There’s a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group’s recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2’s for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.
The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you’re neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.
True. These mega-deals are rarely about games, it's more in the realm of finance. In fact it doesn't really matter if it's games, films, cars, saucepans, it's all about the financial side. And as a consequence in order to make good on that investment these companies end up producing the blandest, widest-appealing pap, the complete opposite of innovation. However, the breathless way these stories are reported by a media, both specialist and mainstream, which is more concerned with business "success", means we're told it's a very good thing, when it clearly isn't.
Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore’s Law kicking in. The difference is that they’re making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren’t.
At this point, I don’t know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say “Xbox everywhere”, what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don’t think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.
I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I’m happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don’t think I’ll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.
I don’t own either current gen consoles. But I do have a rather up to date PC. I don’t have any current gen consoles when I owned some before (360, PS4) because I don’t like how they handle those consoles. I don’t run windows anymore because I disagree that MY PC that I built is somehow Microsoft’s property if I use their software. I used to be a Halo fan but ever since Halo 4 the series has been rather… Mediocre and I just don’t have time for sub par experiences. In fact I have not touched any AAA titles in so long because they have all been overly save and boring.
I don’t hate every big company making games,in fact I miss the old Ubisoft from the early 2000s or valve or blizzard (save of a few things) or…
Either way, the market isn’t infinite and at some point keeping the existing player base is probably a good idea. So is not pissing of customers with practices that are predatory. Ultimately wild uncontrolled growth is also known as cancer.
I don’t think it’s a death, it’s more of a transition. Firstly, a lot of XBox games have been coming to PC, intentionally, because Microsoft basically own the market*. They’ve also created XCloud + Game pass, possibly the most convenient way to play games, and you don’t need an XBox.
The real people who’ve turned on the device itself has been devs. Some of the stuff they’ve been saying at GDC have been at the same level as the stuff they say about Linux as a target. Like your game shouldn’t be that dependent on platform, it hurts things like archival.
You have to ask yourself why. Devs are professionals by definition, for them the context is ease of developing along with potential to make a return on investment. Xbox (console) is now a problem on both those metrics. Simple as that, no fanboying or villifying required.
Its just not a big enough market and a good portion of the market is GP'ified and doesn't spend outside of it. Couple that with dual SKU targets with real challenges working around the S memory constraints and here we are.
But I agree that its a transition. Away from the current hardware model.
I just remembered that Redfall also flopped last year, and that was supposed to be one of their two big titles, along with Starfield, which got overshadowed, to say the least.
Wikipedia tells me the CoD release in 2023 was “the lowest-rated mainline Call of Duty installment on Metacritic”, although it seemed to have still printed them money with essentially no work invested, so I guess that’s good?
Diablo IV, I think, did reasonably well in its niche. I remember it being a bit overshadowed by Zelda.
Not sure, if I’m forgetting any other major Microsoft/Bethesda/Arcane/Obsidian/Activision/Blizzard/King games, but yeah, that doesn’t look too great…
Much as I am loath to admit it, Diablo IV did amazing beyond its niche. Anecdotally I saw soooo many people who’d never played Diablo or any game like it get onboard.
Feels like an understatement - this was the game that killed Arkane, because a majority of the team decided they’d rather fuck off than work on whale chasing live-service nonsense. And like, good on them, but it means no more Dishonored, no sequels to Prey, no chance of Arx Fatalis II, and it fucking sucks to see enshittification strangling good talent. I hope they’ll find success outside of MS’ looming shadow.
The only xbox exclusive(s) that I can think of that I have enjoyed and come back to in the past decade are the forza horizon games. I’ve had more enjoyment from backwards compatibility and 3rd party titles on my Xbox.
Halo should have been good. But something happened to both bungie and 343 during that split. Bungie had some kind of magic with their specific group from halo CE to reach. They knew what they were making, and they knew exactly how to bring their vision to life.
