Pretty stoked for this. The superhero genre seems strangely missing in gaming, barring IP related projects connected to DC and Marvel. This came the closest to matching the thrill of being a superhero, when it came out. Character creation was amazing, too
Wonderful news! I have never played and don’t intend to, but I’m happy for everybody involved.
Let’s hope the team will lead with example and that this event opens up for the possibility for other online games to be preserved in a similar fashion.
Sadly, they are most likely forced to sell their labor for survival short term and hence cannot even invest their own time for the purpose of making something truly great.
On a tangential note, I doubt that the license you include will have any influence on people doing scraping for commercial AI :(
Also, I am not sure what is the default licence the content on forums/lemmy is posted under and if that can be changed by including an overriding licence 🤔
I doubt that the license you include will have any influence on people doing scraping for commercial AI :(
That doesn’t deter me. It’s just a keystroke to insert 🤷 If someday I read that the EU or the US decided anything can be used to train AI, then I’d stop.
I like it. It reminds me that Lemmy is a small space and that people on the internet are not bots, so we have to be nice to each other :) Plus it is always fun seeing you around in different threads.
I don’t work in the industry and I could be way off here. But aren’t some of the developers hired on as a type of contract worker to finish a big game and well aware that if the next project isn’t lined up perfectly, it’s impossible to house that many employees. That’s how our construction industry is. Companies have to hire on and then trim the fat as needed.
As far as I know, it’s usually not so in gaming and in software in general. But since software is easier to abandon when you feel like it (I know buildings, too, sometimes stand incomplete for decades) so it is easier to suddenly close the project and say goodbye to everyone working on that project.
This is true. Some things are completely outsourced to vendor companies with their own employees. You rarely interact with these people at all, or even know their names. All communication goes through a telephone game. Then the primary studio itself will have contract employees and also “permanent staff”.
Management likes to go on and on about how staff are “family”, but then treat them like shit and lay them off anyway. They also like to be subtly shitty to contract workers whenever possible, like free donuts in the break room! (for staff only)
Really, management is just shitty to everyone. Having been in both positions I honestly prefer contract. At least then I’m not expected to participate in their “corporate culture”.
IMO worker-owned businesses should be the future. There should also be a forced role-switch or shadowing for managers and workers, so that both understand better what each others respective jobs look like. Managers often think they should be earning their money because their work is more important and set the salaries as such: “Without me, you wouldn’t know what to do, so my job is more important should be compensated more”. They are out of touch with their workers and their realities.
In my opinion game studios should not sell out to investors and/or have any stocks as it will lead to profit making the calls eventually. It is tempting to get a bunch of investment, I know it would make my game studio easier to run right now, but then you are constantly reminded how it all ends up. Don’t like the system, stop playing in it and build your company slowly and organically instead and retain full control.
Same goes for many businesses outside of gaming. Imagine if there was no such thing as the stock market / investors and all companies had to grow on their own merits.
In my virtual studio everyone is their own sole proprietorship contributing to the project off and on and getting compensated fairly for their contributions. They also have their own projects too and may even pay me to help them sometimes. This way everyone assumes their own risk and reaps their own benefits. If any one person on the virtual team has a hit with their project, they retain full control and owe no money back to some shareholders who did nothing but lend money to make money. It does mean I am way slower than if I could just hire everyone full time as employees, but knowing where having investors will ultimately take me, I accept. Plus going slower means more time to sit on things and polish and not feel time pressure to appease shareholders.
Shareholders are a little like getting a loan and depending on how successful you are, you have to pay back more than you borrowed and giving them control on your art. No thanks.
The CEOs of these investor funded companies have forgotten that investors are not their customers, gamers are. This will hurt them in the long run because they are pissing off their customer base, people who really given them money to appease their shareholders. It never ends well for the companies.
The investors are the ones forgetting that. CEOs work for the investors not for the customers.
Now, a good CEO will be able to manage upwards and throw around things like reputational damage and consumer trust to convince to keep the investors focused on the long term in order to protect the company (and the investors uhh… investment). The problem in the gaming industry is that time and time again gamers show that there’s no such thing as reputational damage with games since there are enough people building their personality around a gaming franchise that even studios with a reputation for consistently putting out mediocre unoriginal crap can count on a mountain of pre-orders.
Exactly. The last year of news full of mistreating game developers caused my to retune my news feeds and Steam wishlist to completely exclude all triple A titles.
There’s years and years worth of great gameplay I haven’t experienced yet in the Indie game market.
That’s probably on Steam, not Nightdive? After all it’s just uploading some files and downloading them again, something the steam client is supposed to do for you.
