theverge.com

Gigan, do games w Palworld isn’t slowing down, hits 19 million players across Steam and Xbox
@Gigan@lemmy.world avatar

Awesome. Game Freak needed some competition, they’ve been coasting for at least a decade.

Blueberrydreamer,

I mean, it’s more competition for ARK than Pokemon. I doubt Game Freak learns anything from all this unfortunately.

danthehutt,

I heard cassette beasts is providing some direct competition but it wasn’t nearly as successful.

Blueberrydreamer,

Yeah, that one is real competition - at least gameplay wise - and a wonderful example of taking inspiration from Pokemon while still making something their own. It really deserves more attention than it got.

Sheeple,
@Sheeple@lemmy.world avatar

Instead we get plagiarism simulator 9000 because it made for great YouTube clickbait.

Cassette Beasts has so much soul put into it, it’s a fucking crime that it ain’t more popular

thorbot,

Game Freak will learn absolutely nothing from this, except “People like Pokemon, lets crank out one every 6 months instead of yearly and make them even shittier!”

Cethin,

Maybe. Maybe not. Pokémon isn’t successful because it’s good. It’s successful because people want to play Pokémon. If they can have the same experience of capturing and training Pokémon in a different format and name, it may compete with them. Admittedly, PalWorld is missing a lot of the higher level Pokémon things, but I don’t think that matters to the vast majority of players, and hunting for perfect traits may make up for it.

I don’t think it’s a particularly great game, but I also don’t think Pokémon is.

mhague,

I like Pokemon games for the adventure, turn based combat, and polished stable of monsters. Does palworld have those things?

force,

no pal world is not at all a pokémon-like game. the adventure aspect is idk what to call it, the only adventure really is finding new pals for the first time. it’s kind of like ark with some inspirations from BOTW mechanics but you throw some pokemon in there

it does have a good variety of pals but honestly the only thing that feels unique is the appearances/sizes and sometimes the modifiers they have. the actual movesets don’t feel very emphasized

in my opinion the actual pal vs pal combat is pretty lackluster, it’s definitely not the focus of the game (although using slave labour is a focus of the game)

nintendiator,

adventure

uuuuh since G5 the Pokémon plots are rehashed and banalised as heck, and there’s almost never any sensation of valuable risk or conflict to the plot. G6 literally makes the first arc of the plot “join this bunch of loser schoolers and do nothing”.

mhague,

Yeah I would like a better Pokemon game, not an fps survival with monsters. The idea is that people looking for a Pokemon game probably aren’t simply looking for a collectible monster game, they want the things that are associated with Pokemon games.

nintendiator,

Yeah I would like a better Pokemon game,

Don’t we all.

For long I’ve dreamed of the heights Pokémon could reach if the mainline videogame production was handed over from a small indie company to a respectable developer with a better track record such as Camelot or CDPR.

Kiosade,

Camelot can’t write themselves out of a paper bag. The Golden Sun games were good for their time, and had me hyped as a pre-teen, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the dialogue or story was actually good. Seriously, if you took off the portraits while characters were speaking, could you tell just by the way they talk who is who (besides Kraden, cuz that mofo likes to TALK)? Could you describe their personalities based on their dialogue, and not the character art? It’s part of why the third Golden Sun failed: it was just too generic, and they tried to stretch the little personality they could muster across 8 characters, just because the 2nd game had 8 characters, but it left them all feeling like hollow husks for the most part.

I’m not saying the games are bad, but there are definitely much better JRPG devs out there.

CaptainEffort,

I like Pokemon for making me feel connected to my Pokemon, and for exploring the world with them.

Imo Palworld had those and does them even better.

mhague,

Interesting, I thought they were more… disposable? But now that I think about it, in ark, you had your near and dear creatures and then you had the faceless workers.

mnemonicmonkeys,

They are as disposable as you want them to be. I personally try to take good care of my pals

thorbot,

I have the ability to learn the butcher’s knife, but I will never learn or use it. Just awful. But I like that it’s there…

mnemonicmonkeys,

I hope the devs add a way to release the pals withou the butcher knife. My box is starting to fill up and I need space

thorbot,

You can sell them to the pal vendor! I refuse to butcher my pals too

Devccoon,
@Devccoon@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly? I think they should be more disposable. You can do stuff like sell, butcher, overwork or fuse away your Pals (all of which are rather deliberate on the player’s part), but I genuinely think if there was some threat of permadeath or having them stolen by the Syndicate baddies if you get sloppy, it would give the adventure a greater sense of threat/risk. People seek out Nuzlocke rules for a reason, and currently I find the options for dropping your items and Pals on death don’t really make compelling gameplay sense (you just walk back and get them).

Setting/story-wise, Palworld supports that kind of thing so I figure it’s most likely coming as an option eventually. The game is on track for some interesting things, and as half-baked as parts might seem now, it’s already fairly fun. Definitely an addictive formula.

It’s worth waiting to see where they take it if the journey and developing those bonds with the creatures are a big part of the draw for you. I doubt you’ll get compelling turn based combat at any point, though.

kemsat,

Nah, this has nothing to do with Pokemon. The whole survival & building aspect isn’t Pokemon at all, and was never what was missing from Pokemon.

