Star Citizen is a game that’s been in development forever, all while attracting money in forms of donations and sales of in-game ships. A single-player game by the same devs, Squadron 42, is a somewhat similar story, except that people can’t even play it yet (as far as I remember).
A whale is a tern that often means someone/something that brings you the substantial part of your revenue, so in case of the games above, whales would be the players that spend most money on the in-game ships or donations to support development.
The “whale fracking operation” in this context probably means that the entire trailer is a yet another bait for the community to go crazy and bring in the money so that the devs don’t starve and finally deliver finished products.
The punchline is, however, that it’s likely not gonna happen anyway lmao
I’d guess that the idea here is that a “whale” is someone who will spend a lot of money on something. Historically, catching an (actual) whale meant that you’d caught something that was very valuable; my guess is that this is where the phrase came from. Whales were valuable because at the time, they were an economically-reasonable place to get oil. Fracking (or hydraulic fracturing) is a way to extract oil from the ground.
It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can see where they’re coming from. A “whale fracking operation” is not a standard term that I’ve ever heard before, though I get what the guy probably meant.
Oh yeah I took it to just be wordplay, interpreting wordplay is still sometimes stupid hard for me, even despite the fact that I speak English at a near-native level and can understand each word individually.
It’s a good question how “whale” ended up having this particular meaning. I was in the games industry for way too long and first saw it used in the context of big spenders in freemium mobile games, but I have a vague memory that it’s used in the same way in the gambling / casino world. Your guess for the history sounds pretty believable, and it seems like the ginormous size of whales could play a part? Big spenders stand out from the “small fish”
The Long Dark came out in 2017 and the story mode still isn’t finished yet, so I dunno if they’re the ones to be pontificating about being slow with the content lol.
I mean it’s a great game, but yeah it’s been a minute.
I bought the alpha version back in 2015. I was happy with my $15 purchase then and they have continually updated the game. Sure, it has taken a while to “complete” the game but I never really even expected a story mode.
I do kind of agree with the sentiment that games so not necessarily need to be constantly worked on. Another game I think of is No Man’s Sky. Yes, it was a shallow and incomplete game on release. But they kept working on it until it was far beyond what would be considered complete. And they are still doing pretty major updates. While I do appreciate it because they have added some great content, I also think they could call it good and possibly put their developers onto a new game. There is also the risk that a major update screws up the game that people thought they bought.
I also bought the Long Dark when it was still new in early access. Haven't played it since, but it was fantastic even then and I felt I got my money's worth.
That was actually my first thought as well lol. Maybe story mode is secondary to some people who just like the survival grind, but it’s the only part I’m interested in, and my attention in The Long Dark has come and gone waiting for it to complete.
Hopefully this showcase is successful enough to become a tradition. It would be nice to have an indie-focused showcase that doesn't have to juggle their time between the games, advertisements, and sponsors.
“OMG, those nerds have had 20 full seconds to talk? WRAP IT UP”
(for those who don’t know Game Awards really did this. The few acceptance speeches that were there were very short, and winners were all told to “WRAP IT UP” via teleprompter and cut with music. 11 minutes of them talking in total, for a 3-hour-long show)
Although I don’t understand the appeal of Leon in a g-string, I also understand that Capcom didn’t make the mod.
Heads up capcom, the religious conservatives of the world are angry that kids are playing games and not praying. Your reputation is already in the sewers.
In a separate slide that’s explained a little more fully, the company adds that the impact of mods on their reputation isn’t just the result of someone stripping Leon Kennedy down to his knickers. Players who install mods only to suffer performance problems such as crashes, freezing or save data corruption can end up turning to Capcom for support, which can then eat up workload and development budget that might otherwise be spent on creating higher-quality games.
While it’s hard to imagine anyone finding goofy mods swapping cartoon characters or kids’ TV characters for grisly monsters all that scandalous - something that Capcom seems to recognise by acknowledging that “the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game”
Oh yes, because everyone knows. They say one thing it totally won't morph into something new afterwards. Also how do you imagine they will "restrict" the modding? By making the game more tamperproof and harder to mod. So while it may not be "prevented" they will basically make the only mods around texture swaps or some shit.
They probably spend fractions of a percent of their profits on moderation. We’re talking like 0.01%. Half the time it’s cycling college grads through 18 month contracts that they terminate so they can pay them less and less each time (Source: Worked at Microsoft, and they’re infamous for this. Hell, QA for Microsoft’s game division make about 50 cents above minimum wage in BC.)