Cloud saves work fine between Linux PCs, but the devs seem to have misconfigured the save path for Steam cloud saves integration on Windows. That’s why it doesn’t work. That’s on the devs, not the Steam client. Apparently they were working on a fix since about half a year ago, maybe they finally released that fix now?
Nope, it’s a bug with how Nightdive coded the save path. Since they made a native Linux version of the game, Steam is using that as opposed to doing Proton compatibility. So that means the save paths in the Linux version and the Windows version aren’t the same, hence not syncing properly.
It’s a really great and faithful remake - but I feel like I heard so little about it that I’m so confused to see new endings and player characters come out for it now months later.
Hoping it has some second wind with the general gaming crowd. Seems like it got overshadowed by RE4 and the latest Zelda game and never hit it off with that kind of TikTok, game of the month crowd
I’ve heard that it’s still by and large like the original game in many areas, so I could see it not hitting with that crowd. But among the old geezers like myself who never stopped playing the old stuff, it’s got nothing but praise. Personally haven’t played it (or even the original game for that matter; only ever had SS2) but both look amazing, and I want to play it.
I have a lot of other remake games and engine ports from Night Dive and almost all of them are absolutely phenomenal.
Yeah I was super-positively surprised by how faithful it was, loved replaying it.
And sure the ending fight was weird, but also, the “proper” ending fight was the room before that. So it felt complete in that regard, the last bit was just finishing off the game. Like in Crysis Warhead when you get the final gun, at that point it’s already won, just about finishing it off.
Valve is an excellent example of a company that is privately owned, so they don’t have to satisfy shareholders with constant growth for growth’s sake. And yet they’re still growing and making a profit, because they make a good product.
Phil and Xbox don’t have that luxury because their masters sold out decades ago.
Valve is also a good example of platform monopoly. People need to stop treating valve like they aren’t also a big problem with the modern games industry. They are PC gaming’s landlord taking a 30% cut of every sale. You have to be smoking crack if you think that doesn’t hurt game developers.
They are a monopoly because they’ve had the best product on the market consistently for 15 years. There used to be huge resistance to them and their drm from gamers, but they have shown over many years that they are trustworthy, unlike others that have tried this.
This is not an Apple or Google store situation where proper competition could not exist. They were always up against giants like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft or more recently Epic.
No they don’t, Steam barely ever gets updated, it’s not magically better than the others it’s just the one everyone uses.
Digital storefronts are natural monopolies. No one wants to use a different game launcher because it’s annoying to remember multiple passwords, to remember which game is where, to install and have multiple launchers running. None of that is Valve doing some amazing engineering that no one else has done, it’s just the natural state of game launcher / storefront economics. The only reason Steam is what people prefer is because it was the first one on the scene and has the lion share of users and games for sale.
We see the same thing happen with streaming platforms, the same thing happen with social networks. And Steam is also a social network which reinforces the monopoly. The other launches have friends and chat and shit but no one uses it because their friends are on steam or discord.
I don’t doubt that Steam being first to market is the biggest reason for their success, but you make it sound as if there’s some alternative store that is better for the consumer in some way. What’s the alternative? I have yet to see any other store/launcher come close to Steam in terms of features, even more so when it comes to Linux support, which Valve have turned into a viable gaming OS pretty much by themselves. In the end, even exclusivity and drastically lower fees for publishers didn’t make EGS the success that Tim Sweeney wishes it was and I think at that point being first to market can’t be the only explanation. They have to be doing something right.
Today, yes, I agree. It’s really hard to compete with them anymore. But 15 years ago when everyone was rushing to capture the market, there were many opportunities to do so. Steam and valve were never infallible, but at least they took feedback and stayed consistent, unlike their competitors.
Nothing stops you from busting your games on other platforms when available. I always choose GOG over steam personally. What cut they take from publishers isn’t consumers’ concern.
They could definitely treat developers better, but they’re an example of treating customers right. That’s why they’re the biggest platform, and that’s why they admittedly have something debatably close to a monopoly.
Bullshit. That 30% cut pays for all the features that make steam a better store than any other store. Those features are all free for the gamers, because they are essentially paid by the devs in that cut.
If that cut wasn’t worth it, I don’t think Microsoft, ea and others would have come back to steam after trying to make their own stores (and failing).
How can it be a monopoly when I can just download another store with a click of a button? Which I have also done, and even bought games from those said other stores, but the experience was just completely miserable compared to steam, up to the point I’ve considered rebuying those games on Steam.
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Aktywne