Palworld is more like Ark, or even Minecraft, than it is Pokemon. The only thing that’s Pokemon about it is the blatant ripoff monsters.

idle, do gaming w Microsoft Teams is now part of the Xbox Game Bar so you can stream gameplay to friends - The Verge
@idle@158436977.xyz avatar

??? Who uses Teams to talk to their friends? Teams is for work.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Teams is for work when your employer got a good deal on Microsoft software and didn't give you Slack or literally any other alternative for voice.

NegativeLookBehind,
@NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social avatar

I miss Slack. Fuck Teams, it’s so awful.

thepianistfroggollum,

I’m the opposite. I literally never hear the slack notifications, and half the time my Taskbar icon doesn’t show I have new messages. My volume is at a reasonable level to hear everything else. I’m not the only one at my job who has the issue either.

Megaman_EXE,

Me too. Teams is the worst for finding old conversations. They might as well be gone after a couple days pass.

Not to mention lately teams will sometimes just not update with any notifications lately. So I’ll go an hour with no messages or whatever and then suddenly teams decides to update informing me that I missed a call and a handful of messages.

Signing out and back in usually helps but man it feels like they took Skype and just Jerry rigged it

Tick_Dracy,
@Tick_Dracy@lemm.ee avatar

They’re both shit, mate! It just happens that Teams is cheaper, since it’s included in 0365.

soulsource,
@soulsource@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

At least Slack has a usable user interface… Teams is, well, I’d rather sit on a cactus. Let me phrase it like this: We have Office at work. We also have a Slack subscription, because Teams is just so much worse in comparison…

Tick_Dracy,
@Tick_Dracy@lemm.ee avatar

I don’t know, I had to use Slack because of a specific customer, and I can’t stand the UI of it.

The way it displays the reply’s… the confusing crap of the workspaces (which each one has it’s own account, and they are independent)… the (lack of?) inline images…

I don’t like those two, but I surely hate Slack!

lud,

Teams is included in most Microsoft/Office 365 licenses. And since a lot of businesses use those licenses already for office apps, email, Azure AD, SharePoint and more, it’s an easy decision to make.

Teams is also neat because it’s integrated with SharePoint which makes access control easy for document sharing within a team.

The Microsoft ecosystem is quite good for administration.

The only one I know is close is Google Workspace but then you have the problem with having to use Google office apps which are lacking in functionality. I don’t believe Google Workspace have any AD equivalent features (except on chromebooks maybe).

dQw4w9WgXcQ,

To be fair, teams has been ahead of slack on video call functionality for a few years. Noise suppression, screen sharing and additional functionality all seems to be a bit ahead.

I use both for work. Slack is far superior when it comes to written messages, and I use slack for quick video calls with collegues, just because I don’t feel like booting up Teams, but for scheduled meetings or longer conversations with screen sharing we always use Teams.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

I don't need Slack to do voice calls. I could use something else for it. It's just that the things that Slack is good at, Teams is horrible at, and Teams sucks for calls too. If someone calls me, the pop up that allows me to accept or decline the call should actually be responsive and not crash. When I'm browsing old messages, it should be able to render a simple text history without thinking about it for 30 seconds. When I get a message, the notification should occur every time instead of just when it feels like it. When I lose and regain my VPN connection, it should be able to dynamically reconnect without crashing or hanging on a disconnect message. If you're going to put document integration into Teams, why is there not a tab system for open documents I need to keep open rather than forcing me to use the history on the back button or otherwise reload the document by clicking through to teams->team name->files?

dQw4w9WgXcQ,

I’ll be honest - it has never been an option for me or my workplace to use teams for anything but video calls for us developers. We have bitbucket for code, slack for dm, confluence for documentation, jira for tasks, email for async communication and Teams for video calls. Each one are great at what we use them for and kinda sucks as soon as we try to use it for something else.

idle,
@idle@158436977.xyz avatar

I guess I don’t know what I’m missing. It’s been totally fine fory work.

Blaiz0r,

Teams’ work makes’ dreamsys workses

Moonrise2473, (edited )

There’s Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is for consumers and is the one preinstalled in Windows 11

Then there’s Microsoft Teams. It’s for business. Is completely incompatible with the other Microsoft Teams and is a separate app.

The icon is also “different”. One has the Microsoft teams logo in white on a purple background, the other has the Microsoft teams logo in purple on a white background (forgot which and which)

I really don’t understand why they don’t use the Skype branding for the consumer version. They forgot how many billions they paid for that?

woelkchen, (edited )
@woelkchen@kbin.social avatar

I really don’t understand why they don’t use the Skype branding for the consumer version. They forgot how many billions they paid for that?

That happened in a past quarter. Money spent in past quarters doesn't matter. The next fiscal quarter is what matters.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

They've totally ruined any brand power that Skype once had by now, so in this case, I get it.

fred,

The icon is also “different”. One has the Microsoft teams logo in white on a purple background, the other has the Microsoft teams logo in purple on a white background (forgot which and which)

They do the same thing with PowerBI. THe cloud version is one icon, the PowerBI for Reports Server (aka locally hosted) is for the on-prem version. Pretty annoying.

