Yeah i see some defense of the studios in the comments but Devolver hasn’t released something I’ve heard of since the first Good Neighbor outside of potion craft and I only know that one because an off-handed recommendation from a friend l. Not to say I’m some penultimate opinion on games, but if your stuff doesn’t make waves I’m assuming you won’t get money.
Like, everyone wants a Stardew Valley, but only 1/10000000 indie games will receive that kind of love and only 1/100000 indie games would even deserve it. Some are legitimately awesome and present unique gameplay you can’t find anywhere else, and the rest, is shit. It’s poorly designed or implemented, it’s dated, or it’s another super generic RPG Maker level of game and those were NOT going to sell well anyway.
I dont know what the alternative is, but what it is now is shit.
Devolver has their hands on a ton of indie games. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of Loop Hero, Deaths Door, Trek to Yomi, or Cult of the Lamb. Out of the Indie studios, they seem like the most likely to be able to push pass this.
Part of this article just feels like the capitalistic notion that profits should only increase and anything but that is failing:
"Expectations for Devolver this financial year were $115 million to $120 million, and they’ve had to go back to $90 million. The majority of that is the delay of big releases into 2024. I think those are decision for the right reasons, although investors won’t like it in the short term.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if the subscription model WAS actually hurting smaller developers. I remember hearing people hypothesizing that would be the case for a long time.
If you have Gamepass or PlayStation Plus Ultra, you can play almost any small publisher game for free. With that set up, there’s a very large incentive to only play the games on the subscription service, instead of buying a full priced game to try out.
The problem is that once a small game is on the service, a large number of potential sales are going to be cannibalized by people playing on the subscription service instead of buying the game.
This leads to a scenario where your game needs to be on the subscription service and you have less sales because of it. This means that Microsoft and Sony have a large amount of power over the small publishers’ vitality, since a lot of money now needs to come from deals with them.
As Microsoft starts tightening its purse strings trying to make Gamepass profitable, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more small publishers suffering as a result.
Honestly, I would hope for that as well; but it seems very similar to the enshittification of Amazon (Wired link, archive link):
Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing more than 45 percent of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees.
Basically the notion is once a storefront has captured the bulk of potential customers, they are able to extort their suppliers however they want, since it’s the only way the suppliers can reasonably reach the customers.
Hopefully in this case, the publishers can explore other sales avenues; but it all depends on the reach of the subscription service.
The ways those two businesses function are dramatically different. Microsoft has a near monopoly of the operating system that powers gaming PCs, and they couldn't turn their store into the Amazon of PC gaming, not for lack of trying, because Steam already offers customers what they want in a far better way and any attempt to close off their operating system is met with market resistance. There's also the fact that the games market is so broad and diverse that Game Pass and Microsoft's stores are nowhere close to being the one-stop shop that an Amazon or a Walmart have historically been, and it's why they're nowhere close to capturing "the bulk of potential customers". They've got about 25-30M subscribers last I checked, which is substantial, but it doesn't even come close to the 100M+ monthly active users on Steam, let alone the wider games market. (Steam is easy to cite, because they make more of their data public, but obviously there are substantial pieces of the market on PlayStation and elsewhere.)
What developers and publishers get from Game Pass and PS+ is a lump sum that devs/pubs project will make up for the potential of lost sales, and if it doesn't, that the word of mouth from offering the game with those services will make up for it in sales outside of those subscription services. If the offer is too low, they don't take the deal. So the subscription service is either a subsidy or marketing or both, but that's only if the figure they're offered is high enough. Saying that Devolver or TinyBuild benefited from that boon in ramping up subscription offerings is one thing; in fact, it may have ripple effects that help them out long-term, as people are more familiar with their brands through subscription services now than they would have been otherwise. But if they're truly "suffering" from those deals being less generous, that's just going back to the old investing adage of "When the tide goes out, you can always tell who was skinny dipping", or to put it another way, they weren't adequately gauging their risk alongside a good deal that was never going to last forever. Judging by the article, Devolver will likely be just fine and TinyBuild is more of a question mark. I honestly had no idea TinyBuild was publicly traded. Both are making sensible long-term bets, at least for the most part...in TinyBuild's case, I hope they didn't invest too much into the likes of RawMen. Both companies were contrasted against Team17, who kept more consistently conservative projections.
