Oh my god we need John Brown simulator. Old western setting, open world, muskets, horses and hand-drawn maps, tracking down slavers and stalking them across the prairie and conducting raids on their properties.
Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we’ll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to play this shit. I’ve got better shit that I can play for free.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
Those aren’t re-skins though, they just used the battle royals game type as their main game type.
I can’t really think of a similar game to fortnite before it in regards to the combination of building and competitive shooter, although I’m sure someone can point out an early example, and Apex is smashing together counterstrike and maybe overwatch or something similar for the gameplay.
Personally I don’t think apex would have worked if it just looked like a re-skin but its got a lot of great artwork and the level designs are interesting at least to me.
Also fortnite has become the everything game, they have Lego and rocket racing and a guitar hero minigame, its sort of gone wild IMO.
You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment
Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality
There have been a number of voxel shooter that have shipped lowkey since Minecraft that attempted to add block placement to the team v team ticket shooter, e.g. Ace of Spades.
I think we should just forget the game exists. One day they will announce it, but until them, let’s just assume there is no Silksong, and Team Cherry is just taking a long long vacation.
My hype train was put away for a couple years, but it came back out this year. If there’s not a definitive release date by the end of the year, then I will go back to pretending it doesn’t exist.
Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.
It’s been I think about 7 years and it’s not feature competitive for end users with 2011 Steam even though they definitely make more money than 2004-2011 Valve and by 2018 had 14 years of history to look at and feature target based off what competition offered
The CEO was regularly on Twitter complaining about Windows but refused to help grow Linux adoption. Valve has been doing that since like 2012. He constantly talks about standing with small developers but then in the Apple court case admits they would have been quiet if Apple gave them a special revenue split deal. He complains about Steam and mobile store cuts but doesn’t complain about consoles having the same.
Exclusive deals in lieu of providing a better experience for the end user. Talked up so much about being superior because they’re developer focused; didn’t have self publishing tools until the end of 2023 - 5 years after EGS launched. It’s been 7 years. They haven’t made PC gaming any better. They made it worse for a time when they were throwing cash at exclusives rather than store platform feature development
Recent example of how bad they are with pushing minimal viable products. EGS mobile store was launched the beginning of this year with no library view. You just scroll up and down, side to side looking for games you own mixed among games you don’t own. Their concept of minimal viable product is insanely mediocre for how vocal the CEO is and how much money they make and their turnaround time on improving these stores is awful.
There are numerous Android storefronts that don’t have Unreal Engine and Fortnite money keeping the companies funded and somehow Epic comes out the gate mediocre again where its marketing is free games but it’s mobile games so what’s available is way less headline worthy. They learned nothing from 2018 about the difference between what they consider a minimal viable product and what the market would consider a market competitive minimal viable product
Years ago Epic put out a kanban board to display a public feature development tracker to assure people they were working on improving the store. They abandoned that quick and I’m pretty sure what few they had on that, most still haven’t been implemented
Their support for handheld is at the level of GOG which barely markets itself and is pretty low revenue as it rarely gets any games that aren’t years old. Whether Windows or Linux, Epic for all their billions haven’t created a gamepad/TV centric interface. EGS is about at the level of GOG Galaxy which because of its DRM free policy will probably never be a big money maker. That’s just insane to me how badly managed EGS is to have so much more money backing it and so little to show for it in the product
The CEO is a regular blowhard virtue signalling about liberty/freedom on Twitter but can’t be bothered to try and pioneer anything for users as a storefront. Since 2018 EGS has been so stagnant while Valve has been expanding Steam as a platform, that EGS is less relevant to me today than when they were throwing out major free games every month. I have no faith in the platform to integrate WINE/Proton, put together a TV/gamepad interface, do something like Steam curators, comparable user review system, crowd sourced game tags - a lot of useless stuff makes it in those but I find them regularly useful at a glance as it’s usually pretty obvious which are probably jokes and which are probably legit, user gamepad mapping repository, I’ve used the guides before. Steam forums are not a place to browse, they’re a place to find when you Google a question and the answer is in a Steam forum thread Google/other shows you
I’d be happy with a suitable competitor. It’s just EGS has been terrible at it. I was sad that GameStop did nothing with Impulse. I had higher expectations for EA Origin. Ubisoft/UPlay was always garbage from day one AC2 always online DRM nonsense. I was hyped on GFWL before I learned they were charging for online multiplayer until that failed, also the install limits GFWL had where you had to call support when you reinstalled the game too many times. I was even excited for Windows 8 store until it was eating up peoples storage only reclaimable with a reformat of the drive
Only GOG exists with a unique selling point, DRM free. Every other competitor has existed just to try and have exclusives to make more money rather than try to attract users with a good service. In the end it turns out there’s so many solid to great games released every year that exclusives aren’t such a great point anymore. There’s not enough of them and exclusives not varied enough to make a storefront platform better than the total Steam package
I find EGS launcher to be incredibly slow, so I don’t even bother claiming their free games using it. I use the browser instead. The annoying part is EGS launcher will prompt my 2FA if I don’t open it at least monthly, which is also too much of a bother.