I work with Teams (Business version) daily. Have never even seen the other one.

dormedas, do games w Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow

Well, that’s tariffs for you. Completely expected, though a ~10% bump on the PS5 doesn’t adjust for all the tariff increase IIRC.

Hubi,
@Hubi@feddit.org avatar

Pretty sure this is due to the dollar weakening by 10%.

mesamunefire,

Both? Probably both.

Rhaedas,
@Rhaedas@fedia.io avatar

Positive feedback from Trump trying to fix an economy he is beyond understanding.

Taldan,

That’s not a particularly realistic explanation

The USD index has weakened by 10% as a whole, but not relative to the JPY. It has held roughly steady against the yen for the past couple years, before which the yen had weakened significantly. USD to JPY is extremely high right now, compared to where it has been over the past 15 years

dormedas,

Pretty sure the dollar weakened by 10% over it being harder to trade with the US.

flandish,

*capitalism for you.

the tariffs are part of the overall system which is designed to exploit folks a few rich owners can profit.

ColeSloth,

Then why did Sony also increase pricing in several other countries?

Postreader2814, do games w Activision/Blizzard QA workers form the largest US video game union yet

Holy shit. Never thought I’d see the day. When I was working QA they would lay us off after the end of every project. It sucked. We’d be off work for months at a time. No benefits, no healthcare, no OT pay, long hours, bullshit 1099 contracts. And if you were on a shit title, sorry homie. Enjoy Barbie’s Island adventure.

duffman,

QA could use some unionizing across the software/game industry imo.

It’s amazing how buggy websites of billion dollar companies are. They either don’t have a QA team or don’t prioritize any of the bugs they file. If I were still in that field I’d probably team up with some litigious ADA lawyers.

BReel,

I’m super happy to see this. Just a few years ago, I was working as QA in a studio adjacent to this group. (We had our own QA, but worked alongside the activision group) and god they needed to do this.

So happy to see them fighting back. I hope the rest of the employees who don’t get fucked QUITE as hard as QA join too.

v4ld1z,

I applied for a job as a QA at Nintendo and barely was not taken. Hearing about all of the bad experiences people have had working as QAs, maybe it’s for the better lol

Postreader2814,

Nintendo is infamous for being horrible. You dodged a bullet.

mesamunefire, do games w Microsoft is raising prices on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games worldwide

It's strange really. You can buy 4 extremely good indie games for the price of one game. And that's at a 20 each.

And with steam sales and sharing...valve is fun.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Trying to raise the “standard” price to $80 will have very nice ripple effects of more pricing diversity, where each game will really consider what it’s actually worth, which we haven’t had for a long time. Even now we’re getting first-party Microsoft titles releasing at $20, $30, and $50.

UnderpantsWeevil,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

A lot of games priced at $70 right now are having a rough go of it, so charging more on top of that isn’t going to help, but there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50. If your game isn’t as hot of a commodity as Mario Kart, you’re probably going to try to lure people in with a lower price.

UnderpantsWeevil,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.

Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.

That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.

Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.

Yermaw,

Steam doesn’t need to. It’s got the steam sale and a hundred million people to share memes of “sale so good spent all my money no time to play all the games I bought in such massive sale”

mesamunefire,

You don't need to promote if everyone else does it for you lol.

Korhaka,

How much is Factorio worth though, everything?

ArmoredThirteen,

The amount of time I’ve put in it could have cost me $200 and it would still be one of the best $/hr games I have

Korhaka,

I bought it long before the steam release, back when multiplayer was in experimental. So glad that there are 1000s of hours that were never tracked so I don’t need to see those.

lagoon8622,

If they charged according to value no one on Earth could afford to buy it

samus12345,

I think all it will do is raise the ceiling of what publishers are willing to price games at. If they think they can get away with it, they’ll charge $80 instead of $70, with the rest being $70 and less just like it already is now.

arakhis_,
@arakhis_@feddit.org avatar

you dont own those games brotherman

TheGreenWizard,

Not ALL steam games have DRM. Yes, you should buy from GOG whenever you can, but if you use Linux like me, GOG doesn’t give a shit. It can be hard to decide, support DRM free games and proper ownership with GOG, or expanding compatibility with Linux and improve it in general. If its cheaper on steam cause of a sale or something, I’ll buy on steam, then years later like with DOOM 2016 for example, I’ll buy it when it hits like 4 bucks on gog. That way, I have acces to an offline installer, and I show support and interest to valve for investing in proton.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Another option is to buy through Heroic Games Launcher. Heroic gets a cut, and GOG sees what they’d have to do to earn your entire dollar.

TheGreenWizard,

Completely forgot about that, I do really like the Heroic Launcher.

cyberpunk007,

What? You can buy gog games through heroic?

