This one made me wonder if they don’t get telemetrics about how people are playing the game to improve the game (or build a new game) from without doing this. And if that same data would be valuable to data brokers in general or if it’s more valuable as an internal trade secret.
Yes, it would be just for Sony to get it; not meaning to say it isn’t collected at all by the developer. Before this, I would have thought they’d share that with the publisher (this case Sony) anyway.
In my experience with telemetry, it’s100% about understanding how the product is performing and being used, and 0% about monitoring individual users. Telemetry data has little to no value for anyone not directly supporting the product.
I expect media companies to be greedy. What feels absurd is when they act out of blind, unmonetized efforts of control that seem to hurt their bottom line - like forcing employees to commute instead of work from home.
While 177 countries sounds like a lot, it's not where the majority of players are. PSN operates in the top 15 countries by GDP and the top 4 by population.
Of course there's still the question of why they work in so few countries when literally none of their competitors (that I know of) have those limitations.
It’s because it’s a Japanese company. I’m not saying this out of racism but because they’re known for being archaic in how they do certain things. Like game modding and work schedules. Their public transit is top fucking notch though.
I thought you were being racist until you said that thing about public transit, so we’re good 👍
EDIT: I was making a dumb joke, y’all. I thought OP did not need to worry about sounding racist at all so I was trying ricochet off of that. Sorry, pretty clearly did not land right, I apologize.
That wasn’t in response to my racist comment but in response to the archaic comment. They’re as much archaic in procedure and bureaucracy as they are advanced in tech.
I think the mistake was ever thinking that one company is “good” while the other is “bad”. Companies are just different flavors of bad once they grow above a size of, well, once they are companies.
I’ve been to Japan a few times. Only Tokyo is super accurate with time. Go to any other Japanese city and it’s no different from any other city in the world. Late trains. Buses that are 10 mins late or not even showing.
Can we kill this narrative that Japan is hyper efficient with public transportation?
PSN (PlayStation Network) is available in 73 countries.
It was PSNow (PlayStation Now, their game steaming service) that was only in 19 countries. PSNow was merged into PlayStation Plus as the Premium level package, and is in 30 or so countries.
This is accurate. I work at a international company. We will tell a bunch of countries to go fuck themselves since combined, they make like 1% of sales.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m just saying it’s a thing many companies do.
I have knowledge on mobile gaming, they do this too.
It doesn’t pay to manage some shitty off brand Android phone’s compatibility issues when your whole country spends less in a month than a half dozen midwestern moms in an evening on the game.
Honestly, I think Sony is going to be more stubborn than Valve. I saw in another thread where some people were getting approved for their Steam refunds even after passing the 2-hour refund window, so it looks like Valve may already be the first to cave.
Sony's probably going to continue digging their heels in, though.
Holy F, what a smooth brain move. They had an IP with incredible goodwill that would have been printing money forever (think about DLCs and merchandise, maybe even a TV series), and they chose to destroy all that to increase the active PSN account numbers by <1%. Which doesn’t even have a direct financial benefit, just something they can peacock in their quarterly reports, trying to boost the stock price.
Adding all those helldiver’s players into the “Sony account to PlayStation now subscription service” sales funnel is the financial goal here, likely along with selling any data they collect about you to any bidder.
This does make Sony money, but it likely doesn’t make them more than an indie becoming the 7th most successful game this year, but here we are anyway.
I understand that sales funnel logic, but I would still argue its actual financial impact would be marginal. It’s wishful thinking from Sony that just because you got your claws into a PC player by making a PSN account, they will start buying PS stuff. The data monetization is much more direct, but still, not much additional money to be made by a few (tens of / hundred) thousand extra registrations (especially as they had to be aware of refunds happening). These are definitely valid upsides, but I don’t think they are big/certain enough to make this call, and compensate for the negative consequences.
My gut / experience tells me this is mostly about the PSN account numbers, and some execs getting a gazillion dollar bonus if they can push it above certain target by the next report, even if they damage the revenues in the process.
My gut / experience tells me this is mostly about the PSN account numbers, and some execs getting a gazillion dollar bonus if they can push it above certain target by the next report, even if they damage the revenues in the process.
I’m inclined to suspect the same. A move like this does not happen without a project “champion” pushing through internal resistance.
I have seen exactly this kind of shortsighted min-maxing, where an exec will fixate on some metric or goal, and just wreck everything in their path.