I’m pretty sure Steam has been able to do that since launch, though I do remember the legendary loading bar that would progress then regress then progress and regress all with the same text message there so it wasn’t perfect in 2003. Roller coaster early on but by like 2007 it was pretty solid
I’m pretty sure EA Origin was able to do that day one or within a year of release. Origin was OK from what I remember just that it took stayed stagnant and I’m guessing onboarding games to the platform being a terrible process considering how sparse releases were on there
Steam is a mature platform. It doesn’t roll out new user facing features often. Yet somehow I think the gap has widened since 2018 vs EGS
And Epic has had a lot more financial resources available when they launched their store. Estimated valuation of $15 billion in 2018, Valve’s was half that in 2022.
I don’t really see an excuse for Epic to have ever had missing features, they entered the market with plenty of templates for what does and doesn’t work
I just went through this yesterday! I did a big upgrade on my wife’s computer, fresh install of Windows on a 2TB NVMe drive replacing the aging 120GB SSD that somehow didn’t completely fill up, etc. Etc. really loved pointing epic at the installs on the secondary drive and it just ignoring them and instead spending 3 hours downloading Fortnite after we just spent 1 hour applying the last update yesterday (and another hour on a different update the day before too!) on the drive that’s RIGHT THERE IN THE COMPUTER!
DRG is a fantastic place to start with moving from a controller to mouse/keyboard.
I would personally T-up some classics like portal and Half-life 2 for solo “history lessons” after that. Only then would I make some harder recomendations like long RPGs, MOBAs, 4X, and would shy away from MMOs unless you have an organized group to introduce them to.
I encourage you to explore the wonderful world of indie games, and free yourself from the shackles and shitty anti-cheat implementations of the AAA/AAAA gaming industry
I can cite way more than 5 excellent games from this decade from the top of my head, We’re almost in 2025, so I’ll limit to games released in or after 2015:
Factorio
RimWorld
Stellaris
Fallout 4
Overcooked 2 (and all you can eat)
Life is Strange
Cyberpunk 2077
Before your eyes
Dead Cells
Shadow Tactics
Cities Skylines
The outer worlds
Two point hospital
I can keep going, but this is just from the top of my head, there are always good games getting released, and very rarely they’re AAA.
Microsoft is a fucking ghoulish, evil company. The only reason they bought Bethesda was to own their IP. They have Elder scrolls, Fallout, and Doom Because of ID games. That alone is going to bring them so much money, if they ever want to sell any of those franchises in the future, they can sell them for a fortune. That’s probably the reason why they acquired Bethesda to begin with. Laying off Hi-Fi Rush after they delivered an excellent product was just pure evil.
Yeah, my thought is that this is a game they'll be supporting for 8-9 years so what the fuck does it matter if it runs like dogshit on day one? Don't fucking buy it until the performance increases and the problems you mentioned are ironed out.
It really is that simple.
Anyone that expected this game to be perfect on launch was clearly not around whenever Cities: Skylines launched. The performance was godawful to the point that I refunded it. A couple of months and a couple of patches later shit was cleared up and I repurchased it. Didn't have an issue after that.
So yeah, the whole "Why doesn't this brand new game not have the same performance and features as a nine year old game with numerous DLCs and mods?" thing is getting fucking tiresome.
I don’t think it’s crazy to expect games to have playable performance levels when they release. Not to mention it’s a sequel so you’d think they would learn some things after fixing the first one.