The firm is also in talks with a “known company” for a potential sale of its NASCAR license.
I’m guessing it’s Kylotonn. They just lost the WRC license and are nearing the end of Test Drive Solar Crown development. They need a franchise they can push out every year.
Another possibility is EA, because they love their yearly releases and have an abundance of racing game developers right now (Codemasters, Slightly Mad Studios, Evolution (or what’s left of them), Criterion, Firemonkeys).
I’d be surprised if it’s not Monster Games (owned by iRacing). They’ve done pretty well in dirt stuff for console with World Of Outlaws and they already have the hardcore sim market conquered.
This company has been such a shitshow for the last few years. They’ve got exclusive licenses for the ACO (Le Mans) and Indycar as well as most of the rights for NASCAR and are just sitting on them not releasing anything.
Unsurprising the devs weren’t getting paid. The company is only still around because of an infusion of cash from a sucker investor last year.
On March 28, 2022, U.S. federal judge Stephanos Bibas accepted a motion by investors Innovate 2 Corp., Continental General Insurance Company, and Leo Capital Holdings LLC to sue Motorsport Games in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. In the filing, the investors accuse four Motorsport Games executives of securities fraud, claiming that the executives provided misleading statistics to the remaining investors of 704Games about the company’s financial situation and the sales performance of its main product, the NASCAR Heat franchise. The investors allege that the information they received allowed Motorsport Games to buy out the remaining shares of 704Games at a significant discount to what Motorsport Games offered at their IPO, at which point the NASCAR Heat series accounted for a majority of Motorsport Games’ total net revenue, estimated at 99%. [48]
In November 2022, Motorsport Games received a notice of non-compliance with Nasdaq listing rules after its board of directors resigned over funding disputes. The company reported losses of $7.5 million against revenue of $1.2 million in the third quarter of 2022.[49]
In January 2023, Motorsport Games organised the fourth annual Le Mans virtual 24-hour endurance race, a parallel to the real-life 24 Hours of Le Mans event. The race took place in Motorsport Games’ sim racing video game rFactor 2 and featured notable motorsport drivers such as Formula One World Champion Max Verstappen and former Formula One driver Romain Grosjean. The event was plagued with server issues and disconnections, and featured a lot of backlash from participants. Verstappen described the event as a “clown show”[50] and online content creator and participant Jimmy Broadbent stated that this would ultimately “damage sim racing”[51] as a medium. Several days after the event, an anonymous employee threatened to publicly leak the source code for NASCAR Heat 5, NASCAR 21: Ignition, KartKraft, and the unreleased IndyCar game unless unpaid wage payments were made.[52]
The Series S is proving to be a boat anchor holding the platform back. They should cut it loose and release a digital only Series X to fill the space and call it good.
The Series S and X are extremely similar hardware wise. Games really just need to scale to fit the two targets. The real issue is that the games and game makers which MS owns largely use a lot more CPU power, which doesn’t really scale down as easily as GPU power. Having a PC game maker act like a console game maker is the real gap in skillset, not the dual targets.
The S only has 10GB of RAM compared to 16 in the X,
Yes, and the Switch is an ARM based architecture, the 360 was a PowerPC. Architecturally, the S and the X are very similar. Your argument seems to be “The Series S is slower and has less RAM”, which is true, but games should just scale properly. Lower res and lower framerate targets should work. They aren’t working because the game probably doesn’t scale across some critical axis. That’s basically a bug and they should fix it.
I think it bothers people because they think that Series S is “holding back” Series X, which is simply not how it works. Fixing things fixes them everywhere. Series S makes Series X games run faster and better.
