A class action lawsuit has been filed against Roblox Corporation, accusing the developer of facilitating "an illegal gambling ecosystem" and violating a federal law.
The complaint was signed by Chief Inspector Slowpoke
If the company has to lose people to remain profitable, that sounds like the executive leadership didnt know what they were doing and should be replaced.
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.
I think greater access to game development tools has been a very good thing for the industry. These days, I’m generally much more interested in what’s coming from indie developers than any of the big companies, with a few exceptions. I think that’s the best way to increase the diversity of games and game developers. Greater access to game development resources will help to democratize the gaming industry.
Yep, the vast majority of the games I buy at this point are coming from indies.
The main issue is large studios want to make a safe game that does everything and appeals to everyone. Meanwhile, indies are making games that are fun-first and targeted at specific audiences, rather than just the mean.
Games like Factorio could be made by a big studio, but it wasn’t, because it don’t have mass appeal. Meanwhile, if you are in it’s target audience, it is a 10/10 game. And it isn’t like the studio had to shovel $200m into a pit to make this 10/10 game.
CEOs are fricking pests/viruses. They don’t know what they do or what the companies values are but get bonus payments even when they are running a company into the ground. then they just move on to another company and do the same again.
finally hated the escapist loved zero punctuation but it’s so annoying how it flooded my sub feed with a million videos I didn’t care about and never would I literally only watched the solo yahtzee stuff
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that’ll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
I’m sorry, but free for online multiplayer is only a thing for consoles if the game itself is f2p
So you can play apex or ow2 multiplayer on your console for “free” but any other game that isn’t explicitly f2p, you will need an online subscription like ps plus/ Xbox live etc
My subscription expired months ago and I play all sorts of games, even some that I downloaded free before my subscription ended that arent in the store anymore. Are those all free to play? If so, what is an example of a non f2p game?
Can you give examples of the games you’re talking about?
So free to play games are things like Fortnite, halo infinite, overwatch, etc. Usually multiplayer based games. Even on console, you can play online multiplayer for those games without an xbox live or ps plus subscription.
Most games don’t follow this model. Take FIFA for example. You can buy the game and play it on console. But if you want to play online multiplayer, you will need to have an Xbox live/pls plus subscription for that.
Obviously there is nothing like this for pc games. Except for mmos or something like that, online multiplayer doesn’t require a subscription.
Sure, here is a list of some games that are still playable and accessible online even though I no longer pay for any subscription:
-Master Hunter World -Wolfenstein II -Grand Theft Auto V -Watch Dogs Legion -Resident Evil VII -Last of Us -God of War
There are a few more, but some I assume fall into that category, like COD. I do get a frequent notice encouraging me to subscribe or I may not be able to access some features or games but I have yet to run into that with existing stuff.
Update, it still doesn’t make sense but now I have no access. The moment I signed into the store and bought Baldurs Gate 3, I lost access to all my games offline or on. How I was able to previously play unsigned in is beyond me. Probably accepted some update when signing in and was previously grandfathered into really old terms would be my only guess.
Yeah none of those give me free online access after I cancelled my subscription. You sure you aren’t still enrolled through the remainder of your subscription period? If you cancel renewal, you still have access till the end date is up on your previous purchase.
I am not sure what’s going on to be honest, I guess I should count myself lucky and hope Sony doesn’t catch on. I have no payment linked, so it’s not auto-pay and the subscription ended like 2 months ago. I checked my wife’s account and she has no subscription linked either. I can’t access any new games or content needed with a subscription obviously, but current stuff mysteriously still works… I wish I had downloaded more games, I thought that they would have been inaccessible after the sub ended.
So update! I just had to sign in to buy Balders Gate. Now none of my games work that I previously downloaded, offline or on. So weird. Wish I played through a few of those before connecting.
Is there any reason to follow game journalism outlets anymore? Reading some positive/negative Steam reviews and watching some gameplay footage on its own gives a really good impression of what a game is like IMO.
I haven’t followed professional outlets for a long time. It’s pretty obvious most of them do not have enough time to give a proper review to these massive, 120+ hour long games. I used to read Computer Gaming World. Their reviewers would often mention that their rules required them to complete the game. Most of the reviews I see today, they don’t even necessarily get the whole fuckin’ game in their review copy. Just look at BG3.
