I’d argue Steam is probably the among the most competitive digital marketplaces. No games are sold above their MSRP, there are frequent deals that drastically cut the prices, and the UI is clear & comprehensive.
Yeah it’s a bit convoluted and there are lots of things hidden in strange places imo. Steam deck is great tho, and the ui works well for a handheld in that context. On the other hand when I try to use big picture mode on my windows handheld, steam refuses to connect to wifi so there’s that 🤷
Coop is completely broken without this mod. A friend and I tried to play vanilla ER but 4/5 times the summon would fail, and 5/5 times I’d get invaded immediately.
Installed the mod and suddenly it all just worked.
Did something happen to the game that made it broken? I played this for the first few months when it dropped with about 3 other friends, and we never had those issues then. We would get invaded maybe 20% of the time, but 50% we actually would win, so it was fun.
The servers aren’t the best and it’s a highly popular game. Connection issues during peak times were pretty bad (and becoming a problem again as the DLC approaches) and the way invasions work, as soon as you have a summon you are almost guaranteed be invaded since invasions only get connected to hosts with phantoms (with it prioritizing 2 coop partners) or if they use the Taunter’s Tongue.
AI is the new procedural generation, in that it will be touted as making the games more real and immersive but really only makes them boring and repetitive, thus stressing the importance of genuine creative handcrafting. I’m looking forward to smaller studios selling their games with a “no AI” pitch in a few years.
I disagree that procedural generation makes games more boring and repetitive. I think it depends on the game and how the procedural generation is implemented. Look at Noita for example - uses lots of procedural generation, mixed with some handcrafted elements, and it’s really fun! Terraria, another similar formula.
Not my cup of tea, but a lot of people love No Man’s Sky for that reason - it’s fun to explore the crazy combinations.
The original Elite was procedurally generated IIRC, and from what I understand it was super fun (before my time though).
You’re allowed to like and enjoy things, even bad things… Hell, theres entire fandoms around liking bad things (like B-Movies), that doesnt make them less fundamentally bad. and it doesnt make you wrong for liking them.
The real message being sent is that you can release a $40 always-online PVE game with MTXs and rootkit anti cheat and gamers will tolerate all of it if they think it’s fun…
Appreciate you not jumping down my throat. You’re right, it is a low bar, and HD2 does clear it pretty easily. But you and I both know that publishers won’t hear the part about the game being fun (or they won’t care). My point isn’t that HD2 is bad, just that publishers will see its success and completely misinterpret why it’s successful. They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I haven’t really got into HD2, too online for my tastes, but I can see its appeal. I think there is a broader phenomenon of a divorce between where big studios are heading and where “traditional” players want to be.
They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
I can say, when you’re out there with your squad and it feels like space Vietnam, that’s why its selling. That portion of the atmosphere, gameplay, and intensity is on point
I suspect the difficulty the publishers face is that fun is difficult to quantify. The read on this might end up being “All things being equal, DRM/MTX/etc aren’t statistically impediments to financial success if the game is going to sell well anyway. If we percieve them to improve our bottom line, let’s include them”.
I wouldn’t mind live service games as much if these companies were forced to give up tools to allow the community to continue hosting.
Corporations have made it loud and clear over and over: they will torch every scrap of gaming culture if it meant an extra 20 bucks. They are NOT to be trusted with the preservation of this history.
It’s completely asinine for a game to cost this much, especially since it is going to be chock full of equally asinine microtransactions and costly DLC.
The “patient games” methodology is the best way to approach all gaming these days because, odds are, the game won’t be worth the $20-30 later price point anyway.
In my opinion game studios should not sell out to investors and/or have any stocks as it will lead to profit making the calls eventually. It is tempting to get a bunch of investment, I know it would make my game studio easier to run right now, but then you are constantly reminded how it all ends up. Don’t like the system, stop playing in it and build your company slowly and organically instead and retain full control.
Same goes for many businesses outside of gaming. Imagine if there was no such thing as the stock market / investors and all companies had to grow on their own merits.
In my virtual studio everyone is their own sole proprietorship contributing to the project off and on and getting compensated fairly for their contributions. They also have their own projects too and may even pay me to help them sometimes. This way everyone assumes their own risk and reaps their own benefits. If any one person on the virtual team has a hit with their project, they retain full control and owe no money back to some shareholders who did nothing but lend money to make money. It does mean I am way slower than if I could just hire everyone full time as employees, but knowing where having investors will ultimately take me, I accept. Plus going slower means more time to sit on things and polish and not feel time pressure to appease shareholders.
Shareholders are a little like getting a loan and depending on how successful you are, you have to pay back more than you borrowed and giving them control on your art. No thanks.
The CEOs of these investor funded companies have forgotten that investors are not their customers, gamers are. This will hurt them in the long run because they are pissing off their customer base, people who really given them money to appease their shareholders. It never ends well for the companies.
The investors are the ones forgetting that. CEOs work for the investors not for the customers.
Now, a good CEO will be able to manage upwards and throw around things like reputational damage and consumer trust to convince to keep the investors focused on the long term in order to protect the company (and the investors uhh… investment). The problem in the gaming industry is that time and time again gamers show that there’s no such thing as reputational damage with games since there are enough people building their personality around a gaming franchise that even studios with a reputation for consistently putting out mediocre unoriginal crap can count on a mountain of pre-orders.
Exactly. The last year of news full of mistreating game developers caused my to retune my news feeds and Steam wishlist to completely exclude all triple A titles.
There’s years and years worth of great gameplay I haven’t experienced yet in the Indie game market.
Well, procedural when applied to generation of scenery/galaxies etc means to create the exact same thing using random values that are the same random for everyone. It just saves on storage.
But, I cannot tell you how this would apply to recoil. It would only make sense if there were an absolutely huge number of possible weapons.
I am legally allowed to make backups of my hardcopies. I can very legally buy TOTK and dump a ROM for Yuzu. In fact, that is precisely what I did to get my copy for Yuzu.
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