I've worked in software support for a decade and saying "We can't support you because you modified this" is pretty standard. And with automated replies they don't take too much support time.
Require customers to email support, require a log file, have your log files show if mods are installed, auto reply that the customer should reinstall the game without mods and see if the issue persists.
If you want to get really snarky, figure out who wrote the mods and cc them on the reply saying "For your convenience we have included the authors of the installed mods on this email so you can work with them to resolve your issue."
Yeah that logic on their part is horseshit, anyone savvy enough to mod a game that isn’t mod friendly knows that if they have instability that’s on them for modding in the first place. All the times I completely hosed my Skyrim install with mods, or my Cities: Skylines install with mods, I never once thought about contacting the game maker for support. So to act like across the board modding will cause a flood of support requests is dishonest.
I killed my Cyberpunk game trying to mod it. I just changed the installation directory, re-download, and loaded from cloud save when I got sick of trying to fix it. It’s so easy to recover from stuff like that nowadays.
Exactly, if you hose your self, uninstall, delete the folder entirely and redownload. It’s a cope out to point to mods as increasing demands for technical support. If handled right modding can breath longevity and extra interest in your games. Shit, some of the most popular games on the market started out as mods originally.
Tone deaf companies will continue missing the point.
Look at the Sims 4 support website, is a good start to see that a lot of people will 100% ask questions like, " Completely moded action, has a bug. How to fix it? I don’t play with any mods I promise."
So personally I don’t have any higher hopes for the Capcom audience, but credit to EA at least they just shrug their shoulders and answer " First completely remove your mods, clean the cache files and repair the game"
Then just impliment some automatic message before anyone in support is contacted. Something like “If you installed mods in your game, the first step is to uninstall them. If it still works, reinstall the game. If it’s still not working after that, THEN we’ll help”
Maybe worded a little more professionally, but just an automatic trouble-shooting message that’s gonna be every support person’s first response anyway
I think highlighting the success story is kind of missing both the great circumstances Larian built that game under, and the giant mountain of singleplayer games that are pretty good, but hit no success at all.
I guess it depends on what reviews were reading or even if you were reading them. I will give it to you that it rated pretty highly but I'm fairly certain most of the reviews I read at launch talked about the bugs, some even mentioned how pointless the open world was since it was just pointless set dressing.
This guy unabashedly loved the base game when it came out. So yeah, I don’t really trust his opinion, but it’s not inconsistent for him to praise new content for a beloved game.
That’s my thing with RPS. They have extreme opinions and while I do disagree with their statements, they’re always entertaining and I always go, “I see your perspective”.
I like it!
They’re also the very few game sites that give attention to indie games, or write creative pieces about specific elements in games. The author Sin Vega does great long form articles about interesting game mechanics.
Have you played it? Aside from the horrible buggy condition it launched in (most of which is fixed now), it's still an absolutely fantastic game. The story, the music, the character development, are all spectacular, IMO. Honestly, it's in the top 5 for me.
I thought it was really shallow. Nothing seemed to matter, the city was supposed to be one of the main protagonists, but it was just cery shallow, driving is the least fun i've ever had in a game like that, to the point that i never drove anywhere, npc's where a joke, so was the police. Most of the time it was just a Bethesda like "collect garbage and shut up" game. The music and artstyle i found fantastic, the sound design in general was very memeroble, but the game felt shallow and dead.
It feels exactly like Witcher 3 with cars, guns, and less janky combat. There’s a lot of people who think Witcher 3 is the best game ever made. I think CP2077 is better than Witcher 3. Of course, I’m that guy who doesn’t really love Witcher 3.
Of course, my favorite games are Bethesda “collect garbage and shut up” games. I play them for the story (feel like I’m getting judged for reading Playboy now)
I have tried to play Witcher 3 in several different stages but I just get incredibly bored and drop it. I genuinely cannot understand what people see in it.
Good thing I didn’t let that lead me to ignoring CP2077 because I liked it a lot. It does have the pointless crafting grind from Witcher 3 but if I just ignore that it’s fine.
I am just one people, so I only speak for me. What kept me engaged in Witcher 3 was the dark and interesting world and the stories the game tells. I really love that about the game! I recommend playing Witcher 3 and Dragons Dogma back to back: one has this rich and interesting world with so many interesting stories and people in it and the other has this great combat system I’d love if those games had a baby!
Basically me, too. I can do 4 or 5 playthroughs of Skyrim and enjoy the hell out of it and want more, but I only reached “late-ish-game” in Witcher 3 once in 4 or 5 attempts… and even then burn out.