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, it just launches a web browser in the client, but behind the scenes, it’s using a referral code in partnership with GOG to make sure they get a cut. So you can support DRM-free and Linux gaming support at the same time.

cyberpunk007,

Oh shit I had no idea. If I didn’t buy so many on my phone I’d be doing this. Next time I’m buying gog on my deck, it’s through heroic.

arakhis_,
@arakhis_@feddit.org avatar

thanks for spreading the word

looks like the solution i needed for all the smaller more useless launchers. wich it included connectability to ea/ubi/battleNet’s launchers too

Xbox for example seems more solid to me as a gamerscore addict for example. Steam obviously the main standard you wouldnt want to compress

mesamunefire,

Your not wrong. If it weren't for steam being absolutely stellar than I wouldn't be buying games from them. I would try to go through gog. But with their work on proton alone I personally give them a pass.

cyberpunk007,

I’d almost argue the same with modern consoles with all the crappy digital bullshit and planned obsolescence

But_my_mom_says_im_cool, (edited )

To run the games i wanna play would require a pc worth 3 ps5s

Edit: people here don’t like facts, but where I live a pc that matches a ps5 is around $1500+ it you’re lucky. Yes your pc is better than my ps5 in the same way that your Ferrari is better than my Honda. But I like Hondas.

Korhaka,

You can play other games, there is so much to choose from just drop the expensive ones.

But_my_mom_says_im_cool,

Again no, that’s not my taste. I’m just saying steam doesn’t work for most people. The convenience of a console alone is always gonna keep me. To know i can buy a game 5 years after the console is released and it’ll run. PC gaming is superior, but it costs way more and takes way more work. Im it’s not convenient for casual people like me, especially since I want to sit on my couch with a controller and not have to interact with a computer

Fiivemacs,

*laugh sitting on the couch playing PC games off steam using a tv to display and a wireless controller

What are you even talking about …enjoy paying more for less, and paying monthly to play games while also being locked to whatever terms they decide all willy nilly.

samus12345,

If you can afford the cost of console game prices, more power to you. They’re pricing me out and I know I’ll have no choice but to switch to PC in the future if I want to be able to keep playing games.

Buelldozer,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Steam doesn’t work for most people? You sure about that? It has 132 Million active users, that’s nearly double the number of PS 5s that have been sold!

But_my_mom_says_im_cool,

Very odd comparison, you need to buy a ps5 to be a ps5 user, you don’t need to buy anything to be a steam user, you just need to sign up and you’re considered a user.

Buelldozer,
@Buelldozer@lemmy.today avatar

Very odd comparison…

Not really. There are more people using Steam than own a PS5 or Xbox X. So in what reality does Steam “not work for most people”?

you just need to sign up and you’re considered a user.

You’ll note that I used Steam’s ACTIVE user statistic. That’s not people who just “signed up”, those are people playing games on Steam.

Steam works just fine for most people.

cyberpunk007,

You can also tweak the graphics settings and get a budget PC.

But_my_mom_says_im_cool,

Again, no. Why not just get a ps2? I want current gen games and I know that for this to be comparative on pc it costs nearly triple

cyberpunk007,

I’m playing current Gen games on my steam deck and my 2019 PC build…

CTDummy, (edited ) do gaming w We played Valve’s secret new shooter: Deadlock

And I’m not under NDA. I have signed no contracts, made no verbal agreements; I haven’t even clicked through a EULA. This message does pop up when I launch Deadlock, but I didn’t click OK; instead, I hit the Escape key and watched it disappear.

I’m not a lawyer but I sure hope the writer of this checked with a lawyer before posting because that does not sound right.

Edit: Thank you Vodulas for pointing out this update appended to the article.

Update, August 12th: Turns out Valve was not fine with me trying Deadlock with friends; I’ve been banned from matchmaking! Oh well. Please feel free to make fun of me in the comments!

GammaGames,

Lawyers hate this one simple trick

Kolanaki,
!deleted6508 avatar

Usually the first line in these agreements is “by using this software you agree…” And not “by pressing okay you agree…”

Though I also am not sure how that itself would hold up in court.

CTDummy,

I’ll have to see if I’ve got a copy of an NDA I signed for play testing but that’s what I would have thought. It would be provisional on your participation not on an agreement like old school EULAs. As someone else pointed out it seems to be in closed beta or some form of early access, so maybe Valve won’t care and it won’t come back on them.

Kolanaki,
!deleted6508 avatar

At best they ignore it. At worst, they never invite the user to test anything again. I doubt they’d issue an account ban for that. Not even sure if they can straight up ban you from the platform anyway and lock you out of your games entirely; pretty sure the bans are limited to VAC secured servers for online play and the array of community features like posting on the forums.

Nilz,

Didn’t we reach a point where EULAs are non-enforcable? Or is that just in the EU? But regardless, Valve can just ban you and good luck doing anything about it.

HKayn,
@HKayn@dormi.zone avatar

Certain clauses may be unenforceable, but not the entire EULA.

powerofm,

Looks like anyone who has access can invite their steam friends, so I guess it’s like closed beta? Seems weird to have something soft-launch with zero announcements. The design also looks very rudimentary. Im

CTDummy,

I’m-

RIP. Taken out by Valve legal team already, everyone bail.

Virkkunen,
@Virkkunen@fedia.io avatar

It's a closed alpha test claiming everything is placeholder content and could/will change while they flesh out the design, hence why they don't want you to share anything.

