I actually have that in my library because I bought the Index but haven’t played it yet because I wanted to play the first 2 games first. I didn’t play the first game for very long tho because I got stuck at some point early into the game and haven’t felt like continuing yet. You can also really feel the age of that game, controls and that kinda stuff. Not sure if I should just punch through that game or just say fuck it and play Alyx.
Well you’re in luck because there are VR mods available free for the older Half Life games. Just get the Orange Box or something with all the half life backlog and VR mod them for free.
If by “first game” you mean HL1, you could try playing “Black Mesa” which is a fan remake of the game, in the same engine that powers HL2. It’s not a 1:1 recreation, but it’s close enough (and I feel it improves on some things).
HL2 is also 3 seperate games (HL2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2), so make sure you have all of those in your library.
At the very least, I’d suggest playing HL2/EP1/EP2 before Alyx, since those would provide the expected background for Alyx, despite it technically being a prequel-ish thing.
Half life 1 just got a new big update that makes it much better to play this day and age and fixed a bunch of bugs. Either way you could skip 1. As a kid I never played 1 and went straight into 2, then 2 episodes 1 and 2 with the orange box. I still haven’t finished 1 but with this new update I think I’ll go back to it some point soon now.
Am not sure there’s a way for them to release HL3 and don’t disappoint huge number of people. Not because they suck at making games but because expectations have grown so so so much they are downright unachievable now.
I had heard of it but I don’t really watch YouTube. I watched that whole video and what a shitshow. I went straight to my wife and said we have to watch out that the kids don’t get caught up in this.
We give an allowance to our young niece and nephew, who both game on PC sometimes, and it seems like this is exactly the kind of shit that would entice our nephew. He has my old PC and it’s really showing its age.
I guess that must be why I can’t buy the Black & White games or Fable 2. Because Microsoft cares so much about preserving the awkward legal Loop some of their Lionhead Games are in.
I love how this continues to crank out articles with 0 information and everyone speculating what it might be about.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo are dickheads, but you can clearly see how everyone greedily clicks on these articles considering how often they get rehashed.
I am just curious, do you have a take on how Nintendo’s lawsuit could be legitimate? Even a high-level theory, surely if you are so concerned about speculation and “greedy clickbait”, you have some logical ideas to back this up?
I would argue we do have enough information to have a take on it. What legitimate patent infringement case do you see in context of Palworld and Nintendo’s products? Be clear and specific.
If you’re going to call for a ban on commentary, you need to have some of argument.
From my perspective, it is crazy to defend some random corporation in this way when you can’t even come up with a basic explanation of why critical commentary is not justified at this stage.
Without going through all of their patent filings no one can. So again, that is the point. Lack of info
We are both gamers (I am assuming this is true for you since you’re commenting here). I am not talking about legal understanding of Japanese patent law. Just a practical evaluation of Palworld vis-a-vis Nintendo products. What genuine technical innovation (I am not talking about bullshit patents for stuff that was implemented many decades ago) do you see in Nintendo’s products that was copied by Palworld?
This is not difficult.
Never said a ban on commentary, just hate bullshit articles.
The implication of thread OP was that articles critical of Nintendo (in the context of this case) should not be published as of today, no? Why is any commentary immediately categorized as “greedy clickbait” or “rehashed content”?
Something I agree with you on. Let them fight. This discussion is in the context of bullshit articles with zero information.
I would argue it’s not a bullshit article as I have yet to hear a single example of what legitimate (in the real sense, not related to Japanese patent law) case Nintendo has. What is this magical innovation that we see in Nintendo products that was copied by Palworld?
I am not talking about legal understanding of Japanese patent law.
But that's what the case is about.
I would argue it's not a bullshit article as I have yet to hear a single example of what legitimate (in the real sense, not related to Japanese patent law) case Nintendo has.
Well then the fact that we still don't know what the case is really about is exactly why these articles are useless. No information in there.