The bugs aren’t even the main problem. The problem was that the game was marketed as “every single decision you make could have massive impacts on the story” and it turns out there’s only one mission near the beginning that can change depending on what you do leading up to it and that’s it. You can make the game completely bug free and it wouldn’t change that the game did not live up to the promises.
That being said, I did enjoy kinda enjoy the game once I accepted it for what it was. Someday, I hope to play the game they were talking about when they were promoting this one.
It is still one of the best games. It didn’t work on outdated consoles, that was the only flaw to complain about. Oh and it wasn’t gta, but that’s a positive in my book.
It’s also soon to be astroturfed to hell and back with “omg let people enjoy things” and the “stop having FUN” comic any time people mention how dogshit this is.
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
(Sorry if you briefly saw a billion duplicate comments from me— Memmy suddenly crashed and when it reopened it seems to have just kept reposting again and again. I think I deleted all the copies now)
RIP Maxis. Who knows what kinds of awesome stuff we could have had. Oh well, at least Cities Skylines 2 is on the way. Haven’t played a Sims game in a long time but had such a blast with the earlier entries in the series.
Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.
never know when your internet just decides to go down for an hour. happened to me 2 nights ago and i didnt even notice until i tried looking at the dlc store (i was playing rock band 4)
It’s kind of bullshit to call people impatient if they buy a game when the publisher says the game is ready for release. That’s on the punisher, not the consumer. While everyone is fine with pushing the blame on the consumer for buying games at release, I’m over here shaking my fist at the publisher. I get the whole idea of being upset that purchasing on release is perpetuating poor practices, but don’t be sloppy with your aim. This is squarely on the publisher.
But it will keep happening regardless - so you can either keep falling for it and screaming it’s not your fault, or wise up and start having a bit more patience and buying games later.
It’s kind of bullshit to call people impatient if they buy a game when the publisher says the game is ready for release.
At this point…you’re contributing to the cycle of buggy releases. Yes, the responsible gamers absolutely can call out the dumbasses who still pre-order games.
You might think that fist shaking will make a publisher change. Look at the history of buggy game releases. It’s extensive. Look at all that fist shaking.
Publishers are run by people. People respond to incentives. Business is incentivized to gain dollars.
If, for example, no one gave publishers dollars until trusted reviewers verified no bugs / issues, the publishers would be incentivized to release polished products. (note, trusted reviewers may not be the ideal solution, but hopefully illustrates the concept)
Even if customer isn’t to be blamed as you claim being voluntarily ignorant despite past trends at the very least makes them an idiot. And the type to get swindled by everyone since they take everything at face value.
This your first day in the real world? Devs have been releasing games in this state since like 2013 (not including the gaming collapse of the 80’s) regularly.
If you still trust developers to claim a game is ready and then release it as such, then you’re gullible and will fall for anything.
You want the system fixed?
DONT PREORDER
Wait for actual reviews, not the “I played the tutorial and then made this video so I could beat the other YouTubers, 7/10.” Two weeks or so gives the passionate reviewers to play the whole game and give their opinion.
(This one is where you morons keep fucking up) If the game isn’t up to your standards… DONT FUCKING BUY IT! Buying shitty products tells the devs and publishers that you’re willing to spend money on a heap of garbage! You know what they’ll do next time? That’s right! More garbage!
Stop trying to blame the system because you’re a shitty consumer who will hand over their money for a promise and no second thought.
Stop. Buying. The. Crap. Products.
If this was housing or medical I’d be calling for regulation, this is video games. A luxury good. Just don’t pay money for garbage and they’ll be forced to make better products to get our money.
Not even a good dev reputation is enough anymore. I’ve avoided a lot of wasted money by just letting people QA the game for a few months. How good the game is and how much I want it get factored in and then I decide when I want to buy it and at what sale price.
If it’s a franchise I love and the game gets good reviews, only then will I buy it completely new for 70 USD. Anything less and I either wait for patches to make the game what it should have been or just wait for a Steam 9.99 sale on the GOTY edition.
Unfortunately a trend I’ve noticed is a game will come out busted, get dropped to like 40 bucks a month in cause it’s shit, then when it’s finally patched a year later to launch day expectations they bump the price back up to its original value.
The system is so fucked and it works cause people will willingly pay to be QA testers.
You wait for a sale and not only do you pay less, you get a patched version of the game, with mods available, often with DRM removed or toned down, walkthroughs and wikis already matured, and depending on how long you wait, your hardware might have evolved allowing you to experience the game better than you could at release.
