Each game needs to have a custom profile created to render in 3D. From the linked article:
3dSen is an emulator that lets you play 2D NES games in 3D. Its programmers have to create a custom profile for it to work its magic on each game, which means there are currently 100 supported games, including Contra, Super Mario Bros, Batman, Castlevania, Bubble Bobble, and Gradius.
Yes, it is better to have incentives tied to metacritic scores and units sold rather than… your actual existence.
But it is still the same bullshit. That is even worse in the era of chud influencers looking for the latest game to blame all the sins of the world on.
This article is basically the equivalent of “In rare economic W, man succeeds in using bootstraps to climb out of The Pit”
As the article says, this should be the norm, not the exception, but how can we expect it to become the norm if they don’t even get positive press for it?
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
No. This shouldn’t be the norm. How “successful” a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait… the CEO doesn’t have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.
I’ll also add on that this kind of model actively penalizes long tail games and post release support.
The poster child of this being Terraria. According to wikipedia, it was basically the indy dev darling of the year… 2011. Getting 70-80% from different outlets. And while we don’t know those initial sales figures, we do know that… 14 years later it continues to sell well enough that there will probably never be an actual final final patch. Like, the world will have cooled down from all the nuclear war and, somehow, there will be another re-release of Skyrim and another “final for reals this time” content drop for Terraria.
I agree with all of your points, but if we don’t even shine a positive light on steps in the right direction, then what are we supposed to do? Wait until we’re in a utopia, then start acknowledging improvements?
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so I’d still say worth celebrating.
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so is still say worth celebrating.
It is a “positive step” up from the hellscape that has been used to underpay and screw over devs for decades now.
I get we all want to feel good and not have to give a shit about actual labor issues and compensation of workers. But… this is just the kind of shit that makes it even easier to continue abusing the people who make the games we love and make sure that the golden parachute upper level managers get to have 500 person studios all on the back of having been at a meeting for a successful game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well. If they get a material reward for the big windfall they helped their employer get, that’s a good thing. You could argue they deserve pay raises instead, and I’d be inclined to agree, but then we’re agreeing on the principle and just quibbling over the extent.
Its not a false dilemma, devs getting the boot after release is fairly common in this industry. Also not sure why you keep bringing it back to chuds and bigots, since that has nothing to do with the topic.
Guess what impacts sales figures and even metacritic scores these days?
Assholes like asmongold. Because getting your game review bombed and having all the twitch streamers checking out your game have their unpaid moderators run triple time because they didn’t sticky a clip of them calling the character generator “woke trash”? That severely impacts sales. And Games Media is in a horrible state and the more corporate outlets (but also even a lot of the independent ones) just aren’t going to want that smoke for daring to say a game was fun if it is the latest “culture war” game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well.
There is a reason that it has increasingly become a good practice to refer to “total compensation”. Because, yeah, everyone loves getting told by the CEO that they are essential and saved the company and are awesome and everybody gets a day off … but only if they give the CEO time to peel out in his new ferrari first. But the reality is that that is baked into the expected salary and you are effectively taking a pay cut any year you don’t meet those arbitrary criteria… which are almost always never something YOU have any control over.
And you know who DOESN’T get a pay cut in the years where half your department got fired on a Thursday?
Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don’t have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
I mean if you think a system doesn’t work well it’s because you are able to identify why it isn’t working well and can visualize somewhat of an alternative. If that isn’t the case then you cannot be fully sure that there is a better way to do things, and maybe the system is working as well as it can be given the environment the system needs to operate in.
I’m not a dev myself so I can’t speak too much about the pov of being a worker in the industry and the issues you describe with credits. But from a management perspective the problem is that it is simply not possible to accurately predict which games will have a long tail. So if you plan for a long tail and the game isn’t received as well as you expected, what happens then? The game makes a loss. The studio might need to close because they overcommitted resources to the project etc. it’s much safer to assume that all the sales will happen in the first 6 months and forecast for that, and if the game turns out to be more successful than expected then that’s free money basically from a planning POV.
The intention of live service games is pretty much that, creating games that will purposefully and predictably have long tails, but the problem is that even if a game is designed to have a long tail it doesn’t mean that it will find an audience that will give it the momentum needed in the first place.
As for bonuses being tied to reviews or sales, they both have pros and cons. Maybe it should be a little bit of both, because well received game might make lackluster sales while a badly received game might make crazy sales numbers (most AAA games).
