In what way? I know it’s great but I don’t know if I’d call it the last hope for all of gaming. It’s a good store front. Their application has better FOSS alternatives and there are other pretty okay ways to buy games too. I don’t follow them closely. Are they doing anything particular that warrants that description?
Yeah I was aware of that. I don’t know if that constitutes the last hope for all gaming, but it’s definitely a positive. Other stores have a much better user experience, and until they rival stores like Steam in functionality and ease of use, actually owning your own game is just a very nice to have feature and nothing more. Of course, I wish all stores did that. I don’t want to have to resort to piracy if my steam library goes poof, but so far I haven’t had to, and piracy is still an ethical choice in that scenario.
My point isn’t that steam is better, but that GOG has a couple nice features and several downsides, and it is by no means changing or saving the industry. They have a long way to go, and I don’t think saving the industry is the end goal for them.
No, but saving the industry is their “hook”, if not explicitly stated as such. I know that every game I buy from them will be impossible to take away from me if I backed up the installers first.
Are you sure? I haven’t played any of Sony’s games on GOG. From reviews, it looks like Horizon still sends telemetry if you’re connected to the internet, but I don’t believe it’s gotten the remaster update that mandates PSN. I could be out of the loop though. I do know that GOG caught flak for allowing Hitman 2016 on the store, which is technically playable from start to finish without an internet connection, but the connection to their server gates all sorts of extras, so the customers rebelled and got it removed.
But you don’t need to download it again. Keep good backup practices and it’s eternal. If you lose it, that’s the same as losing a physical object you bought at a store. Or if you don’t maintain your backup like you would clean and maintain a physical object you bought, it’s your fault you lose it. I can buy a game from GOG right now and keep it and use it until the day I die, then my grandchildren can use it after that.
when the servers are down, you’re fucked regardless.
As long as you keep the files you don’t have to access their servers to play it again. That’s exactly the same as even physical media. It’s not like a company will send you a new DVD for free if you throw out the one you bought.
And why does that matter? When they go out of business you can’t download even if you do or don’t have a license.
That’s why it matters.
Because you now have a game that you don’t need a license that you still won’t be able to access or play? So how does that make a single fucking difference lmfao.
They don’t, they make furniture. You clearly don’t understand metaphors.
When they go out of business you can’t download even if you do or don’t have a license.
If Ikea goes out of business, you can’t buy their products anymore and the ones you do have you need to protect and make sure they don’t degrade. Your argument is true for every single product, digital or physical.
The games from GOG don’t have any DRM so you can very easily make copies of the game and safely store them elsewhere, even on new computers.
Games that do have DRM lock you down to verify that you’re allowed to play their game, which severely limits how you can use your own product. If that game publisher or developer goes out if business than you can’t play the game that you already have, even if it’s kept “pristine”.
People who bought The Sims 4 couldn’t play their offline game because the DRM stopped them, meanwhile people didn’t buy the game were free to play it when they wanted. The legitimate buyers of the game were punished simply because of DRM.
Ummm… That’s the case for disc games too of only being able to retain possession once it’s shipped to you and you properly store it. Or any tangible good for that matter. I don’t what point you are trying to make.
That GOG downloaded installers can’t be forcibly deactivated or taken away? Your phrasing is confusing so I don’t think people are able to tell whether you think GOG installers are a good or bad thing, or acting like it is useless and provides no further benefit than DRM alternatives.
You are just ignoring that the installers can be downloaded and saved. Or even just the game directory can continue to work.
For people who value that it is a difference. Even how the game works is different with how some don’t work offline or lose ability to function offline once verification expires compared to non DRM counterparts.
You are an idiot acting as if DRM and DRM free is the same as though some license terms is the only determining factor.
You are just ignoring that the installers can be downloaded and saved. Or even just the game directory can continue to work.
Dude, no I am not, my very first comment in this chain talked about the needing to download and store it in a non-degrading way…. Fucking hell dude lmfao.
The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.
