with the DRM intact. It also might not be depending upon the copy protection mechanism. Commercial video DVDs used to employ tricks with the storage sector that made it almost impossible to properly copy by a standard computer disc drive. You could get around this with additional program like AnyDVD, but that was only available for sale outside the USA because of the fact that it allowed you to bypass DRM.
And like you said, the content can be encrypted. Decrypting it is, IIRC, considered bypassing DRM - at least in the USA.
Again, I don’t agree that this is how things should be, but the legality of emulation is complicated depending upon what we’re talking about emulating.
I also don’t like how things are legally speaking with DMCA, but the main takeaway is - the creation and distribution of an emulator, without DRM protections, is unequivocally protected and legal. ROM backup is certainly in most cases not, but if you are making your own copies for your own use, even while illegally breaking encryption, it would be difficult to prove and prosecute on an individual basis.
The right we must continually remind people is NOT even REMOTELY in question is the right to create and distribute emulators. This is by far the more important one, because people cannot reasonably develop their own emulators - it requires an open, collaborative community to ensure future preservation, and it’s a constant battle to keep people from actively trying to cede this right because they have nebulous loyalties to soulless companies that return no such feelings.
The emulation itself is legal, assuming you’re not using any copyrighted code, BIOS, etc. to make work.
The backup copy of your game that you need can be made legally as well, but in the USA, if the source contains a form of DRM, then you cannot legally make a copy.
Time will tell. I mean, he’s not wrong. I think it’s pretty clear that studios have to make profitable games at the cost of interesting games. But it’s not like msft or anyone else is going to change their behavior. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to profit as much as possible.
This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
Features that had to be cut because they lack the time to implement it, so basically “large scope games take too long to make”.
One feature was also removed because of player feedback, so the issue there is talking about features before they were tested. This issue stems from their lack of PR expertise, but it means they weren’t lying when they said it.
Except weren’t they still promoting those features at launch? And they had taken preorders before review embargoes were lifted.
Both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk both had dishonest marketing and significant bugs. Call me crazy, but if a game isn’t ready to launch, it shouldn’t launch. The developer sets the launch date, and if they didn’t give themselves enough time, it’s not reasonable to ask the people who have paid for he thing as advertised to wait because they couldn’t deliver the features as promised.
As much fun as I’m having with starfield(150 hours since September 1st, because yes I pre-ordered but it was also the first time I’d pre ordered a game in a very very long time ) that was my take on a lot of its issues. I won’t say they did no QA playthrough but it certainly feels like they didn’t do enough and that was after delaying the game even for like an additional 2 years. Supposedly they were all set to launch the game in late 2021 but Phil Spencer paid them to work on bug fixes for longer. Then nonsensical design choices like not having med pack counters where your grenade counter is or a “current equiped power” info area above your current equiped weapon info area on the HUD in 2021 or 2023 is laughably unthinkable. But the meat of the game has been worth the questionable sourced veggie “bugs” on the burger as a whole imo.
You See advertisements for a big, thick, juicy black angus burger. Stacked with garden fresh tomato, lettuce, onion, with a side of the best onion rings man can make, for an ultra premium price (at least for those who actually paid money for it, Some of us got it free with a different purchase, and arent so heavily invested in it financially that we’re more free to criticize it, and the ridiculous price for what you get)
So you buy it
and what you got was a thin patty with a texture and taste that doesnt match any of your expectations of meat, much less black angus. The greenery is small, disappointing, and utterly tasteless and completely missable if you didnt open bun to go hunt for it… and instead of onion rings, you got some weird, oily, deep fried brussel sprouts instead.
and the Chef comes out and tells you “Of course the burgers mostly empy. We made it that way because the universe is mostly empty. Get used to it and upgrade your expectations”
Some people might be able to force themselves to enjoy that burger, by throwing salt and pepper and whatever else they can on the bland, tasteless, amorphus “meat”, but that doesnt mean its a super premium burger. and it certainly doestnt mean that its what you were sold, and ordered.
