It is one of the reasons. The major reason is that companies aim for maximum profit with low risk, and not best products.
So for them, 10 meh games that gonna sell is better than 10 risky and maybe exceptional games, because they treat games as a dose to junkies. Thats why you have 200 Call of Duty and 500 Assassins Creed, games.
Deadlines, pulling plugs, moving people to different games all the time to reduce costs are the results of gaming becoming an industry. And guess what, they will continue that, even if more BG3 and Expedition 33 come out to hit them.
Yeah it’s pretty much the same whenever the Money People get involved in anything. It inevitably stops being about making something really cool, or even just making a living from making something, and becomes all about shipping the absolute minimum viable product and then strip-mining as much cash as you can out of it at all costs, and then dumping it when people stop buying it.
And the thing that gets me is that this makes nobody happy. The creators hate it because they’re making trash, consumers hate it because they’re being ripped off, and the Money People aren’t even happy because they never are. They always want more.
My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don’t exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That “don’t you guys have phones?” Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don’t. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on “nobody cares”. Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.
It actually makes sense in Fallout since it’s post-apocalyptic. Yes, the apocalypse happened hundreds of years earlier, but most people still live in squalor while only a privileged few have high tech stuff. Starfield, though? The “apocalypse” took like 50 years to happen and everyone escaped Earth. There’s no excuse for widespread telecommunication to not exist.
I’m having a good time on a laptop with no fancy graphics card and have no desire to buy one.
I also do not look for super high graphical fidelity, play mostly indies instead of AAA, and am like 5 years behind the industry, mostly buying old gems on sale, so my tastes probably enable this strategy as much as anything else.
I’ll be honest, I have never paid attention to GPUs and I don’t understand what your comment is trying to say or (this feels selfish to say) how it applies to me and my comment. Is this intended to mostly be a reply to me, or something to help others reading the thread?
Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.
My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.
AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.
It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.
External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.
If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.
Thank you for explaining! I am not sure why people are reacting badly to my statement, is knowledge of GPUs something every gamer is expected to have and I am violating the social contract by being clueless?
Well at one point to be a computer gamer you basically needed to put together your own desktop PC.
Integrated GPUs basically were only capable of displaying a desktop, not doing anything a game would need, and desktop CPUs didn’t integrate graphics at all, generally.
So computer-building knowledge was a given. If you were a PC gamer, you had a custom computer for the purpose.
As a result, even as integrated GPUs became better and more capable, the general crowd of gamers didn’t trust them, because it was common knowledge they sucked.
It’s a lot like how older people go “They didn’t teach you CURSIVE?” in schools nowadays. Being a gamer and being a PC builder are fully seperatable, now, but they learned PC building when they weren’t and therefore think you should have that, too.
It’s fine, don’t sweat it. You’re not missing out on anything, really, anyway. Especially given the current GPU situation, it’s never been a worse time to be a PC builder or enthusiast.
Oh boy. Thanks for the context, by the way! I did not know that about the history of PC gaming.
I did learn cursive, but I have been playing games on laptops since I was little too and was never told I had to learn PC building. And to be completely honest, although knowledge is good, I am very uninterested in doing that especially since I have an object that serves my needs.
I have the perspective to realize that I have been on the “other side” of the WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE SATISFIED, LEARN MORE AND CHANGE TO BE LIKE US side, although I’m exaggerating because I don’t actually push others to take on my decisions. I don’t spam the uninterested to come to Linux, but I do want people who get their needs adequately served by Windows to jump to Linux anyways because I want to see Windows 11, with even more forced telemetry and shoved-in AI and things just made worse, fail. Even though that would actually be more work for satisfied Windows users.
But I would not downvote a happy Windows user for not wanting to switch, and that kind of behavior is frowned upon, is it just more acceptable to be outwardly disapproving to those who do not know about GPUs and are satisfied with what they have with zero desire to upgrade? I don’t have Sufficient Gamer Cred and am being shown the “not a Real Gamer” door? I think my comment was civil and polite so I really don’t understand the disapproval. If it is just “not a Real Gamer” I’ll let it roll off my back, though I did think the Gaming community on Lemmy was better than that… I would understand the reaction if I rolled up to c/GPUs with “I don’t care about this :)” and got downvoted. Is Gaming secretly kind of also c/GPUs and I just did not know that?
Okay I literally just realized it is probably because I hopped on a thread about GPUs and do not know about the topic being posted about. Whoops. Sorry.
Yeah, it’s pretty okay and all, but the hype made it out to be cooler than it was, in my opinion. I’ve been playing Foundation the last day or two and I find it way more addictive, satisfying, and unique, so far. Maybe I just need to revisit Manor Lords. The trailers made the combat out to be Mount and Blade-esque, so I think that’s what really underwhelmed me. It felt more like Civilization-style “throw a bunch of units at the bad guy” combat.
after you hit the 10-15 hours mark you are just looking around like Travolta, that’s it? yep that’s it… no more content. Potential is there but will the devs deliver it? not so sure. Atm the game is overpriced.
For context, it’s somewhat common here in Latin America to name markets after the owner’s name; doubly so in smaller cities. (The city where this happened has 9k inhabitants)
It’s also common to name supermarkets “Super [something]”, to highlight that it sells general goods instead of just produce.
With that out of the way: seriously? Nintendo going after a mum-and-dad market in a small city in North America??? This only highlights that the current trademark and intellectual property laws across the world are toilet paper - they aren’t there to defend “healthy competition” or crap like that, but to ensure megacorps get their way. Screw this shit and screw Nintendo - might as well rename their company to Ninjigoku/任地獄, bloody hell.
I was hoping for Eskel or Letho to be honest. Ciri is a safe choice but a bit on the boring side. Eskel would have been a lot more multi-layered protagonist and dialogues would have been funnier.
I was praying for Letho even though we all knew it was going to be Ciri (for better or worse, we’ll see).
Leaning into the moral grey of the Witcher world with Letho would have been awesome, he says (in one of the endings to his story) he’ll head out east over the mountains so we could have gotten some all-new environments and it would have been 100% CDPR IP so they could have done whatever they wanted without trampling over lore too much. Plus Letho is just an amazing character with huge protagonist energy. Oh well.
Nothing clever to say except that this is fascinating and it would be cool to see mmorpg-like environments for other studies of virality, social phenomena etc. Anyone know of anything else like this?
Not exactly the same, but Borderlands 3 had a minigame that helped map the gut microbiome.
Developed in conjunction with McGill University, Massively Multiplayer Online Science, and The Microsetta Initiative, Borderlands Science is a puzzle game that benefits the real-world scientific community as you play. Borderlands Science presents you with simple block puzzles based on strands of DNA, and by solving them you’re helping to map and compare the microbes contained therein. Completing these puzzles also earns you in-game currency.
In case you’re curious about the practical applications for the raw data gathered through Borderlands Science, the human gut is linked to numerous diseases and conditions, including diabetes, depression, autism, anxiety, obesity and more. By mapping these microbes, the hope is that scientists will be able to better understand these ecosystems, which may help guide future research into novel treatments and interventions.
There’s only one I can think of, the Faldor Massacre. runescape.wiki/w/Falador_MassacreBasically a bug let players kill anyone they wanted even in safe zones. This meant a lot of people lost a lot of gear. Ironically occurring on the date 06/6/06.
Even DRM-free, all digital purchases are still just a license, legally speaking.
Pragmatically speaking, they can't forcibly take the bits off my hard drive. But it also bears pointing out that these days most games on Steam don't bother enabling Steamworks DRM either.
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