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.
They tried too hard to be a CoD/Siege clone without offering anything new. I'm surprised it ever launched in the first place.
It really feels like somebody at Ubisoft is intentionally trying to tank the whole company or something lately. They used to be such a competent studio, so much so that it's hard to believe that these major failures as of late are an accident.
It’s not F2P, and furthermore it’s not a CoD clone. But you make a good point. They should’ve retasked those employees instead of just sacking them on the spot. Fucking corpo assholes.
I still fondly remember how Spellbreak just dropped the tools to run dedicated servers when they shut down. I don’t think forcing companies to run servers forever is tenable, and slapping an expiration date on the games is less helpful than it seems. Would be nice to enforce distributing those tools on shutdown, but that seems like a difficult fight considering what right to repair looks like.
The analogy makes no sense.
Your pinball machine keeps working until it breaks, relying only on electricity you provide.
A server-based computer game relies on running it on a server you aren’t paying the upkeep on.
If you buy a game that relies on servers that don’t belong to you, you should expect this to be a temporary lease, not something you can expect to use forever.
Of course, the language in the store’s UI needs to match that. You can’t “buy” a server-reliant game.
With games people used to setup their own servers. (And we liked it that way. Way more sense of a community.) So that could be an option. Allow people to run their own servers again.
What you say makes sense for a multiplayer-only game! But the game has a full single player campaign. There is no technical reason to remove access to that part. That part can be kept working without incurring recurring costs.
First off, I support both this campaign and linking to it. More awareness is always good.
However, as Ross himself posted, the problem with this comparison is that the “Stop Killing Games” campaign is aiming to end the tradition of simply turning off game servers. This Californian lawsuit, though not a bad thing, is very likely to simply change the labeling of games, which doesn’t help the end goal of Stop Killing Games.
I want both to succeed and am not attempting to attack your post, just provide clarity.
IMO if every such game came with a large “Playable until [Date]” sticker, a lot more people would care about preserving them. And just the market pressure may save a lot of games.
Now I’m picturing a video game version of the Disney Vault. “Play now through the end of the year for just $129.99* before GTA 9 goes back in the Vault for another decade! *Not including Microtransactions, Online Pass, BattlePass, Totally-Not-A-Lootboxes, or Megalodon Cards”
If they could, they would. But a lot of the time, they don’t even bother to keep the source code of the games that they make. It’s estimated that more than 50% of all games are lost to history because the companies that made them never kept the source code or a copy.
I remember there being a little scandal a few years ago when a remaster of a game came out and it still had the cracker’s logo in it from the pirated copy they used for the source code.
After the cluster fuck that was their previous release on top of the mass amount of actual DLC so I can’t just buy the game and run with it, there was no way in hell I would buy this game.
The last flight Sim game that I had was flight simulator x, and honestly even that one if I hadn’t got it as a gift I probably wouldn’t have purchased because even that, the amount of DLC that it had was outrageous, I was lucky enough that I got it on disc so I’m not bombarded with them all the time, but I had looked at the steam page because I was curious about it and man was I in for a shock.
I wish I still had all the discs to my flight simulator 2004, it did basically the same exact thing that X did, and arguably was better than the previous iteration of flight simulator without all of the stupid paywalls. I just threw the disc in and it ran, didn’t have to wait days for it to download, it didn’t monopolize part of my drive and it didn’t need a NASA supercomputer plus Internet to run
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