Looking at this list of 3rd party games, I wonder if the reason for this is that most of these games have been available on other platforms already for quite some time. If you were interested in e.g. Hades 2, unless you just didn’t have a PC available, you probably weren’t waiting for an at-the-time unannounced Switch 2 to play it on. Heck, Cyberpunk is 5 years old at this point. Street Fighter 6 is 2 years old and was on a lot of other platforms.
I expect we might see different results when we see more 3rd party games getting simultaneous launch on Switch 2 and other platforms.
A lot of players and local venues prefer PS4, PS5 and PC for fighting games. If you have licensed PS4/PS5 arcade stick it should work on all three of these platforms. Unlicensed ones might not work with PS5 games. Switch is mostly just for melee.
That being said game key-cards seem largely inferior to physical versions on other platforms even if you likely have to patch most games these days anyways.
I mean - they’re better than the codes they used to slap in boxes. At least you can lend these or sell them (for the lifespan of the console, or whatever server it uses…)
Yeah, they’re not tied to accounts or consoles. Any console with the card in will be able to play the game after downloading it. You can trade or sell them.
Codes and boxes are just digital purchases with plastic waste attached and no further benefit.
They’re shittier than real physical games, but they still do have that one advantage over digital games, just with the drawback that you still have a physical cartridge you have to switch out and carry around. It’s a mixed bag.
He has some points but the main one, mentioned in the headline, is shite.
There are plenty of gamers to go around for just about any game, if it’s worth playing.
If we wanna talk about soulless AAA bullshit like live service, or making trash out of a popular existing IP, that’s a different convo. Taking shareholders out of gaming would benefit everyone.
I don’t think private business is the issue. I think publicly traded business is the issue. In a private business, you don’t have quarterly shareholder meetings with the expectation of continuous growth, and then shareholders demanding you fuck everything up.
Many private businesses are also fucked up, but so many others work just fine. Many work great, particularly small business or employee owned business or coops or similar.
Obviously there are a lot of large privately held companies, many of them owned by billionaires, some of whom are very public assholes. Forbes maintains this US-only list (Twitter is 149th and falling): www.forbes.com/lists/largest-private-companies/ But, Twitter notwithstanding, most of these giant companies just quietly go about their business. Some of them become conspiracy theory targets (Koch) due to the flex their owners exhibit on the public sphere. And some of this is clearly incorrect in their table (ie: Cargill is not making $1M in revenue per employee – they probably used US employee count, but global revenue).
Large private companies should be paying more taxes, imo, but are not strictly the problem. Large public companies are evil almost across the whole spectrum. The large private companies don’t typically fire 25% of their staff at Christmas just to massage numbers for the quarterly report.
When you look at small companies though (for example, my company is two people, both owners, no employees), I hope you’ll see that we’re just trying to make a living :)
What’s wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO’s are a live service and many are good games (if MMO’s are your thing).
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
Or they don’t disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn’t happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that’s the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn’t prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it’s not an inherent property of it.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I’ve had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn’t for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they’ll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
Any multiplayer game will die once its community moves on. Whether it’s live service or not and one could argue live service helps prolong a game’s time in the spotlight.
007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.
I see lots of MMOs that become ran by the community on private servers after the developer stops supporting it. It’s crap when companies try to stop that, but the game being a live service isn’t a problem in itself.
Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.
I'm still playing Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine with bots. I don't need a community to play Project Zomboid with my SO. Your claim is factually incorrect.
It replicates it well enough for me to still be playing it regularly 20 years later and well enough to debunk the myth that every multiplayer game must automatically become unplayable with time ("die") solely due to the fact that it's multiplayer.
I can also still play UT2K4 with my friends, should I want to. I can't do either of these with a "live service" game where there is no offline mode or self-hostable servers.
Also, you ignored my mention of PZ, which is a multiplayer-enabled game which also won't die when the developer dies (or abandons the game).
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don’t remember any bullshit from the devs.
Yeah, my point boils down to “nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices”, but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.
Stuff like this is why I never buy new games. Not only can you not trust the critics, but players get so blinded by hype and buyers remorse that they’ll ignore everything bad about the games they love.
