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.
You can play Unciv I guess, I don't see why you would want a strategic view only though? Nothing stopping you just using that mode exclusively yourself.
Honestly that’s just how Civ has been for the past few releases, most people don’t get it until the typical set of 2 major expansion packs come out and eventually go on sale. The base price of the full package has always been crazy high.
I played through exactly one full game, and it just felt… pointless, I guess? Like I was just clicking through turns to get to the end and none of it mattered. Then it told me I’d lost and was like “K” and then played Civ VI for a bit.
I mean why play an unfinished game? The radical changes sound interesting to me but it needs at least two add-ons to flourish, the same old story as with 5 and 6. I can wait and pick up the complete experience for half the price if that ever sees the light of day after the layoffs.
Yeah, I like it. It's definitely an unfinished product and lacking a lot of content and polish atm, but it's got the bones of a good game. Absolutely not worth the current asking price tho
I would understand forcibly banning/removing something, if it poses a real existential threat to the majority of people.
But religion fueled bigotry, in a place where you can CHOOSE to buy and play something, or completely ignore and hide if you’d like? Come on. Adults can decide if they want to have access to this content on their own, without a completely unrelated third party constantly trying to fucking inject themselves in between
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.
What industry standards is he talking about here? Steam code of conduct only says you must engage in lawful behaviour. There’s no American law banning far-right symbols. There’s no doubt Steam has a content moderation issue and I would love to see those things go as well. But unless there’s some kind of law then Valve is just going to ignore this problem like they’ve done in the past.
Well, name another game platform that openly allows swastikas. I think they are saying the rest of the industry largely doesn’t allow this so Valve shouldn’t either.
No other gaming platform has the userbase Steam does. I see this more of a numbers thing than anything else. If 2% of the gaming population is far right then it’s going to be much more noticeable when one company has a userbase of ~100million. I’d be very surprised if the other companies like Ubisoft and EA have this kind of content moderation.
I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.
Roblox. It’s a game but also a platform in a sense. It’s full of kids running around yelling racial slurs, kicking users with dark coloured avatars, and lots of far right content. It is like a grade school run by 4chan.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
With all the studio buyouts, closures, layoffs, etc to pile on top of all the usual greedy macrotransaction crap - it’s really hard to give a shit about games right now. Seriously, the only upcoming game I’m even remotely interested in is Tiny Glade.
The indie/pseudo-indie space still has a lot of great games. And the reception to those are vital for convincing the few remaining funding sources to “take a risk” on their next game.
But that is also not what the keighleys are. They are basically E3 in that it is about the big publishers and platform owners doing big announcements and a select few smaller studios being allowed to pad things out and get cut if Kojima decides he wants another jerk off session.
But I assume there will be a Steam demo event of some form during this (it feels like we have one of those every week now). There are also actual indie groups that do showcases around the same time. And THOSE are a spectacular time where it is clear people love the games they are working on. Also it is usually a great contrast to “all dudes, all the time” on the keighleys and actually having developers on the indie showcases.
I got badges for PAX this year, first time since pre covid, and was really excited. After I bought them though I was like “Why did I buy these, there are literally no games coming out”. Hoping the indie scene will be great though
Haven’t been to pax in years, but the indie corner was alway my favorite part anyway. So many games to play I’ve never heard about, the lines to play are usually much shorter and you get to talk to someone who’s directly working on the game so they are super passionate about it and happy to have people there.
Yeah last time I was there I met the American truck simulator guys, they were really cool, and learned about a lot of newer games. Definitely a fun area.
I’ve known all year that the game I was most looking forward to was the new trails. Sad/disappointing that were halfway through the year and I can honestly say that there’s almost nothing already announced that excites me, I was hoping to see something that would excite me but alas that wont be the case. And I do play indies as well as bigger budget games and I’m not depressed or mentally unwell (I’ve had people armchair diagnose me on Reddit for not being interested in games before)
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn’t come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
it might just be me but I come back to this game about once a year, play for about 4 hours before feeling like it feels almost exactly the same? I see these huge update drops but they don’t ever feel like anything
I have an idea lets make a game that embodied the spirit of the successful versions, lets stop trying to court devil may cry/elden ring fans and get back to making a turn based rpg or similar to ff10.
It doesn’t have to be turn-based. FFXI and FFXII are also great. I feel the bigger issue is that making a story heavy game while everyone else is also making story heavy games makes it no longer unique.
I wouldn’t mind going back to ATB, but I don’t think that would win back an audience except for nostalgia points.
I enjoyed all of them and FFXVI too. I think it’s okay to reinvent FF combat every iteration to keep it fresh. I’m not sure if I’d enjoy a turn based combat today like I enjoyed it 20 years ago.
Love this idea. The turn-based system in FFX was my absolute favorite, and I was really sad they didn’t follow this direction further (even for FFX-II, like WTF).
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