This game felt like it was written by 2 different groups of writers, who also hated each other. The first group wrote about a world where everything was dying and dark.
The second group was a PR team, who wrote about “wouldn’t it be fun to go camping!” And “the pirates and assassins are unambiguously good”.
I made a rule that I can’t spend over $10 on a game until I’ve played through my entire backlog. I haven’t bought a game over $10 in 10 years and I’ve spent $6k on Steam since I started using it.
There are very few games I would spend $80 on. Actually, at this point I don't buy a lot of new games to begin with, I'm mostly just grinding the same old favorites now.
But for the games I really care about, I'm willing to spend on games I know will be worth it to me. I've waited 22 years for a sequel to Kirby Air Ride and if I have to pay $80 for it, I will pay $80 for it.
There are a few franchises that still have me day 1 even if they went to that price point (The Witcher, Persona, Trails). Those are always 80 hours minimum, though.
To be fair though, this is about the easiest prediction you could possibly make. I don’t think anyone expects this thing to come in under $400 even in a world where there aren’t tariffs looming in the distance.
Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.
I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.
That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.
That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.
They abandoned Linux support. Fuck them. It was one of the only games that did. Linux users were a bug part of their initial success, and they dumped us as soon as the money came in.
It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.
There are so many options out there that asking for $80, or whatever the equivalent is, is just ridiculous. I really hope people stand up against this bulshit.
It’s because they want to measure the creative process.
Which is impossible to do before it has happened.
So they try, and try, and try, and end up with a complex system where everything is measured, especially any kind of risk which is promptly eliminated and then the result is an expensive nothingburger they sell with extraordinary publicity budgets.
Some times they get a little bit creative and buys up a studio that has made a hit, but then they only try to capitalise on the brand name, not the creativity, while compressing costs, and monitor and remove the risks and thus the creativity.
bloomberg.com
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