It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)
I’ve read through your various comments, and I’m not sure you see the difference here.
With other platforms such as Steam, you download the Steam program that acts as a single installer for every game on the platform. You have to be logged into a valid Steam account to download a game from their single installer. If you use a new computer, you have to log into Steam and download from Steam. On GoG, you download an installer per game. Those installers can be transferred to any device and download the games even if the computer has never logged into GoG or even connected to the internet. You can store all the installers on an external drive, which you can’t do for Steam.
If Steam eventually dies or your account is banned, you can never install those games again. If GoG eventually dies or your account is banned, you are correct that you can’t download new installers, but you can use any installer you have already downloaded.
If Steam dies or your account is banned, the game you already have downloaded may not even work anymore due to DRM (this is on a game-by-game basis). If GoG dies or your account is banned, your games are guaranteed to still run since they are not dependant on GoG DRM (with a small list of exceptions people aren’t happy about).
You may not care about any of this, but there’s a decent chunk of people who want to keep their games regardless of anything the purchasing company does.
You really need to look at what you’re buying. Whether it’s a download, a DVD, or damn floppy disk, you’re still just buying a license. A very revokable license. If it’s online, the publisher can cut you off.
And how does that work when they close down and servers that host the games can no longer be accessed to download your license free game?
Wheter you have a revokabke license or not, you still won’t ever be able to access the game…… how do people need this explained to them? And yet use this single reason like it matters lmfao.
When I buy a game from GOG, it comes with the presumption that I will download the installer in a timely manner and store a copy on my local storage device. Assuming I have good backup practices, that’s really the end of the story. I can build a 100 new computers and install the game I bought on each one. GOG went bankrupt ten years ago? That’s a shame, but my installer works just as well as when they were kicking.
When I “buy a game” on Steam, I technically get an installer, but Steam isn’t going to help me keep it. Those 100 new computers are going to download that installer a 100 times. And if the 51st install comes around and Steam isn’t around anymore? Or Steam decides not enough people play this game anymore and it no longer makes financial sense to host the installer? Well, at that point I guess I’ll just regret not buying the game on GOG.
When you buy a game on a CD or Cartidge, it’s up to you to make sure you continue to own it from then on. That is the same model as GoGs digital downloads. You own it, you make sure you still have it on hand for as long as you want to still have it on hand for.
GoG isn’t the publisher. Y’all don’t read the shit you agree to, and know fuck all about media distribution. You’ve never owned a video game, a movie, or even a book that isn’t in the public domain. You’ve only ever owned licenses for personal use, and those licenses have always been provisional and revokable. Always. Your ignorance is not change that.
Enhance your calm. I was merely pointing out that the game installers are offline for GOG, meaning there’s not a physical mechanism to cut you off. As you mentioned, if it’s online, then they can cut you off, which is true for Steam but not GOG.
Those are terminologies corporations care about. But, for real life use there is a difference between a product that can be remotely taken away and products that can’t. Otherwise could be argued there is no difference between a pirated copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 and a legit one, which there is once you try to play offline.
GOG Seels DRM free games that you can download the installers and all necessary files. No matter what they do, once you’ve downloaded it, they can’t stop you from playing it.
We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
How do you disprove that this “GOG content” are offline installer files that, as long as you keep them backed up, work indefinitely even if GOG revokes your license to download them again?
the reality of the situation is that these 2 things look exactly the same in 99% of circumstance and 100% of circumstances that consumers actually care about
How do you use a Steam game after its license was revoked?
By default Steam is a mere download manager without any DRM. You can zip the game folder and back it up anywhere. Whether or not publishers go through the additional steps to enable one or more DRM solution is a different matter. My favorite Steam games have no DRM at all.
They can’t, actually, because they don’t hold the rights to that content, only to GOG and the installer. Once it’s installed their distribution and license rights end.
If the game you install has its own license from the rights holder that gets revoked then you’ll be in breach of that license, if anything.
