Well, the USD is worth 15% less today than it was when the consoles launched. As such, keeping the price the same is the same as discounting it with a stable currency. The price today is the same as $425 at launch, so prices have come down we just don’t see it reflected in the dollar price.
In addition to that we’ve passed that era of Moores law. New hardware is coming out with diminishing returns unless it’s big and expensive. We’re long past the era of every 2 years hardware is released with exponential returns in power and efficiency rendering everything that came before obsolete.
Hell even from an aesthetic point of view Red Dead Redemption 2 came out almost 5 years ago and with higher settings on PC still holds up as a pretty game. The biggest factor holding graphics back these days is development time and money.
Also fab production is a fundamental limitation to a greater degree than it was in the past, prices typically fell quickly as a process node gained better yields and could be made on less busy production lines but you have a much higher fixed cost just to convince TSMC or whoever to put you high enough up in priority to get your wafers made at all.
I hope most developers stay away from Denuvo on Switch. Devs already have to squeeze the thing for every fps they can get out of it, it really doesn’t need anything else bogging it down.
“We hear you. I can relate to your struggles. We’d love to solve the problem. Of course, preservation is front and centre when all these decisions are made.” isn’t quite the same as “We’re working on a solution to preserve 360 games. We came up with the following solutions so far: […]. Let us know what you think. Stay tuned!”
I wouldn’t expect anything to come from this. Microsoft employees wrap a “fuck you” in a gift, gaslight the backlash, and tap dance. When the excrement makes abrupt contact with the rotating blades of the fan, the lead self-resigns with a long-wielded and non-apologetic notice. Another Microsoft employee takes over, and leads the team with the same mindset until the next incident.
it used to be the case that when you weren’t able to enforce DRM on a piece of software anymore, you would offer it as a free download so people who bought it wouldn’t lose it
they don’t have to keep supporting, just not make it unavailable the best case would be if they made it open source, in that case other people could keep maintaining it, but would be against their profit incentives
Reworded: Think of all the resources spent on making sure people don’t steal the software you paid to make.
I’m all for open source software. But if a company spends money paying employees, they need to not go out of business.
Now, do I think they overcharge? Yes. Do I think their subscription model is offensive? Yes. Are there other alternatives: Affinity Photo, you pay once for the version. Yours forever.
Ubisoft is currently developing Far Cry 7 and a standalone Far Cry multiplayer game.
It’s claimed that Far Cry 7 is being made with Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine, rather than the Dunia engine used for recent series entries. The multiplayer game is currently an extraction-based shooter set in the Alaskan wilderness, it’s claimed.
Oh crap. That’s not good. I know Far Cry 6 wasn’t great, but making FC7 multiplayer and an extraction shooter isn’t the answer. What’s next, Forza the card game?
ETA: Ubisoft is making Far Cry 7 AND a standalone Far Cry multiplayer game. I misread “as” instead of “and.”
Oh those are pretty big games haha, the recent dark and darker release has people playing it all over twitch.
Basically, you spawn into a map with nothing. It’s both pvp and pve, and the usable map gets smaller over time (fortnite/battle royale style). You pick up loot throughout the game, lose everything when you die, and there are only x points where you can “extract.” If you extract, you can store that loot in your vault and choose what items to bring into the next match, so you have an advantage over other players.
Personally, I’m not much of a PC gamer, so I don’t have a lot of personal experience with Denuvo; but this sounds pretty concerning.
My understanding is that by Denuvo LoJacking into every part of the game, it seriously hampers performance; and the Switch is underpowered enough as it is. I can only imagine how poorly games will run if the Switch has to devote resources to Denuvo as well.
Plus, from a preservation standpoint this is terrible too. Even if the studio drops Denuvo down the line, it will forever be included on the cartridge. This means that in the future, the only way to play this game will have to be an emulated copy, since you won’t be able to get the update to clear the (no longer supported) Denuvo from the game.
Exactly. But AFAIK every Denuvo game eventually gets cracked, so at least we will have the pirate copies. From a preservation standpoint, a dumped ROM is much better than a physical cartridge anyway, since it's more portable and easier to back up. It's the contents of the cartridge minus the physical limitations.
There’s plenty of games which haven’t been cracked. More often than not, a game is updated to remove denuvo or a drm-free .exe is released accidentally.
It’s been hard to crack games and from what I’ve read, it now relies on one person and they have been a bit of a lunatic.
EMPRESS is their name and yeah, they are bonkers. They are also very picky and influenced by donations, so obscure games won’t be cured from DENUVO ever. Judgement, a somehow popular Sega release, was cracked days ago, and it’s a 2018 game. They picked a fight with a ripper\cracker Skidrow in .nfo announcing that.
For clarity sake, Judgment only released this March September 2022 (thank you for the correction) on PC. But for example, Dead Space Remake, which released in January, is still uncracked.
EMPRESS may be a lunatic, but it’s not like we have any better options. If anything, I wish EMPRESS would teach the next generation of d€nuvø crackers and that they would be chill and just crack for the sake of piracy/preservation.
I hope it’s not a single person but a group mascarding as one deranged individual so it means that capable crackers are more widespread than one singular genius holding it down.
Who really knows it’s all very strange to me, the scene has generally always been very much out of mainstream politics except when it relates to tech/IP law, and generally pretty egalitarian, insofar as no one knows who is on the other end of any conversation.
I can only imagine how poorly games will run if the Switch has to devote resources to Denuvo as well.
Pokemon Go added code obfuscation (I forgot the name of the company that provided it) some months after it was first released. Phones started running very hot, battery life dropped drastically, and people who played a lot had to replace their batteries (or phones) in a fraction of their normal lifetime. Also, as you imagined, performance dropped significantly.
Wouldn’t necessarily be impossible to “remove” Denuvo from a cartridge after a certain amount of time, not physically remove it, but bypass it with a patch. Makes sense to add in this capability too, since Denuvo licenses can be subscription based and at some point it just isn’t worth the ongoing costs.
Definitely expect a huge performance hit though. Games with Denuvo run like absolute shit lol.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne