I lasted a little longer but not much. It really was bad. I reinstalled it after their giant patch that was supposed to fix it and gave it a second chance: the shooting was better but the main issues with everything else were still there.
It was like they asked ChatGPT to create a Saints game.
User Create the plot for a game similar to the first four Saints Row games
ChatGPT Title: “City Unleashed”
Plot: In the sprawling metropolis of Havencross, crime syndicates have taken control, leaving the city in chaos. You play as a street-smart vigilante who rises to power in order to reclaim the city from the clutches of these criminal organizations. As you build your own crew and establish dominance, you’ll face off against rival gangs, corrupt officials, and powerful crime lords.
Starting as a small-time crook with a personal vendetta, you’ll complete daring heists, engage in intense street races, and execute audacious stunts to earn respect and resources. Your actions catch the attention of an underground resistance that seeks to topple the syndicates. They offer you support, guidance, and a chance to reshape Havencross.
The game offers an open-world environment, allowing you to explore the sprawling city, engage in a variety of activities, and make choices that influence the narrative. Customization plays a significant role, not only in terms of your character’s appearance but also in building your gang’s identity, from outfits to vehicles to hideouts.
Throughout the game, you’ll encounter memorable characters, each with their own motivations and backstories. As you forge alliances and rivalries, the balance of power in the city shifts dynamically. The story takes unexpected turns as you uncover the dark secrets behind the syndicates’ rise to power and their connections to influential figures in the city.
With a blend of over-the-top action, humor, and engaging storytelling, “City Unleashed” captures the essence of the first four Saints Row games, delivering a high-octane, open-world experience filled with outrageous missions, explosive combat, and a dynamic environment that reacts to your choices.
I’ll be honest, that is kinda how the new Saints Row was probably pitched in the design docs.
The problem is in the details. They failed to:
Create other games worth mention.
Have memorable characters.
Implement motivating vendettas or any personal motivation.
Make the city feel alive, which invalidates the whole open-world environment (a criticism I’d level against CP2077 too, it feels way too sterile).
Have any meaningful way of influencing your relationship with characters or forces.
Have a story worth mentioning.
In a lot of ways, the pitch document probably describe a good game. Just like ChatGPT does, there. But note how your mind is filling in that all of this would end up in the actual game, and be competently done. And that’s where the actual GenZ Saints Row fell apart, too.
I didn't even bother buying it. The trailers looked so bad and then you'd have to wait for a Steam release. No thanks. When the first gameplay videos dropped it looked like absolute trash and really just rehashed all the repetitive content from the previous games, which was plentifully criticized to be a huge weakpoint of them already, with a lame story, idiotic characters and a boring map on top of it. It was just a rehash of all the bad, but I guess that's all they could pull off.
For me, the big “Nope” was how despite being a modern game and running like arse (and not looking all that well), the streets are mostly empty. I mean at the very least I would assume they could re-implement SR3 one-to-one in more … opulent?
But instead it looks and feels worse than the older games, even in a direct comparison, because everything is dead and empty and still stutters like crazy.
SR2 was the peak of the series for me. I played 3 and 4 but they already felt like they were being constrained by budget even back then. They were mostly copy pasted mini games with far fewer missions.
Yeah there’s always a lot of divided audience feedback. SR2 was too serious for me still, it felt like a low-budget GTA clone and I wasn’t even a GTA fan in the first place.
But SR3 and 4? They were so ridiculously over the top, they parodied the whole genre. A genre I love to see made fun of, so they were perfect for me.
3 struck the perfect balance for me, it was like playing an action movie that didn’t take itself too seriously while still maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. 4 fully jumped the shark for me and was hard to enjoy.
I really shouldn’t. Using discord is dumb. Using discord for a switch emulator, while Nintendos lawyers are waking around with their cocks out is stupid.
If their priority is to make a nintendo emulator, they have to think about keeping their lines of communication secure against corporate legal threats, because those lines of communication are basically what software development is.
