It was pretty bad for a long time, but once they started letting users make their own hats and body models and shit, it got absurd. At least the games are usually just ripoffs, but the user-made catalog is just full of straight up model rips. I don't understand how they're not getting sued to oblivion for openly making money off of copyrighted material like that.
Indie developers are not immune to being bad people or making bad choices.
Saying “indie devs keep being the best devs” gives the impression that people can automatically trust all indie developers, which I am cautioning against. While it may be true right now that most indie developers are more likely to be “better” than AAA developers, that is not always true and can always change very rapidly.
Or is it just the ‘humans fighting giant machines’ part that they’re likening to Shadow of the Colossus Metal Gear Solid Horizon Zero Dawn?
Jokes aside, the standard of “could confuse consumers into mistaking one for another” was meant to prevent things like essentially typo-squatting in product names, e.g. going and making Orao cookies, instead of Oreo (which is why Oreo was able to copy Hydrox).
It wasn’t meant to just be about aping a concept or art style. No one would actually mistake “Light of Motiram” for “Horizon: Zero Dawn”.
Even if it was ripping on the other two games crossed out: Sony owns (or partially owns) those, too. They’re not suing over those games because… They’re theirs.
I agree with your latter paragraph but not the former. I’m really not liking these overbroad IP claims. This is almost worse than the Nintendo/Palworld stuff, which was already pretty bad.
Tencent may also be a villain, but if Sony gets its way here, it will be bad for games and other forms of expression.
It’s gonna depend on the game. It reads like it’s a system setting that games can read and adjust their resource demand. Like a game boots up and checks if power saving is turned on and if it is, renders at a lower resolution or something like that. The system software will probably do that as well.
That seems like a great idea. Now that so many games are much less demanding on your gaming machine than others (playing a Phoenix Wright game, or Stardew Valley, or Minecraft), holding back a bit of power makes a lot of sense. If implemented right, I imagine you wouldn’t see any effect from this on most games.
It is arguable how much it is needed if games/libraries are coded “correctly”.
If a game is not resource intensive it won’t consume a lot of resources. This is why people who don’t understand power supplies might pop a breaker if they boot up the least AAA game but won’t have issues playing Stardew and the like. Or why you can get a few hours out of some games on the Steam Deck and MAYBE an hour with others.
If this is meaningfully effective then it speaks to something with the underlying Sony libraries (I forget the technical term) space filling resources. It sees memory is free so it uses memory and so forth. Which is pretty common with a lot of database/queuing software and why good practices tend to be restricting those with VMs.
Nah. Fuck the remnants of polygon (buncha scabs) but I think they are right that this has to do with setting a threshold/target for a potential handheld SKU. Basically the same thing MS had with the Series X vs S.
Just to provide a bit more. A common way of thinking of it is you have a static and a dynamic energy cost. Running the CPU at all costs a certain amount of power (static). But doing actual work on it costs more power on top (dynamic). So a completely idle chip is just the static and a balls to the walls run is static and 100% of the dynamic.
You can potentially turn off parts of chips to reduce the static cost (e.g. run with 4 cores active instead of 6) but that tends to require significant hardware support. And… most literature on the subject tends to e that it is still better to just run until the proverbial sweat runs down your crack because you’ll consume less power than if you had run lower for longer.
I wonder how much of it is mismanagement on behalf of Microsoft itself, and how much of it is small-time devs suddenly getting more budget than they’ve ever seen before and deciding to get super ambitious with their next project and then having to scale it back when they can’t actually handle the project?
It’s what happened with EA and Anthem. Bioware suddenly got a shitload of money, couldn’t hack it, had to scale back the project, and it all fell apart.
AAA devs are finding out there’s no such thing as infinite money doesn’t mean there are no good games. Look around and you might just realize they’re actually the least interesting content out there. There are more games coming out per/day than at any other point in history. Take some initiative and you’ll find something great.
Yeah, remember when we had a proper alternative to twitch that had a better & faster Streaming Protocol called Mixer. Which was actually focussed on Gaming ??
Yeah it was run by Microsoft & then they killed it.