As for getting review bombed or getting panned by influencers. That is always a risk in every industry. I find that most games get the reception they deserve, For example a lot of people want to frame the latest Dragon Age for flopping because of chuds, but that is not in fact the case, because those same chuds probably sunk hundreds of of hours into BG3 which is by all chud metrics also a “woke” game. So the problem, very often is the quality of the game. Chuds are more than willing to put up with politics they don’t like in games when the game is objectively (subjective to the expectations of the intended audience) good.
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren’t tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a “dark maga” hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And… fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
I mean you could make a studio where there is no manager (how does that work I’m not sure) and you’d still need to make financial forecasting if you want the studio to be an entity that continues to exist. Like I don’t understand your logic here, the only other alternative is to make everyone’s salary contingent to sales and then the pie is divided evenly like in a coop model but that means a lot more of the financial risk is shouldered by the devs and you probably don’t get paid until the game releases.
Like what is a proper alternative that: a) pays you a salary while the game is being developed b) accounts for the risk inherent with not knowing the future?
Yeah, this looks awful to use. It’s okay on the Deck because that’s a mobile device and has a lot of functions it needs to satisfy on the go. For a dedicated controller? Why the hell would you prefer this over the better ergonomically designed SC 1 or literally any other console controller?
The original Steam Controller was great for games that didn’t support gamepads… and came out within like a year of “hey, we can actually map CRPGs, grand strategies, and RTSes to gamepads pretty well apparently?”
The Steam Deck is awesome because it is a best of both worlds. Sticks for games that map to those and trackpads for navigating the OS/Steam and for games that don’t map well to sticks. And a gamepad form of the Steam Deck would be awesome, if only for letting those of us with fewer brain cells to only learn one scheme for a game rather than two or three.
This… is not that. Mechanically it is there (and it is a good ad for pcbway or whatever) but the ergonomics are just complete trash. The Steam Deck itself has shockingly awesome ergonomics (and is a great isometric exercise because that thing is a brick) because it is like holding a large hardcover book. Shrink that down and you are just straining your wrists . It is why basically every gamepad has flared “wings” these days. It softens the angle of your wrist while you hold it.
All fair points. I can definitely see the appeal of wanting the same functionality that the Deck controller brings, as I myself really enjoy the extra flexibility the trackpads and back buttons provide. But the ergonomics in this example just looks awful and feels really reminiscent of the original Xbox controller.
Hopefully Valve will decide to release their Ibex soon. I do like that this is a split controller, but the ergonomics don’t look great compared to the leaked Ibex image.
The headline seems a bit overly snarky and dismissive of a small studio dealing with the kind of licensing problems that just come with big properties and image rights to expensive actors. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in a game.
It sounds like without the image rights, there won’t be any closeup cutscenes of Arnold’s face, but given that the game play is a 16ish bit throwback aesthetic, it actually doesn’t seem as distracting as it sounds.
Maybe they aren’t allowed to do an accurate Arnie voice impression, but if all the character audio is crunched up to feel more retro, that might not be a problem either.
That’s why I called it “16ish”. It is probably taking some liberties to improve the graphics that wouldn’t have been available in the 90s, but it is trying get those nostalgia neurons firing. Point is, the aesthetic is intentionally not photo realistic, so missing out on Arnold’s face isn’t the biggest problem in the world.
If you want to know about crap licenses to movies, there was a 8bit game for Blade Runner, but the developers couldn’t obtain the rights to do it. However, they were able to gain the rights to another part of the film.
The box art for the Blade Runner game states in rather small text on the cover, “video game interpretation of the film score”. Yes, they got the rights to the soundtrack!
Similar to the 1997 point-n-click Blade Runner game. The rights to all the aspects of that movie were such a mess that the developers decided not to use any footage or audio from the game because they honestly couldn’t figure out who owned what, and made it follow a new main character which was an obvious “Not-Deckard” who was chasing replicants in a similar but ever so changed variation on the plot of the movie.
What “Mojo” are you talking about? The downfall and enshittification? Is that the “mojo” you want other companies to replicate? I fucking hate games “urinalists”. Nothing but shit, paid opinions and nonsense.
Funny how all of that is straight up solved with any package manager or even git itself (with submodules) for free and yet gaming community is protecting some proprietary burning heap of garbage.
The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers’ sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you’re running. Having an “easy one click GUI!!!” doesn’t actually help anybody because modding different games isn’t a universally systematic process.
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Aktywne