Sure, but they also need to be on a platform that people actually use. I agree that there are lots of reasons against Discord, but my point is, they didn’t choose Discord because of a lack of intelligence.
Yep, I’ve known specialists that are extremely good at their job but when you hear them talk about other stuff you sometimes wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.
Have you considered that the person you consider smart is focusing all their brain power on their projects and they don’t have time to set up and maintain a website? That’s what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
While there’s truth in your words, there are alternatives that require little effort. Even a IRC channel would have been better.
Discord is not only a terrible bad application, it’s the equivalent of writing posts on medium. If and when they decide to gatekeep your content, there’s nothing you can do.
IRC is considered unsafe too to a certain degree with pirating folks.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
If you are doing development as a hobby, you just don’t have the time to use a different system, get used to that system, and then critically convince everyone else to go there too. Just look at Lemmy, I want it to be great as well but we have to accept that a few tiny steps more in the day to say usability of a system can be the difference between Twitter and Mastodon. And before ppl are saying “well Twitter was there longer”, sure but that doesn’t mean we cannot see the trend for growth that does or doesn’t exist.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
you completely missed the point here:
the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
discord is a black hole for information:
it sucks information in and deletes it from existence.
the issue that those aren’t around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
That’s still not really the purpose of discord, and I think you have actually missed the point. It’s not an informational archive, it’s a tech support line, and oftentimes one which can be used to improve the FAQ and documentation, which is usually found on GitHub or independently hosted, and is usually light enough in weight that it can just be copy pasted anywhere or even included in software. For much of these kinds of software, creating an incredibly comprehensive and well-organized FAQ isn’t as large of an up-front priority as mashing bugs. Of that use case, what strikes you as better, the app that everyone already uses, or IRC?
Not easily searchable, only solves the problem of the user who is currently being interacted with, and on top of that a forum does everything you mentioned but better because it is indexed in the web, meaning the next person with that problem will probably find the forum post before they contact you. No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them, and if they were, they could save that time by just having a forum that is indexed by search engines. IRC isn’t the best option, but it limits corpo takedowns like this so at least what you have doesn’t randomly get nuked one day. Altogether, moving from forums to discord is a massive downgrade and much information will be lost in the Discord Exodus that will come with time as the company consumes its users for the shareholders.
No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them
Why do you think this is, though? This really hasn’t been my experience, people are usually pretty quick to add shit to the FAQ if it actually comes up ime.
You’re also relying a lot, ironically, on Google, when you advocate for using search engines as a repository for forums. Google is not that good anymore, and most forums don’t come up. For a niche software, do you think the specific forum for that software would actually come up 99% of the time, or would the results just be flooded by a bunch of youtube tutorials and posts to random subreddits and other forums about irrelevant shit that you weren’t looking for? If you were even lucky enough to get results in the first place, that is. Partially this is due to things moving to discord, but partially it’s due to Google having an effective monopoly on search engining.
If you’re just going to like, go to a forum and use the forum’s internal search. One, it probably sucks because they always have these stupid idiot rules like no common words and it has to be in a range of 4-40 characters and no symbols, shit like that, which sucks. But also, you can do the same thing with discord and just navigate to the web version and then just look up what you wanted to find on the chat logs and read an old conversation. They seem functionally pretty similar in that respect.
Moderating a forum to protect against random people spamming you with CSAM attacks is also more time-consuming for a small developer, and it’s also time consuming to redirect people to previous threads when they inevitably come in and post shit that’s already been asked about, which is also going to breed probably a more insular culture than discord, as impossible as that might seem. Again, you’re also waiting like 2 days for a response, and this is especially stupid when you’re dealing with a back and forth, because not everyone is going to put in the effort to present their problems as thoroughly as possible and present you with like an actual bug report or screenshots or anything. They might not even know what to search for or ask about, and then they’re completely fucked. It’s easier to manage discord because of it’s more active nature.
