Idk, on Android you can run Pojav Launcher, but I don’t really know much about x boxes. Probably a mistake to buy such a closed ecosystem in the first place, from the little I have heard.
At ten I was coding basic stuff and figuring out lan networks to play multiplayer games in the early 90’s. An average 10 year old is very capable of figuring out tech stuff.
Eh… Like I said, I was doing a bit more just to play with friends. I guess these days it would depend. If you did the install and introduced it as the method for launching the game I don’t think they’d even question it.
Almost definitely. When they did the initial release, it could have easily been a flop, and if it was a flop, it would have been pointless to have gone in planning to repair and sell refurbished units. Now that sales are showing its a hit, they are taking the time to invest in changes for more long-term support.
Self-tapping screws made sense for a product in an entirely new product category without knowledge if it would be successful or not. Torx screws that slide into metal threads makes a lot more sense for what is expected to be a product with long shelf-life.
The only thing is, the refurb market can’t be that great to pay for this change. You might not think it, but changing to better screws and adding the metal threads is crazy more expensive.
Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.
You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens
Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation
I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan
Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step
Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals
I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version
It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
Yes! I almost always change a few of the buttons when I get the chance. Extra points if the game is nice enough to let you know when your changes conflict with other presets.
A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have “keyboard and mouse mode” or “console mode” if the controller is used.
I’ve got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.
Yeah, but if that’s the only way a game developer implements it, they’re tying themselves to Steam. I mean, if I were a game developer, I wouldn’t want to do that, as it’s a lot of lock-in.
I think that Valve’s service is a pretty good one, but they’re taking a 30% cut for doing a number of things for game developers. If they become the only game in town, it’s possible that they might start taking more than 30% and those developers are going to be kind of stuck with that.
It’s common across games, so it doesn’t make sense for game devs to reimplement the wheel, but I’d think that putting as much as possible in the game engine would be a reasonable place.
Not being able to bind the controller on PC is even more insane to me. Why can I change my entire keyboard layout but not change the controller AT ALL?
I get that you‘re frustrated for more reasons than a freshly released game has bugs but this is literally the first time I hear of bg 3 being not completeable. What specs are you running on?
You just have to use your judgement and laugh at what you find funny on your own, if you need peer pressure (opinions of others) to find something funny then it’s not really funny to you and maybe isn’t even funny for many people to begin with.
This might be controversial but maybe many Sitcoms that do this were never funny in the first place and used laugh tracks because try as they might they had to force people to find it funny via artificial peer pressure, that either constitutes of a crowd being told to laugh on cue, or a recording of them doing so, which is what a laugh track is.
Here’s the key point and why we stopped using them, things aren’t funny, people think certain things are funny, and they also think plenty of things are not funny, and like it or not people are not always going to find the same things funny.
I always thought it was because the earliest stuff was actually filmed infront of a live audience (Like a theatre) who did laugh, so when switching to non-live-audience stuff, the viewing public would be ‘put off’ by no laughter, so they injected it with canned laughter… then as time went on they realised this was rubbish and stopped it.
But maybe I’m just missing the joke in the previous two comments, I dunno.
In the earlier days it was like that but as time went on it became a technique known as sweetening to make the joke seem funnier, sometimes they would even use it to fill in silence or dead air since that was frowned upon (I wonder why people said TV rots your brain for the longest time… can’t be related to any of these practices could it?).
The beginning part is essentially saying that if people need laugh-tracks to find things funny they are dry and humor-less, a joke at their expense but also at the same time it’s 100% sincere, a person who can’t find things funny without others lacks a sense of humor.
Steam Deck is shaping up to be the “Nintendo” of handheld PCs. Not the most powerful thing on the market, but cleverly put together with its own bespoke software that allows users to customise and tweak games at the system level via quick access to its features. Having windows on the other machines makes your access to games better but means you have to dig harder or install extra software to do what the deck does. To paraphrase Sega’s 90s marketing, It Does what Windon’t.
Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.
I think it’s a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand… but there hasn’t been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.
Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It’s got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur’s Gate. And it’s reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn’t get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it’s gotten lots of buzz.
I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of “free” (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.
For me Half Life: Alyx was not even the best VR game but maybe one of the best games i played in my 20+ years gaming experience. It really shows how great VR can be if developers put an immense amount of time, effort and love into a game. Other honorable mentions: Pavlov VR, Blade and Sorcery (especially the Star Wars mods) and War Thunder
It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.
If you are going to compete with AAA games it’s going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.
A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.
Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a ‘failure’ sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.
Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn’t want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.
I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft’s gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it’s understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it’s just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don’t agree with it.
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.
It’s not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not
I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been.
Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it and pretend to give it extra development? I haven’t seen any details on why it wasn’t ready for release or what they are changing or adding? A quarter billion dollars in savings seems like pretty good motivation for a company to park a project for 6 to 12 months.
Agreed. Subnautica 1 steam revenue breakdown offers a bit of perspective on why they might want to play pretend.
“How much money did Subnautica make? We estimate that Subnautica made $274,113,745.92 in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $80,863,555.05. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers.”
Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
It’s far and away their most profitable game to date, so it would make sense to get some perspective from it. Can you offer anything concrete about their other platform sales? I’m not familiar with any tools for that
Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
According to one of the articles above the publishers operating profit last year was "only" $300m so that bonus would make the shareholders mad I guess.
Choom, you gotta remember any Edgerunner know they’re gonna flatline young.
Most people get chipped to perform their job, which is basically to barely survive a corpo life. Some have chrome for medical reasons. Most people don’t wanna be a chrome jock anyway, with cyberpsychosis and all.
Also, ripperdocs are the closest thing to medical attention proles can afford. And I suspect with the jack they make they can afford actual medical care.
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