He’s wrong. It seems that people are trending towards game subscriptions like game pass. It makes sense, people won’t finish bg3 once let alone multiple times. They don’t need to own the game outright they can play it on their gsmepass subscription for a month then move on to whatever is in next month’s pass.
Failed to reach target isn’t a sign gamepass is failing. They have 30 million subscribers. In only 4 years they’ve gone from 10 to 30 million and seem to still be growing.
Didn’t imply it was failing, hell they’ve announced they’re making profit off of the service, I’m pointing out that your hypothesis that people are trending toward game subscriptions is weak.
Let’s look at it this way, there are 132 million active steam users and game pass is at 30 million with new game pass subscribers are beginning are slowing down and seeming like it’s reaching a plateau.
Here have another article that goes a little more in depth at the current situation with game pass subscribers.
That article is only speculating that the gamepass user growth has slowed or reached a plateau. Even if we say that gamepass has reached its peak thats 30million people subscribing monthly. Platstation plus is at 50million monthly subscribers. BG3 is estimated to have sold 7m copies so they aren’t exactly in a position to say what the market wants.
Subscribing to gamepass is better value than buying the games outright. The up and coming generations are far less opposed to subscriptions and as they get older and have more money I see them just paying $10-15 a month for an endless supply of games. Maybe they buy a few games here and there the ones they know they will play a lot of.
I obviously havent thought much about it and am just kneejerk reacting to the headline. While I do think the apatite for full priced, fully developed, content rich games is there and BG3 proves to developers that its viable. I also think that subscription bundles and games that release with only core content and use microtransactions or subsciptions to fund developement of more content are easier to make, easier to get investors and overall safer to pull off and that is why I believe the market is trending towards games as a service.
Valve has wrapped the banhammer in tinsel, adding a lovely Christmassy flavour to their anti-smurfing actions. Players who have been banned for smurfing are finding a Highly Toxic Lump of Coal in their accounts, a ‘Seasonal Reward’.
I tried CS2 on my Deck after the update. I only tried against bots on Italy but found that given the hardware, it ran surprisingly OK. 40 FPS with default settings. Obviously the controls are not so great. I’ve read somewhere later that resetting Steam Input for this game to defaults is required but didn’t know that at the time.
Btw I played with the Deck on a stand and my left hand on the controller part while my right hand held a Bluetooth mouse.
Is that… comfortable? That sounds like a really awkward way to play.
It was kinda OK. It actually had the benefit of analog movement as compared to WASD. Biggest downside was the small screen.
Any reason you didn’t do all in on the controller or keyboard+mouse?
The game did not seem to work with controller only and forced me to use the trackpads and I cannot play FPS games with just a controller anyway. As for why no keyboard, the answer is simple: I was too lazy to get up and get my BT keyboard and my USB C dock (all my Deck accessories are stored in a dedicated bag).
Can agree to this, I’ve tried to play but it plays at like 30fps and the controls are all messed up all the menu based stuff is gone it’s actually awful.
I have played last epoch for hundreds of hours as well, and I will say I really enjoy it. It’s my go-to ARPG because the skill system feels so damn good. It isn’t the mess of nodes that PoE is, and it isn’t the very braindead level of skills that Diablo 3 had (haven’t played 4 because blizzard). Pretty much every skill has its own skill tree, and you can often make skills cast other skills or find awesome synergies and the game excels at giving you the power to make your own build and have it actually work.
Other notes, the crafting system is absolutely fantastic. You will end up crafting all the time, not just at endgame and it feels so good, and is very easy to understand without being braindead.
Most of the endgame content is great, but it just needs more and extra of it. They have a few dungeons that do different specific things, so you don’t necessarily go there to farm, you go there because you want some feature or thing that place has. It’s a really fun system.
I will say at 0.9.2 there are still some issues with multiplayer sync, so if you want to wait til 1.0 to play it with bros then understandable. What a fun game IMO though.
Just speculation here, but is this a sign that CDPR is tilting more towards mainstreaming GOG over prioritizing game development? Valve did exactly that with Steam and they very, very rarely release games they make any more.
Steam is a cash cow that literally just prints money for them. I’d imagine CDPR corpos to be salivating over that kind of low maintenance income that comes with owning a large digital distribution gaming platform.
Extremely lazy and scammy way to get your customers to make the content for you for free (and as a result what little content there is is absolute garbage).
Just an excuse to implement always-online DRM.