Virkkunen,
@Virkkunen@fedia.io avatar

There is no NDA to sign or anything though, only this pop up warning. Valve can't sue you for sharing details of the game but they absolutely can remove you from the play testing and/or ban you from ever playing it again for this.

Vodulas,

Which they did. There is an update at the end of the article. Just a thoughtless move by that author

callouscomic, do games w Sony calls Tencent game ‘slavish clone’ of Horizon in new lawsuit
A7thStone,

Wow! I didn’t realize Sony invented sweeping vistas and giant creatures.

derin,
@derin@lemmy.beru.co avatar

I think it’s because of the colors used, visual theme, mecha nature of the enemies, and character design of the protagonists - too many direct similarities to argue it’s just inspiration.

callouscomic,

I am a huge fan of the original. It did not take long for the trailer to seem like a Horizon game, and then it was clear it was a watered down ripoff. Agreed the similarities are way too obvious.

In the trailer there’s clearly some new things and different creatures Horizon doesn’t have, but the stylistic nature of it all is so damn similar.

samus12345,
@samus12345@sh.itjust.works avatar

They might have been able to get away with it if they didn’t use giant mechanical creatures. That’s pretty distinct.

Pyr_Pressure,
@Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca avatar

Eh, it’s unique but I don’t think that should give Sony the right to use the exclusively (looking at you Nintendo and Pokemon)

You could have the exact same game but with fleshy dinosaurs and all of a sudden it’s not a problem? And then a third company can come out with another copy with fleshy dinosaurs and there’s no issue because fleshy dinosaurs aren’t unique.

SkunkWorkz,

It’s not that they used animal mechs. It’s that the style of the mechs are very close to that of Horizon. Sony has copyright on the design, not on the idea.

Psythik,

deleted_by_moderator

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  • prole,

    To be fair, there have been a few great Chinese AAA games lately. And the Chinese are far from the only ones who steal IP

    criss_cross,

    Ooh yeah that’s a bit much.

    Games are gonna copy major mechanics. Look at all the BOTW clones that came out after Breath of the Wild was successful. But you have to put a liiiittle effort into mixing up the art style and color palette.

    samus12345,
    @samus12345@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Surprised they didn’t call it Light of Noziroh.

    ampersandrew, do games w Marvel Snap is banned, just like TikTok
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    I’ll add, “my government might get pissed off at one of the companies involved” to my list of reasons why always-online games are a terrible idea.

    Jambalaya,

    Why wouldn’t a multiplayer-focused game be always online?

    AkatsukiLevi,
    @AkatsukiLevi@lemmy.world avatar

    Self-hostable servers, this way if their datacenters go down, game is still playable

    ampersandrew,
    @ampersandrew@lemmy.world avatar

    Another commenter already gave you the answer, but it truly sucks that we’ve gotten so used to this that you can’t imagine an alternative.

    catloaf,

    LAN play

    ech,

    Or “the company might get pissy with your government for any reason”. No reason to let them off the hook, either.

    KickyMcAssington, do games w Saints Row developer Volition permanently shuts down

    This game had all kinda of problems, but problem #1 was releasing on epic games with 0 hype. At least with a wider release they could have secured a decent launch.

    Rose,

    It wasn’t published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic’s offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.

    Carighan,
    @Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

    Yeah since they explicitly say performance met mangement expectations, I suspect they knew ahead of time that it’s going to bomb, so they took Epic’s money and thereby guaranteed some monetary return at least.

    It’s a shame, because while I loved SR3 (and enjoyed SR4 and even GOOH albeit I could not stand playing as Johnny), Agents of Mayhem and now the new Saints Row showed that not only is the humor outdated by modern standards and they didn’t know how to modernize it, they also couldn’t even properly recreate the actual humor the way it was.

    Call_Me_Maple,
    @Call_Me_Maple@lemmy.world avatar

    The issue with SR Reboot is that they did try to modernize the humor, they went and dove head first to new style of humor and it clearly didn’t work for them.

    ImpossibleRubiksCube,

    Never tell a joke, if you don’t think it’s funny.

    Call_Me_Maple,
    @Call_Me_Maple@lemmy.world avatar

    Wise words

    Blackmist,

    Epic was the least of the problems here.

    SR2022 is free on PS+ next month and all the advice I’ve seen says “save your bandwidth and time”.

    Raise a glass to a fallen comrade, and maybe play Red Faction Guerrilla again, but the Volition of old was gone a long time ago.

    onlooker, do gaming w Microsoft says it needs games like Hi-Fi Rush the day after killing its studio
    @onlooker@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’m frankly astounded by the sheer ineptitude on display here. I don’t know what’s happening at Microsoft, but whatever it is, it’s insanity. How tone deaf can you be? And this is only days after the gamepad fiasco.

    BorgDrone,

    Simple: It’s GamePass.

    If you sell individual games, you have basically two ways of making more money: make more games or make better games so more people buy them.

    The economies for a subscription service are completely different. People don’t subscribe to GamePass for a specific game, they subscribe for the entire collection. More games or better games don’t really drive up the number of subscribers. The only way to make more money is to drive down costs. You don’t make expensive, awesome games. Instead you drip-feed a steady stream of low-budget titles. You just have to make sure that the value of access to the entire collection is just about worth the subscription price.

