But this was a dying business years ago, it was propped up by a few people who made a shit ton of money and a whole bunch of idiots they convinced to hold the bag.
GameStop was never going to last long, it was just delayed
It could if they were willing to modify their business model. They could have leaned into the game merchandise more but relying on used game sales was never going to be sustainable.
It should have ended years ago, it’s a crap company who were annoying to do business with, it became a meme and got to live a few extra years. But I say good riddance
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn’t on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
I don’t really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn’t be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren’t.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I’m a developer. It’s work to do anything, code doesn’t grow on the LLM tree yet. That’s a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is ‘let us figure it out, just don’t sue us’. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
Apparently the graphics are basically the same as 3, but performance is dog shit on even the best hardware and crashes are unavoidable.
When people complained, he said they need to use AI fake frame and upscale from 720. Which still wasn’t good performance.
It might get fixed later in updates. But this guy is handling so badly he might legitimately be mentally unwell. It’s at the point it’s weird he still has a job
That’s probably not the cause of the issues here though. Denuvo impacts game performance but not as badly as Borderlands 4 is seeing. The engine they chose has issues even on non denuvo games. It’s an unoptimized mess and then gearbox didn’t optimize any further themselves.
BL4 is running horribly, even on higher end PCs. I have a 4090 and a decent processor, but only getting 80FPS max with a good few settings on low or off and AI frame gen on (I would rather not, but performance is just that bad).
According to hardware unboxed 4090 at 1440 natively on the badass preset gets an average of 67 FPS. I'm not defending the poor performance of Borderlands 4, it's definitely ass, I just don't think we should take insane statements from randos at face value. Always verify performance with reputable sources instead of someone saying something on the web without giving the full picture. Who knows what they've done with their computer to get such poor performance.
That doesn’t really seem to contradict the other person’s claim that much? In fact like your said if just a few other things are running on that person’s pc and eating some resources, their claim seems super believable in the context of what you just said so I’m not sure what your point is.
A reviewer/tester is going to be benchmarking in a best case scenario environment. Real people using their real computers will be experiencing a huge variety of other environments. Different temps, hardware settings, programs running, etc. None of that context excuses the performance, and makes that person’s performance claim believable.
And Silksong will also run like shit if I run an AI model in the background that's hogging all resources, but if I said Silksong ran like shit on a 4090 you'd say I'm full of shit. But with Borderlands 4 it would be okay to say that because it fits your biases?
My point is you can't take such statements at face value. They need to be looked at critically because who knows what the person is doing with their machine or what kind of information they're omitting. Maybe the other person has a CPU bottleneck because they threw a 4090 together with a Ryzen 7 2700X? If you take them at face value you're just reflecting your own biases which means you call it bullshit if it doesn't fit your bias or you agree with it when it does fit your bias.
What’s crazy is how inconsistent the problems seem to be. I’ve got a 4080 Super and a decent processor, and I’m getting 120-140fps with most settings as high as they can go with frame gen on at 1440p. Only crashed once in about 40 hours of gameplay.
Oh, you have identical specs and built at the exact same time? Yeah, half of you are going to randomly have issues and half won’t. Enjoy head casing about that.
I’ve got a 6800xt and it runs really well on medium settings. Looks pretty good as well. Never had the game crash on me either. It’s 60fps but I’m cool with that. Gameplay feels smooth at that and it’s steady. No upscaling no frame Gen. 3440x1440.
I have heard a lot of people are having issues with Nvidia hardware though.
Well fuck me, apparently. The Adobe and Sibelius fees already break me, and I’ve invested enough in Unity assets (not to mention the learning curve) to get a game close to preproduction, and this could drive me out.
I’m a tiny Dev just trying to break into VR, console, and mobile by myself, and am dirt poor with no support, just my knowledge and talent. I’m working on three beta projects, but this makes me scared to continue on Unity.
I’m a good designer and developer with industry experience, but my health has forced me into smaller Indy projects. I put all my eggs in Unity’s basket and now it feels like they’re ditching me just at the point I was ready for production.
You might wait at least a few weeks before throwing everything down - There’s been a lot of backlash, so much that Unity might walk this back or change it entirely.
The problem is they keep changing the license terms every 6-12 months and the changes have always been retroactive. I think they've changed it about once every year for the last 5 years and this year they did it twice. Games often take years to make and that means you might have no idea what the terms are going to be by the time you're ready to release.
So lets say they walk this back. What about next time?
It doesn’t seem right that they can retroactively change their terms and just decide you owe them money. I’m guessing this is legal since they are doing it anyways?
It's really no different than a service upping their subscription fee or a grocery store raising the price of eggs. There's no law that says the price will remain the same forever. You can of course add it to the terms of a contract, but it's at your (in this case Unity's) own discretion.