The worst thing about Stadia was the squandered opportunities. Had Google actually put some effort into marketing it, it could have really succeeded. The tech behind it worked amazingly well. I played Destiny 2 on it from launch to the service's shutdown, and it was a fantastic experience. The latency was nowhere near as bad as people (who often never even tried the platform) would claim, and it was also the best place to play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, as it was somehow the most stable version of the game. Streaming to YouTube worked very well, and some of the integrated features with YouTube (where viewers could interact with certain games) were also kinda groundbreaking.
But somehow, Google couldn't be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn't make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that. They refused to inform the public about what the product is or how it worked or what stood it apart from its competition, which led to bad-faith reviews and rumors being spread about the platform, ultimately leading to most people who knew about Stadia being wildly misinformed on it.
It's such a shame. I absolutely loved Stadia. It fit my needs perfectly. None of the other streaming platforms I've tried have even come close, even today.
Yeah a product like that needs a Big Personality to be a sort of spokesperson for it. To go around and do the press circuit, and be the face of the product. Get memed, etc.
My guess is it was just a bunch of well meaning nerds behind this one, and no one wanted to actually go out there and bat for it.
But you don’t need PS+ for Spider-Man and Horizon? And you could buy and sell the console + games after playing the two games you wanted to play on the platform.
It’s not as convenient as just streaming the games, but it is possible.
I wouldnt call a PS4 e-waste, if the PS2 is anything to go by it will end up cycling about for a long time in some shape or form. Seriously PS2 parts are a solid mix of old new stock, newly manufactured parts, or spares taken from scrapped dead consoles.
Regular use is irrelevant so long as it doesnt end up in a land fill, what matters is that they get some continued use and survive in solid enough numbers.
Eh, I will still be able to play the base game of say far cry 4 or assassins creed black flag. I have the disks, and even then you could always buy the versions that have all the dlc. Nobody talks about the fable 1 dlc but they existed.
Unless its a multiplayer focused game there will always be games to play on it, even if ya dont get the DLC.
Would’ve loved a streaming platform that doesn’t cost a whole console in a year in subscription fees + makes you pay for the games
Stadia's subscription service wouldn't have cost more than a console for several years. It was only $10/month, and also not required to play the games or use multiplayer.
It would've taken over 4 years for Stadia Pro's subscription costs to reach the price of a PS5, not even including a PS+ subscription. And during that time, you'd have been able to claim ~150 free games. Realistically, Stadia had the potential to be more economic than buying a console.
I got one, was super disappointed with the functionality and didn’t like it at all. Returned it in less than a week. I got it after it’d already been steeply discounted and was so glad I hated it and got a refund when they killed it…
After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.
Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.
I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.
The subscription fee was for a gamepass-like access to a catalog of free games, so they didn’t refund that. The subscription fee also wasn’t required for playing purchased games (although it was required for 4K quality).
especially with a controller
I mostly used keyboard and mouse with the service, since the games I like to play tend to work better with keyboard and mouse. I had a dinky underpowered laptop but was playing AAA PC-oriented games through the browser interface. It was great.
I’m on GeForce Now these days but I find that it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as Stadia did.
It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.
I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.
I pulled them all from Google Takeout. Most of them are unusable unless I figure out how to convert them to a state that can be read by other platforms, but at least I still have them, for such a day.
But somehow, Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that.
Google is really bad at marketing despite being an advertising company. Most of the products they’ve launched then shut down I just never heard of, despite finding the ideas behind them really enticing after the fact.
In my experience it was pretty shit. While visiting family in Minnesota, I got a better experience using Steam remote play to my desktop in Seattle than I did using Stadia, both in terms of latency and visual quality. I’m sure it would have been better living in California or New York, where you’re closer to a datacenter. But Doom Eternal was just unplayable for me.
