They still have no real reason to exist though. Theyre a catalyst for ending physical media.
You get the worst part of owning a physical copy (you gotta find the physical game and put it in the console every time you want to.play that game) combined with the worst part about owning a digital copy (you still have to download all the game data).
Unless these versions of the game are cheaper than even the digital versions of the game, then there is no reason anybody would just pick the digital version over these. Any person interested in selling the game when they are done playing will just get normal physical media.
its worse than comparing it to physical media that has all content on media, but better than display boxes that only has a digital code in it.
digital key carts are more replacing the latter (which is better) but there will definitely be a few devs who will opt out of physical media storage costs for the key card
It is still possible to redownloaded previously purchased 3DS and Wii U games, they haven't taken that down yet. You just can't buy anything anymore. They haven't said how long they'll keep that up for, their FAQ simply says "for the foreseeable future", but we know it can't be forever and ever and ever.
Wii downloads went fully offline in 2019, 13 years after the console's launch, or 7 years after the console's successor. I wouldn't try to extrapolate off a single data point though, Switch servers may potentially last longer based on both a longer console life-cycle and a desire to keep backwards compatibility going.
outside of the official service, there is actually one other feature that people forget exists, and would be relevent to the resell of the key.
updating by local user (no not the recently announced game sharing stuff, but the ability to update a game via just being near a device with the update)
edit: of course, this will only work if nintendo okays the transfer of the BASE game instalation as well. time will tell if its possible or not, as its a situation thats functionalyl hard to test.
The 3DS and Wii U eShop was available for more than a decade, a full 6 years after the Switch was released. So all in all I’d say it was available pretty long, especially considering that there was no authorization required to download a game, so they were paying for servers to give away games for free
Okay but NES games are still playable and transferrable. Even earlier games for the first gen consoles like the MagnaVox Odyssey are still playable, and those are far older than one decade. And if it suffers physical damage, even to the point of becoming inoperable, as long as you dumped the ROM of your game you can continue to play it (at least in the US).
If a ditigal game shop server goes away, you better hope you downloaded your data, and that the hard drive you downloaded the data to never becomes inoperable. Because once that happens, it is gone forever. Even if you technically legally still have the license still to play it, if you tried to bring a legal case about being unable to access a game you paid for, the game publisher can just invoke their right as granted to them by the EULA of the game license you are forced to agree to to use their software (shrinkwrap license) to “revoke your license at any time, for any reason.”
Much, much harder to do that when someone owns a physical copy of a game, as that would require forcibly removing the physical game from you (AKA theft).
I mean with this setup you can still sell the game and it keeps a used game market. I don’t like not actually “possessing” the game cause we know everything online shuts down eventually, but it’s much better than the “physical games” that actually just have a download code.
Its effectively a self-destructing game set on a timer.
Not unlike real physical games that succumb to time and damage, except you cannot dump the gamedata to preserve your own physical copy.
Also, physical games deteriorate at a much slower rate than Nintendo shutting down their servers. Sure, you have the right to download your digital Wii games you paid for, but have fun doing that right now on servers that no longer exist. The WiiU and 3DS eShops are next, they already have purchases disabled.
I can still play physical NES games, the only maintenance required is changing the battery, if the cart even has one, and keeping the pins clean.
Nintendo doesnt want to sell them either. They lose so much revenue on wholesaling and manufacturing. Digital gets them that sweet sweet 100% of the consumer price per sale. Holy fuck they’re just counting the days until they can finally convince idiots physical shouldnt exist. Ask Sony and Microsoft what they learned about even trying to suggest they were killing the used market.
You may have seen reports of leaks of older text messages that had previously been sent to Steam customers. We have examined the leak sample and have determined this was NOT a breach of Steam systems.
We’re still digging into the source of the leak, which is compounded by the fact that any SMS messages are unencrypted in transit, and routed through multiple providers on the way to your phone.
The leak consisted of older text messages that included one-time codes that were only valid for 15-minute time frames and the phone numbers they were sent to. The leaked data did not associate the phone numbers with a Steam account, password information, payment information or other personal data. Old text messages cannot be used to breach the security of your Steam account, and whenever a code is used to change your Steam email or password using SMS, you will receive a confirmation via email and/or Steam secure messages.