After the split, it felt like both company’s were limping their releases to the finish line.
To be fair, I think a good portion of the issues are that Microsoft seems to be treating everything like a financial decision and not a creative one. I know this might not be the most popular opinion, but shit I would be happy if they scaled back their games a bit and just made something solid for once on a cheaper budget. I think we’ve seen that people don’t need these massive projects to have fun. If you look at what some of the most popular games have been the past while, a lot are indie games.
I think the saddest part is that the xbox ecosystem during the xbox 360 was so good when it came to community features. Party chat was a game changer, and it made the system feel like a hub to gather friends. A lot of the games available were perfect for groups. Now because the games have been suffering, a lot of my friends have moved to various platforms. It’s become less social and a lot less fun. Of course this is anecdotal and less of a tangible issue for Microsoft. But it’s these long term issues that have cause a cascading effect of corroding their brand.
They’re so pointless too. What are they even expecting forcing them in our faces to accomplish? You either care about audio or you don’t. Seeing your logo isn’t going to change that
Except most people don’t give a shit about Dolby. Even audophiles mostly don’t care about them as a company or the fact that they’re involved beyond the games ability to support high end output devices. Put that garbage on the box or in the credits at the end of the game where it belongs
Most people that say they give a shit about surround sound don’t have it set up correctly anyway lol
They’re lucky if the speakers are even in the right place…let alone tuned properly. Good AVRs come with a microphone and most of the takeover projects I did when I was in home AV had it sitting unopened in the box.
Audiophiles loathe that crap. It’s not making better sound, just adds loudness and other shit. Surround? It’s like when groups long time ago started using stereo and made the sound Left then Right then LEFT etc. After the first experience its just a nuisance.
But gotta sell the crap I guess. Good they just didn’t care about big corpo :-)
If you don’t have more or less a listening room with the loudspeakers very well placed, you won’t notice a difference. Mono with a good setup will give spatial clues as good as stereo. Yes you might get the left-right mixed up I guess but does it matter?
There was some mp3 matchbox shaking sound clip that really felt like it went around your head (popular maybe 10-15 years ago?), a simple mobile phone produced the effect very well, you just needed to close your eyes.
PSA: On PS5, after launching your game, hit the PS button. If there are activities, you can probably hit square to resume. This speeds through all the startup wankery and the main menu straight to loading your save. It rarely saves time, but it means you can launch your game and walk away to get a glass of water or whatever. I enjoy it.
Honestly, 5.1 surround sound is worth waiting the extra like 2 seconds of the logo. The fact that the game only has mono or stereo sound output just because he didn’t want to have a logo on the screen for a few seconds is not putting user experience over marketing.
It would honestly make more sense that Nintendo told him he couldn’t add it because they didn’t want to pay for it and this is how he justified it to himself.
Most households have a TV with TV speakers, only capable of L/R. Why pay money and have people sit through a corporate short film for a feature most won’t use?
The problem people have with your argument is not the existence of 5.1 surround sound.
Nor is it that the vast majority of households can’t afford a properly tuned surround sound setup instead of haphazardly throwing speakers around which arguably creates a worse experience than stereo.
It’s that the Dolby implementation requires publishers to license it and pay for an unstoppable ad that plays before every session, while benefitting only the petit bourgeois.
Notice how you reverted so quickly to your capitalist brainwashing. May be a good inspiration to see what other ideologies have been implanted into you.
I would understand the complaint if it was longer, like 5 or 7 seconds long for just the Dolby logo. But its not.
Like, if seeing a logo for two seconds bothers you that much, better close your eyes when driving riding the bus walking around town, otherwise you might see a dreaded billboard or advertisement.
Loading screens in a game take longer than two seconds and don’t have the benefit of running one time before the game starts and adding surround sound support. So you would rather be greeted with a black screen as a game with less features loads instead?
It’s a really good reminder when I’m ever in another state that things like that just… Aren’t needed.