Yeah the fucks up with all the Paradox apologia in this thread? I also remember Cities: Skylines on release It ran fine and my rig was shitty back then. It was a perfectly functional little city builder. People loved it and it was called the new Sim City! “Just wait two years and put down another $50 on dlc bro. Ur dumb for expecting it to be good now.” Nah this shits unacceptable. If a game needs to be supported for years before its considered good then an honest developer would call it an early access game. Ya know, those games that get years of support, updates, and features for free.
Yeah but it’s Paradox as the publisher who is the one setting the parameters of them having to build a game that is designed to support 10 years of DLC like all of their other products because that’s their monetization strategy.
Publishers still have a lot of power in a games development. They can set deadlines and dictate the direction they want a games development to take. Seeing as this is a recurring problem with games Paradox both develops and publishes, its easy to see who is to blame here.
DLC part pisses me off also. I know this game isn’t developed by Paradox but it seems to be a trend in Paradox games where you need to spend the base price + an absurd amount of extra money to get the developer’s “true vision” or whatever. It’s really annoying.
To get most of the base game features that are currently present in Crusader Kings III, you would’ve had to spend a sizeable chunk of cash on DLC for Crusader Kings II.
I completely agree. I think the point of the commenter you’re replying to is that this is the kind of game that will fix these eventually. It’s still disappointing for a launch, but eventually it will probably become better than CS1.
I just bought Fallout 4 GOTY for $5 the other day. Look forward to doing the same in a few years when Cyberpunk 2077 has a final release with everything fixed and polished. There’s so many good old games, why buy anything brand new.
And this doesn’t forgive devs for buggy initial releases either, because I’m not throwing money at something until it’s actually done.
The base game of 2077 is pretty good now that 2.0 is out. My biggest issie with it at launch was the lack of cyberspace for hacker player characters. Felt like the game was funneling me towards standard FPS gameplay, even if there are a lot of options within that realm
Exactly this. No man’s Sky is apparently decent nowadays too.
Part of the issue is that publishers make studies sign contracts with fixed release dates, with heavy penalties for delays (even though basically any software project ends up going over time).
But yeah, just go through the backlog of older games, this way you also don’t need the latest PC either to play on max settings.
Preorders. It used to be that you had to preorder the LOTR special edition on DVD with figurines to make sure the shop had existences… then Kickstarter bastardized it into “pay to maybe get something”… and Steam jumped onto the bandvagon of “pay hoping it might work some day”.
Not sure how the point about Kickstarter is relevant but it’s not Steams fault devs are releasing unfinished games.
And I wouldn’t say it went straight to bad digital preorders. I feel like that is a more recent phenomenon and digital preorders were better years ago.
I’d much rather play the game in its current state than waiting 3 or 4 months, i have a pretty beefy system and i dont mind low framerates in a strategy game. If you don’t feel the same then don’t pick it up, wait the 3 or 4 months and enjoy it then.
The problem is that they don’t communicate this and still ask for the full price.
Imagine I’m a gamer who wants to buy and play a working game today, not in half a year. Nothing on their store page indicates that the game isn’t in a playable state yet, so I’d pay full price for a game I can’t actually play. That’s misleading at best, and a downright fraud at worst.
They could easily fix this by delaying the game or launching it as early access for people who don’t mind playtesting a half-finished game, but they didn’t.
It’s kind of baffling how we accept this as pretty much the standard for major releases these days. Why would we be okay buying anything else like this? If I bought a pair of shoes and they had issues that made them unwearable until I got them repaired I would be irritated as fuck, and obviously this would be unacceptable for a store to sell them like that.
I doubt the average player looks up whether the devs came out to warn players their game runs like shit before buying it, I think they just buy it. Similar to how people probably don’t check to see if a movie director has mentioned how bad the sound mixing and lighting is in a movie before going to watch it. Might be a crazy take but imo the onus isn’t on the person buying the game to make sure the game is finished, let alone looking up articles on the game to make sure the devs didn’t admit that it runs like ass and isn’t finished. Though with how often it happens and how often there’s people that excuse it maybe that’s where we’re at now, you reap what you sow and whatnot lol
Anyone buying a full price title without looking it up with a quick Google search or reading reviews on Steam is far gone from my compassion.
You can even refund it so easy it’s not even worth the outcry and i don’t even pretend to care about anyone pre-ordering digital downloads.