Basically, the problem is this: Forums put more responsibility and onus on the users to adequately present their problems in a more easily parsable format, and better search for solutions to their own problems. It’s not a mystery, then, why people might prefer to use discord, in my mind.
I will say this, if you are a Lemmy user, sure probably.
But I did a simple websearch for “how to set up a freenode server.” The very first 3 things I saw (what fits on the screen) were a page full of syntax, a 13 minute YouTube video, and a page where the first thing that’s written is literally “Internet Relay Chat is a difficult thing to get used to, especially for people who were born into this world of full graphical interfaces and messaging web apps that handle user interaction seamlessly.”
For the average user, creating a channel does not “take seconds” if you need proof, discord. Its popular because it is so easy to use and the numbers back that up
Uhm, freenode already exists, you don’t have to set up another server just to create a channel. There are clients that are embeddable into webpages as well, so joining an existing channel could be as simple as opening a page for a new user.
Otherwise it’s just install a client, select freenode and join the channel.
I challenge you to find a non tech savvy person who can do this In under 10 minutes.
Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber of the tech minded, you have to remember most people wouldn’t be able to even get on this platform because that “little bit of effort” is way too much for them
That’s what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
and thats also the reason why this project is now gone…
also you are pretty much “paying” with all you information and since they started heavily monetizing Discord you will pay even more as they soon will start to sell you conveniences or essential features. Also Tencent you know, which is pretty much like Nestlé, so it should be avoided.
The lack of intelligence is thinking you can build a grey zone project in discord. It’s like saying you want to build a house but don’t want to pour a foundation. Like, good for you, focus on windows and paint, but you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Easy quick and dirty are not acceptable when you are trying to build emulation software based on the products of a very litigious international corporation
I think you just need to know what you are getting into.
It’s a private company, it’s closed to sourced, they capture and monetise your data.
For people who value transparency and privacy, there are better options. This emulator project, should have known better than to use is.
aaalll of that being said, it’s very popular and if you are not concerned by any of the points raised in this who threads, it’s a good place to meet people to chat about Warcraft or whatever your thing is.
Just be aware that any thing your write, effectively belongs to them forever.
I’m pretty sure most of people who mainly use discord as their main social apps probably never touched forum-based internet.
Hosting your own forum is also better as you (the owner of the site) can still retrieve the msgs as long as you still have the access to the host server (so you can back them up in case shutting down, then going to resurfacing later).
Not to mention using discord is already risking yourself because of their shitty policy.
Maybe in my message seems to focus solely on discord for putting the blame… The problem nowadays is that mostly these “devs” share/upload/host their releases in Discord which means you do use Discord’s CDN to host their files. Another common complaint of these practices is that you need to join their server in order to just download relevant files which makes it infuriating if you stumbles across these practices often. For example I joined 8 different discord servers just to download a software/binary/release, why can’t just put the release on something like Mediafire, Google Drive, Megaupload or perhaps sourceforge.
I do understand Discord is communication platform but most of time some people are too lazy to manage stuff so what happen is that everything is hosted in single place as such Discord.
some third party hosts let you sign up anonymously with an anonymous email etc.
Only ever connect to the server host via VPN
Get a domain with anonymous WHOIS protection
Stick it all behind a reverse proxy
Technically Nintendo or whoever could demand your proxy/host to stop doing business with your account, but they won’t have enough personal info to go beyond that and you can just rehost it under new info.
There is always a price (inconvenience) for secure-ness in online world.
There’s 2 option to host a forum,
You can use service like forum hoster or rent a VPS (so you can setup your own server although not self-hosting).
Self-host yourself (this one a bit tricky if you aren’t prepared).
Learn some good basic OpSec habit (eg. Never use same password, Never put your personal detail in your active directory especially on your site source document, use 2FA and so on).
