It’s kind of wild that I’ve seen trailers and posts for Lollipop Chainsaw’s remaster, but the first time I hear about a Shadows of the Damned remaster is buried in the last paragraph of a dev interview.
It’s a useful place to find out if something totally sucks though. That’s how I use it. 60+? Probably good, at least for some audiences. Less than that? Only if you’re already hyped or a fan of whatever thing it’s related to.
Yeah I mean ratings are giving you an idea of whether there’s a chance you like that game. The higher the rating, the higher the chance. But there’s always a bit of chance involved.
I tend to buy highly rated games much more often, but if I really am hyped for a game with an OK rating, I still might give it a go. You never know if it will hit your specific niche.
In 99% of the situations, i couldn’t care less what the metacritic score is. Reviewers can be paid, publications can be biased and/or tired, and in general, a lot of the scores don’t actually represent how real players feel.
This is especially obvious, when reviewing longer games, or specifically MMOs. You cannot rank that after playing for 10 hours.
My first stop for reviews is always my friends. Based on their general recommendations, i frequently find incredibly fun games, that are otherwise unimpressive at first glance
I remember back in the 90s PC mags had the same issues, simple numerical ratings don’t mean shit.
The only score I follow is Steams user satisfies rating thing. the top voted complaints or praises tell me more about the state of a game than anything else ever could.
the advtage the steam system has is first the bought game/gifted game situation, as well as the more important factor, the recent opinion score, as at amy given momemt a game can get good because of a major change (e. g payday 2 reverting all the pay 2 win content the original publisher mandated) or gone to shit because of greed or a bad patch.
the problem users have is finding a curator that has a similar taste in games that they do. If I was a fan of JRPGs, im not going to care about the opinion on some person who doesnt really play jrpgs. at the same time, if you like some niche genre, to the general public, that niche is always less popular, so itll get worse ratings thanit should compared to people who enjoy said niche.
THPS 1+2 (the HD remake) is excellent but they decided not to do a THPS3+4 remake. Presumably due to low numbers. BUT online is broken. What I mean by broken is that you basically can’t log in to the server if your console is connected to the internet through a router. As far as I know Activision never acknowledged that failure. Do you think this problem might have hurt sales/microtransaction revenue?
Oh god, not them. Pick another producer, please. There are plenty out there… Most of them suck but at least most of them aren’t publicly known to be sex abusers.
Right? Sports games in general back in the aughts had the best soundtracks of any games, so much edgy rock, punk and metal. I don’t think anything nowadays can compare unfortunately.
People say Rockstar just “Isn’t a rockstar anymore”
No, this is pretty much how I expect from washed up rockstars who’ve sold out and only care about reliving the glory days. Constantly shouting “Don’t you know who I am?” when anyone gives them any grief.
I’m tired of games getting songs removed, so I am actually glad Rockstar and hopefully others are going the route of trying to only get songs that won’t end up having to be removed down the line. Not cool getting an update getting a song removed.
it’s interesting to think about the logistics here. How much money should Rockstar have allocated for the soundtrack, to offer a better deal to artists? The article mentions that they licensed over 240 songs for GTA5. At $7500 a song (who knows what they actually paid), that’s $1.8 million. The total budget for GTA5 was around $265 million, so that $1.8 million is less than 1% of the total budget. Some songs surely cost more than $7500 to license, so let’s assume it added up to 1% of the budget by the end. Evidently GTA6 is looking like a $2 billion budget game atm (absolutely bonkers), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to allocate at least the same percentage to the music licenses, given how central the soundtrack is to the GTA experience.
If they allocated 1% of $2 billion to the soundtrack, that would give them $20,000,000 to play with, or average $83k per song if they are going for about the same size of soundtrack. Now, this is all just my quick napkin math based on the assumption that Rockstar paid about $7500 per song for GTA5, but I think this indicates that either A) they are massively underballing Heaven 17 here, or B) Rockstar senior management has not allocated a music licensing budget that matches the size of the game they are making.
What do y’all think? Is $83k per song a reasonable rate for the kind of license Rockstar is asking for? Or is even that too low?
I’ve never heard of Heaven 17. On GTA V, there are a lot of bands than I had never heard of too. Rockstar introduced me to those bands, their other work, solos from those members, and other artists in those genres.
Frankly, if I was a musician that wasn’t already a huge star, I’d do it for FREE because of the massive GUARANTEED exposure.
artists die from “exposure”, because it doesn’t pay the bills. I think you are right that the exposure has value, but it definitely doesn’t have $83k worth of value, because musicians simply do not make money from album sales anymore. Most artists barely break even from doing concert tours.
Artists die from not getting exposure. This isn’t one of those “play my wedding for exposure” things. It’s being a regular song playing in one of the world’s most popular game franchises.
They should get paid, sure, but telling them to fuck off because the rate wasn’t what they want is dumb.
It takes upward of 200 streams of a track on Spotify to earn a single penny. 20,000 streams to earn a dollar.
(For me and my personal expenses, this would mean I would need 40,000,000 streams per month to pay rent/pay bills/eat. I’m dirt poor and live a dirt poor budget. 40,000,000 streams to pay $1400 in rent is INSANE.)
That “exposure” can still add up to “not paying the bills.”
Also, if he gains no new listeners? He would have made a huge mistake not angling for more money.
This guy is being smart, and the rich just want people to THINK that exposure is worth it. Even Oprah pays in exposure and its bullshit. The company has got the fucking money to pay it they just don’t want to.
You, as an individual, buy enough of their stuff to support them month-to-month? How generous of you.
Now that the snark is out of the way: Clearly an individual doesn’t make enough money to do that, and if you’re the only new fan they gain that’s still nowhere near enough to make a living.
You could have responded without being an asshole. If we had discussed this politely we probably could have reached an acceptable middle ground and both learned something from the other person’s experiences and ideas.
You’re coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.
It’s the internet. Calm down. Not everything has to be a fight. Use that energy to yell about something more important, like genocide or climate change. Goodbye
To be fair, they were smart enough to get some exposure even without accepting the deal. This is not the first place I see this discussion and some people are definitely going to check their stuff now out of curiosity.
But this exposure is short-lived with an incredibly limited audience Who may or may not listen to it. I did not look them up. I don’t have the time right this moment and I will definitely forget.
I just think that in this particular video game franchise, even if they did not receive the amount of money they wanted upfront for royalties, They could not pay for this kind of Marketing opportunity.
Sometimes, when I play a AAA game and something expensive is visible on screen (e.g. half of New York getting destroyed during that long quick-time event in Spider-Man), I like to shout “Production value!” at nobody, like that director self-insert kid in “Super 8” (2011).
I get a feeling I would ruin my voice doing this every time in GTA 6.
To answer your question, I think we would have to look at what music licenses usually cost. Some quick googling tells me that $7500 is hardly an outrageously low sum for a song from a middle of the road '80s band. They aren’t exactly Depeche Mode. I think they would have benefited far more from the inclusion of their song in this game financially (since it would cast them into the limelight again, providing streaming revenue and perhaps gain them new fans) than the little and likely very temporary publicity they gained from rejecting the offer.
But your assumption is that every artist gets the same deal. Some maybe more valuable and expensive than others. Then the question is, if this group was valued very low and that is whats upsetting. But come on, 7500 for lifetime rights is really bad payment. I wonder what the deals with prior games and songs was.
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