You do not need to change your passwords or phone numbers as a result of this event. It is a good reminder to treat any account security messages that you have not explicitly requested as suspicious. We recommend regularly checking your Steam account security at any time at
We also recommend setting up the Steam Mobile Authenticator if you haven’t already, as it gives us the best way to send secure messages about your account and your account’s safety.
Reportedly found on a Wii test kit discovered at an e-waste recycling center
Man, talk about a find.
The reason for it being canned so late seems to be mostly on internal higher up conflict within Lucasarts, whose leadership became bean counters. www.eurogamer.net/free-radical-vs-the-monsters
And then we went from talking to people who were passionate about making games to talking to psychopaths who insisted on having an unpleasant lawyer in the room." (David Doak on the change within Lucasarts after Jim Ward left)
“LucasArts hadn’t paid us for six months,” says Norgate “and were refusing to pass a milestone so we would limp along until the money finally ran out. They knew what they were doing, and six months of free work to pass on to Rebellion wasn’t to be sniffed at.”
My 8bitdo story, back when they’re we’re just starting to put joysticks on their SNES style controllers, I used mine to the point that the joysticks were falling apart. I sent them a support email, and even though it wasn’t covered by any warranty or anything, a very nice Chinese person working there sent me a spare set of joysticks in the mail, plus words of encouragement (in somewhat broken English) since I wasn’t shy about fixing the thing myself.
Can’t imagine that today, but it was a nice gesture and I’m glad they’re still making stuff today.
Yep. I just bought an 8bitdo controller a few weeks ago with a defective RB button. I asked support if there was anything I could do to reseat it or replace a membrane to fix it. Support said either take it back to where I bought it or ship it to them in China to get fixed on my dime. That left a bad taste in my mouth for their products.
My joystick broke on my Ultimate controller. It could have been my fault or it could’ve been when I was traveling for work or the two year-old. Either way, I managed to take the front cover off and look at the joysticks and order a new set from AliExpress. Less than four dollars later and 20 minutes of work it was all fixed up. It wasn’t due to contacting customer support, but replacement parts were readily available.
To be fair: They are probably not working with a lot of margin and shipping it bavk to china is costly for them.
If I buy on AliExpress I am under the impression of it either fits or needs to be trashed. But returning is very unlikely.
And 8bitdo is (when not being sold by a 3rd party like for example microcenter) just another chinese seller/manufacturer on AliExpress or Amazon^(which is just a chinese shipping proxy with some local sellers nowadays)
If you buy a game, which you cannot use in single player mode, without internet access, you are signing up for this happening to you too, one day, guaranteed.
I mean, that’s basically all AAA games in 2024. Even songs PC ports which historically avoided DRM and network requirements is starting to mandate PSN accounts. I 100% would prefer to be able to play offline, more often than not it’s unwanted telemetry or BS bloat but that isn’t something we as users can enforce.
Stumbles ass first into giving creative control of their property to one of the most devoted and talented studios of the decade, leading to a wildly successful and popular game.
“That’s great! Let’s give it to someone else!” - some stupid ass exec who can only see ahead one financial quarter at a time.
I thought Larian themselves didn’t want to make another one? Could be wrong though but it would make sense for them to use their surge in popularity to create something that they wholly own.
While I respect Larian’s right to turn down another time intensive game like Baldur’s Gate…I do worry about the same thing you are concerned about: A shitty executive that only cares about cash and not art! A love for art and appreciating great storytelling is what made Baldur’s Gate 3 the breakout hit. The AAA industry is too shortsighted to be capable of creating such a marvel like BG3, though they occasionally stumble into success without understanding why. They won’t let their teams cook and, it’s very likely, their creatives have either moved on to another studio or became a stress casualty (Bioware’s own term).
Larian probably wouldn't have turned it down if Hasbro hadn't fired pretty much everyone who worked with Larian on BG3. Sven Vincke (CEO of Larian) seems like the kind of guy who would take such an action personally, which is probably why he doesn't want to work with Hasbro again and rightfully so, fuck Hasbro.
His team was also burnt out after working on BG3 after such a long time, Sven respected the wishes of his team over the lure of making more money. It’s important to remember, Sven actually cares about the team he’s assembled over short term profit. Screw Hasbro any day of the week is such a mood, but, not an inciting incident that lead to Sven making his choice.