That’s just wrong. They just sell you a license and provide a DRM free game. You are not supposed to continue playing the game if the publisher terminates your license. They just give you the ability to do it, but it has no legal value
Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.
This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it’s not even about making art that is profitable, it’s about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn’t get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is “I don’t care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI” will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it’ll net them more money. In other words, they won’t actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
“The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer.” Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don’t care about the products at all can decide the company isn’t up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work because wealthy people can “out-vote” you, on a level that even collectively you can’t compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe… so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
Right?! I freaked on the same paragraph. Most depressing thing ever said about game dev. These suits would rather fire everyone and play stonks all day if it earned a dime more. I’m so mad for the massive creative force being crushed by this broken system.
I feel like corporations are inherently evil. The owners have no actual liability for the harm they do, and their highest calling is profits. I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market, but I do know if you play a little game called “what is the end result,” you’ll quickly see a dystopian future where everyone is slaves except in name.
We’d better look into the French solution long before it gets to that point.
I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market
I invest in stuff that’s not stocks all the time. When I give money to someone so that they will hopefully create a cool new product in the future (e.g. a video), I’m not paying for an individual product, I’m investing in them as a creator in hopes for future ROI. That’s Patreon.
We treat the addiction to wealth accrual different from any other addiction, in that we laud it, but make no mistake that it is addictive. Watching numbers in your account go up gives you a rush, just as sure as watching numbers in a video game.
When other addictions cause harm, we push people to get treatment, or at very least condemn the addiction. When someone is addicted to the accrual of wealth, even to the detriment of others, we call them, ‘genius’, ‘savvy’, ‘visionary’, or ‘shrewd’.
It’s such a destructive mindset, and it seems to me like indie games are hopefully on the cusp of re-demonstrating to the rest of the industry why it is so.
Art/luxury products depend on catering to subjective tastes to turn a profit. You need to speak to someone’s perspective or interests, and are competing for their disposable income against all other forms of entertainment. Thus the wider the targeted audience, the harder it is to outcompete the rest of the market on “consumer interest” (no idea if that’s the proper use of the term but it sounds correct for the context), the harder it is to even turn a profit.
Simultaneously, these corporations want an ever-greater magnitude of profit (aka growth). So they decide to target the widest audience possible, while investing as much capital as they can.
That’s already an unstable balance of priorities. As soon as you start conceiving yourself as competing with almost every single other market on the basis of shareholder speculation, in terms of ROI, it’s doomed.
You’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, you’re trying to do a Paul Muad’hib Atreides except because this is reality, not sci-fi, instead of drinking the Water of Life you mixed 10 grams of ketamine, 5 tabs of acid, and a fistful of meth into a blue Gatorade and chugged it in one go. All you end up doing is vibrating in place so hard you begin to slough off flesh and erratically disintegrate, like some sort of sad eldritch horror.
God do I hate corpos sick with capitalism.
To continue the Dune analogy, they really could use some ecology-derived thinking: specialize and find your niche (or help it emerge), and give back to the rest of the ecosystem so that it continues to flourish with you. Monoculture has a negative correlation between scale and sustainability, let alone ROI.
I think it highlights how perverse the stock market itself is. It doesn’t really seem like it functions much as a way for riskier ventures to raise capital outside of a bank, but a giant casino that gives the illusion of not being a zero sum game.
It’s hypothetically possible for a company to make more money in the stock market by investing in themselves than by creating anything (see Tesla). And if all companies could behave this way and somehow knew what the stock market would do for 5 years, I’d wager a TON of companies wouldn’t meet it, invest in the stock market, drive up the “value,” more don’t meet it, etc. etc. until no one is making anything, and everyone is happy with their paper fortunes and try to sell.
There is no value considered in providing stable income to the team members. No value considered in artists honing their craft. Even if the games only had marginal profits in and of themselves, considering the cost of big budget games, there is still huge value in creating and maintaining a large IP.