It’s shitty that these devs have to put the games out too early, but it would save everybody’s money and nerves if you just start to see releases today as early access because that’s what they all are. There are many companies out there which don’t say a peep and i won’t wreck anyone who at least tries to give a heads-up !pre! which anyone who cares could get easily for free.
This is not what I’m talking about, because the vast majority of people buying the game won’t have seen this. It’s not enough that the info is somewhere on the internet, it needs to be front and center when buying the game.
We didn’t have god damn tunnels in CS1 when it was released and people were raging about the city being limited to 9 tiles.
If company admitted performance issues before release is the hill that these people are willing to die on, well go ahead then. Back then the alternative was either cities platinum series or the abomination sim city became and neither of those was any good. At least now you have something more modern than sim city 4 to fall back on if CS2 disappoints.
The problem is, this sets a precedence in the gaming industry (and in the consumer’s minds too) that it’s fine to consume 16 GB of RAM, not on a late game megacity but on a new save.
Games like this are also pretty palatable at low framerates imo, certainly much better than an fps or something. If the gameplay is solid I’ll definitely pick it up. I like to have it as a second monitor game.
I’m sorry, but your reasoning is absolute nonsense. Maybe game developers should unionize, but suggesting that it should work like Hollywood is pretty ridiculous.
The huge studios would function just like in Hollywood.
Okay, so fuck the developers at big studios just like how most of the people working on movies get fucked now? You think because a deal was reached by the union that the big studios aren’t still just running to the bank with their loads of cash? The recent strike (and most strikes in Hollywood) were mostly about residuals. You know why? Because people who aren’t above the line in the credits get shit pay. At least in the games industry most people are employees, get paid up front, have a salary, and whether the game succeeds or flops they get their money. And most people don’t get laid off between games. You’re getting paid your salary even while there is downtime. In Hollywood, if the movie flops(*), you’re shit outta luck, my friend. Hope you’re happy with whatever you made during production and you’re able to find your next gig quick. Because you’re not an employee of the studio, you were working for a production company on this one movie and now you gotta fend for yourself because the movie’s done and so is this LLC.
(*) which brings us to the big fucking asterisk in how Hollywood “works”. Movies don’t make money. Not on paper anyway. It’s so bad, it even has its own name: Hollywood Accounting. The gist of it is that they use creative accounting techniques so that profit sharing agreements (like the residuals that were just fought so hard for by the unions) pay as little as possible.
And yeah they would want to pump out those blockbusters, but nothing would stop indie developers from developing.
What stops indie developers from developing now? Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution, a larger audience, and much lower cost to entry.
I would allow for consistent and fair discussions for the unions and studios as to how pay will be done.
Yeah, because that’s what Hollywood is known for…
It will also put in safeties for crunch and other abuses.
Crunch (and other abuse) still happens in Hollywood production, so… Nope, sorry.
I’m just saying [the Hollywood model] makes way more sense as a model for how modern AAA games are made.
No fucking way. As someone who was a salaried employee for 15 years in the A to AAA game industry over 7 projects, some of which failed but I still got paid, with bonuses and stock awards and job security, please fucking no. I’m glad I didn’t have to fight for a new gig every couple of years and hope for residuals.
Very well said. I think there is an argument that the gaming industry would benefit from more unionisation (there are very few sectors that wouldn’t benefit from it!), but emulating Hollywood doesn’t seem like the answer.
I think it’s fair to say they’re are some significant similarities between the two industries. They both focus on large, multi year creative projects with unknown returns. I’m not sure emulating Hollywood is the answer, but they can at least look at how existing Hollywood unions have approached addressing any similar problems
Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution...
It kills me that there's no Steam or GOG for TV and movies. My options are either Blu Rays, when they exist, or streaming, even if I buy the movie outright.
You mean delivering an actual file/media that you can watch without streaming? I know Netflix has the ability to download stuff to watch offline later. I assume other platforms support something similar. That’s pretty close to steam or gog where you don’t own a copy of the game, you own a license to use their copy.
Edit: But yes, I do sometimes wish I could pay per title and not have to worry about subscriptions to maintain access to certain things.
It's not close enough if I want to run it from a PC or Steam Deck. They only allow it on mobile where they can enforce their DRM. Then those downloads are only good for a few days before they need to be renewed and they run into all sorts of technical problems trying to enforce the DRM.
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