Outer Wilds is so good. A perfect game for Switch. And the DLC included too, which was also superb.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh. Half the point of the game (and DLC) is just figuring out what the game is. Because I already know what to do I’d just complete it in about 10 minutes so it’s sadly not worth me picking it up again.
But anyone who hasn’t played it, please give it a go. It’s just wonderful.
I played about 3 hours of it and didn’t like it. Everyone talks about how great it is and how it’s a once in a lifetime game, but it just wasn’t that enjoyable to me. I might revisit it one day, but we’ll see.
It's not like many (any?) other games, not in the mainstream sphere anyway.
I made the mistake of trying to play with mouse and keyboard but once I got flying with a controller I was set.
I still played with mouse and keyboard just fine. I wish they had finer thrust control for that one part, but it just made more sense to me as a first-person and space sim game.
It’s not for everyone. You have to actually learn what the game is telling you from text, little physics interactions, and more. Nothing is completely spelled out for you, and everything you accomplish is a result of diligent understanding on your part.
Oh my god, I don’t have a headset anymore, but there was a VR mod for it that I absolutely fucking loved. It was one of the things that the Index was made for. I spent so much time crashing into planets in VR.
I’ve been hesitant to play it because I heard it’s existentially depressing and I don’t think my mental state is in a good place to deal with that. Otherwise I’d probably give it a go. I loved Return of the Obra Dinn and many people who love one of those games seem to also love the other.
I don’t know, slight spoilers for the general mood, but, outer wilds is that, but it’s more like… wistful, or melancholic, or bittersweet. It’s sad, but it’s a good sad. It’s emotional, and emotions feel good.
I feel like, if I were in a bad place when playing that, I don’t think it would have made it worse. It might have made it more meaningful, and be kinda… nice, in a sense. But I also feel like art like that help me a lot when I am in bad places. It’s kinda like seeing beauty in sadness, right?
It’s hard because it depends on the type of melancholy. I get what you mean about wistful melancholy and “good sad” if the stories are on the smaller scale. Human tragedy, personal failure, doomed relationships, lost love, that sort of stuff.
I have a harder time dealing with elaborations on an existential level: the ultimate end of all things, the futility of existence, the meaninglessness of life etc. I’m hesitant because I’ve gotten the impression this is the sphere Outer Wilds operates in.
It’s a kind of hopeful nihilism, a sort of sense that no matter how far apart you are in space or time, everyone and everything is ultimately connected, and looking up at the same stars.
You should try the talos principle 2. They’re not apples to apples, but I’d guess that most who loved outer wilds would like it. The first talos principle is also good, but far less refined than the second.
The outerwilds dlc does add a fair bit of content. Although, I really don’t like jump scares so the dlc was not my favorite.
Massively overrated game. I thought it’d be an adventure game, but it turned out to be a timed puzzle game where you end up just rushing back to the same spot over and over again because the game kills you when times up. and you don’t even know if what you’re doing is correct. By the time you figure out this isn’t an adventure game it’s too late to return it for a refund.
That’s not really a problem with the game, but with your expectations. If I watch the film Alien expecting a comedy but it’s actually a horror I wouldn’t complain the film is overrated and not funny.
Pity they can’t release a way to erase the game from my memory so I can play it afresh.
That’s why people watch playthroughs to see somebody else go through the game for the first time. There’s an “Interloper” Discord server for people who are looking for VODs or live playthroughs.
While I haven’t played Outer Wilds, I with I could erase Witcher 3 from my mind. Going back for a second play through is a bit more tedious as I already know the storyline. Only completing secondary quests is somewhat fulfilling, but they end quickly. And after a point you’ve leveled up so much pretty much all combat becomes a bore.
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.
Maybe that’s part of the problem? HDR implementation on my Samsung sets is garbage, I have to disable it to watch anything. Too bad too, because the picture is gorgeous without it.
Smart TV having absolutely horrible default settings and filters that ruin any viewing experience has little to do with HDR because the TV isn‘t even processing HDR images most of the time. That stuff is already mixed and there‘s not much any device can do to give you details in the darks and brights back. It‘s a much different story when you‘re actually processing real color information like in a video game. HDR should absolutely help you see in the dark here.
I WISH it was the default settings. I went through every calibration and firmware update I could find. Even the model specific calibrations on rtings.com. Nothing made a difference.
It appears to just be a flaw in Samsung’s implementation. After going through all the Samsung forum information, the only suggestion that’s guaranteed to work is “turn it off”.
