Imagine if you could go on the Nintendo store and buy a game you couldn’t even run, or had to check a third party website to see if it ran acceptably and let you use all the buttons.
How is that different from any other computer buying from steam, ever? In the history of all computer games? A steam deck is a hand held computer with a community large enough, and system specs stable enough to have a rating on potentially any PC, and most Nintendo games in existence. Compared to nintendo’s walled garden. Your comparing apples to oranges.
My comment is germane to the post comparing the two devices in an aspect that exemplifies how they can’t be compared, and tries to spin it as a negative, while attempting to bury its positive.
The fact you say that the switch is not like any other computer is both true in the sense that i already argued, and false in that it IS yet just another computer, but with a walled garden.
If there was any a comment that was irrelevant, it would be yours.
If you try to buy a game on Deck that you couldn’t run on Deck, there will be very clear warning about it, one you can’t miss. At least it was last time I checked. And to be honest, I’m pretty sure the list of games like that is now almost exclusively consists of competitive shooters, and you wouldn’t even think of buying it on Deck anyway.
You can even get every achievement in a game, and return it for a full refund, granted you can beat the game in under two hours. Someone did it with resident evil 3 remake: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp8a5EjAcGs
I don’t really see the point in comparing them. They’re different devices for different markets.
The Switch is for people who want to play first party Nintendo titles. That’s really the only reason for its existence. Without Nintendo’s first party lineup, the Switch would be just another Arm based handheld, and a fairly unremarkable one at that.
The Switch is all about exclusivity, the Steam Deck is the exact opposite. Not only is the Steam client, and the massive library of games that it gives gamers access to, available on scores of x86 devices and hardware configurations, the Steam Deck operating system will soon be available pre-installed on multiple, third party devices, and it will be available for anymore to download and install on any device they want.
They’re not just different devices, they’re vastly different company philosophies.
I’m hoping this lights a fire under devs’ asses and reminds them that the platformer genre exists. I’ve played a few recent indie platformers that were decent but I’d love to see the genre get some love from bigger studios (other than Nintendo).
The only recent one I can think of that fits that bill is Yooka Laylee and that game was doodoo.
It gets to be way harder to argue in court when it isn’t a “clean kill”, using Ross Scott’s words, so The Crew is going to be one of the best examples we’ll ever get for courts to rule on. I expect Ubisoft would rather settle than let this one go that far though.
I imagine a lawsuit would likely bring up the topic of how hard it would be for a developer to keep the game around past purchase.
For instance, imagine a massively multiplayer online game; everyone playing the game is acutely aware of how much server hardware is needed to maintain that online presence, and it’s unrealistic to assume it would exist forever.
That’s probably why attention was pushed onto The Crew. It’s a racing game that shouldn’t need much from a server, so it’s arguably unfair to tie it to that access and take it offline.
I would imagine it would reveal how sh*tty the ubisoft code bases are and has a reputation cost XD. But if it’s that big of a risk then they should keep the servers running indefinitely.
Pirates have managed to run servers for tons of MMOs. The only thing stopping people from running servers themselves is that they’re not made available.
Don’t get it wrong, the reason The Crew was the perfect game to start the movement is solely because Ubisoft is french, a country that has pretty strong consumer laws that they aren’t respecting.
You’d be making a mistake there. AI elements can’t be copyrighted, but human-created elements can. There’s also a line somewhere at which point AI generation is used as a tool to enhance hand-made art rather than to generate entire pieces wholesale.
Like, let’s look at this Soul Token for my Planescape themed Conan Exiles server (still in development).
I went into GIMP, drew a simple skull based on a design I found on google image search, slapped it on a very simple little circle, and popped it into NightCafe for some detail work. The end result is something I composed myself, with the most significant visual elements created by hand and spiced up a bit essentially using a big complicated filter. The result saved me hours and gave me one of many little in-game items to mod into my server that I never would have had the resources to produce in bulk otherwise as an independent developer.
Who owns it?
Well, I drew the skull after training myself on google image search data, but presumably my hand drawing of a fairly generic object still belongs to me. I drew the circle that makes up the coin itself, but NightCafe added some nicely lit metallic coloring, gave it a border, and turned my little skull into a gem. This, of course, requiring some prompt engineering and iteration on my part.
So is adding a texture and a little border detail enough to interfere with my ownership? Should it be? If I didn’t hand-create enough of the work to constitute ownership, surely there’s some point at which a vanishingly small amount of AI detail being added to the art doesn’t eliminate the independent creation of the art itself. If I were to paint an elaborate landscape by hand and then AI generate a border for it, surely that border shouldn’t eliminate the legitimacy of my contributions.