What is your argument here? Your support the Japanese patent law irrespective of whether it reflects reality? You would be OK with Japanese patent that is de facto non-valid (i.e. the approach was already used in games 10+ years ago) just to support a random company?
I am going off memory, but one example would be one of the Japanese gaming companies patenting cross-game saves (release to sequel); an approach that was implemented by the Ultima games 10+ years before the patent was filled? Do you support this?
We have access to Palworld, we have access to Nintendo products. If commentary criticizing Nintendo is “greedy clickbait”, then what innovation has been abused by Palworld? Can you provide an example in context of gaming experiences?
Sure, I mean this is a forum discussion (in a relatively underground platform no less).
I don’t see what this has to do with what I am talking about. If the article sucks, what is this innovation in Nintendo’s products/services that was copied by Palworld? This is a very simple and straightforward question, no?
What’s wrong or “too deep” about a question like that?
Let's go back to the start of this comment thread:
I love how this continues to crank out articles with 0 information and everyone speculating what it might be about.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo are dickheads, but you can clearly see how everyone greedily clicks on these articles considering how often they get rehashed.
That's the argument: these articles add nothing to the discussion. And you responding to that with "but can you prove Nintendo is right?" isn't the point and also isn't adding anything to the discussion.
So nintendo and palworld are based in Japan which has no fair use on copyright.
If this became a copyright case in Japan and palworld won it could change the law on copyright fair use in, which Nintendo and other corps don’t want as it would open up new games based on their products under fair use.
The only way Nintendo can attack palworld is via patent infringement.
If this became a copyright case in Japan and palworld won it could change the law on copyright fair use
not every country has case law. most of Europe is eg using “code law”, which means a precedent doesn’t change the law, but only applies to the one specific case with all its specific context and circumstances taken into account. under slightly different circumstances, a judge may rule differently
Yes, there are going to be opinion pieces like this one filling the space for a major news story like this one, but there’s still room for proper journalism right now. I recommend folks check out PC Gamer’s interview with an IP attorney that worked in Tokyo (which was also the second link in this posted article).
Software patents are a thorny topic, and it’s worthwhile for enthusiasts of the industry or those interested in IP law to read up on the concept in general. There’s risk for Nintendo here, and I found Sigmon’s offhand comment about how Nintendo’s ramped up legal hiring to be particularly interesting.
Lmao Valve made a service so good at what it does, it’s fucking over all these other business ghouls like Tim Sweemey who are actively trying to dominate the market without actually competing; just look at Epic’s store, it’s d o g s h i t. They give out free games and still no one I know wants to use it. It’s the same across the board, these companies do not want to make good services, they want to legally strongarm the consumer.
I’ll tell you a secret) nowadays ALMOST all corporations regardless of what they make business into wanna strongarm the consumer, for quick example look up denuvo and baldurs gate, if product is good then people will buy and denuvo won’t be needed
GOG has shown that drms are never needed. More often than not, denuvo causes issues to the player, and gets bypassed by a pirate easily. It is simply there because gamedev companies think they get something out of it, when in reality they don’t.
Yeah. I don’t even know that much about the whole thing, just what I learned when going to look for a game a while back, and even from that little it was like, wtf is with this person?
this is very true, its not like they saying no to other stores like apple for example, they just cant compete so they sue instead, really show how pathetic they are.
I recently got Alan wake 2 on EGS because I’m a huge Remedy head and huge fan of the first game and couldn’t contain my excitement to wait for a steam release and potentially see spoilers, and damn dude that store really is the most bare bones half assed thing ever. Even EAs store on their launcher is nicer.
I don’t know if this is a hot take, but I think allowing straight and cis people to identify as such is appropriate, because the alternative assumes that we live in a state of default heteronormativity.
If anything, I want to live in a world where homophobes get mad that if they want to be assumed to be straight online they have to identify like anyone else. No one gets assumed to be straight any more. That’s better imo.
No shade to my Ace friends intended. Totally possible to be horny for art or rock collecting or whatever. Doesn’t have to be a sexy thing. I’m horny for none of the above is totally valid.
heh, this totally reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s dwarves, that spend a lot of time trying to find out what’s under the beard of the other first without asking that akward question xD
as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.
Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.
Until I hear that they have dumped the requirement to log into Ubisoft Connect or Uplay or whatever they are calling it noe, then Ubisoft will remain dead to me.
Makes me sad. I really enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series and have waited for Shadows for what feels like a decade now.
I was really confused by your responce thinking it was meant for someone else toll I reread my comment. I’m referring to the “ubisoft game” that we all know and are bored of
If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they’re clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you’re estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that’s because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
Well for one they’re a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.
It’s even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn’t fix in 3 years.
6 months doesn’t sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it’s done, that alone can take a month.
Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.
it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work
Sure, but it can also be reused in future games. Separate styling from behavior and you can make it look unique for every game with minimal code changes.
The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.
The systems used in development and delivery haven’t been invested in enough to automate repetitive steps, optimize workflow, and increase safety of changes.
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he’s spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it’s simple, but it rarely ever is. It’s hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that’s what you sign up for in this line of work.
I know it isn’t completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that it should only be changing a few global variables. It’s a frontend with very little backend to consider.
Something like that is not a year’s work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.
And tbh - the main problem with it isn’t even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analog stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficulty select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they’ve managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that’s unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. Every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told by everyone to keep their game scope small. Not saying these kinds of games shouldn’t improve, but it’s not as trivial as it might appearr.
Scale absolutely matters, but the scale of the new game screen is (or should be) very minor compared to the game itself. That one scene should only be setting the variables for new play, not interacting with anything outside of it.
And, to be clear, the main concern is simply the input handling in that scene. The UI itself doesn’t really need to be changed, just which buttons change the highlight focus.
I can imagine it was likely thrown together quickly, perhaps with some unnecessary coupling, or maybe reading the inputs using action names that also relate to gameplay, so it becomes awkward changing it out.
I’m not so experienced with Unity, but in UE and Godot, adding and mapping inputs is fairly trivial - select the “up” button and map it to “ui_focus_up”, etc. I can’t see it being much more complex in Unity.
If you’re spending months on your menu system, you’re doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It’s really important because it’s the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn’t impact much.
I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it’s mostly time for bug fixing and polish.
This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can’t just “bang that out in a few days”.
I’m sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.
menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuf
Right, which is why I specifically said there’s an exception for menu-heavy games like 4x and grand strategy. If we’re mostly talking about launch and pause menus (which was my intent), that’s a small scope of work, as in weeks, not months.
You can absolutely build that in a few days, and then redo it later once UX has decided what needs to go there. It’s pretty similar game to game, so build it properly once to be data driven, and then tweak the UX and options a bit for each game. Optimization is generally done pretty late in the dev cycle, so those options don’t need to exist until later in development anyway, and that’s like half the work.
The important thing is to have your UX team iterate on it before your devs get involved, so it’s ready. And have them build it out while optimizing things for release. Your menu systems don’t need a ton of testing relative to the actual mechanics and gameplay.
Describing design problems and attributing them to “bad code” is part of the problem tbh. The issue in your example started long before any code was written.
laying off 1,100 employees as a way to "modernize our organization and get even leaner
Yeah because that’s what we want of the ones in charge of publishing, administering and providing support for some of the most played games in the world now and historically: leanness! The fewer people to take care of important things, the better! 🤦
I know that he’s talking to investors rather than players, but come on! Also, there’s nothing “modern” about stupidly trying to increase profits via mass layoffs without expecting blowback and for quality to suffer. That’s some 1700s bullshit right there.
Also, when your company is ailing (read: Not making more profit than last year, no matter what ocean of money your managers are swimming in), fire the good parts. That’ll fix it!
Hasbro is unprofitable, but there was a memo a while back that said Wizards of the Coast was their most profitable division. Possibly their only profitable division. That covers Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
This is also why we’re seeing both those properties getting the fuck monetized out of them. Big influxes of MTG sets based on other licensed properties, and attempts to undo the open licensing around One D&D.