Learn to spot a phising or malicious link and never to randomly click random link in an email (in times when someone tried to social engineering you).
Use reputable service provider if you are not going to self-host yourself.
If you happen to self-host, make sure to check your open ports and secure them. Bots always probing any site in the world!
For some reason if you’re going to run sketchy stuff, never use your real credential. This point may not apply on your region as it depends on your local law.
Hm not really sure this answers what I mean. If you are hosting a site, how do you stop corps demanding your name from the hosting provider and going after you?
Sadly for that matter it is more to the legal area.
For identity they can catch you either from email or the payment info. For email you can make one easily, but for payment search a provider that accept virtual (credit) card, or get something that accept crypto wallet.
Yeah, online exposure can point you sooner or later depending how motivated the party that seek you.
Technically Discord is trying to solve this with their threads feature, but I’ve found either the server owners don’t force it or the users don’t use it. Either way, it sucks.
The threads/forum feature on discord is just awful. Topics get buried and I think the general ethos of discord encourages people to just spam in the chat channels rather than wait in a forum for help.
It’s so goddamn easy to set up a basic forum site for a few bucks a month, and it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of options for file sharing as well.
The Xbox and PSP modding forums were where I used to hang out before Reddit, a well-designed and run forum is so much better than trying to basically make a website out of a chat room.
Still not the point of a live-chat application. The use case is not the same as a forum. You want an archive where everything is well-organized and most questions have already been answered. Discord and other live chat services are more like live tech support, to fill the gap between the raw technical documentation found in GitHub, and the just getting started guide or FAQ, which are usually lightweight enough that they could be posted anywhere. Discord doesn’t exist to be an archive that holds all the knowledge, discord exists so that when you open an app, you can go in, ask a couple questions, and hopefully someone will get to you in a couple minutes, at most, rather than in a couple days.
I mean, cool, they’re finally replacing Geforce Experience, one of the worst pieces of software ever made.
But they’re replacing it with shit that commits all the same crimes. Locally run webserver hosting web interfaces and a website running in a packaged Chrome accesses. Instead of something utterly wild like oh I don’t know, actually building a piece of software not a web page!
Also it still commits the cardinal crime of letting 11y old me do the design and what I thought was “COOOOOL!”, instead of just, you know, looking like an app. In the design language of the OS. Which would be wild, I know.
That is true. I will say, even with all the features dropped, this is a step in the right direction.
It’s a small one overall, but credit where credit is due, this shows promise. Just wish the underlying architecture were better, it’s still based on the packaged chrome thing.
Agreed. They are planning to take away the control panel so we’ll be stuck with this dogshit. Hopefully someone makes something similar to nvidia profile inspector to simulate the old drivers so we remove this new app bullshit.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
There was this guy working on the patch and he was basically the only person in Volition that cared about it, guy got cancer and instead of spending his last days with his family he worked on it until he died. His dying wish was to get this patch out. Soon after they diverted all their resources to that garbage game, it failed and now we’re here.
Both insulting to his memory and for everyone waiting for this patch for damn years. Fuck Volition and fuck Embracer.
Years ago when I played SR2 on PC I needed to download a reverse speed hack (a slow hack) because my processor clock speed was faster than the console the game was designed for. Would that patch have fixed that? If so, very sad indeed.
I mean with From Software in particular I am surprised they do PC ports at all. They clearly loathe the platform, and they seem to refuse to even have a single programmer that knows anything about PCs that isn’t from Wikipedia, nevermind owns one. Their ports are always so laughably bad in all technical aspects, they feel like comedy.
Dark Souls 1 had the stupid 30 fps cap and rendered at 720p and then stretched it. But otherwise it was very stable and bug free, totally playable from beginning to end. Dark Souls 2, Scholar, 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring were all fantastic ports, rock solid 60 fps, all the settings that you could ask for, and ran great. If I was picking on a Japanese dev that did shitty ports, wouldn’t really have picked From.