Same, although maybe it was targeted more at console players and fans of fps games. I looked it up just now and it looks well made, and also interesting. Finger guns and lots of movement, etc. Something went very wrong to get low numbers on this.
Don’t worry, more people are on it than just Empress. You don’t have to lash out just because you don’t know how to find them. I will save you the trouble of reading my future comments.
RUNE used to be there, but once Denuvo got updated, Empress was the only one.
I did some research and apparently Empress is out too. Apparently they shut off their Internet connection because they started hurting themself. The golden age is over
Which means there’s an incentive for studios to remove it as soon as new sales aren’t bringing enough money for its cost to be worth it.
That’s when you want to pirate (or buy, if you’re into that kind of shit) the game. With the added benefit that it’s unlikely that the studio will come up with more updates or DLC, and if the game is at all moddable it’ll probably have a mature community patch that’ll fix everything the studio was unwilling or unable to patch. (Also, I’m not sure how denuvo cracking works, but I doubt it removes all of that shit, so a game with it properly removed will probably run better than a cracked one, even if the cracked one still ran better than the original infected version.)
HL2 is peak first person shooter. More recent games have added a lot, but after playing through HL2 recent, it's really nice to strip all that extra stuff away.
It’s only awful if you’re achievement hunting and trying to drive the god damn gnome through the level without it flinging off into space and being lost forever
The actual answer is that everyone should play Earth Defence Force (they just announced EDF 6), which I feel was a big inspiration for helldivers 2 bugs.
Oh yeah definitely, Starship troopers is a huge influence to both, I don’t disagree at all, the Starship troopers games seem to be a bit more serious and gritty in comparison to edf though. I’d say the gameplay in helldivers is very EDF also with the huge big swarms and over the top weapons.
I much prefer the extremely deliberate aiming and the heavily physics influenced combat of Helldivers. Just makes it feel a lot deeper than EDF that sort of makes up for that granular detail by instead being extremely arcadey and over the top in its weapons and class abilities.
They play quite differently even though they have some surface similarities, but EDF is indeed also awesome and I wish it was more popular.
I can’t imagine how soul-destroying it must be to put so much time and effort into a big-budget game like this only for it to flop so utterly. Even notoriously bad games sell at least a few thousand copies; being ignored is even worse. I’d say “at least it’s not an indie game,” but then most indie developers would expect their games to have minimal uptake these days.
To be fair there is a lot of speculation that the delisting is actually entirely from steam’s side not sony or arrowhead. Nothing is confirmed of course but the thought is that steam is throwing the kill switch on selling in these countries right now because obviously the publisher hadn’t thought this out and just straight up doesn’t have a plan for it. Valve may be doing this to put extra pressure on the situation drying up sales a little prematurely and more importantly to protect Valve from legal repercussions. Again this is entirely speculation but it makes a lot of sense, Arrowhead and Sony have been pretty quiet.
The cm’s have literally said it’s Sony. Why would there be speculation that it’s steam?
Edit: I misunderstood. I meant that the whole initiative was from Sony. Kroxx was talking about the delisting in specific. I don’t have any info on that.
Yeah I’ve not seen them address the delisting anywhere yet, if you have a link or anything please add it I’m trying to stay as updated as possible on this.
Edit: I also edited the first line, I had written “this” originally and I replaced it with “the delisting” because I can see how it was a little ambiguous before.
Same old shit with everything. A company makes a move that users don’t like. The company just ignores all the flak they are getting online. The uproar calms down and then things continue.
We’re seeing this more and more. Windows with ads, Amazon adding ads to their prime video account holders. Spotify moving lyrics to their premium subscription. The past couple of years are shit and companies continue to do whatever the fuck they want.
Yeah same, bunch of my friends had been playing it for a week or two, but between the in game story, the season passes and the utterly intrusive DRM, I figured I’ll wait for a good sale at least. Well, guess I’ll be saving 100% on this, now!
Half Life 2 still holds up really well, honestly better than a ton of modern first person shooters. The only places it’s lacking from a non-technical aspect is enemy variety. If valve did a remake just updating the graphics and gun play that would be my only knock on it and that says a lot for a 20 year old game.
The physics puzzles, whole still functioning fine, feel extremely goofy today. It’s easy to forget how revolutionary they were. I’m not saying the game shouldn’t have them or anything, but some are just so silly lol.
On enemy variety, I see the critique of games like Zelda: BOTW and even realistic games like Hitman. Something those games have in common is very well-made enemy AI that presents you many ways to defeat them.
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