The advertising thing is a slippery slope, and it’s OK for people to draw the line for how far down the slope they’re willing to go higher up than you would. It’s also OK that your line comfortably holds a 2-second ad.
No position here is unreasonable, and everyone should keep that in mind.
Gamecube doesn't have enough RAM to preload everything at startup like that, you have to go through the menus and pick a game mode and map to load.
Surely if it needed that startup load anyway, then Sakurai wouldn't be saying he turned the license down in order to get players in the game faster. I'm going to trust Sakurai's word here!
Sure, and the Spectrum ZX I used to use 35 years ago had even less. The GameCube is ancient history, it’s not the benchmark for a reasonable amount of memory for anyone.
Edit: apologies, I forgot we were talking specifically about a GameCube game.
If every single software a company licensed to produce a video game required this, you would be waiting an hour to see the start menu. Don’t let any company do this or they all will.
Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.
Bear in mind that Kirby Air Ride came out in 2003, on a console that's only meant to be hooked up to CRTs. How many users back then do you think would've had access to this feature in the first place? Or would still be playing this game if/when they upgrade later?
It was uncommon, but not so uncommon that it didn’t warrant being added to the game. Especially when Dolby was handing out licenses like candy apparently. I would imagine it was cheap to get a license, and would make some sense why Air Ride wouldn’t have it. Air Ride is my favorite Kirby game, but even I recognize that Air Ride is probably one of the lowest budget Kirby games.
Sound is at least as important to the experience as the picture. Go watch a scary movie with the sound muted and you’ll notice it’s not scary at all.
Playing a game or watching a movie with just 2.0 audio, or worse: using the TV’s built-in speakers, is such a diminished experience that you might as well not bother.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s cool, and I find good sound design at least as important as good visuals. It’s all part of the aesthetics package. One of my fondest media memories is watching Jurassic Park at a relative’s house with the sounds of the raptors coming from speakers all around. I even spent great expense setting up my own 5.1 setup.
But I’ve been chasing this dragon for too long. Audiovisual fidelity doesn’t move the needle for me anymore (pardon the metaphor overload). I no longer feel the need to have my media reach out and immerse me - if it’s good, I can do the work and use my imagination to get lost in the fantasy
Imagine not being able to feel explosions in your gut because you have a pair of tiny speakers strapped to your head instead of a big long-throw woofer moving air.
Sorry I’ll be explicit: I’m making fun of how pretentious you sound and can’t take anything you say here seriously. I actually agree that a monster sound system can greatly enhance a movie or game experience, but the difference depends on the specific media. I saw Fury Road three times in the theater because I knew my home system would never match the experience. Something like Star Trek TNG or My Cousin Vinny or, as the topic of this post, Kirby’s Air Ride hinges far less on the audio quality to deliver the intended content. Gatekeeping enjoyment behind speakers makes you a colossal ass.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I’d love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I’m sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you’re playing the game. If they’re even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo’s time.
Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: “The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”
The title states “Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo” presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it’s likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn’t use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).
You can downvote me too, I don’t really care about imaginary numbers. No need to apologize.
I am just disappointed that Lemmy was supposed to be a better place than Reddit, but my experience on Lemmy has actually become worse than my experience on Reddit.
You say you don’t go on reddit out of principle. Now can’t you understand someone not wanting users sit through a 2 second pointless marketing animation, out of a similar principle?
You can downvote me too, I don’t really care about imaginary numbers. No need to apologize.
You care enough to be bothered with Lemmy.
I am just disappointed that Lemmy was supposed to be a better place than Reddit, but my experience on Lemmy has actually become worse than my experience on Reddit.
I mean, at least this can be fixed, you can’t really fix Reddit.
And I think we still have a better experience on Lemmy than Reddit, for starters we don’t have ads here wink.
TBH I agree with you, 2 secs doesn’t seem like a big deal to me, especially when many other awesome games implement it, but that could also be because I have been desensitized from the daily ads of my life (it used to be worse, I have an ad blocker for anything, but I still use open TV as a background noise and there are some other advertisements you can’t just evade).
