What’s also kinda wild is how those plans often have 0 interest rate as long as you’re able to pay the installments on time. Which means in theory you MAKE money by using them because you can earn interest with that money in the meantime.
It ALSO means they know the people using those services are so bad with money that they can sustain themselves (and make a nice profit) purely by their clients failing to pay on time and then selling the debt to debt collectors. It’s absolutely disgusting how predatory this is, making their money mostly on the people who’d need such a system the most (and to a smaller amount, on people who don’t care).
Financing can actually be an incredibly good idea if you expect inflation to increase at a greater rate than the interest. It literally saves you effective money.
That said, it also tends to involve a credit pull (which hurts said interest rates) and becomes a monthly bill.
So if you can afford the monthly bill AND it is a meaningfully large purchase AND you have every reason to expect inflation to increase more than the interest rate? It is actually a pretty good idea.
Glad you understand. It’s great when people on the Internet understand that their backlash against a very popular thing doesn’t matter because the popular thing is still beloved by millions
But it’ll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.
At first, I read this as if you needed to ingest a verification can before you’re allowed to make a purchase. But alas, it is the usual shit where you have to buy their fake money.
That shit is never going away, and for one simple reason: it’s incredibly profitable. By converting real money into some nebulous fun bucks that doesn’t directly correlate in value, they obfuscate how much money you’re actually spending and make it more likely that you’ll spend more than you intend to. The same reason that casinos have no windows and pump extra oxygen into the air so you feel less tired, all so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there.
Sure it’s profitable, but it’s also (correctly) seen as a manipulative, and some companies have stopped using those.
As I said Nintendo and Xbox store used to do that, but they transitioned to prices in real money quite some time ago, and if they got a wallet, they let you fill it with the exact amount of what you’re buying. Same with PS store, most PC game stores, even freaking playdate catalogue and itch.io where the average payment must be like $3.
I expect that from shitty mobile games, because I know mobile gaming monetization is fucked forever, but I didn’t know major publishers still used that garbage unemptiable wallet strategy.
yep. Never underestimate how stupid the average gamer is.
Then realize half of them are even dumber than that.
Which is why gaming is in the state it is right now, cause a bunch of drooling mouth breathers keep throwing their wallets at problems because god forbid they do without or make a single sacrifice.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
So you have the stupid people, but also the people whose brains are naturally wired to be played like a fiddle by these companies, and then on top of that, you have the new generation of gamers who have simply never known a world where you didn’t pay for skins.
Except it’s even worse than that. Because these companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to tweak the levers in people’s brains to get them to pay.
Which is where the whole concept of using real money, to buy fake money (and never in the exact amounts that they charge for items), so you obfuscate the actual cost, especially once people start carrying a balance of fake money due to never being able to get the exact amount of fake money for the item came from.
Like Dave and Buster’s play cards and games that cost 7.8 credits (at least right now, higher weekend evenings because of dynamic pricing) and needing to get out a fucking calculator to do the conversion from dollars to points to figure out you are spending $3.72 or whatever to play a single shitty game.
It does look like a clone, but fuck IP law. Sony winning this will only hurt games because any publisher with a genre creating / defining game could gatekeep any competitors from coming in *cough Nintendo.
The original horizon came out 8 years ago, that’s plenty of time for them to cash in on the monopoly they get for all the creativity that went into creating the genre / style.
Its not like they’re marketing it with a similar name or main character or any other identifier that could trick someone into buying it instead either.
Eh this lawsuit actually sounds like it has grounds… Tencent asked to make a spinoff, got rejected, then made it anyway.
Sony states that during the pitch meeting, Tencent did not disclose it was already working on Light of Motiram. According to the lawsuit, Sony rejected Tencent’s Horizon pitch in April 2024, stating that while it “greatly appreciated Aurora’s level of passion and the effort put into the pitch,” it would not be pursuing the partnership.
When Tencent did announce Light of Motiram in November 2024, Sony states in the lawsuit that its gameplay trailer did not feature any of the “Eastern-inspired clothing, aesthetics, and backdrops that Tencent pitched and instead copied Horizon whole cloth.”
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
They're all digital only now. There's no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn't take into consideration that it's much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn't exist for Bluray.
That doesn't account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won't be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don't exist anymore. You don't include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, 10$ to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don't drop the drive entirely.
Nobody said it was. It's a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can't play modern games directly from Bluray either.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there's no reason that games couldn't be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can't make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy's game work right out of the box. Without them, there's nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that "no game could be expected to last more than 10 years", and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there's people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don't know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
You don't need CDs for that, and CDs don't prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don't even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn't even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won't deliver it that way.
Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
But they still couldn't be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly "played without any download" rather than "run from the disk", the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn't care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it's about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
That’s what differentiates free games from free-to-play games. A free game gets you the entire experience for free. A FTP game gets you a barebones experience unless you spend money.
Big studios typically don’t release actual free games, obviously because there’s no money to be made that way.
There’s a spectrum among F2P games as well. There are games that are designed to coax the player into constantly spending increasing amounts of money by either inconveniencing them (wait times, slow or nonexistent progress) or by providing them with massive advantages against other players. Towards the softer side, there are titles that are solely selling cosmetic items - but they can be so incessant with it that people, especially kids, feel pressured into purchasing them, sometimes even out of peer pressure (see: Fortnite). Finally, the mildest kind are games that have a free mode that is little more than a demo, but you can make one-time purchases to permanently unlock more content, which isn’t too dissimilar to expansion packs of the olden days. Prime example for this: The Battle of Polytopia, a Civilization-lite. On mobile, you can permanently unlock more tribes and thus larger maps and multiplayer with very small one-time purchases.
To your point, Warframe is a full game with a F2P model that only offers cosmetics and in-game currency for purchase, the latter of which you can earn through grinding and selling items in the in-game market. It uses the aforementioned “wait times,” but they’re not overly lengthy, given the amount of things you can do while you wait.
So with some extra effort, you can get the paid experience, but you don’t miss out on any of the actual game by skipping that part of the grind either. Plus, in the end, even paid players can’t defeat the RNG gods.
While Warframe is a perfect example of a well done FTP model, you can buy a lot of stuff with real money in Warframe, it isn’t just cosmetics. But it has limited PVP and the community is fairly friendly, so it isn’t so much Pay-To-Win as it is Pay-To-Not-Work-Hard.
It’s just a clunky reskin of fo4 with no depth. I’ve put about 50 hrs in at this point & will probably continue for a bit because it’s a comforting loot cycle that pleases my lizard brain. It really lacks the feeling exploration possibilities that Skyrim & fallout worlds have. The bugs, UI, bland emptiness, and shit tier maps are why I wouldn’t recommend…but is a decent time kill if you’ve enjoyed their previous games
Same, I pirated it to give it a try, put in a few dozen hours to make sure I'm not missing anything but left pretty disappointed tbh. It has a strong interesting opening but the more you try to get into the nitty gritty details, the more shallow and flawed the game becomes until you're just doing chores for the sake of it. Some people find enjoyment in these chores but it ain't me, maybe in a few years it becomes better. I got phantom liberty instead and am having a blast there instead
When I say opening / beginning I don't mean the 20 minutes of prologue, I mean the first ~5 hours of game showing new mechanics and worlds to you, making the illusion that there's lot of unique fun content to do. Eventually it all started to look like same formulaic shallow crap to me and the game didn't live up to that initial impression of freedom, exploration and progression, it's half baked in everything.
The game didn't open up for me until about 8-10 hours in and felt really weird and restricted during that time. No idea what impression of freedom, exploration and progression you're talking about here because the beginning does not give you anything like that at all with how it makes you follow the very boring main quest.
Same happened to me, I pirated it to try it out and after an hour or two I got bored and called it quits. I returned to it once more but after maybe 5 hours I just uninstalled it.
Their source is a reporter at Giant Bomb? GameSpot and Giant Bomb are owned by the same company.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have much faith in this remake, but citing the opinion of a guy who works for your sister company doesn’t seem like proper journalism.
It’s terrible journalism. If you skimmed past the first couple short paragraphs, the quotes from Jeff Grub (their “source”) read like he’s an insider at Aspyr or Embracer. In reality, the article is just linking to a 1.5 hour news podcast and quoting the host. The article doesn’t even try to summarize Jeff’s basis for his opinion, and the only quote they have from an actual insider is, essentially, “no comment.”
Look, gaming "scoops", such as they are, boil down to somebody having a friend somewhere that will break NDAs to you on the basis of being your buddy, being somewhat intoxicated, or both. The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
But on the flipside, it does mean that you have to take them at their word, and like any long game of telephone that also means you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Things may be lies, the source may just be mistaken, opinions may get passed as facts, things can change later. Rumors are rumors until they aren't rumors.
But that being said, will the vaporware huge triple-A remake that was explicitly struggling during development come out in the middle of the great 2023 game developer purge?
The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
Oh, I’m not criticizing Grubb. I’m criticizing the GameSpot article quoting Grubb. I have no opinion on whether Grubb is right, and I certainly don’t expect him to give up sources. I don’t even know whether he has a specific source, or if he was just giving his (no doubt well-informed) opinion on the situation, because I haven’t watched the podcast.