The main difference is that if you built your product on their platform, you don’t have the option to pick a different vendor for what you’ve already built like you would for subscriptions or eggs. It feels much more akin to extortion to me.
You built your product on their platform and agreed to the terms they set. Thats a level of commitment you put in. Them changing it afterwards is forcing you to agree to new terms that you wouldn’t agree to if you weren’t forced.
If the issue is using their servers, or keeping the runtime code updates, there should at least be the option of self hosting or locking into an older version.
Having said all that, I know very little about vendor contracts and don’t doubt you when you say legally its the same as any other price change. It feels different because of the lack of choice.
Oh, I’ll keep going, for sure! (…with one eye on developments.) But now I also need to prepare contingencies if their licensing goes the way of Avid, Adobe, and most recently Reddit and the bird one.
Something major might have to change and I can’t be blindsided by it, so I have to carve out time to deal with this, anyhow.
It’s not like nobody warned you Unity was bad, they’ve been hounding developers forever. I’ve personally been warning people to not touch unity and instead use the vastly superior Unreal Engine, ever since the UDK days. This isn’t the fall of Unity, it’s mid descent.
Sometimes it seems to me that almost everything that isn’t FOSS/non-profit goes down the shitter these days in the name of profit. It really does feel like the only way to avoid getting fucked over is to completely ditch commercial stuff.
add this to the list of games that flopped before I even knew they existed, You really do have to put down real money to market games if you want people to purchase them
You’re thinking iwata, but that was a brief blip on Nintendo history. The OG CEO was a straight up suit. The man had no interest in videogames, only business. Which is why they practically had a monopoly over their hardware in the 80s and 90s.
The OG CEO is from the 1800s so yeah. And yes I’m thinking of Iwata. And look at what was produced during his tenure. That’s the Nintendo everyone is nostalgic about nowadays. 1989 Nintendo was a corporation throwing spaghetti at the wall, 2000’s Nintendo was streamlining the end gamer experience, 2020’s Nintendo is looking for an easy paycheck.
Seriously. If they were changing the terms going forward, that’d at least be defensible, but trying to make it apply to everything that’s ever been made is just nonsensical.
Even then it would be pretty bad for a lot of devs. If you’ve been developing a game in unity for years, you can’t just easily change engines just because they’ve changed the rules of using their engine.
I agree with you; they’d have to give plenty of notice that the changes were coming and maybe even offer exemptions for developers who can show they were working on something significantly before the announcement… I don’t think there’s any way they could reasonably do it that would avoid all backlash, but this just seems like the absolute worst way to handle it.
Any future installs starting on January 1. It does, however, mean that many developers will be more or less forced to pull their games off of storefronts, if it actually goes through. It also means that if you bought a Unity game in the past, you’re costing the developer money every time you install it (again, if this actually goes through - I can’t imagine they won’t backpedal.)
The real issue with this isn’t the policy itself, which I would bet money won’t actually be enacted, but the fact that Unity (thinks they) can just unilaterally and retroactively change their policies. If this actually held up in court, which I think is a tenuous possibility at best (but I am not a lawyer so take that with a grain of salt), it sets an awful, awful precedent.
If they can change the terms of games already released and ask for a % per install, what’s stopping them from just asking for 100% and saying suck it bitches.
It’s not a scam if you buy it and enjoy it for what it is, but it’s a scam if you keep putting money into it for features and content that is promised but not delivered.
But that’s an obvious scam. I don’t already have space-themed PC games stored in my fridge that I can readily shove up my butt.
So you’re saying that I shouldn’t buy Star Citizen and stick eggs in my butt instead? I don’t like your ideas, but you seem like a reasonable person and I can’t argue with your logic.
Because based on the amount of sales they’ve made and the combined player numbers between those and gamepass players, lots of people don’t care.
I started gaming on an Amstrad in the late 80s, I’ve lived though multiple groundbreaking leaps in graphical quality since then and now and frankly, it doesn’t impress me anymore, especially with how incremental it’s become. I’m more impressed by the scale and world building of Starfield and how all its systems come together than how it’s character models look.
Fishburne was very diplomatic when asked for his opinion on the finished Matrix 4: “it was better than I expected, but not as good as I had hoped”.
Hugo weaving, the actor for Smith, didn’t appear in the film due to alleged scheduling conflicts, but I suspect he took a look at the script and noped out of it.
This has to be it. I watched the RLM video where they say the same thing, then I watched the movie for myself and in the first five minutes of dialog when the new Smith says “our bosses at Warner Brothers” and I was just like “ooookay”
Didn’t he not even want to do Infinity War and Endgame, which were actually solid stories? I have a feeling he wants no part of The Matrix at this point.
ign.com
Ważne