Then Glimesh revived it in a way& now it’s dead too. Shame, it was OpenSource too
The problem in most big companies (and organisations or countries) is that leaders promote people who think like themselves or at least are very agreeable. And as time passes they end up surrounding themselves with yes-people; every bad idea is cheered on, because all the critics have been fired or are way down in the hierarchy.
And in that environment, everyone who actually understands how things work quits or gets quit. It’s my understanding that there are large sections of code bases that MS just doesn’t touch, because everyone who understood how they function is gone. Continuity of institutional knowledge is difficult in the best cases and impossible under leaders that discourage dissenting perspectives.
/gestures about wildly
Eighteen months ago, I was an advocate for Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, because I didn’t think anybody could have done a worse job than Bobby Kotick.
Phil Spencer has proven me wrong. This arsehole tried to shut down Tango Gameworks after they literally shadowdropped a critically acclaimed GOTY contender.
Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.
It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they’re so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.
Same with EA. It’s just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they’ve closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.
I 100% believe the claim that Microsoft executives mistakenly thought they’ve just nabbed the Donkey Kong IP by acquiring Rare. Definitely seems like something some c-suite ghouls who are totally out of touch with the games industry would believe.
Also, I’m not sure how much of Rare’s downfall was due to Microsoft’s mismanagement or their core talent leaving to form other studios. Maybe a bit of both.
I assume a lot of the top level staff stick about until their contractually obliged period for getting a massive payday is over, and then look very closely at whether they actually want to be told what to do by a bunch of suits all day long.
Realistically they’re working to make somebody else richer at that point, and there’s only so much enthusiasm anyone can have for that. Certainly not enough for the long hours needed in the games industry.
To be fair, Age of Empires III was bad, and the last project Ensemble was working on before they got shuttered was a Halo MMO.
Also, Robot Entertainment (the studio that rose from the ashes of Ensemble) were the initial developers of Age of Empires Online, which was P2W slop that 90% of players couldn’t run because Games For Windows LIVE was a buggy crock of shit. And since then they’ve released nothing but Orcs Must Die games.
AoE III was excellent. It explored new ideas and did it well. As a long time AoE fan who played all of them since the first, AoE II is massively overhyped, and AoE III is unfairly shit on.
Also they were voluntold to do Halo Wars, and they did a good job on it. It’s a good game, and it did an excellent job on console with a controller scheme, which was impressive at the time.
Ensemble got shafted. They were held up at the time as the leaders of RTS and Microsoft didn’t give a fuck. Just used and abused.
AoE online was clearly executive suite demands. Of course it fucking sucked.
AoE III was excellent. It explored new ideas and did it well. As a long time AoE fan who played all of them since the first, AoE II is massively overhyped, and AoE III is unfairly shit on.
AoE2 genuinely had a small competitive scene on Voobly and Gameranger. It was being played as a grassroots esport by dedicated fans even before the HD and DE remasters.
One of the third game’s glaring problems was how poorly balanced it was. IIRC the winning strategy was to play French (who already had overpowered cavalry), rush to the third age and use a particular tech to effectively blockade your opponent’s home city and prevent them from playing anything in their deck.
Even when AoE3’s Definitive Edition came out, fixed a lot of the balance issues and added a bunch of new civs via expansions, the damage was already done and sales were so low that Microsoft cancelled their latest expansion and halted development a few months ago.
Also they were voluntold to do Halo Wars, and they did a good job on it. It’s a good game, and it did an excellent job on console with a controller scheme, which was impressive at the time.
Played the Xbox 360 demo of Halo Wars near its initial release and wasn’t impressed. All I really remember about the game beyond that was how bad the box art looked. I mean those spartans look like they have fucking long giraffe necks.
Gamepad controls and real time strategy just don’t mix. You either make something so mechanically slow that keyboard & mouse would shit all over that control style, or have to bastardize the game mechanics so much that it’s all but fully automated. The only game I’ve seen remotely work as a gamepad RTS is Tooth and Tail.
I couldn’t believe it when they shut down the studio that did Hi-Fi Rush. They put out a great game that received universal praise, then shut them down like a few months later. Infuriating.
polygon.com
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