The numbers aren’t much better for Resident Evil 4 (remake), Resident Evil 8, or Death Stranding. Customers are offered the opportunity to get a worse version of the game for the same price, often without cross-buy like you’d get when buying a game on Steam Deck.
I wouldn’t say its that bad. Various forms of collectibles/cards have been around for a long time. Asking for gametime for a game like WoW isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
I think it’s just that there are a few specific examples that stand out. Some aspects of Roblox can be pretty concerning.
But if a kid just wants some money for a skin for Fornite, or to buy a specific world setup for Minecraft, I don’t necessarily see that as some scary new thing.
While I hate slippery slopes, this is an historic trend. They squeeze in little ones that don’t seem so bad. I accept no games with these predatory or greedy models and I’d argue that kids shouldn’t be subjected to them.
Every time it looks like it’s starting to calm down the idiot CEO comes out and makes a bunch of inflammatory comments and tells everybody it’s their fault for being confused or somebody actually asks for an exemption and they deny it on made up grounds.
It would actually be better if they just fired the CEO and try to blame everything on him. That is literally their only move at this point.
Is he the same guy who trash talk the employee a while back?
In 2019, he said:
“Ferrari and some of the other high-end car manufacturers still use clay and carving knives. It’s a very small portion of the gaming industry that works that way, and some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest f*cking idiots,” Riccitiello told PG in the interview."
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.
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