The engine was apparently optimized for stutters on PC, not the actual game.
Keybinds were incomplete, and you couldn’t even rebind the ones that were doable properly because of the fixed nature of some keys. (An incredibly common problem for so many games)
Lots of auto-combo keys (where one key does a lot of things instead of using all the buttons available), too.
Mouse acceleration completely broken, and they never fixed that. Mods can somewhat rectify it, granted.
The re-auth to the online server makes sense from the way a console handles launching/closing games, but not for a PC. Makes going back out for settings (since at launch a lot could not be changed mid-game) really fun. 😑
The UI makes no use of the keyboard or mouse, and in fact seems to actively hate them.
All of these would be trivial except maybe the stuttering if they had developers that regularly do PC games. They’re just part of basic development or basic UX evaluation.
Apart from your first point, I think this just indicates that they hate m+kb users. There is a reason people say that people that use m+kb in a souls game are masochists!
Bethesda games up to the Xbox 360 era were mostly processor-bound prior to community patches.
Oblivion on the 360 would actually secretly reboot your console during long loading screens to clear the cache when it started running out of RAM due to memory leaks. Bethesda is hilarious.
Let’s not forget that in fallout fucking 76 speed was tied to framerate on launch. An online game. With a beefy compy and graphics set to low, you could look at the ground and absolutely zoom across the wasteland.
Mind you, that error was already patched in fallout 4, so they literally copy pasted an old version of 4 to base 76 off of. Here’s hoping starfield isn’t literally just skyrim with space textures added.
That game was so fucked I actually blocked out my memories of playing it. Now all I remember is going to the office to get fans to get screws to repair my shit because I was trying to upgrade something and my guns broke because weapon degradation is fucking bullshit.
I heard that Bethesda was being told by Microsoft to adapt the Idtech engine that runs Doom and Id games to be moddable, and (if you can believe this) media are reporting that it’s the “least buggy Bethesda game on launch to date” so maybe something did happen. Or they’re lying.
Talking about starfield? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised that they’re being forced to shape up, and the reviews seem pretty good so far. I’m still gonna give it a few months before looking at it seriously though. I tend to wait on all triple A games just because how launches traditionally go (baldurs gate being an exception, girlfriend was too hype to wait).
I thought that was Morrowind on the OG Xbox? Or did they do that on both? Still a hilarious fix, I remember Morrowind taking so long to load and thought it was due to the cheese collection I was building up in Balmora.
SR2 is unplayable without stuff like Gentlemen of the Row on modern machines. Fixes a bunch of baseline bugs on the port in addition to removing the processor-bound bullshit.
I recall a few games where I’ve had to limit the processor speed.
The weirdest one was an old adventure point and click. It was either “The 11th Hour” or “The 7th Guest”. It had a puzzle where you need to beat the CPU in a board game.
At the time it was released, it was possible. On a modern PC, not so much. The more powerful your processor, the more skilled the CPU was in the board game. Made it impossible.
Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.
Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone's dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying... That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations... that would be absolutely ghoulish.
Who died exactly? I ask because I work less than a block From the Volition offices. I’ve tattooed a few employees their, but there was a guy I would see walking around in a sort of Cowboy hat that I think worked there and I havent seen him in what feels like a year or two.
There is 0% chance this has happened by accident. Someone ordered the developers to program for them to appear there, and that’s exactly how they ended up there
And even if it was a technical error such as extra code/functionality they decided to scrap but left in there at some point it was discussed and planned enough to be in there which is just as bad.
Yeah I don’t understand why they don’t just own it. You’re a company trying to maximize profits, and tried money grubbing your way to more. Then you got caught and your customers didn’t like it. Admit it, move on to your next appallingly bad idea. Weak lies are the worst
I’m not defending Ubi here, they absolutely should have ripped this code out. They had to know the outrage that it would generate.