I don’t think there are palette limitations, but many games are running on the Series S at SD with FSR upscaling to 1080P. Quality wise they do look acceptable. See Immportals of Aveum as an example
I’m inclined to agree. Many folks saw Elden Ring and its hype/critical acclaim, and they’ll look to AC6 next. Of course, I’m already seeing folks that are playing it and saying its not for them via Steam Reviews. So double edged sword I guess. It’ll bring new players in, but some may have bought solely on the hype, expecting something like Elden Ring but sci fi. Personally, I just like Armored Core and mechs.
I had zero expectations going into AC6, having never played one before and only discovering FromSoft in the past 3 years, but I love this game. I feel like I’m 13 years old playing PS2 Gundam games again
If you’re enjoying it, I would recommend checking out the rest of the series too. They all emulate well enough, except the PS2 games but they have PSP ports that emulate almost perfectly. The PS3 games might still be purchasable.
Honestly the PS1 and PS2 games emulate pretty well on Duckstation and the Nightly builds of PCSX2 (except for AC2, that needs the Stable)
You’ll just need to get used to the clunky tank controls.
You can customize them through the emulator (or Steam) to make the controls a bit more modern. I found a community layout for AC2 when I played in on my Steam Deck that made it feel much more like how AC6 plays.
Oh I played AC2 emulated a while back, but just needed to remap the turning buttons to the shoulders and I was good with the oldgen layout. At least until Silent Line when I needed to dual wield. But hey, I defeated all versions of old Nineball with those, so I’m happy!
Honestly while the aiming and moving controls in the old game were bonkers, imho the jumping and firing controls were better. Only 4 buttons – fire, switch weapon, sword, and jump (which is lateral boost if you do it while walking) fit the game into a standard PS1 pad. Playing ac6 I’m annoyed how much my right thumb has to jump back and forth between the aim stick and the face buttons – if they didn’t have 4 attack actions and 3 boost actions they could’ve fit more on the shoulders and l3/r3 actions.
I didn’t say it in this thread, but since you mentioned it I’ll concur: yeah after a tiny bit of remapping the shoulder buttons and d-pad, I actually got really into the old controls, and other than dual wielding, I actually preferred them over the later 3rd gen style. But both were usable. yeah I’m playing AC6 right now and I’m twisting my right hand into a knot operating the stick and the face buttons at the same time, but this is a kind of problem that every japanese mech game has… Gundam Battle Operation 2, EDF, the 4th and 5th gen of AC too. At this point I’m just used to it.
I’m playing on PC and switched to KB+M in my 2nd session and it’s night and day. Unless you’re using a PS5 controller with the extra buttons on the back, this game is meant for keyboard and mouse.
My kid thought I was nuts: “it’s a fromsoft game! They don’t even know keyboards exist!” but they provided basic keyboard/mouse support and it works amazingly.
Edit: I feel like dual-wielding takes away a lot from AC. The swordplay is too essential to the game, imho. My dream AC game would play more with melee weapons in the left-hand slot but remove dual-wielding. However, otherwise I prefer weapons in AC6 - more oomph and longer cooldowns means there’s more fun cycling through your gear instead of switching to a weapon and emptying it like was often the strategy on AC1, and the AC1 “heavy shoulder guns mean going immobile” and the stunlocking were dumb ideas.
But I assume I’m weird since I skipped all the middle games in the series and jumped from ac2 (which I barely played) straight to ac6 and was mostly an AC1 die-hard. I’m sure I missed a lot of good reasons why dual-wielding is good.
I also played Daemon x Machina and it was boring as hell, and duallies was a big reason.
I’m not switching to KB+M but I am switching to Type B controls after struggling against Balteus for 6 hours today. My hands actually hurt from how hard I was gripping the controller, lol.
Dual wielding was basically the only way to play in late Gen 3 as the games got harder and harder, and the enemy ACs started coming more and more decked out (or in the case of Last Raven, straight up cheating) and is what I’m most used to. First thing I did in 6 was to put on dual rifles. But now after trying out other builds I put a sword back on, they’re really fun and VERY strong in this game.
Yeah we need to become better to calm ourselves on new game releases and ask ourselves if it’s for me. Hype only serves publishers, hence they are so good at creating it.
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