This is basically why the largest studio in my county shut down last year. It was considered “insufficiently profitable” by the parent company. Not unprofitable. It was turning a profit and had produced some highly regarded games, including an award winner. It was also a company that treated its employees well, including offering highly flexible working hours and having a dog-friendly office. I’d been eyeing them up because I’d hoped to work there when I got my degree. But nope, they’re gone now because they weren’t making enough money.
I believe society as a whole should stop idolising the wealthy, and start seeing their inability to be satisfied with having enough money for a comfortable life as the dysfunction it is. Never being satisfied no matter how much money you have should be seen as a problem, not something to aspire to.
So game companies have several ways to increase the ROI for their products: decrease costs, increase price, or increase audience size. As it is hard for single-player titles to signficiantly icnrease the number of players, Novak believes that publishers will continue to charge more for their games. The new $70 base price already seems too much for many customers, so companies try to come up with tricky monetization methods, including various deluxe editions priced at $100 or even higher.
Absolute imbeciles. We’re living in an era where customers have less and less purchasing power, where people can - and should - make more precise decisions when buying products, with wide availability of other options that aren’t AAAA titles, so what are execs thinking of? Charge more, obviously.
It is unrealistic to invest 150 millions in a game and expect a profit because you’re disconnected from your customer base. And you have the bare minimum of self awareness to consider that investing less and expecting less growth is an option, but choose instead to ignore it and push ahead with infinite growth. The development schedule of your average AAAA title is already almost as long as a console generation, there’s nothing that can be done if suits are staring at this wall and choosing to bash their head against it, rather than try alternative options.
It’s the golden age of indie games. I’ve got dozens of games on my steam library made by a team of between 1 and 12 people that I bought for $20 or less. Those guys are doing great, and doing great work. I rarely ever even give a second glance to big AAA releases anymore, with a couple specific exceptions.
Slay the Spire is currently $8 USD on sale and is one of my most played games of all time. Deck building roguelike.
Caves of Qud is the single greatest modern classic roguelike that I’ve ever played and is also in my top 5 of most played games of all time. $20 USD. If you understand what the string of words “modern classic roguelike” means and that intrigues you then you’re in for a treat and a half.
Dead Cells speaks for itself on its store page and is technically out of price range for this at $25 when not on sale, but it’s worth the extra five bucks. It’s also worth the additional $25 for all the DLCs, after you’ve sunk 200 hours into the base game already.
Cult of the Lamb - ditto above about the price tag, you actually largely can’t go wrong with most things published by Devolver Digital. I own a significant percentage of their lineup and haven’t been disappointed. Devolver isn’t the dev company, but they take a lot of indie teams for publishing and I like them a lot. They’re good folks that sell good games.
Risk of Rain 2 - is also $25 but worth the squeeze. I’ll try to keep everything else in the price range.
Rift Wizard - $14.99, and the very similar but slightly superior Rift Wizard 2 at $17.99 are fun little strategy-heavy games about playing what amounts to wizard chess. The store page videos will describe this game better than I’m able to. It’s actually quite a good little game for people that enjoy games that require you to become ludicrously overpowered to survive.
Balatro - $14.99, the significant buzz around this game is entirely warranted, cursed poker will consume the next four months of your life. You have been warned.
Path of Achra - $9.99 A self described “broken build sandbox” that is, and very much looks like, a game made by one dude in his spare time. Don’t let the art fool you, I love it to pieces. Another game for people that enjoy games that require you to get super overpowered to survive.
Tiny Rogues - $9.99 I only recently got into this one. Great game, great replay value, check out videos to see if it’s for you.
Outside of the roguelike genre there are also a couple good ones that I’ll name, though I do admit this list will probably be shorter:
Siralim Ultimate - $19.99 is one of the grindiest monster collector games I’ve ever played but if you enjoy grinding that sort of game, you can build teams that would dunk your competitive Uber Pokémon team into the shadow realm. It has a ridiculous number of creatures with a ridiculous number of absurd abilities and you’ll find yourself farming this game on and off for like six years. Or I did anyway, I’ve been following the evolution of the game since Siralim 2 in 2016. You can also play any of them on your phone, which I actually find to be the superior experience for the most part because it’s a good game to play in 10-minute bursts over long periods of time. If you’re going to get any of them go straight to Ultimate, don’t bother with the others, it’s the same game significantly evolved over time.