But it might not have been a management decision. It could have been a “20% time” project where a developer designed and implemented a system that they thought management would like, and then it never got ripped back out after it was rejected. Those projects are usually barebones and use existing assets as much as possible, so it wouldn’t even mean that they had to stand up other systems to support it… They could just link to an existing ad from something else.
That would imply they give a shit. Which they don’t. If there’s a chance they can squeeze 1€ extra out of their customers they will go for it, even if it enrages everyone.
Yeah. What kind of idiotic accident would even cause this? That's specifically programmed functions to do exactly what it did. That's honestly a mind blowingly bad excuse to make.
Guess another reason on the pile of shit of why I continue to boycott this trash company.
I don't think they can do much at all, actually. They're not allowed much wiggle room when it comes to being DMCA-compliant. They pretty much have to take every takedown request at face value, because DMCA requests are a legal process, and I imagine that any intervention on YouTube's side could be seen as arbitration. I doubt they could do much to interfere with an impersonator, since even a falsely-submitted DMCA complaint is still a legal request that has to be processed accordingly.
The DMCA needs to be gutted.
Nintendo can do something, though. They're the ones being impersonated, so they can actually take the guy to court.
Platforms actually do get more leeway than is usually thought with DMCA takedown requests. If they believe it to be fraudulent, they have every right to disregard it. That’s a fact they conveniently try to downplay because they want people to think they have no responsibility for their actions.
Yeah, that’s bullshit. You can tell by the fact that they don’t take down videos from big corporations when some nobody trolls with a fraudulent DMCA request. They only do it when it’s the other way around.
If cloud gaming ever becomes the norm, the consumer will have no power left. That’s their end game, to lock us into platforms and extract subscription and when they can’t get more subscribers they will demand higher prices and add more advertising. People who are paying for game pass, are investing in this future for gaming.
MS surprise launched hifi rush with zero marketing, put it on gamepass day 1 then complains it didn’t meets ales expectations and shuts down the studio that made it. Now, 48 hours later, they are saying they need more games like that.
It may not be directly referenced in the article but cloud gaming was absolutely a part of what led to the closure of tango gameworks.
Gamepass isn’t cloud gaming, though. It’s a game subscription, but cloud gaming is only optional and only available for a subset of games. All of the games however can be downloaded and are played locally.
You are right, that there are no games now bound to the cloud right now. But look at Microsoft business model in other areas. It’s all software as a service, web apps in the cloud, that businesses pay a subscription to use. It’s great way to extract value from customers, because it gets harder and harder to move away from these platforms. Your data, save games, your friend list, your ability to play multiplayer and so on, get increasingly locked to one platform, which makes it harder to move. And then Microsoft can just collect rent, they don’t have to innovate or compete on a free market. This trend is sometimes called techno-feudalism.
Sure that’s how it is now. As soon as the technology is mature enough, they will slowly begin to make a push for cloud only games. In that way they have total control. They can’t do it now because the technology is not quite there yet, and people is not ready. But you can see where they are heading. All business software such as Office and other cloud services is already there.
There’s also GeForce Now and they seem to be doing okay but at supposed 25 million registered users, that doesn’t seem like that much all things considered. For comparison, I can’t get the number of registered Steam users but they alone have around 30 million concurrent users on a typical day.
Oh I agree with you, I was just adding onto your point to the person you’re replying to. There’s plenty of options in the cloud gaming space but they’re not doing well enough to impact traditional gaming where you run the game on your own hardware which they were worried about.
I’d argue that xcloud and gamepass are equally disruptive to the industry. In either case you don’t own the games and they are tied to a subscription. Whether the game is running locally or in remote hardware doesn’t change how it impacts development and sales of games.
Cloud based gaming is not going to replace owning hardware unless they can ensure sub 20ms response time for every and I don’t belive that target is feasible but either case is bad for gaming as a whole. Games with 100 million dollar budgets are never going to see a positive ROI on services like gamepass and are reliant on gamers being willing to pay full price at launch.