I got a samsung monitor last year too (it was the cheapest hdr option and I keep seeing reddit praise them) and it has such a terrible hdr experience. When hdr is on either dark colors are light grayish, brights are too dark, darks are crushed, everything’s too bright or colors are over saturated. I’ve tried every combination of adjusting brightness / gamma from the screen and/or from kde but couldn’t figure out a simple way to easily turn down the brightness at night without some sort of image issue popping up. So recently I gave up and turned hdr off. Still can’t use the kde brightness slider without fucking up the image but at least the monitor’s brightness slider works now.
Also if there are very few bright areas on the screen it further decreases its overall screen brightness, which also affects color saturation bcz of course.
Also also just discovered freesync and vrr are two different toggles in two different menus for some fucking reason and if you only enable freesync like I did you get a flickering screen
I really wish there was a ‘no smart image fuckery’ toggle in the settings.
I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.
And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.
That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.
If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/
These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.
When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).
See my “set 2” links above. (at the time) $3,200 8K television, “If you want the brightest image possible, use the default Dynamic Mode settings with Local Dimming set to ‘High’, as we were able to get 1666 nits in the 10% peak window test.”
Nope, it does have wide color gamut and high-ish brightness, wouldn’t buy unless reviews said it was ok. But it does some fuckery to the image I can only imagine could be to make non-hdr content pop on windows but ends up messing up the image coming from kde. I can set it up to look alright in either in a light or dark environment but the problem is I can’t quickly switch between them without fiddling with all the settings again.
Compared to my cooler master a grayscale gradient on it has a much sharper transition from crushed bright to gray but then gets darker much slower as well, to a point where unless a color is black it appears darker on the cm despite it having an ips screen. Said gray also shows up as huge and very noticable red green and blue bands on it, again unlike the cm which also has banding but at least the tones of gray are similiar.
Also unrelated but just noticed while testing the monitors, max sdr brightness slider of kde seems to have changed again. Hdr content gets darker on the last 200 nits while sdr gets brighter. Does anyone know anything about that? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work
3 months edit: I might’ve been wrong about this. At the time I had both monitors connected to the motherboard (amd igpu) since the nvidia driver had washed out colors. Since the cooler master worked I assumed the amd drivers were fine. But a while back I ended up plugging both into the nvidia gpu and discovered that not only were the nvidia drivers fixed, but with it the Samsung didn’t have the weird brightness issue neither.
Edit edit: Even though the brightness is more manageable it’s still fucked. I’ve calibrated it with kde’s new screen calibration tool and according to it the brightness tops out at 250 nits. However it is advertised and benchmarked to go up to 600 and I’ve measured 800 ish using my phone sensor, and it looks much brighter than an sdr 200 nit monitor. Which makes me think even though it is receiving hdr signal, it doesn’t trust the signal to be actually hdr and maps sdr range to its full range instead; causing all kinds of image issues when the signal is actually hdr.
And just to make sure it’s not a linux issue I’ve tried it with windows 10 too. With amd gpu hdr immediately disables itself if you enable it and with nvidia gpu if you enable hdr all screens including ones not connected to it turn off and don’t work until you unplug the monitor and reboot. Cooler master just works
Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.
Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).
It’s one of those things where it looks good where in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.
“It was pretty much done, it was in final [quality assurance testing],” Free Radical founder and former studio director Steve Ellis told GamesIndustry.biz in 2012. “It had been in final QA for half of 2008, it was just being fixed for release. LucasArts’ opinion is that when you launch a game you have to spend big on the marketing, and they’re right. But at that time they were, for whatever reason, unable to commit to spending big. They effectively canned a game that was finished.”
They also say the controller mapping is a challenge in the emulation software, but doable. It’s the wii version so I bet the aiming and whatnot is going to be wonky when using a controller or kbm vs the other releases.
Worth noting that the wiimote just uses Bluetooth, so it doesn’t take any specialized equipment to connect to your computer. And Dolphin has built in support for it. The sensor bar was also just a pair of infrared LEDs; All of the actual “sensing” happened at the wiimote directly. So you can just throw a wireless sensor bar (like $15 on amazon) underneath your computer monitor, and it will work fine.