Despite Google being heavily invested in the advertising space, they have always been terrible at advertising their own products. It almost seems like the top brass don’t actually care about their non-search products at all.
Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. Except, apparently, to me specifically. I must have seen the same handful of Stadia advertisements literally 100+ times while watching YouTube. I got very sick of it after a certain point.
He says that like big budget studios are barely scraping by. Piss off. AAA games are massively profitable. What he really means is that endless growth is the most important thing for investors/shareholders and that we should all just shut up and accept it.
They could get the regular £50 from me for the game, but their greed means they’ll get £0. I’ll just pirate it (if/when it releases on PC). And I’m sure there will be a lot of people with the same mindset.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
This is the solution moving forward and is probably what most studios are doing right now (see: publishers shelving low-profit studios, massive layoffs, etc.), but the issue is that the games launching right now with $70-100 price tags have been in development for years. Their budgets were written under contract during the boom a few years ago, they can’t just “unspend” that money, but at the same time, they’re probably seeing that gamers are being a lot tighter with their wallets these days.
I’m obviously never one to praise higher prices for the same thing, but I at least get why major releases are feeling justified to charge a higher door fee for the base game than to gamble on the freemium market (See: Concord).
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
So, their solution is to charge $90 (lets not kid ourselves, the premium, deluxe, anticipated access, special edition is going to be over $120), so even less people buy it?
LMAO, Rockstar made 9 billion dollars off GTAV micro-transactions. Fuck that noise, ain’t no one crying for billionaires. They could finance and market more than 40 different $200 million games, then give them away for free, and still break even! This is pure greed.
I like GOG, but this is just weasel-words to take advantage of the ignorance of the public. Whether you receive the installs directly or not, you still don’t own your games, you are just licensing them, same as Steam.
This doesn’t tip the scales into the “this is wrong” territory for me, but I do think this kind of word manipulation exploiting an unknowledgeable public is a little bit slimy.
edit: I had a bit of knee-jerk reaction to the sensationalism of the headline; what GOG actually says is fine and doesn’t imply anything beyond licensing in my eyes.
I don’t think “weasel words” is the right term here.
You own the GOG games like you own a book you bought, and like you don’t own a DRM-crippled book, even though you might be entitled to read it under certain circumstances. The difference between downloading an installer and downloading a game on Steam is, the installer will continue to work even if GOG folds or decides they don’t like you anymore. But if Steam blocks your account, all the games you bought are gone, and Steam is fully in the right to do so since you don’t own their games.
That’s not true. You still only receive a license to play the game, you do not own it. Directly from GOG’s website:
We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
Practically this means you cannot resell your GOG installer in the way you could resell a physical book.
I think OP is saying that, while you can buy a book to read it, you do not own the copyright to that book. They’re saying it’s basically the same idea with GOG.
The illustration does break down, but I think their point still stands.
I think it is fair. When you buy games through GOG, you get the offline installer. Nobody can take that away from you.
When you buy games through Steam, you can only install them via the Steam client. If the Steam servers are offline, you cannot install your games. In theory, some games are without any DRM, and you can just zip them up, but even then that doesn’t always work, and you shouldn’t have to. That’s not to take away from Steam, of course, it is great at what it does.
Providing an offline installer that works no matter what is as good as “owning” the game IMO, even if “technically” you are just purchasing a license to use the game.
edit: I went and read what GOG itself actually says. The headline is slimy, GOG’s disclosure is fine. I don’t think they’re implying anything beyond what they offer.
Are you referring to the use of the word “killshot”? Otherwise, the headline says exactly the same thing.
Its offline installers ‘cannot be taken away from you’
No implication of outright ownership, just that they can’t take away the offline installers. I mean, I guess it doesn’t outright say “that you’ve already downloaded,” but given the length, I’d say that’s a passable omission.
We don’t have to do this. It’s the juxtaposition of GOG’s claim paired being intentionally paired with the steam disclaimer so as to present it as if an alternative.
pcgamer.com
Ważne