At some point, the difference between the use of AI and the use of a filter in an image editor becomes essentially non-existent. Yes, an AI can create a lot more from scratch, but in practical terms it’s much easier to get it started with a bit of traditional art than it is to spend hours engineering prompts trying to get rid of weird extra eyeballs and spaghetti fingers.
I’d love to see a more elaborate discussion on this topic, but so far all we get is some form of ‘AI bad!’ and then some artists dropping a little bit of nuance without it really seeming to go anywhere.
This technology has the potential to elevate independent artists to the sort of productivity that only corporations, with their inherent inspiration-killing bureaucracy, could previously achieve. That’s a good thing.
Seems like even if someone could in theory legally reuse some aspect of AI generated/assisted art, it would be prohibitively difficult or impossible to separate it out from the manually created components or know exactly where the line is legally, so it would be completely impractical to use.
Artists aren’t lawyers and don’t want to be. Except for the ones that are. But that isn’t most of us.
Artists make art. If you want to look for the people who like to make policy, look to the jackasses in suits who sit around having meetings about meetings all day to justify scalping the work made by actual artists. The same kinds of people who fund stories like this blatantly uninformed hit piece.
Fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
At some point the line will have to be discovered, because the use of AI for art isn’t going away. Suits can whine about it all they want. Art doesn’t really care.
Smaller studios have been consistently putting out good games as of late anyway. Indy and AA studios have the freedom to make fun things instead of having to check every box on a spreadsheet.
With the success of BG3, Larian has a great opportunity to strengthen their own IP. Their Divinity games were great but had pretty nonsensical world-building (to this day, I still have no idea how DOS and DOS2 are related plotwise), and one of the great things about BG3 was the fusion of Larian game design with an appealing fantasy world. If Larian can build up a coherent setting of their own, their future would be bright.
I have not played it myself but what I’ve seen of it looks at the very least polished and made with care. That being said there just wasn’t that much competition this year. The industry is overshadowed with mass layoffs and a smaller budget pool. And yes, of course some good games released, but nothing in the ballpark of a Baldur’s Gate 3 or GTA 5.
John Linneman from digital foundry said the game reminded him of why he loves games after all the AAA slop and UE5 games they’ve been through. Up there in quality with the Mario games.
As a game? Astrobot is a VERY solid and polished platformer.
But mostly it is the nostalgia and target demographic. If you ever had a PS1 or PS2 growing up then you will have insane amounts of nostalgia for all the costumes and easter eggs while not realizing most are from the late PS3/early PS4 anyway.
So… it is basically a modern Nintendo game. Others do platforming and level design better. But only this has the excessive amount of references to nu-God of War and rare reference to Jumping Flash that makes your heart remember the happy times.
And… even though I see it for what it is, I am not gonna pretend I am above it.
For what it is worth? I think it IS the better game than Balatro (one would hope so since it had a full major studio and platform holder behind it…). But I still think Balatro was THE game of 2024 just for how much it pervaded everything and everyone.
It’s a 100% perfect addition to THE core combat light puzzle platformer games. It also has an age range of 0-99 by both having cute jokes and references that would appeal to older folks while never being even remotely offensive.
Also yea, what else was there? Closest was make Wukong which primarily crushed the market because it again proved that the new or smaller studios can absolutely give a better AAA experience than the big studios these days by focusing on delivering a game not a storefront
I just bought it used for $45. Started 5 hours ago, now time to sleep, then play again.
It is a better super Mario game. The difficulty is a bit higher I think, there’s some platforming where I thought like “ain’t no way some of my friends would get this first try”
Not one bit. Sackboy is a 2d platformer, AstroBot is 3d. It feels like a Super Mario Galaxy 3 - better than 2 in every way. If AstroBot would have a wall jump and triple jump it totally would be a super Mario Galaxy 3.
That’s a tough decision to make, especially in today’s gaming marketing, but I applaud them for stepping back and recognizing what they had wasn’t good enough to sell. Blizzard made that decisions years ago with Starcraft Ghost, the Blizzard of today wouldn’t make that same call any more.
Steam suspicously absent from this conversation, but I’m willing to be patient and see.
It’s a positive attitude for Spencer to take, but would have to see it in practice to be able to make judgment on if he really stands behind those words or if he is simply making a strategic business decision whose real motives are simply masked by these words.