It really is a bloodbath in the tech sector. I don’t understand where these thousands of people are even going to go considering major companies are on hiring freeze
My pipe dream is a bunch of new indie studios forming out of all these layoffs and kicking publisher‘s asses on sales with new competent and passionate games.
…But I guess they‘d then probably sell to those publishers again and repeat…
The largest factor is lack of capital, which is something everyone is enduring due to the SVB collapse. This is a giant recession of the entire sector and I don’t see how it corrects any time soon.
While breathing is cool, I have some hope that it will start correcting this year or next.
The big thing is that the raised interest rates have helped to prevent a real recession. So the real question is when can they come back down. I hope it starts this year even though it’ll likely take years to go back to what they were pre-pandemic, if the go that low again.
I don’t need to remember it. I’m in the middle of replaying Baldur’s Gate 1. But that was more of a complicated math formula to derive something that we can do much more simply. The hope and fear thing not only reminds me of that scam curriculum in Donnie Darko, it also doesn’t feel like an interesting tactical layer; it does the opposite by interfering with initiative in a way that I’m not a fan of.
It’s rooted in the light/dark side of the force from Star Wars tabletop, and kind of inherent to Star Wars is making out everything in the world to be light or dark as though it’s that simple, but hardly anything in life is.
I don’t think any designer has ever said it is from Star Wars, and it most definitely does not use them as Light Side/Dark Side or imposed morality. It’s inspired by the Genesys rpg system of degrees of success/failure and has narrative effects like “Yes, but” and “No, however”.
I’d seen it written up in other articles as coming from Star Wars, so perhaps it was that writer that was mistaken. I’ve watched them play, heard the rules explanations and such, and “yes, but” and “no, however” to skill checks aren’t solving some problem I’ve had in other systems.
Sure, it’s not solving anything, but IMO it’s fun giving the GM a tokenified response currency even though you pull off a success. I’ve seen a fair amount of backlash, but just feel portraying the dice mechanic as Star Wars is miles off base, when it adds a narrative prompt for success/failure (D&D does this with nat20/nat1).
I’ll grant you I’m not typically the GM. From your perspective, do you see it making things more interesting as a GM? Because as a player, it’s less up my alley, and the GM’s response currency without that system is whatever they want it to be, because they’re the GM.
It does, I think. It powers “lair actions”, gives powers like interrupting turn sequence, making multiple moves in sequence. When the GM has a pool of currency players can see, there’s an unsaid acknowledgement things are going wrong/badly, which helps fuel collaboration in the storytelling aspect. I can say that someone fails an attack, but on a fail with fear they miss the attack AND leave themselves open to a harsh counterattack, or perhaps lose their weapon. I can do all of this off the cuff in D&D because ‘GM said so’, but then the players can feel an adversarial relationship instead of collaborative, which is so much more encouraged in Daggerheart.
All entirely subjective, and at its core it’s still heroic fantasy same as hundreds of other systems and if you are put off by rolling two dice for metacurrency, it’s likely not for you.
That interrupting turn sequence part is the one that upsets me the most, and I’m not fond of the extra drag on pacing that the "yes, but"s and "no, however"s can have over time. If they are putting their weight behind it, I hope it’s resonating with others, but if they intend to ever replace their D&D with Daggerheart, I wouldn’t be thrilled with the substitution.
It comes from the FFG Star wars RPG system and its method of creating multiple success/failure conditions. It’s an entirely independent system to the light/dark side force mechanics.
That’s fair if it’s not solving a problem for you, but it does add something new that resonates with a lot of people (at least it did for me). I’m speaking from the Genesys side so I don’t know how daggerheart handles it, but I absolutely loved it. I found it made skill checks more collaborative, my table would suggest ideas for how to interpret the roll, and having more to ‘explain’ got people more descriptive in how they talk about their actions. We went from ‘I take a swing. Nope, that’s a miss’ to ‘failure with advantage, ok I go in with my axe but I can’t get through this guy’s defenses. For my advantage, I want to hook this guys shield with my axe so the next attacker gets a boost die to hit’.
It does make checks more involved, but I prefer fewer, more impactful checks as a general rule anyway.
I can see why the comparison to Genysis would exist now but I don’t think it’s a very worthwhile comparison to make in how they play out and are used in each system.
It’s interesting and it seems like a good change for people that have done a lot of d&d but it’s probably not going to be a complete replacement for 5e. It seems good for short campaigns but it only has one book out for now.
polygon.com
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