But then it makes even less sense to lay people off from those divisions.
They also said in a memo maybe 2 years ago they want WotC to be worth double their value in 5 years. That’s pretty unrealistic standards for an already established company.
The best way to save hasbro is cut back on making trash plastic toys for kids and stake the company to a well-staffed, functional WoTC who can deliver what MTG and DND fans want.
Is that in the original spirit of the company? No, but who the hell cares? Certainly not investors and certainly not consumers or they’d be buying the toys
God that’s so corporate-coded - instead of fixing your divisions so they are all profitable, just take your two successful divisions and squeeze them like you’re trying to get blood out of a stone.
I’ve survived layoffs at companies where we were told that following the cuts, we were going to get leaner and more agile and more efficient.
I’m sure you’ll be just shocked to learn that what actually happened is I ended up doing twice as much work to pick up the laid off people’s slack, and at the end of the year got a smaller bonus than the previous year, along with a raise that didn’t cover inflation. Overall company profits, of course, hit a record high.
So… basically, Musk turned up at a studio and threatened the devs with a gun (which antique or not, could have been loaded and functional - shooting with antique guns is a thing) to make them put him in the game?
I know there’s a massive cultural difference around guns between the UK and the US, but I’m genuinely struggling to see how “a man has turned up to our studio with a gun because he wants us to put him in our game” doesn’t warrant a call to the police.
Hence why, when calling the police, you wouldn’t say who it is. Just “a man” or “a person” has come in with the gun. Which happens to be true, since until proved otherwise, Musk can indeed be accurately described as a person. Whether he manages to wiggle out of it later is less important than the immediate problem of getting the gun-wielding lunatic out of the studio.
Yeah, hence why I said “until proven otherwise”. At some point someone will pull the mask off and reveal the monstrosity underneath. But until then we have to be the bigger people, give the benefit of the doubt, and assume he is actually a human being.
Whether or not the gun was loaded, the person wielding it sure was, and it’s much easier to say “Call the cops on him” if you’re not worried about whether that guy might be rich and vindictive enough to ruin your life over it.
No matter whether Musk would have actually had any way of doing so, the fear of the possibility alone can be enough to cow you into compliance.
There are ways of surreptitiously sending a message to, say, someone who isn’t in the room, without making it a very obvious call to the police. Or, for that matter, just dial the number on your phone and don’t say anything other than “your gun is really impressive but I’m a bit uncomfortable with having it pointed in this direction”. The operator on the other end will know what to do with that.
Because another way Musk could ruin your life is shooting you while showing off and waving a gun around, given that he is immature and arrogant enough to have loaded it, and reckless enough for his finger to slip.
Sounds like assault with a deadly weapon, and if he took it out to show, then it's brandishing. It doesn't matter if it was non-firming because the target didn't know that, and typically these laws are written to be what "a reasonable person would believe".
Also, at the time this happened he was a known user of Marijuana and thus not eligible to own a firearm, as that rule had not yet been struck down.
Thanks for the explanation! It sounds fairly similar to the law here, where it’s based on what a reasonable person would believe - so even waving a realistic toy gun at someone would get someone in trouble, if the person being threatened with it would reasonably believe it was real.
If charged as a felony, you could be facing a sentence of two to four years in State prison. Regular assault (Penal Code § 240), is always charged as a misdemeanor offense.
The instrument used includes any type of firearm, knife, bat, car, or anything other type of weapon that could produce significant harm to the victim.
In order to prove a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you assaulted another person and you used a deadly weapon or force that would likely result in great bodily injury.
An assault charge does not require that you actually make physical contact with or injure the person.
The English voice recordings for Cyberpunk 2077 were all done in London and LA. So it's basically sure that it wasn't Poland, and it's much more likely that it was LA than London in this case.