The latter is par for the course for corporations, so we don’t have a lot to lean on in favor of him truly holding these values, sadly. One can hope, however, that miracles can and do happen.
That’s not where Valve makes their money from though. Their money primarily comes from store purchases, so anything to expand Steam’s reach is better for them. Plus, keeping Steam as relevant and ubiquitous as possible will in turn promote sales of the Steam Deck. The Xbox and Steam Deck cater to fundamentally different use cases anyways.
Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 as well as Divinity: Original Sin 2 were all huge successes and Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access for 3 years to either test it or read testers opinions. So you’ve got a very successful IP using a renown system, a devoted studio known for quality games with proper resources and their own, capable and proven game engine, years of polishing the game and adhering to fans feedback. If you “completely understand why it wasn’t on the radar” then… I guess you could get a job at Microsoft.
Everyone knew BG3 would "a success," but it hasn't just been a success, it's been a nuclear bomb of a success.
Optimistically, people were expecting to get around 1 million in sales. Total. THAT would have been a GREAT SUCCESS. Today I think it has around 10 million on Steam alone, 10x the "hope we get there" number.
Imagine taking a job and hoping for a $10,000 bonus for good performance, and then your boss drops $100,000 on your desk. It's that level of joyful shock.
Estimates for Steam is roughly 4.9 million sales. That data comes from peak players, average weekly players, and achievement tracking information.
Estimates taken this way usually skew higher than they really are, but the data for the current active and peak player estimates look good. As they have dropped to a quarter of weekly players.
DOS2 has sold 5M copies over the life of it. BG3 has sold nearly 10M in the first month on steam alone. Probably close to 30M over the life of the game.
It’s several orders of magnitude more successful and easily the most successful CRPG ever. You all really are missing the scale.
They could have predicted more success than they probably did but I don’t get why your comment has so many downvotes, Larian itself prepared for 100k players at launch too, not over 800k so no one really predicted how much of a bomb this game would be!
I bought the game for science cause it was the only game so far using all major features of UE5 and is a good reference to see how they manage asset, etc to keep the game running at 60fps with provided spec.
I think it does have potential, the mechanic is tight enough(the kbm default binding is not good, needs some rebind to make the combat flow more fluid), frame pacing is smooth majority of time(you have jitter mostly when it switch between cutscenes<->game), pretty much checked all the boxes and doesn’t feel lacking when playing the game.
BUT, it does have poor marketing plan and kinda bad luck in releasing window. It’s a good “alt shooter game” IMO.
It also requires EA's always-online DRM like the recent Star Wars Jedi games. Steam needs to make that notification bigger so I know not to buy that sort of trash.
You mean denuvo? I think it’s a money sinker now so might as well remove it at this point. But it’s EA’s call. Also, yes I have to download EA’s launcher as well.
And EA's launcher requires an active internet connection. Try playing Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, because I sure did, and it doesn't work. There may be a way to sidestep the launcher, particularly on older games like this one that had the launcher retrofitted into it after launch, but regardless, it tells me to stop buying EA games.
I generally avoid denuvo and EA. I literally break this stance just to see what they did with UE5 but ended up enjoying the game as well. It sucks cause denuvo means I can’t hook up RenderDoc and see how they render a frame compare to stock UE5. The movement reminds me a lot of original Quakes(very close to Q3) where you can have lots of control mid air and really snappy movement speed with their mechanics(blinks and grapples). But yeah, if this game doesn’t have this “use all UE5 latest tech” tag I will probably not even know or touching it cause I don’t play shooters after like Battlefield 3. Cause I am old and I like fast arena shooter not modern slow pace CQB/battle pass shooter, I was quite disappointed after trying Halo Infinite. But, that said, any shooter fits my criteria, would probably fail in sales. ^^;
lol, I go take a look, yep, battlefield 3.(note, I have no idea when I added crysis, it’s probably from a bundle or something and it redeems directly. I had high hope when crysis 2 released. ) And yes, I did played 2042 open beta cause we had a company game day that picked the open beta.(and yep I don’t like it. )
Like which type of shooter is your thing?? For me it’s the quick arena/team shooter, my good shooter example would be Q3 and Tribes 2. I think it’s really satisfying when moving quickly and shoot people with actual projectiles, rocket/disc launcher in my examples. (not a fan of hit scan type)
Not quite Quake speed, though I enjoy Quake just fine too. For me, the sweet spot was stuff like Halo, 007, Metal Arms, Half-Life, Crysis, that sort of thing. But yeah, everything these days is an online-only, live service battle royale or extraction shooter.
polygon.com
Ważne