    Microsoft doesn’t care about games, they care about making money. They didn’t get into gaming because of a love for games, they realized it’s a market they didn’t dominate yet.

    They lured people into GamePass with day-1 drops of AAA titles and now that the subscribers are there it’s time to squeeze as much money out of the service as possible.

    And it’s not just GamePass. It’s all subscription services. Netflix is a good example: quality has been going down there for years.

    The only real exception seems to be music streaming, but that’s mainly because there are so many artists and practically no exclusivity. In other words: there is healthy competition in the music streaming business.

    onlooker,
    @onlooker@lemmy.ml avatar

    Very nicely explained, I find myself in agreement with you. This makes a lot of sense and would explain their current behaviour. So, with this in mind, if I look at Microsoft’s statement from the article, it now reads slightly differently. Before, it was just their statement verbatim: “we need games like Hi-Fi rush”, but now it’s “we need games like Hi-Fi Rush, but a hell of a lot cheaper”. All because of GamePass. Dude, I am so sick of subscription services.

    Katana314,

    This is an excellent explanation of why the layoffs were a terrible idea.

    I wouldn’t have volunteered $30-$40 for Hi-Fi Rush on release because of my low budget for new singleplayer games - but I did play it through Game Pass, and knowing how good it is now I would’ve paid more. Similarly, MS has put out many “mixed” games that are perfect for certain types of people but not many others. Those are the things that keep people on Game Pass. Nobody needs to be paying $100 a year to keep playing the few familiar live service games they know.

    The “unsubscribe” button is really easy to reach the month Game Pass stops putting out anything new and interesting, and that’s coming soon now that they have no one ready to put out these surprise hits.

    skozzii,

    The gamepass numbers looks way better than they actually are. There is that loophole where you can buy Xbox gold and convert to gamepass for a really small amount compared to what gamepass actually charges. A ton of people like myself got that deal, because it was like $100 for 3 years of gamepass. I will never renew or do gamepass again, as it’s just not worth it for me. I imagine there a ton of people like myself on the discounted converted plans with no plans of renewal, especially at full price.

    They have set themselves up to lose a ton of users, and fail, and they are unaware.

    Cort,

    No, they’re aware. They’re just hoping the shareholders aren’t.

    MeaanBeaan,

    And music streaming is only as good as it is because artists are getting completely shafted at every turn by both the streaming services and the record labels.

    Agent_Karyo, do games w Here are the patents Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Palworld over
    @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

    From the translation of the claims, they appear to describe Pokémon-style activities, with ‘191 focused on the act of throwing a ball at characters in a field, ‘117 tied to aiming, and ‘390 on riding characters.

    If this is indeed the case, the lawsuit is clearly illegitimate (in the real sense, can’t speak for legal nuances). Not surprising.

    simple,

    That’s not exactly it. I read the description of '191 and it seems to be more like “throwing a ball to capture a character and place it in the player’s possession or throwing it to release a captured character”. You can see the patent drawings also depecting that, so it’s basically a patent of the Pokeball.

    Not a lawyer so I have no idea how it’ll go in court but it does sound like Palworld infringes on this. It’s kinda funny that they could’ve avoided this by being a bit more legally distinct, like how TemTem throws cards instead of balls.

    Agent_Karyo, (edited )
    @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

    Interesting. Yes, that is a bit more specific.

    I personally do not support game design patents because that’s not how gaming works (and people who file such game design patents know this).

    What are the other two patents like if you don’t mind me asking? Aiming in particular seems openly malicious (as do mounts to be honest).

    simple,

    The second one is an older application of the first patent (pokeball again). The third one is literally just being able to mount an object or creature with some caveats like a flying one having to come down and carry you up, that one is ridiculous and a lot of games do something similar all the time.

    Agent_Karyo,
    @Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

    Cheers!

    LordGimp,

    Skyrim did it first with dragons. Honestly I bought palworld specifically to spite shitendo and ended up pleasantly surprised by a very playable game. Shitendo is just mad that someone else did it better on a shoestring budget

    Cocodapuf,

    I’m pretty sure there were flying mounts even before Skyrim. Hell, go all the way back to joust.

    Walican132,

    Didn’t you know gaming started with Skyrim. 🤦

    BakedCatboy,

    It would be funny if a legal defense would have been using an n-sided 3d polygon that definitely isn’t a sphere. Is a tetrahedron legally distinct enough? How about a truncated isocohedron? Seems silly for the shape to matter.

    brlemworld,

    The patents were filed after Palworld was released

    smeg,

    The one thing about patent law I know is that you can’t patent something that already exists in the wild (“prior art”), so surely that can’t be the case, and if it is then it’s open-and-shut, right?