I have shot and killed a deer with a flintlock gun. They’re not toys or props. He committed assault with a deadly weapon and the whole word is just like “Oh, that’s just wish.com iron man. You know how he is.”
They didn’t earn $544M, they had $544M in revenue. They lost $124M but it’s all due to their decisions. They have a great operating margin in the 60s and spent all the money elsewhere.
Revenue is how much you sold stuff for. Profit is how much did you make after paying for everything to run your business. They got $544M but spent $668M, so they didn’t make a profit.
Bethesda has so far stayed quiet about the update’s reception, so there’s no clue as to whether an official fix or even an option to rollback may be forthcoming.
My bet is they “fix” it in 6 months once most mods have been patched, this breaking them all over again.
I played Skyrim on and off (mostly off) starting about eeeh idk 4 years ago. Around November and a few months before that I got into the game again and decided to expand my mod list and go deeper into that rabbit hole. I’ve always played modded but it was pretty light stuff and nothing that required the script extender
Then they updated it and broke mods and just kept updating, so i bought oldrim and started again cus i only like to mod games that have stopped being updated for this exact reason
I would love to play Skyrim vr but my laptop is an absolute powerhouse and doesn’t have the right ports for my vive pro and I use a family desktop that my family uses for sports simulators for VR
the desktop is pretty good but it’s a potato for vr. Capable of running if I turn the settings low enough and long load times :(
I’ve tried adapters that didn’t work and a wireless attachment requires me to open up the laptop and there’s probably no room in there cus laptop
Well, hope you can get it sorted at some point. I played through it on a 1660 with Quest 2 and it was amazing. The base game is a super lazy VR port, but a couple of mods can make it into one of the best VR games around.
The big three are VRIK to have a body, HIGGS for proper hand interactions and PLANCK for physics. And you’ll want something for magic selection. I got used to the glyph-writing system of MageVR, but there are some selection-wheel based mods that are highly praised if you want a more simple, if gamey, system.
For more I’d have to look into my modlist but these are the must-haves IIRC. Maybe there’s something new too. The modding scene was fairly active last time I checked.
Unless there’s been a breakthrough, it’s best to stay away from melee combat, as that’s more than a little jank. I went with a lightning mage and had a ton of fun. Stealth archer is of course always an option, but I couldn’t be arsed to keep crouching IRL all the time
I mean, technically yeah - the criticism here is just that Bethesda chose the worst possible time to drop an unnecessary patch considering the influx of new players from the TV show’s success.
It wasn’t unnecessary, it was definitely necessary and many people, including me, waited for it. It’s also the best time to drop the patch now that there’s the hype from the show. It’s unlikely to affect new players because it’s an issue with mods, not the actual game. Can’t image many players start a game for the first time and install mods but if anyone does that, there’s a warning. You can’t expect Bethesda to test the compatibility of their game with all the mods out there, that’s up to the respective modders.
You make a valid point, I just personally disagree that this was good timing on their part (and for the record I’m not downvoting you or anything). A better time would have been before the show dropped - granted, they likely didn’t anticipate its overwhelming positive reception.
I know I’m in the minority here, but I bought FO4 after watching the show and immediately installed the highest-rated mod pack on Nexus, assuming with a game this old it’d work great. I’ve been playing their games since Daggerfall and believe that modern Bethesda games are best played modded - at the very least with the unofficial patches that fix issues with the base game. I only found out a few days after starting my run that there was an incoming patch that’d ruin my fun.
Anyway - it’s not the end of the world. I’m used to patches breaking mods and having to replace them or wait months for them all to get updated. Just having some fun slagging on a publisher that, in my opinion, timed this badly. I don’t regret the 10 bucks I spent on the game, as I’ll eventually get back to it.
The very least I’d expect is a patch note that fixes some long standing bugs that are yet to be addressed officially, but have been fixed in the Unofficial Patch. Here’s their changelog, afkmods.com/Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch Version Hi… , there’s one fix that was superseded by an official patch.