Exanima - $14.99 Top down physics based melee combat RPG. Check the store page videos and youtube to figure out if this interests you. It very much did interest me, and after several years of dev silence the game is now being actively updated again, which is very exciting.
Ultrakill - $25 currently (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t do this anymore…) Buy it on sale if you’re a fan of fast paced FPS games, say new Doom for example. Don’t read, just buy. Trust me on this one. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, I promise.
Hollow Knight - $14.99 The greatest metroidvania of our age and spawned more knockoffs than the genre namesakes did. Pls give silksong.
Sunless Sea - $18.99 This is a very slow and very story driven game about being a sailor in hell. Familiarity with the general setting of Fallen London is very beneficial but is not required. This game is slow. But if you can vibe with it, it will deliver one of the most deeply touching RPG stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. This game is truly a treasure that won’t be appreciated by most people. But even so I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at least mention it for you to look at.
I have to stop myself here because I could go on about this all night and still not be done. Gaming is my main hobby and indie games are the main games I play. Name me a genre you enjoy and I’ll scroll around for recommendations if none of the above catch your eye.
After reviewing this list I have neglected to mention Shadows of Forbidden Gods, a Civ like where you play as Cthulhu, and more importantly I forgot to talk about Deep Rock Galactic and will be hurling myself into lava as penance at my nearest convenience.
I would agree, but XIV (the MMO) moved so far off the norm that I don’t really count it with the others. It managed to handle things pretty well, and was stomachable even if the combat mechanics aren’t often what draw people in.
Maybe don’t break up what was one massive and awesome game into 3 games over the course of like 8+ years. You don’t even get to keep levels and abilities across each game. I know they have made them quite a bit different from the original game, but I still know I’m only getting to have 1/3 of a story at a time, now. I don’t want to read half a book and know I can’t finish the other half for another 5 years. Let alone that it may have to be on a different game system.
I was going to re-buy the OG ff7 just to play on my steam deck using all the awesome mods that it has to balance things and improve the looks.
Well I nixed that idea. Fucking square requires an active internet to play their 28 year old single player RPG. I may just pirate the thing, but then I can’t use all the mods that have been made.
I’ve started feeling this way about anime too, so it’s obviously a pervasive problem in Japanese markets.
Got a series that’s interesting? You can have some curious character developments and mysteries in the twelve episodes you get, but its REAL reason for existing is the hope of selling merchandise and concluding its story arc across 100 manga releases and 80 episodes (which almost never happens)
US animation existed for the sole purpose of merchandising and advertisements. Back in the 80s when transformers were all the rage (the cartoon existed for the almost sole purpose of selling the action figures) they released a movie that killed off most of the transformers (children cried) and they did this so they could bring in all new transformers to carry on the battle, so that kids would have to go out and buy more new toys.
Fun fact to add onto this. Before Reagan repealed the law, it was illegal to make a show purely to advertise to kids. Once it was repealed we got the transformers and GI Joe and so on but before Reagan every single one of those would’ve been illegal to show.
Final Fantasy doesnt need to cost $100+ million to make; especially when your only big idea is just to make it look expensive. Execs like to blame their own hubris on market changes but like… treat your workers better and give them creative freedom and they could do great things. Instead its all on the backs of money-grubbing trend-chasers who get to keep their jobs when their inevitable failures lead to mass layoffs.
Ya’ll spent 50 mil on marketing? I barely even noticed ffxvi came out. How much did Dunkey spend on marketing Animal Well and that shit was inescapable for weeks.
We clearly run in different circles. To me, the drip-feed marketing for FF16 felt constant for the months running up to the game. Meanwhile, the very first time I heard of Animal Well was when the reviews started getting posted (and even then I only took notice because they were above average).