It’s always wiser to wait for the hype to die down and see what the retrospective consensus is
I don’t see an official statement but it would be really amazing for a company that is asking everyone to follow the new rules to ignore the well established laws at the same time. They can have whatever opinions they want but these places are recognized as such.
I mean, they kinda started that by the statement already. They could have just limited it to a pre-approved list of charities, but instead, by not calling it a charity, in direct contradiction with US law, they’ve dragged themselves further into the clusterfuck, as if that were somehow possible.
I just checked this page and none of the games that I’m playing currently are on it (Diablo 4, Elden Ring, God of War, Jedi Survivor etc). It’s not like the games I’m playing are obscure or brand new either. Not to mention some of the console exclusives that I’m also playing, like TotK on the Switch and Horizon FW on the PS5, but of course, I understand that the cloud provider can do nothing about that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite enthusiastic about cloud gaming as well and looked seriously into it a while ago, because I wanted to upgrade my PC but the upgrade costs were looking pretty high (this was during the peak of the supply chain issues during COVID), also I wanted to break out of the constant and expensive upgrade cycles.
But everything I looked at had some or the other limitation, either they didn’t have the games that I was playing, or the service wasn’t available in my country (eg Shadow PC), or it didn’t allow you to bring your own games (Stadia), or it was working out to be too expensive (Azure VM), or had other limitations such as not supporting ultra-wide resolutions at 60+ FPS. I think for me, being able to play my own games is a big fan requirement for it to work, and the pricing of things like Shadow could work out for me, but those sort of services have limited availability, and rolling your own VM on a public cloud can turn very expensive if you’re a heavy gamer, as I’ve experienced first-hand in Azure.
Therefore, IMO, cloud gaming, while is the future, just isn’t there yet.
Right, but as so many other threads have acknowledged, not everyone is capable of paying a large upfront cost to save them in the long-term. That’s one example of why it’s more expensive to be broke. That’s why I’m responding to these comments - it’s not all ignorance or stupidity; people are broke out here.
I’ve never known any different but it still always felt like paying twice to the Internet to me. My first console with online connection was an Xbox which required Live. Before that they just didn’t have any network connectivity at all.
I know, I got the GC adapter hoping to have multiplayer Mario or Metroid games. So imagine my surprise when those never came.(I was more PC gamer back then and multiplayer is already plenty.)
Coming from someone whos never had to play for online play, i understand it cause the main driving force for someone to get x console over p console is what their friends have. The amount of ppl who only own a playstation to play COD with their friends is staggering, and moving all their friends to pc is a big task.
Until hardware manufacturers like Nvidia and Intel start getting thirsty and lock features behind a subscription :/ Only $10.99 a month to use those RTX cores, $7.99 for DLSS.
… Humble monthly? Game pass? EA play? Even PS Plus has subscriptions for streaming to a PC. People buy these things a lot. You can try to excuse Humble monthly but there are far more game pass players than Humble monthly ones. Either way, you can pretend that PC doesn’t tolerate this nonsense but many people are playing Starfield on Game Pass this month. PC players already tolerate this and in some cases, welcome it.
Those aren't the same or similar. Those are options in addition to buying that allow access to a large library of games (except humble, which is just buying games). They aren't "pay this subscription or you can't play the game you bought".
Switch 2 had a wider selection, with 13 physical games available at launch.
Many gamers do not count game key-cards as physical games. Just another version of code in a box. Cyberpunk is probably only actual physical 3rd party release on switch.
“Just yesterday, it was alleged that Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons had purchased 24 cars cumulatively valued at $2.5m just before the layoffs. Parson’s Twitter account went private yesterday, too.”
For sure there are alternatives, but I doubt there’s a lot of overlap between kids who want books and kids who want some e-currency. Probably not much overlap with gift givers either.
Just more monopolies coming I’d wager. Disney is supposedly looking at buying EA. Microsoft and Sony have shown they both would rather buy companies and consolidate studios over how it was before.
As others have said it’ll be not good for the gamer/consumer. Nor will it be good for people working in the industry.
This is the correct answer. The same is playing out in so many other industries; the big players don’t bother innovating anymore, it’s easier to make more money by buying out their smaller competitors and essentially killing them by subsuming them.