    TheRealCharlesEames, (edited ) do games w Apex Legends is taking away its support for the Steam Deck and Linux
    @TheRealCharlesEames@lemm.ee avatar

    Make fun of Apex all you want, it was the best performing game of its kind on the Deck and kept me from selling my Deck sooner. Now, I’m even a Linux convert because of how well games like Apex worked away from their Windows origins. Seeing a large game like this be killed off on Linux is awful. I’m not sure where the blame lies (with EA, right?) but it needs to be fixed.

    tal,
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    I mean, the problem is kind of fundamental. They have a competitive multiplayer game. Many competitive multiplayer games are vulnerable to cheating if you can manipulate the client software; some software just can’t really be hardened and still deal with latency and such reasonably. Consoles are reasonably well locked down. PCs are not, and trying to clamp down on them at all is a pain – there are lots of holes to modify the software. Linux is specifically made to be open and thus modifiable. You’re never going to get major Linux distros committing to a closed system.

    Frankly, my answer has been “Consoles are really the right answer for competitive multiplayer, not PCs.” It’s not just the cheating issue, but that you also want a level playing field, and PCs fundamentally are not that. Someone can, to at least some degree, pay to win with higher framerates or resolution or a more-responsive system on a PC.

    My guess is that the most-realistic way to do do games like this on the PC is to introduce some kind of trusted hardware sufficient to handle all the critical data in a game, like a PCI card or something, and then stick critical portions of the game on that trusted hardware. But that infrastructure doesn’t exist today, and it’s still trying to make an open system imperfectly act like a closed one.

    I think that the real answer here is to use consoles for that, because they already are what game developers are after – a locked-down, non-expandable system. In the specific context of competitive multiplayer games, that’s desirable. I don’t like it for most other things, but consoles are well-suited to that.

    My own personal guess is the even longer run answer is going to be a slow shift away from multiplayer games.

    Inexpensive, low-latency, long-range data connectivity started to give multiplayer games a boost around 2000-ish. Suddenly, it was possible to play a lot of games against people remotely. And there are neat things you can do with multiplayer games. Humans are a sophisticated, “smarter game AI”. They have their own problems, like sometimes doing things that aren’t fun for other players – like cheating – but if you can rely on other players, you don’t have to write a lot of complicated game AI.

    The problem is that it also comes with a lot of drawbacks. You can’t pause most multiplayer games, and even when you do, it’s disruptive. If you’re, say, raising a kid who can get themselves into trouble, not being able to simply stand up and walk away from the keyboard is kinda limiting. You cannot play a multiplayer game without data connectivity. At some point, the game isn’t going to be playable any more, as the player base falls off and central servers go away. You have to deal with other people exploiting the game in various ways that aren’t fun for other players. That could be a game’s meta evolving to use strategies that aren’t very much fun to counter, or cheating, or people just abusing other people. Yeah, you can try to structure a game to discourage that, but we’ve been working on that for many years and griefing and such is still a thing.

    Writing game AI is hard and expensive, but I think that in the long run, what we’re going to do is to see game AI take up a lot of the slack. I think that we’re going to to see advances in generic game AI engines, the sort of way we do graphics or sound engines, where one company makes a game AI software package that is reused in many, many games and only slightly tweaked by the game developers.

    Multiplayer games are always going to be around, short of us hitting human-level AI. But I think that the trend will be towards single-player games over time, just because of those technical limitations I mentioned. I think that where multiplayer happens, it’ll be more-frequently with people that someone knows – someone’s friends or spouse or such – and where someone specifically wants to interact with that other person, and where the human isn’t just a faceless random person filling in for a smart piece of game AI that doesn’t exist. That’d also hopefully solve the cheating problem.

    umami_wasbi,

    Ain’t the modern hardware already got the trusted hardware, namely TEE?

    Katana314,

    Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.

    Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.

    acosmichippo,
    @acosmichippo@lemmy.world avatar

    I was with you up until the shift away from multiplayer part. I do not see that happening at all, and I don’t even like multiplayer games myself. There’s no denying that more multiplayer has been the trend for the last 30 years, spanning multiple (people) generations, and I don’t see AI changing that.

    rdri,

    Developers have full control over servers in most cases. A viable server side anti cheat should be a thing. For every case of “client sending false data to server” we can come up with a solution to verify that to some degree. Finally, it should help a lot to rely on player generated reports and utilize replay recording on server.

    But no, developers will continue to rely on 3rd party solutions (made by people who never developed a game), even infect their co-op-only games with it, and complain “uh oh we can’t handle Linux cheaters”.

    RiQuY,

    The problem are kernel-anticheats, and EA of course.

    cmhe,

    The problem is EAs business model for this game. It is free to pay, so EA need to extract money otherwise. They introduce some gamified resource collection and crafting with exponentially rising costs, etc. And hope that gamers circumvent that by buying stuff with real money. Now players don’t all want or can’t do that, and look for alternative solutions.

    So EAs business model drives people to cheat. To cheat them primarily and other players secondarily.

    And because of their business model, they cannot solve the cheating between players by giving them dedicated servers or just let them P2P match, because they would loose control over them and their ability to extract more money.

    geneva_convenience, do games w Nvidia Announces RTX 50's Graphic Card Blackwell Series: RTX 5090 ($1999), RTX 5080 ($999), RTX 5070 Ti ($749), RTX 5070 ($549)
    @geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml avatar

    By rendering only 25% of the frames we made DLSS4 100% faster than DLSS3. Which only renders 50% of the frames! - NVIDIA unironically

    ZeroHora,
    @ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

    You living in the past, rendering 100% of the frames is called Brute Force Rendering, that’s for losers.