This felt like reading a New York Times article that links to a Washington Post article about some news event, and the NYT article is quoting the WaPo author in the same way that they would quote a witness. It’s just bizarre to me.
Yeah, it's a bit weirder when Gamespot repackages Grubb's take as news, in that it becomes harder to tell whether it's them being coy about "we know a guy who knows a guy" info or if they're just trying to manufacture a click out of something that's unverified.
But then again, we're rating them against Youtube "influencers" and whatnot, so I'm actively shocked that any standards would remain at all these days.
Are they? I know CBS used to own them both but GB got sold on a few years ago, around the time the Giant Bomb guys left (Vinny, Brad, Jeff Gerstmann, etc).
Either way, I’m confused as to how a simple guess from Grubb could be constituted as actual sourced news. What an odd article.
I honestly don’t get it. It’s Bethesda. We know them. We know what Bethesda does. Did people honestly expect something different? Did they delusion themselves into thinking it was going to be different?
The game is exactly as i expected it to be. And I think it great.
Once I changed my mindset to “this map of the solar system is really just like a flat plane in Fallout New Vegas, except with extra steps” then I was able to enjoy it more. I think games like No Mans Sky spoiled people in terms of an engaging space travel mechanic, even though Bethesda was honest from the beginning about there not being transitions into/out of planet atmospheres.
The opening story about joining Constellation was pretty weak though.
Yeah I figured it was going to be a Bethesda game, and those usually frustrate me. I didn’t buy it. Maybe in a couple years when the Ultimate Edition is on sale I’ll try it.
I’m over 100 hours into it and have enjoyed every minute. I had to use mods though to make some aspects manageable tho. Like the UI and some bat files to increase merchants money. Little personal tweaks. Well… A lot of personal tweaks lol
I didn’t expect the game to be the best thing since sliced bread. I expected it to be a Bethesda game in space. That’s exactly what I got and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Personally I think Bethesdas approach to their game design is EXTREMELY dated and frustrating. Also they made Fallout 76, one of the most dog shit games I ever played.
They need some new talent making decisions on their games to make them more modern. The problems they have in their games should be inexcusable from a “AAA” studio in 2023.
They’re still using the same engine they’ve used since Morrowind. That’s a big reason their games feel dated. As for Starfield itself it tries to do a lot of things but it doesn’t do anything perfect. Everything it does there are other games that do better.
Yep. I don’t play it either, but it looks great. UE5 can look amazing, but it’s built up from the engine they made for UT in '99. People don’t understand engines.
Apparently you’re not super mad about Skyrim having bugs in 2012 because that was just so unforgivable I’m still mad about it /s
Sadly while I’m sarcastic here this is literally the truth for a lot of people. PS I played Skyrim like 200 hours and saw irritating bugs maybe like 3 times. It didn’t really bother or deter me from playing in any way.
The haters of Bethesda games clearly have never written code. What they are doing in these games is honestly mind-blowing that it could be done so well that the games are actually playable
As a programmer, it isn’t mind blowing. Some of its neat, but pretty much all of it I’ve seen before at least as pieces. It’s also doing a lot worse and less than I’ve seen before too. Bethesda games are not known for their technical capabilities though, so I’m not too bothered by any of the technical stuff. A lot of the design is what bothers me. There’s so much friction for the player that you (or at least me) can never get immersed.
I have played every Bethesda game since Morrowind. Sure it’s a Bethesda game. That’s come in many forms though, and they will say they’ve learned lessons but continue to repeat them. For example, they said they learned their lesson with the “yes, no, sarcastic yes, more information” dialogue wheel. In Starfield it’s technically gone, but dialogue is functionally identical. No one complained because it was on a wheel, it’s because it didn’t provide options.
Bethesda has gone through many forms, so “a Bethesda game” means different things to different people. Starfield they advertised as a return to form (as in, back to the classic style of actually a role playing game), yet it’s probably the game with the fewest options for role play. If you are young (started with Skyrim and later), then I can see not having the experience to know better. For those who do remember them and saw all the marketing of them acting like they cared about that style, it falls flat. It doesn’t help it released after the best RPG of the past decade or more probably, but it comes short of my desires (but not expectations) regardless.
I’d argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best RPG in at least 20 years. It’s been so long since we’ve had an RPG on its level that I had almost forgotten what it felt like. It makes me feel like the original Fallout games (from Black Isle Studios, not Bethesda) made me feel back in the day.
Yeah, it’s quite possibly the best ever. It takes what made classic CRPGs great but brings it into the modern era with everything we’ve learned. Compared to when it came out, it’s probably not the greatest, but comparing them all to each other directly it quite possibly is.
I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren’t able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.
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