This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
As has been said I’m sure without Yahtzee the site is basically over.
Which is too bad I really enjoyed extra punctuation and the Slightly Something Else podcast. The whole point of having a subscriber model is that you’re not beholden to advertising or the algorithm or nebulous corporate goals, as the hosts have aid many times.
I guess it goes to show getting acquired by a corp only ever benefits the corp
how many names can there be left for outlets that rose out of the ashes of other outlets? Second Wind, Remap, Aftermath, Nextlander…i didn’t think I would see this kind of name become a “genre” in my lifetime.
Given how much time they’ve had to think about branding, I’m not sure that this is necessarily the name that they’ll stick with. But I think that it’s probably – while this is in the news – a good move to get people looking at some channel that they do control, so that if they come up with something else, they can tell people about it.
no i mean to be clear, i know that names are hard! you have to think of something that’s catchy but also unique enough to google but also doesn’t sound stupid and also kind of signifies what your outlet is about…it’s hard! And most of the outlets i named also had to come up with their names within a 2-week period where they had no jobs but had to scramble to pick a name while their names were still in the news. You and I are on the same page here.
This reminds me a lot of what happened to Waypoint with Vice. They were running on an ad-based model since their inception, and then they launched Waypoint Plus (their subscription model) to basically save themselves from extinction. Then Vice itself hit the bankruptcy wall, so the Waypoint staff were all laid off because, while Waypoint Plus was profitable and sustainable, it wasn’t growing.
Then the laid off staff just launched their own subscription-based small business and, at least for now, it seems like they’re better off. Based on other comments, it looks like that is what the Escapist Staff is doing with Second Wind.
Haha Aftermath is ex-Kotaku staff, although they do have Gita Jackson, who was with Vice and Motherboard for a while after she left Kotaku. The ex-Waypoint staff is Remap!
I’m with you on subscription-fatigue, I love the Remap crew and maintain my sub with them for now. The thing is, I think this whole thing works better if all of us gaming enthusiasts continue to read and share everything from every subscription-based outlets, and then only sub to our favorite one or two. The problem with the ad-based model was that there was not enough money to go around, even if the engagement from individual users was high. Ads were paying less and less, and a small, highly-engaged audience can only generate so many clicks. With the subscription model, everyone subscribes to their faves, and then outlets are rewarded for catering to a niche. This is what most of these small outlets were doing best anyway, so i personally think it works out well. Eventually there has to be an upper limit to how many of these outlets can survive, but i think the ceiling is a little higher than most people think.
The Cold Takes videos makes me feel like I’m getting some scotch and sitting down and listening to an old friend talk about games in a 1950s detective style bar.
It’s definitely a “you get what you deserve” situation, yet I can’t help but be sad, thinking that more than a decade ago, Ubisoft made some of my favorite games (e.g Splinter Cell series, Far Cry 3, AC Black Flag).
Though that Ubisoft is long gone by now, and I haven’t touched their games for years.
I was so looking forward to that game. Once I found out it was basically just a multiplayer experience, my interest dropped. Still haven’t played it.
The problem with many games and movies nowadays is that the gatekeepers are people who don’t really have creative/artistic background. They are business people who make decisions on whatever they think makes the company the most money.
A.I. has its issues and controversy, but I feel like creative people who can’t get through the blocked doors of these business types will go on their own and create wonderful things with the technology. I guess time will tell.
The same can’t be said of the iOS App Store. Still has garbage on it, but I’d bet that games are far more successful on the iOS platform for a multitude of reasons.
RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
That must be so difficult for them to “get through”. Surviving for a few months, maybe a year (if non-compete clauses are enforced, which they probably aren’t for CEOs) on just tens of millions, which forces them to buy only one yacht instead of three until they can get back into another well-paid CEO gig. The greatest tragedy of our age. Won’t anybody think of the CEOs?!
It’s been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. “YOU DON’T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN’T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!”
And I was like “Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN’T want me to play are going to be better?”