Yeah, its a good thing Bethesda games aren’t really known for having a vibrant modding community. Otherwise a bunch of headlines saying “new update breaks mods” might turn away a bunch of players who had originally played it on console and would have bought it on PC to try those mods.
Sarcasm aside, the amount of potential new players who changed their minds due to broken mods are far greater than the amount of new players who wouldn’t have gotten it if not for the update. If Bethesda dropped the update even a couple months ago, they could have had the best of both world. It was poorly timed, and definitely cost them sales.
Yes - unexpectedly, on a game that's pretty much a decade old. Modders are not expected to maintain stuff that long, because when does that ever happen?
Modders are not expected to do anything, there are also not a factor here as it’s not their game and the developers don’t need to check up with them. The update however has been 2 years in the making so hardly anyone can be surprised, especially modders.
It can be the least predatory mtx system ever, being in a paid game is still not acceptable and I’ll die on that hill. Never bought anything with a shop or battle pass and won’t start now.
I agree if those things leverage fomo to get people to pay. In helldivers you can earn that currency just playing the game so if you have less time to play you have the option of purchasing the currency and their versions of battle passes are always available to buy and work on at your leisure.
It started with “It’s just a silly horse armor DLC, just don’t buy it!”, continued with “It’s just cosmetics bro, just don’t get them!”, then we got “The shop is fine though, you can get the currency ingame!” and got to “The timed battle pass is fine, you also get free stuff!”. You can draw your own line for mtx, but slowly we’re both approaching and crossing it if you accept anything before that.
The way I see things, “the least pressured to buy stuff” reads like “the least aggressive cancer”. Sure, it could be worse, but like, you’ve still got cancer. There’s still the ideal option of being healthy instead.
I’m actually not making any of those arguments and disagree with all of them myself. My issue with mtx is generally that they prey on people with psychological tactics that are proven to work on a lot of (generally vulnerable and younger) people. Helldivers does none of that, it’s not “least pressured to buy stuff”, you’re not pressured at all.
And I know I’m being a little sensitive here but it really sucks to lose someone from cancer and see someone comparing it to a shop in a video game of all things.
I appreciate the consideration and at the end of the day I really agree with you and it sucks to see the state of the industry as a whole right now and really hope we can get back to being respected as consumers some day.
Having the option to use real money is the problem. Nothing is stopping them from adding more and more expensive stuff until you cannot grind it anymore. That’s how we went free cosmetics to 60+ bucks for skins.
Oh, they can add content not included in the original purchase? And they ask me to buy those things they worked on if I want to play with them? Fucking monsters… someone needs to stop them.
You know, drip feeding stuff is no fun. Paying for trivial things is no fun either. We used to get full-blown expansions for the price some companies want for a single skin.
Instead of adding stuff to a shop, games could get actual new content. Instead of buying every asset separately, they could all be thrown in with said new content. Like, yeah, they should get paid for their continued work, but that does not mean the consumer should be milked for every penny.
Sure, and it’ll be unacceptable when that actually happens. Saying “X is unacceptable because think about what they might do in the future” isn’t really an amazing argument if they’re not doing it now.
Unpopular opinion but I think it’s acceptable as long as its optional especially as multiplayer game where they are hosting servers. Those aren’t cheap and I don’t have the game so I wouldn’t know but if they do release more multiplayer content for free, I think it’s further justification because that’s better than paid content packs. As an example, CoD on PC had a recurring issue of DLC content being useless since too little people would buy them. Titanfall saw this issue as well and it was even worse due to the smaller player base. So with Titanfall 2 they just made it free and added cosmetics microtransactions that were actually reasonably priced.
Maybe this is not the solution for everything but as long as it has no bearing on gameplay what’s the harm? If you’re not one to spend on microtransactions then you only get the benefits. I don’t think a more benign implementation should be criticised just because we fear the potential of it potentially becoming worse.
To each their own, but I think this is a bit extremist. Life isn’t black and white. Free games with mtx can be good or bad, paid games without can be good or bad.