    With only 2k trump coins our new graphic card can run Cyberpunk 2077, a game from 4 years ago, at 30 fps with RTX ON but you see with DLSS and all the other crap magic we can run at 280 FPS!!! Everything is blurry and ugly as fuck but look at the numbers!!!

    nondescripthandle, do gaming w Twitch banned Dr Disrespect after viewing messages sent to a minor, say former employees

    Shocking the guy who was ‘playing’ a dumass ragelord ‘character’ turned out to be a POS in real life.

    candyman337,

    It’s important to be said that you have to be very careful when playing a satire character, because if you’re not you will just become the satire character. Larry the Cable Guy is not even from the south. If you’re doing something ironically or you like something ironically you have to make sure that it’s something that you’re okay with doing unironically or that you really take care to separate yourself from that thing in certain ways otherwise you will start to believe, like, and/or do those things unironically

    zero_spelled_with_an_ecks,

    As Kurt Vonnegut put it in Mother Night: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

    NotMyOldRedditName,

    Fake it till you make it.

    Or in this case, fake it you’ll become it.

    essteeyou, (edited )

    Allegedly.

    Edit 1: Downvotes for not jumping to a conclusion with no actual proof. Okey dokey.

    Edit 2: I hadn’t seen his post on Twitter that was made around the same time as my comment.

    Wilmo,

    Actual proof of what? That Dr. Disrespect sent private messages to a minor? I guess I would take him at his own word since he tweeted about it admitting it hours ago.

    x.com/DrDisrespect/status/1805662419261460986

    essteeyou,

    I hadn’t seen the post on Twitter, I don’t use Twitter. Looks like he posted that about an hour before I commented, so it’s not like you’d expect everyone in the world to have seen it.

    Having read it I’ve obviously got new information and can update my opinion accordingly.

    To be clear, though, he hadn’t made this statement until today, and so everyone until now was acting based on hearsay, not proof.

    Were there twitch whisper messages with an individual minor back in 2017? The answer is yes. Were there real intentions behind these messages, the answer is absolutely not. These were casual, mutual conversations that sometimes leaned too much in the direction of being inappropriate, but nothing more.

    Disgusting.

    rozodru,
    @rozodru@lemmy.ca avatar

    what? he said it himself. he admitted, today, in his OWN words he had inappropriate chats with a minor. What more proof do you need? Like if someone came up to you and said “you know essteeyou, I did this” you’d be like “well you allegedly did it”. cope some more bro, cope some more.

    essteeyou,

    I just hadn’t seen the post yet. I’m not omniscient.

    DoucheBagMcSwag,

    He admitted it

    essteeyou,

    Thanks, I saw after I posted.

    rimjob_rainer, (edited ) do games w Discord Shuts Down Servers for Switch Emulators Suyu & Sudachi; Disables Lead Developers Account As Well

    Discord is the antithesis to free web. Stop using it. I won’t join any community using discord.

    Oh yeah, and fuck Nintendo

    Muffi,

    Yea, I immediately stopped using it after the CEO’s horrifying speech at the “Protecting Children Online” hearing.

    Karyoplasma,

    I started using Discord because Skype was pissing me off. Now, Discord starts to piss me off with their bullshit. I’m just too tired to move to yet another platform that will start sucking once it’s grown bigger. I hate this “social media” focus on every little fucking thing. This stupid “we are building a community” garbage should die.

    Maybe it’s time for me to burn everything down and go live in the woods. I don’t particularly resonate with people anyway.

    Wiz,

    You’ve touched on the cycle of enshittification. Step 1, everything is free and wonderful. Step 2: milk those customers for money.

    The solution is to favor and support services which take capitalism out of the equation. It might cost a little bit, but I think a few small donations can go a long way.

    morphballganon,

    Could you (or someone) elaborate on that first point there?

    dubyakay,

    It’s a closed ecosystem. What else is there to say?Compare Contrast with IRC, Matrix or XMPP.

    morphballganon,

    So, it’s the lack of admin rights? Inability to decide your own sitewide TOS, lack of privacy from Discord admins, possibility of getting shut down, that’s what they meant?

    (I’m not familiar with those other platforms)

    uin,

    None of those details really matter.

    What matters for the point of this argument is the simple fact that Discord is owned by the company Discord Inc.

    That includes all of the servers and everything on them.

    Imagine if ALL OF THE INTERNET was owned by Google …

    morphballganon,

    So the worry is of a surveillance state?

    Thirdborne,

    More than that. They own the content and relationships and can use them in ways you cannot predict. LLMs gobble up human produced content because we entrusted it to corporations. What hit hardest for me was when Facebook published a study where they found they could influence users attitude by prioritizing certain posts in their feeds.

    Imagine it. Corporations owning your relationships and using them to get a profit out of you

    rimjob_rainer,

    It’s a closed system owned by a single company. If you provide data or information there, the company owns the data, other people can’t find the data using search engines and they would need an account to access the data. Imagine the internet is owned by a single company and they could sell, change, censor, delete restrict access to or use the information in means you cannot predict.

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