My point is that Gamepass and similar services will kill AAA games if they become the primary way people access games and that is something that is best avoided. Games need a 6-12 month buffer to hit sales targets before they are considered for subscription services, otherwise the entire business model will fall flat on its face and take gaming with it.
There’s a huge difference between game pass and cloud gaming though. The way things are, cloud gaming isn’t gonna take off for a long time. And game pass games aren’t exclusive to game pass,i very much doubt it would make much financial sense to do that either as things are right now. Game pass and game sales aren’t mutually exclusive. Most people are still more than willing to pay full price for games rather than renting it except in certain situations.
And if you really want it, some steam key resellers probably have some keys left. I really wanted alpha protocol since I played it so much in college, and was able to find a steam key from a reseller after sega pulled it from steam
I hope Nintendo is able to make emulation illegal once and for all and end all this. People really shouldn’t be allowed to run whatever software they want, they should only be allowed to run Microsoft Windows and the fun games they include on the bonus disc
I was using Lenovo’s handheld a few weeks before release and was really impressed by the specs until I turned it on and it was windows and I made an audible laugh. They were saying I had no idea what I was talking about and how windows was the future of handheld gaming. Which made me laugh some more, guess who’s making a SteamOS handheld now?
That is because the job of Game Pass isn’t to make money, it is to funnel customers into subscription services and destroy the idea that people buy games from artists.
Game Pass either succeeds and destroys the gaming industry like spotify did to music or Microsoft will abandon Game Pass.
They’ve already plateaued and basically admitted to it. It’s a large revenue stream that’s not as large as they thought it would be, so now they’re going to coast with it and rely on just being a massive publisher instead.
Renting games and music seems like a bad idea to me, but I am in the minority. Buy a new album once a month for $8, after a year I have 12 albums. Pay that to spotify and I have nothing.
Gamepass is priced more aggressively at $12/mo, but I assume it’s a loss so they can eventually raise prices. Even so, if I buy a new somewhat discounted game for $36 every three months, after a year I have four games. With gamepass, I’m pretty sure I end up with nothing.
But I don’t think humans are known for long term thinking.
It’s happening across the board at every industry.
Rather than try to appeal to a larger audience, they’ve found it’s more profitable to take greater advantage of an ever-shrinking pool of saps.
Mark my words, they legitimately don’t want the business of people with standards or self-respect. They want to cultivate communities where the only participants are Stockholm Syndrome victims and their abusers.
GamePass used to be such a good value, but it’s gotten so overpriced. I’d rather keep the money and spend it on a few games a year I get to keep. Plus, not being available on Linux and/or Steam Deck makes it easier to ignore. Never going back to Windows.
Things like this actually makes me sad because you know who to blame for the games failure yet you also know who will take the blame and who will leave with a golden parachute.
Not entirely true. IRC can have network splits (I believe they were referred to as netsplits if I remember correctly) where one network can drop out. You can notice this when you see like 50+ people leave a channel at the exact same time because the network they were on disconnected, it’s kind of interesting imo lol but also I’m a nerd so maybe that’s why I find it interesting.
I guess if you like matrix thats cool, but I did just do a quick google and it looks like their clients and server backend are all open source (AGPL-3) and self-hostable so I wouldn’t say there’s much to distrust.
Revolt is promising in that it’s trying to be a direct Discord clone, but it’s also being made by one person as a passion project, and it sounds like it’s their first time doing a project of this size. Last time I checked, encryption was not even implemented in it yet.
Matrix is distinctly different from Discord, but it’s certainly more mature and featurefull as well.
Until ten years ago we used TeamSpeak for voice chat, IRC and forum for text. You can host all of them yourself. Today we have the fediverse and matrix. The problem is that kids get caught by the likes of tiktok and discord (because they are easily accessible with no other requirements than a phone or pc) and they can’t get away from them.
theverge.com
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