I agree with the statement up here that when we allow these 2 secs it lets the path open for more annoying stuff in the future, but also it is ultimately a decision from Nintendo to continue the deal with them if it is annoying enough for most users.
I don’t care about the number. The frustration comes from people that act exactly as Redditors do. Lemmy users in this thread insulting and name calling, etc. I don’t care about the insults themselves (which are against communit rules), the fact that Lemmy was supposed to be “a better place” and yet the exact same crap is happening is what is disappointing.
Reddit is equally as fixable as Lemmy. Just because the primary owner of Reddit is a shareholder and the primary developer of Lemmy is a communist doesn’t make it easier for either to do anything. The fundamental problem is the users, the people hiding behind anonymity. They can be the absolute worst garbage being because they’re anonymous, instead of just being a decent human. Changing that people isntantly go to that rather than a kind human is the only real way to fix it, and in that regard Lemmy can never be fixed just like Reddit can never be fixed.
Lemmy was not always like this. But since about 7 or 8 months ago, it became this way. And there is no going back.
Lemmy was not always like this. But since about 7 or 8 months ago, it became this way. And there is no going back.
Well, are we gonna ignore where the biggest influx of ppl comes from?
I’d say don’t take it too personal if other ppl think differently than you, I think this is the healthiest approach we all can take (especially when we are discussing hobbies).
This stopped being a matter of Lemmy vs Reddit, you can’t really fix Internet people, and that is to be expected.
Two issues though. Sakurai was taking about how he likes the ability to jump from game to game at an arcade and jump straight into the game. But a lot of console games had you go through intros, menus, tutorials, etc. And he didn’t like that, hence why he was saying he’d rather not have an extra logo screen to click through
The second issue was that the game in question was a GameCube game. It only outputs in stereo. Surround sound wasnt a common thing in games at the time. It would have been the old school Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II encoding. Most gaming setups didn’t have surround sound receivers or sound bars yet. Also, it’s a Kirby game. The target audience wouldn’t have cared
The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it’s nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it’s not something that adds up a lot unless you’re jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn’t make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.
As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn’t worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don’t pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.
The perception of delay is a lot larger for a single initial delay than a lot of smaller delays within the game. It’s very noticable if a game takes 20 seconds to get past the intro screens, while it is barely noticeable if a quarter of a second of delay is added to the loading between each level, even if it adds up to a lot more than the initial loading screen.
Considering that the use of 5.1 surround would be a very rare case for the target aidience, I find the choice of dropping it to be excellent to enhance the experience.
If it was money thing, couldn’t he just say “I needed as much coin as I could scrape up to get Sora from Disney” like he basically said with the last wave of DLC characters?
Maybe it’s my nostalgia glasses, but this is something I actually believe coming from Sakurai. The man almost hates useless ads as much as Lemmy users.
Is that the whole thing? I thought it would be a long screen with JUST Dolby. That’s like two seconds and has other credits on it. I don’t understand folks’ rage over that.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but I think the issue is they would have to work out how to encode the audio for surround themselves, and then it would be up to all of the different AV receivers out there to decode it properly. Using Dolby just standardizes it to where if your receiver supports that format you know it’ll decode it properly.
Yes there are other formats such as DTS and Auro 3D. You can even do it with straight up LPCM if you want, but DD is one of the quickest ways to do it and iirc DTS has similar licensing requirements with their logo, and barely anyone has Auro. You could try to use LPCM but you’d need a multichannel output such as 6x analog connections or a digital source using bitstreamed output which many didn’t have at the time.
Longer answer, no. This was a GameCube game. It only supports stereo output. It would have needed Dolby Surround/Pro Logic II libraries to do surround sound encoding within the stereo signal. The use would have also needed a receiver with Pro Logic II support and surround speakers.
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