I literally saw Animal Well for the first time on the sale page on PSN just before it launched. I thought about buying it because it looked good.
Meanwhile, I saw a ridiculous amount of hype for XVI every time news or a trailer dropped for it. The demo convinced me to pick it up, and I’m so glad I did. It sucks because it’s the first mainline single player game since XII (or maybe X) that lives up to the brand.
I was excited for Persona 5, but not FFXVI. I think they’ve headed a bit too far down the road of Western imitation - going full medieval look, action combat (which I’m sorry, they’re not good at and it’s still confusing), etc.
The main thing I’ve expected from JRPGs is having a story and world that surprises me. There was something signature about the look of a guy with an oversized sword in a steampunk grungy city that pulled me into those games.
I know they poured a lot of budget into FFXVI, but it feels unplanned and vision-less. Like they could have been making the eikon fights in one team before writing the rest of the story, like how studios will film a car chase in one country and then work it into their action movie’s plot however they want.
I don’t feel that way about ffVVI at all. The story was fantastic. My only complaint was that some of the fights just felt like the eikons were damage sponges.
I’d love to play XVI, the story sounds amazing and the graphics are cutting-edge Square but two things keep turning me off:
The fighting system is way too close to DMC which I absolutely hated, I want a JPRG not an action game
it’s platform exclusive, talk to me when it’s on Steam
So really they’re doing it to themselves here. Their comment about “we’re modernizing the game to bring it to more people” just rings of BS, especially with their sales recently, and if they really cared about that they’d be fast tracking and announcing a date for XVI on the PC.
I thought the fighting was really fun in ff16. I’m not familiar with DMC though. All a matter of taste I suppose. Second point is fair, I happen to own a ps5, so I was able to play it right away, didn’t even realize it was an exclusive.
Paraphrasing : those expectations are not too high, they’re the direct result of the games’ budget.
Yeah, okay, let’s admit that for a second. It’s not like they have no control over the scale and budget of their own games. Seems to me this still counts as unrealistic expectations…
According to the article at least, that is essentially what they did. But their model was based on earlier years when there was higher projected growth, so the budgets were set too high as a result.
Personally, as long as the final installment in the FF7 Remake trilogy is made with the same budget as the first two and ends on a satisfying note, I’ll be happy. A good ending gives the trilogy as a whole have more lifetime sales than it would if part 3 makes the first two less good in retrospect, i.e. the Mass Effect 3 effect.
I will just agree to disagree on that front. Playing casually, I clocked over 100 hours on the 2nd game, which is more time than it took me to complete the original full game on PS1. I enjoyed basically every minute of time played (save for one particular mini-game that I didn’t care for), so I’d say I got a good value out of it for the cost. It is also hard to say that it is a cash grab when it provides a much fuller experience than most AAA games these days seem to have.
Basically, I don’t hate it any more than I hate the fact that The Lord of the Rings is three separate movies; it’s not like The Hobbit.
The problem is that the first is easy, the later is hard, nigh impossible.
Software development is notoriously hard to predict. Specially features against time and cost of development. But video games are even harder to predict. It’s impossible to know how many copies a game will sell, you might as well hire a tarot reader. Specially if the game doesn’t exist yet.
This is not a justification of the AAA practices. Quite the contrary, things are this way because mid and high management refuse to do their job or plainly suck at it. I guess that the adage still rings true: I want smaller games, with worse graphics, made by well paid developers who work less hours. But this games have never sold billions of dollars or sparked billion dollar game as a service IPs. So executives think it can’t be done and keep expending more in a desperate chase of the golden eggs goose.
SQEX did have significant AA-sized development for a long while, although potentially less going forward until their flagship rights itself (or they develop a new one). It’s less risky, and the payoff can still end up highly successful like Life is Strange or Octopath Traveler.