But it doesnt hurt the industry enough to notice or care, because the vast majority of gamers are idiots who continue to throw buckets of money at game devs, often while begging for more pointless DLCs so they can throw even more at it,
and until the little gremlins with fat wallets and minimal sense see the light, we’re just gonna have to sit back and watch all the worst shit continue to get ever more worse.
And of all the hubris to want to rock up to a company that is over 125 years old and still going strong to tell them you would know better how to run their company than them.
It’s really hard for humans to imagine things at that scale, but Microsoft is so many orders of magnitude larger than Nintendo that whatever Microsoft (and other mega tech companies like Apple and Google) does the entire global international finance system feels it.
It’s the most bizarre and almost worrying thing now how much video games have transitioned into this “game of the month” thing - where seemingly everyone with a computer all goes and buys the same game each month because it got hyped up by the twitch steamers they watch or whatever.
Just strange. “Are you playing Lethal Company? Everyone’s playing it. Oh, you wanna play Lethal Conpany? Everyone’s playing Palworld now. Oh shit man, we’re not playing that anymore, Dragons Dogma 2 is out”
I noticed this after a hiatus from my gamer friend, when I reunited with them a few months back I saw how games would release and they’d buy it, even defend some aspects like kernel level anti cheat/micro-transactions as well as bad game design.
The hive mind seems somewhat new to me like I’d dabble with a few titles a year while spending considerably more time than the average gamer on my PC. And the fast action from lethal company to plate up to velhaim to palword/and hell divers over the last few months has been jarring maybe concerning too
Are they playing on console? A lot of those times the problems just aren’t equally represented, like when Wild Hearts came out and ended up with Mixed reception although buying on console I simply didn’t have the performance problems and enjoyed the game as a unique take on MH gameplay
The fast pace certainly comes from console subscriptions and trying to eke out as much value from Game Pass or PS+ Extra, on both the consumer and publisher sides. If I’m regularly paying for it, I’m gonna keep looking for new value in it, and conversely MS and Sony will look to keep adding value to it at a consistent rate. It’s simply far too much income to not throw everything at the wall to prevent it stagnating
pc but some of my buds are on pc and console, constantly hearing about game pass :P idk when it come to subscription services its normal for the initial few years to be packed with plenty to capture a large pool of customers, operating at a near loss, then prices go up and content declines. hopefully this doesn’t happen with game-pass
To be fair Lethal Company and Plate Up are fantastic games made by single devs and priced very fairly. It's not really the indie scene that's the problem, that's the holy grail right now. It's these big releases and "triple A" games that are all disgusting cash grabs driven by marketing and how many twitch streamers they can pay to play their game for the "hype".
thought we were talking in general trends. also i am not saying the games i listed were bad, instead i was describing how people are consuming more games in a smaller window of time to what i have been use to
Yeah fair enough, that's definitely true. People tend to have a 'main game' that they hop off to play the new thing, burn out and then go back to their main.
It would make less sense if the games were single player and full price, but Lethal Company, Palworld, and Helldivers 2 are all at $40 or below for the base games and have a multi-player experience.
Of course people are going to jump on lower priced multi-player games with positive word of mouth quickly so they can play with their friends and get a few dozen hours or more entertainment.
Those people have always been around. They want to be a part of the current conversation. And that’s cool. There are plenty of people who wait years to play games until the ultimate version with all DLC goes on sale for 50% off. I’m one of those people. But I also don’t care about being a part of the conversation. I’m just a patient gamer who never spends more than 15$ for a game.
Yep, and it was probably even way worse before the internet with few outlets to let people know about games, and way less resources to get different opinions on the matter.
I don't know if it was really worse, but magazines did cost money.
Most magazines that I used to buy had coverdisks with demo versions.
If the demo was no good it didn't matter what the review said. And they can't really get away with describing things that are proven false in the demo.
Worst thing would be a great demo but very little more in the main game.
But I wasn't going to pay a lot for a game if I'd not played the demo a lot.
Frankly that also proved it'd run ok on my usually very old HW.
As for getting lots of other peoples opinions - not as important if you have a decent demo.
Issue is even knowing about the games existence. So I would assume back then that it would be games that had marketing budgets and pushed by big publishers that ended up even being in a position to have a demo in a magazine. Now days games made by one dev can become hits out of nowhere to even their surprise.
shareware - I mean they probably didn't make much money.
But apogee, epic, id all came fom releasing shareware initially.
but also nethack and all that stuff.
I can't really remeber how it worked, but i think you got these bundles of paper stapled pamphlets for free with hundreds of shareware packages listed with a few lines of text describing each one.