Either subscription based or ridden with pay to win microtransactions, or both. In any case, evidently not worth a fraction of what you end up paying for it, and therefore a scam.
Extremely hostile and unenjoyable experience.
Nothing wrong with being a masochist, but I ain’t one.
I play games to get away from people, not to get an overdose of the damn fuckers. If I for some self destructive reason wanted that I could just go outside.
And, in this particular case, means the game is being sold as a successor to something it’s the opposite of, making it extremely offensive and even more of a scam than most multiplayer games.
Alright, I accept this is your opinion but the overall aversion to multiplayer on Lemmy surprises me. Games have historically been multiplayer experiences since human existence. Go back thousands of years to ancient mesopotamia and people will play games with each other. And even in videogames, they play a huge part. I’ve had countless fun hours in games like Super Smash Bros., Minecraft multiplayer or Team Fortress 2 and I’m always looking forward to multiplayer experiences that look interesting. I’m not sure what you mean by
get your customers to make the content for you for free
in this particular case. Do the devs have a bad track record when it comes to this? Because it’s not something exclusive to online games by any means.
Anyway I understand the title rubs people the wrong way because it’s nonsene of course, but I don’t get the hate. It’s almost like people want the same old stuff wrapped in a new shell over an over again when they criticize studios solely for going into a new direction instead of making yet another sequel.
get your customers to make the content for you for free
I mean that (besides always-online DRM, and scamming your victims with subscriptions and microtransactions) the main reason for perpetrating an online multiplayer computer game is that you can get away with not writing a story, or lore, or quests, or puzzles, or NPCs, or AI, or any actual gameplay, or anything even remotely resembling a proper game through the magic of scamming your customers (or rather victims) into paying you for the privilege of filling in the gaps and acting as NPCs, and gameplay, and whatnot.
You get away with selling the rotting carcass of what could have been a game, and scamming your customers into believing it’s still alive just because it’s (temporarily) crawling with maggots.
I can get any old single player game and, provided I can replicate its environment, play it and enjoy it just as much as I could have when it came out, or even more.
Even if it was possible to enjoy an online game, on the other hand, it will have been stillborn to start with, a mere shell of a game, an insult to real games, a sad parody only resembling a game as long as there’s enough victims trapped in the scam; the second they start leaving (supposing the scammers don’t turn the servers off before that, to drive their victims to their latest shiny defecation) it’ll go back to being the empty unplayable shell it’s always been, utterly devoid of enjoyability or replayability.
The very concept is insulting, revolting, and a clear intentional predatory attack on computer game players and the very concept of computer games.
Online computer games are not games. They’re a cheap (as long as you can afford the initial investment), fast, and easy way of extracting as much wealth as possible from their customers using the least effort.
The companies making them don’t care about computer games, or about whatever setting they’re raping and tearing apart in order to promote their crap, or about their customers. They just care about extracting as much wealth as possible from them, and moving on to their next scam.
And if left unchecked they’ll destroy the very concept of computer games as an art form, or even as an industry, and they won’t care, because they’ll have already extracted everything they could.
None of the downsides you’ve mentioned are exclusive to online games, though. Publishers put these mechanics in single player games as often as they do it in online games so you criticism doesn’t make much sense here, to be honest. There are also countless online games that don’t have any of those things.
Only online “games” this maybe wouldn’t apply to would have to be peer to peer, serverless, and probably open source to be safe… and, even then, you’d have to provide a sufficient amount of players to replay them a decade on, as, lacking any actual game, they’re useless without other players.
As for offline games, sure, publishers might attempt to use them in the same way, but it’s much more expensive since a minimum amount of game must actually exist in order for players to fall for it, and they can’t fake it using other players. Asset flips are obviously a thing, but easily detected and avoided. And, most importantly, even those will remain equally playable or unplayable in a few decades, while an online “game” will be unplayable the instant it doesn’t have enough players.
I think what he means is multi-player games are typically cheaper than single-player because the devs make 6 maps or whatever and let the players loose.
A full campaign requires a lot more work to keep it interesting for more than a few minutes.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Mutliplayer games are a huge undertaking because you have no choice but to develop and test for any possible individuality and keep pushing new patches so the game can keep running smoothly. Not to speak of server costs and complex match making systems that typically come with it. No, multiplayer games are hard to make and they’re rarely ever finished.
Well… saying something is a spiritual successor to deus ex and then saying it is a multilayer title is doing what exactly? Clickbait? In what way is it a spiritual successor then? I dont mind mp, I mind being misled.
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