I guess the silver lining for them here is that FF16 had much better management than 13 and 15. It would have been a real disaster if 16 went into the budget overruns those two games did. Being hitched to a low-market-share platform and being released in a crazy year for gaming was also bad luck. Granted, FF16 and Rebirth not being good enough to move PS5 units is its own problem.
Consoles shouldn’t tie their success to a single game. Nintendo, the creators of such model, ditched it almost immediately. After the Famicom. Volume of games + convenience is what move consoles, not a single game. Exclusives have diminishing returns and at the beginning of console sales cycle they’re more likely to hurt the game.
Foamstars was a new IP, so they didn’t count on brand name to carry this one.
Unless they thought “Square Enix” would be enough to hype it, and yeah, for a game that far away from their usual, that would be completely disconnected from reality.
Not to diss his train of thoughts because it is hard to get money to fund risky projects. What he said is entirely base on the premise that vest majority of games are funded by publisher money, kickstarter or not that’s the reality for the longest time.
BUT, the part he is missing is that pitching is very important, the so called “risky” business is a economical/statistical analysis as of late. And you CAN get funding if you propose something that are sound and reasonable. Like today I was surprised that Immortals of Aveum has no microtransactions, even though the gear/resource interface hinted that at one point that’s probably considered. So EA, new IP, new engine tech, high spec req everyone spit at, can you come up with a even better counter argument to Rami? The game launched, after checking discord and discussions, consoles seems to run fine and smooth. I meet the 1440p/60fps requirement on PC so I took the plunge bought it this morning. Guess what, it delivered, I only tweaked 2 things, changing boarderless to full screen and disable vsync. Game is running very smooth on 60fps locked even at the big open field scene a youtuber tested yesterday that dips into 40+fps I have no issue at all running at exactly same location he did. (I did change the sensitivity settings on my mouse/in game so I don’t feel too dizzy cause there is no mouse smoothing, if your dpi set too high it’s actually hard to play. )
Will they be financially successful? I don’t know, it’s a big gamble for them and EA. But as far as Rami’s argument concerned, there is no problem getting funded and stick to your guns as long as you can prove to those doing the internal tests. Believe me, EA game with Denuvo, from dev I didn’t heard of, I did my homeworks and then decided to support them and took my risk. This is where I vote with my wallet. It works right after install and I haven’t run into bug/crash yet, and I hope this game is successful.
edit: is it fun? I also can’t be quite sure yet cause I just got out of tutorial area. But the mechanic is sound, KBM might be a bit odd on how they set the default bindings but you can change those, I did plan to give controller a try later.
“We’re literally stuck in a system where funding decides what gets made, everything that’s successful tightens the noose, and everything that’s unsuccessful is used as proof that we shouldn’t make more like it,” Ismail noted.
“So if you think things are bad now, wait until you see what’s coming, because as things get forced under larger & larger money-umbrellas for not being able to compete with Genshin/DFO/League /Roblox/etc., they’ll have to care more about promising money with whatever they do make.”
Basically, he is saying nothing can beat free-to-play games like Genshin and Roblox, which are earning tons through micro transactions. As for the quote in title, the second part says if you fail it will also lead to fewer games funded in genre.
He also says:
So I don’t know what the answer is & I’ve been looking for it as if my career depends on it because it kinda does. What I do know is that to get better, it’ll either take a full collapse of the industry, or “shorter games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less”
In other words, as a gamer (specially if you don’t play those free-to-play games), there is nothing you can do.
I also find it funny he talks about risk, litterally, if Genshin Impact wasnt a success, Mihoyo would have went under. Blaming another company who was willing to take the risk of bellying up is a dumb stance to have just because you wanted to play it safe.
I get his general frustration with the F2P and making bank on microtransactions, but I think the Larian story somewhat contradicts that even though the road to BG2 was long and difficult. They've slowly been refining the work since the 90s and you can see this reflected in the reviews their games got. Sure, BG3 with that scale was still a risk, but it's built on so much knowledge they've built from the Divinity series that at least some of that seems mitigated.
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