Surprise… the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I’d have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it’s a bad game or it can be bad because it’s functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it’s pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin’s Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
What was the worst game that comes to mind from your time writing? I used to write album reviews for a metal site years ago and one of our writers got HIM’s latest album at the time. They really just didn’t like the album and I shit you not, the review garnered 1,000+ comments from pissed off fans. It got so out of hand, we had to close comments.
Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long…
“Were you able to use any of the original assets?”
“Oh, all of them!” He seemed super excited.
To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter… but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
It didn’t matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.
Man, DN4E sat in limbo forever. I remember waiting patiently for it knowing full well it would be a mess, but I didn’t care because I was such a massive Duke Nukem fan. Definitely on my list of bad games but I managed to complete it. It was so dated and clunky.
I vaguely remember Brink and all of the hype absolutely vanishing when it came out. I think I ended up skipping it because of the feedback people had.
Brink... Sigh. I remember that trailer coming out and I watched it like every day for years waiting for it to come. I watched every dev vlog, read every update. For years I was hyped on that. At time of release my buddy and I took the week off of work. We played it for like 3 hours one night and finished it. I remember thinking "there must be a mistake. This can't be it. This isn't the game I've been dreaming about." I never booted it up again after that first night.
It’s a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin’ here… A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.
The assets, art, backstory, it’s all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(
I actually played through it last month and it blew me away. I cannot wait to do a second play through when phantom liberty comes out! It was so so good.
That happened for me too. Great 2077 experience through and through on good hardware with RT+DLSS. Had a couple bugs but nothing unsolvable like a puzzle with some saving involved, and they were things like scanning one thing early stops a scan later. Which is an unintended pretty cool mechanic lol, if only we’d been told it was a mechanic at the time.
Game got even crazier looking in recent updates and with better hardware, but I 100%ed it early and I haven’t done another playthrough since so I’ve been at the endgame through all the updates lol
I ran a gaming store at the time, with rentals. I remember when brink came out and I had the exact same experience when I took it home to try. At least I had no anticipation and didn’t pay anything for it.
The first Brink patch made it quasi-playable, but the damage had already been done.
And even after they fixed it, the AI still stank. They'd just ran back in the exact same path sometimes; to the point that you could just aim at a point and headshot all of them.
I think Brink was game that killed my naive trust in the hype machine. So much anticipation, so much desperation to enjoy it, so much disappointment. From there on I only believed the hyperbole from proven developers but eventually Destiny killed even that. Now I’m a bitter shell of a gamer who lives by the creed, “never pre-order!”
I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went “LOL - story missions? What’s that?” and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.
No more money for Bungie after that, I’m surprised it’s somehow still going.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
I would like to add Outer Wilds to this. No combat, virtually no violence, and adult themes are aimed at mild existentialism. Great exploration game with fun physics and puzzles.
For older kids I'd suggest: Satisfactory. Essentially first person Factorio with mild combat vs fauna.
Astroneer: exploration and advancement.
The DLC, definitely. The thorny planet is in the OG game a little bit. For the DLC I turned off scares because I don't really play horror games and it was still very fun.
Exactly! This is more about the social aspect of these games. Kids are playing Fortnite/Roblox/Minecraft because that’s where their friends are hanging out after school.
The top DDG search result for that (on crazygames . com) looks like a rip-off or something. I’m going to assume the thing you mean to recommend is MineClone2, a mod for MineTest, which is the most prominent Free Software Minecraft-style game.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)
Clone Wars is also really good, plus it has a lot better split screen which is great for 2p coop playing with your kid/nephew/niece or just being able to have 2 children play together instead of fighting over who gets to play and who has to wait for their turn that never comes
I never played the DLCs or the Shovel Knight adjacent games they made (think there was a puzzler?) but I loved the original when it came out. Might be time to dive back in to that world.
I only played the original. I had a super shitty laptop that I loved back in the day when I was working the ambulance. Would play it between calls. As well as a special LoL account that would occasionally go afk dying matches. (Sorry guys. Not my fault. Kind of my fault. I’m sorry.
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