Consumers have fewer and fewer real options for anything, everything costs more and more (the majority of current inflation is actually driven by execs realizing they can just raise prices and blame it on the “economy”), and the quality of everything is going down because why bother with quality when the goal is to make more money?
“But the free markets will solve this! A company making a better product will win over consumers!”, the market liberal says. “Oh, a competitor! We can’t have that, let’s buy them and make sure they can’t affect our bottom line” says the megacorp, and before you know it the “superior option” will have disappeared because producing it was 15% more expensive than producing shit.
The big players don't bother innovating anymore, which is why they don't see any other option except to sell to someone bigger than them. Meanwhile, publishers that used to be small are getting much larger by offering the breadth of games that the biggest publishers haven't for 20 years. To think that things can only get worse is to ignore what's happening right in front of us.
That assumes Phil Spencer’s daddy wants to spend more cloud-earned cash on toys that nobody will use. While Microsoft is undoubtedly the bigger company, Sony’s revenue is much more dependant on Playstation.
How else do you want to handle a CEO owning stock? From his perspective: He sees hard times coming for Unity so he sells his stock. At the same time he tries to turn the situation around, uncertain if he will succeed.
And AFAIK the trades are public so everyone would know that the CEO is sceptical about the company’s future. There are obviously problems with the ToS changes but is the stock selling really all that relevant in this discussion?
The selling was planned a long time ago right? I think the main problem here is a CEO owning stock in the first place. If he owns stock he will obviously sell it when he no longer thinks it’s a good investment. And if it’s planned some time ahead it’s not exactly inside knowledge. At least I don’t think that this is a bad case of insider trading.
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
I mean, if you phrase it that way, sure. Just a dude in his spare room. But then again, aside from the fact that he makes probably 20 000 dollar a month alone from his Patreon, almost everyone who is interested in video games knows this man’s name for way over a decade. More like two decades, actually. And while he certainly hasn’t anywhere near the same visibility as he had at Gamespot or Giantbomb, way more of the people who do follow him, actually pay him money directly. Reach alone isn’t what’s important these days. And yet, Jeff still has the potential to influence a lot of people who do not directly give him money. He also has a podcast, he streams and has 170k follower on Twitter. And if he has a very contrarian take on something, it will get noticed. Maybe not as much as 15 years ago but still noticed.
A bit of a ramble, sorry! I guess it triggered some memories of me listening to Giantbomb with him, Ryan, Vinnie, Alex and Brad while going to work or cleaning the house. Bombcast was pretty much the first podcast I regularly listened to.
Yeah, Ive followed Jeff for a long time and he's absolutely not afraid to say a game isn't good, and his tastes can be fickle and particular, if I were a publisher cynically selecting who to send advance codes to to manufacture a good score he would not be one of them.
As a consumer, I love him because he has integrity, likes what he likes, and says what he means, and I even can tell sometimes when he dislikes a game that I'd still like.
DnD 5e had a license for use that allowed 3rd party companies to make stuff for the game following specific rules, and they did so which of course helped with increasing the popularity of the brand. This license existed due to the backlash from players and 3rd party developers who did not like the 4e licensing which was ridiculously restrictive.
Then WotC/Hasbro decided they wanted more control and put out a draconian revision and also tried to invalidate the existing license using questionable legal logic that wouldn't stand up in court, but would be cost prohibitive for the 3rd party companies to fight in court. This revision also included licensing costs that would drive 3rd party companies out of business. Then they did a revision that tried to make creating a virtual tabletop that could be used with DnD a violation to try and corner the market for WotC's completely non-existent virtual tabletop.
Basically they tried to stop doing the thing they had in place for like a decade to milk an unrealistically high amount of money out of companies that were working with them and tried to force this on extremely short notice. So same thing as reddit and now Unity are doing.
Expect the next version of DnD to be a walled garden again like 4e was and most likely fade out of the public view again.
The true irony here is that TSR went bankrupt because they tried to mess with the community content licenses that were basically gentleman’s agreements at the time, allowing WotC to purchase D&D in the first place with 3rd edition. I hope they sell the property to someone that understands how to run that golden goose, without expecting unlimited growth.
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