Just not buying solely because it has a shop/battle pass means you miss out on a lot of games where it has zero meaning and you’re not allowing any nuanced discussion to happen on the issue.
There are so many games available without microtransactions that I can happily never play one and not feel I’m missing out. We’re having the nuanced discussion now!
I think there need to be a balance. If it’s a service game, they need money to keep servicing the game. There is a fine line between a reasonable voluntary option to support a game in exchange for some symbolic cosmetic and gross predatory practices.
I don’t think every topic deserves nuance. Every mtx shop is predatory, every successful service game lives off whales. You’d just draw an arbitrary line at how aggressivly they hunt whales, but they need them all the same. Even if you can get everything with ingame currency drops, if people wouldn’t spend enough, the game wouldn’t get new content.
The only fair solution is to scrap mtx entirely and make all service games subscription based. But people aren’t ready for that, this conversation often comes down to “as long as they don’t exploit me, I’ll take my free games”.
I would not call Deep Rock Galactic predatory… They release one! cosmetic pack for each season, and that’s it? There is no whales to catch, because in that case it’s very limited how much you can even spend. Like 10 euro every 4-5 months and that’s it. Is that predatory to you?
I honestly can’t answer you, I don’t know anything about the game besides seeing it everywhere for years. Stuff like: How in your face is advertising? Do season even add anything besides these packs? Are they missable? The only thing I can say for sure: I dislike how they present multiple bundles with varying amounts of DLC on their steam page. Without prior knowledge I’d have to go through everything and check if I’d be missing out on some actual DLC content and I’d assume there are people buying an actually reasonably priced game for over a 100 bucks because they want all DLC assuming it’s real content. Sure, that’s on them not checking, but also kinda on the developer naming it stuff like “Deluxe” or “Master” Edition instead of “All Cosmetics Edition” or something among those lines.
Regardless, even if it is an genuine exception, they add massive content updates and don’t push these packs at all. Do they even make a profit then? Massively successful games like DRG, Terraria or Stardew Valley can do whatever they want - they have funded themselves more or less for life already and probably would still sell anyways. Normal service games need to turn a profit with their updates which still means either having a subscription or predatory mtx.
It’s OK for people to spend as much money as they want supporting a game. If you enjoy the work that a developer does for a live service game, it makes sense to fund their business.
I paid for a couple of the cosmetic packs in DRG for example. They genuinely made a great game, and they released additional content as well. I like that I’m not pressured into a subscription, and I can choose how much extra money I want to throw their way.
Destiny 2 is a bit ridiculous in my opinion. The DLC is very expensive, each pack corresponding to the cost of a full game, and there are several of these packs at least. That being said, some people really like Destiny 2. Who am I to say that their spending is wrong? It’s their hobby, and they’re funding it by supporting the company that makes the content for them.
It’s OK for people to spend as much money as they want supporting [gambling]. If you enjoy the work that a developer does for a [gambling service], it makes sense to fund their business.
Would you feel the same about your paragraph with these changes? Destiny 2 used to have full blown loot boxes after all.
I think it is important to still ralley against predatory mtx mechanics even if they don’t work for you. Other people don’t necessarily have full control over their own spending habits and by allowing these systems we openly allow developers to exploit these people. Luckily we started having laws against gambling mechanics (although Gacha is still a thing), but there are still many other psychological tricks at play for almost all of these shops.
If it were a level playing field I’d be inclined to agree with you, but it isn’t. These companies are hiring specialists in the psychology of creating a sense of need where there is no need. It doesn’t work on everyone for everything but there are people who are susceptible to these techniques and they’re the people funding everything. The issue isn’t people spending their money on what they want, it’s them being put in the situation where they feel compelled to purchase things and encouraged to do so by companies who know full well that these people can’t handle it and will cough up the dough no matter what comes their way.
There’s merit to that, but keep in mind that sometimes the game is bound to a service for the sake of enabling microtransactions to begin with, and if not for that they would have let players to host their own servers. This has happened to most multiplayer games from larger publishers.
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