Phenomenal game, with a solid story, incredible characters, fun game play, and just… Bugs. Lotta bugs. Especially after the first act. You might not even realize you are getting them because so many are that things that should happen, don’t. The reviews for it clearly only covered the first, most polished act. And even then, they didn’t actually mention bugs there and while it’s the most polished, it is still far from perfect. As time goes on and more people push further into the game, now those same review outlets put out editorials reporting on players bitching about the bugs on social media. Things that should have been covered in their own official reviews in the first damn place.
If all they’re going to do is write a bunch of bullshit they were likely paid to say, and then rely on users to generate more “news” content for them, I’m just going to stick with going straight to other players. There are still plenty that think for themselves and give honest, detailed descriptions of the game while trying to limit their personal opinions and bias. I want to be told how the thing actually is and make my own mind up based on my opinions; reviews can be objective.
Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn’t. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it’s simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.
That’s a bummer. I really liked the vision she initially set out with when she entered the role, but the actual content of the site never seemed to move beyond “game journalism, but a bit more snarky.” I wonder if some higher-ups never really let her vision move forward.
My interest shot up super high when they said they were making a new Marathon, and then it plummeted right back to 0 when they showed it was going to be a BR/extraction shooter.
I honestly don’t understand this situation and how horny people are to see ubisoft fail. I get it their games are not stellar masterpieces but honestly they are okay/good. It feels like they are incredibly overhated.
For me it’s a combination of them making games that all seem to represent everything wrong in modern gaming, coupled with all of the sexual misconduct among their leadership that they covered up and have still not been held accountable for.
I don’t really care enough to actively hate Ubisoft - I save those sentiments for companies like Nintendo and Disney. However, they did influence about a decade of horrible game design trends with the popularisation of the dreadful checklist-filled Ubisoft Open World^TM, and that is worth at least a mild dislike.
They’ve been releasing a lot of half baked games lately, coupled with lazy game design, where a lot of their open world games are the same thing with a different skin. And then the games themselves are the same first few hours of gameplay loops repeated for the rest of the game.
When their CEO said that players should get comfortable not owning the games they paid for I went from not really caring about their games to actively disliking the company
Far cry feels just the same since 3. Same gameplay, different story, different setting. While the story itself is usually good, I don’t think it has progressed gameplay wise or in technical or graphics aspects in any meaningful way. Car physics are worse than gta5 which is already out for 10 years or so.
For me it’s the arrogance. It’s the calling of themselves “AAAA” gaming and trying to push base prices of games past $100 and then making bland boring games. They think they’re amazing. This is their reality check. Their games are what I play when I have nothing, and I mean nothing else to play
Interesting article. They also talk about indies and different consoles:
Having heard some indies at GDC talking about skipping Xbox and PlayStation because there just isn’t much of an audience for indies on those platforms if you can’t get included in their subscription services, we ask Lowrie about how healthy the console ecosystems are for indies these days.
He echoes the indies we heard from in acknowledging that Switch stands apart from Xbox and PlayStation on this front.
“They’ve created an ecosystem – and therefore a user base – that is really open to interesting concepts and gameplay ideas,” Lowrie says of Nintendo. "The PlayStation and Xbox user, for as long as I’ve been doing this… there’s a lot of people that still like indie games, don’t get me wrong. Cult of the Lamb has done very well on those platforms. But I think the large majority of those people buy those platforms to show off what they can really do. They’re looking at Destiny. They’re looking at Helldivers. They’re looking at Starfield. They definitely push those.
“I think the platforms themselves all are really strong believers in indie games. They really do push them. I think on the other end, the consumers – as big as they might be – there’s still a smaller portion than we would like on Xbox and PlayStation that are open to looking at a pixel art platformer and going, ‘I’ll give this a shot.’”
I wish we had more small publishers. It’s so rare to go into a store now and see a $20-$40 title from some rando. Cheap enough that I can go “Oh, that’s interesting looking I’ll grab it”. Limited Run is great and all, but there’s no magic when you pre-order something 8 months out.
The return on indie games (if there even is a return) is already vanishingly small for 99% of releases - printing and distributing physical copies would just be pouring even more money down the drain.
Oh no doubt. It’s a shame too. We saw the death of the mid-level developer long ago.
When I go to cons I try to buy any smaller self-published titles I see, but wish the market could support smaller devs while remaining consumer-friendly with a “coop” publisher. An entity that can eat a loss while still finding gems that would be lost to time if stuck on a digital store.
That isn’t to say that smaller titles are dead. Currently I look out for stuff published by Soedesco, GS2 Games, Team17, Microids, EastAsiaSoft, etc etc.
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