If you didn't have BBS, you sent a real mail back to a distributor and they send you disks in the post ffor a fairly small charge.
Some shareware was so good the magazines had to cover it (for example, doom)
Also i think there just werent as many big budget titles back then (on PC),
Consoles probably had most of the money.
elite 2 was massive, but still only 1 bloke i think.
I’m doing my part to be part of the conversation by finally playing Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. It was in my library and I’ve never played it. Figured I’d check out what all the fuss is about without dropping $70 bucks.
People never usually never (updating since absolute statements not best to make) vote with their wallet and gaming industry is way too big for people voting with their wallet to even matter, since it’s not a niche hobby. So bad press is the best outcome possible.
I also have a backlog of games and my friend just spun up his Minecraft server again, so my friend group havr been playing that a lot. My coworker took a day off to play Dragons Dogma 2. I have no desire to play that game rn.
If they actually believe something so patently ridiculous, then it’s probably best that they cancelled it. So I guess this is good news. Those are the only kinds of games I want to play. FFS.
That’s not the sad part. It is companies going for maximising profit as aggressively as possible, meaning they don’t care if they could earn 20 mil on this game, if they can get 50 on another.
Meh, if people didn’t pay or play those it wouldn’t make business sense to make em. Gaming is weird these days.
Everybody seems to have “the game” they play like OW or Valorant(?) or Fortnite, certain genres like racing and fighting games seem to have split up from mainstream gaming altogether where if you just check out what’s the new Tekken like people assume you’re like a “fighting game person” that goes to tournaments and builds your whole life around it and have since forever, back in my day it was just a game you played cuz the dudes on the cover looked cool and the game was fun.
‘Core’ games are all rip offs of souls or some other crap that I personally hate deeply, or straight up remakes of games where the original is just kinda better, consoles and GPUs cost way too much this gen and there are no real exclusives.
The trends in graphics are concerning too, everything is a TAA or AI upscale smearfest, PS5 can’t run that new Star wars game at more than DVD resolution without the same bullshit 8th gen checkerboarding or some other dynamic resolution technique alongside god damned AI trash. MSAA and SSAA seem dead and with them clarity and good visuals, all that artwork gone to waste, the only pretty games are MSFS and CP2077 with Path Tracing on max, UE5 is built from the ground up around smear and unity is enshittified, devs are cutting costs and custom engines are out, so future looks bleak
The only thing that I love about gaming nowadays is indie and AA games, from Stray (barring the awful graphics) to Sea Power, Descenders to Teardown to Airport Sim, these are games I had the most fun with this year that aren’t 5th-7th gen classics. That football game at TGA from Sifu devs seems fun tho. Tower networking looks cool too, reminds me of cozy weed shop 2 vibes with a WTTG2 style tech element and a game dev tycoon art style
Fwiw I love gaming nowadays, things like itch and steam self-publishing just didn’t exist nearly to the same extent back in the day, and this has allowed for niche titles I could only dream of back in the day and weird artsy games like Buckshot Roulette, Disco Elysium and Warframe finding success is awesome and was definitely not a thing in the past where gatekeeping was inherent to gaming.
Even hardware stuff like FBT trackers and steam deck and the crazy modding scene of today are things I love about modern gaming.
That doesn’t mean it’s not without things to critique, as every generation of games has, nor that nothing of value has been lost.
What doesn’t sell are the games that don’t have a well written story or well-written characters. Or the games that their developers themselves don’t have any passion or interest in, games just made to please shareholders… Or games that get preachy on issues without proper care…
Baldur’s Gate 3 was only last year. Metaphor just set records for Atlas’ fastest selling game this year. Even amidst the tremendously troubled launch, Cyberpunk 2077 went on to be one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its DLC did very well too. God of War: Ragnarok sold at least 15 million copies. And these are just a few examples off of the top of my head that don’t fall into gray areas like GTA where they’re also a live service.
Those are are the exceptions not the normal case. Look at almost anything remedy has done. Great stories but bad sales. Alan Wake 2 was still not profitable in November.
Meanwhile candy crush has generated more than 20 billion in revenue
Alan Wake 2 took an upfront buyout in exchange for appearing on a less popular platform. That would be an exception to the normal use case. A thousand companies will go bankrupt trying to make Candy Crush even though someone already made Candy Crush. And you can replace Candy Crush with Call of Duty, World of WarCraft, Destiny, or whatever you like. Those games take up all of your time by design rather than allowing and encouraging you to move on to another game.
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