“gamers” would have a cow if there was ever a sequel seriously discussed. He already charged them once, how dare he charge them again.
I suspect 10-20% of the community would take that stance, even if it’s only a few%, it would absolutely be magnified by the echo chamber and there will be talk or how concerned ape left stardew valley “incomplete” and it’s "abandon-ware"and all future products should be pirated.
Not sure where you’re coming from. Stardew Valley was completed years ago and the guy has actually kept releasing free content updates nobody even asked for. People are actually getting annoyed at him for continuing to update it since he’s supposed to be working on his next game.
Plus the updates keep breaking mods. Part of why I’m holding off on another playthrough is that I’m worried he’s going to add one more update as soon as I finish a modlist and boot up
Bethesda is already prepping to screw them over. Like with the Fallout London guys. Fuck Bethesda. Leaning heavily on the community to fix their issues but ready to fuck them over when they come with a large project by quickly releasing their own shitty remake or updating the game, breaking the mod. Better pirate their games or don’t play them at all, they do not deserve our money.
This is a weird take. Bethesda isn’t getting in the way of mods and actively supports them, it’s not like they pushed an update to screw over Fallout London, they’re not going to get permission from mod creators to work on their own franchise.
If Bethesda does make their own remake, I fail to see how that hurts the people working on Skyblivion.
Combining oblivion, morrowind and Skyrim into one game mod: Bethesda broke it. Fallout London: Bethesda broke it. Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod. Yeah, they do actively break mods to screw too enthusiastic modders who will create more and better content using their platforms, which will show their failure, laziness and not-caring-at-all-about-their-customers-at-all, because they only think of money and how to get as much as much as possible by screwing their customers over again and again. Todd is an asshole and Bethesda is a rotten company which still profits and milks their old successes from the time they weren’t rotten.
Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.
I’m now curious about this from a technical perspective - how did the update specifically break their mod in particular? Were they doing a bunch of custom DLL hooks or something?
I know with Skyrim SE modding it’s usually that any update breaks SKSE and a tiny handful of other mods that directly hook DLLs or the executable (these mods are usually scripting engine extensions and are a dependency for a variety of other mods), and depending on the update sometimes it takes longer than average to get a new version of those running (the AE update was one of those because they switched compiler version and that broke the method SKSE was using to find hooks). But in general that only breaks 1) mods using those (think SkyUI) until a new version comes out, after which most of those mods start working again without the individual mods needing an update and 2) mods that include their own plugin DLL, (think SkyClimb) which have to wait on an update and then compile a new version of the DLL for the new version of both the game and the other mod, because addresses and functions they are hooking may have changed. Mods not using SKSE or similar generally run just fine between versions of SSE (including AE).
So basically what happened with the AE release for Skyrim SE where Bethesda switched to a new compiler version and the tool the script extender team was using to find the correct offsets couldn’t handle it so they had to track down the offsets manually like before they’d written the tool, leading to a longer than usual time for the script extender to update than usual?
Which if it’s anything like SSE means that mods that didn’t use F4SE were basically unaffected, mods that use F4SE had to wait for it to update which took longer than usual after which they would mostly work unmodified, and mods that involved a plugin DLL for F4SE had to at the very least be recompiled against the new versions of the game and F4SE. Nothing about that specifically targets Fallout: London though from what it sounds like.
I mean, it would suck for any mod using F4SE. The answer for what to do is the same as every other update - recommend people not update until F4SE is updated.
Did they have their own plugin DLL or were they just using F4SE as is? If the former that would make it suck for them even worse since they’d potentially need to find some new hook addresses of their own and wait for the new F4SE and then reconcile their DLL.against that and then test it all again to make sure nothing broke.
Yeah, that’s what Fallout Londond creators advised - delay the update. A lot of folk got already hit with it by this time tho, so a lot of people were pissed.
And they DID insert their own IIRC, may be wrong on that one.
WTF are you smoking? It was not “specifically designed to break the mod”. It was specifically designed to coincide with the Fallout TV series on Amazon prime.
Exactly! I hate when people keep saying Bethesda “screwed over” mod devs, as if making a free mod takes precedence over someone who actually works for the game studio being told by their boss to make this update happen.
There’s too much going on at the company for someone to try to track down mod authors to “get their permission”
It would be like you offering me a place to stay and asking if I’m okay with you doing housework. Like I have no say, it’s your house, you need to do regular maintenance.
Personal beliefs and the laws to which you are upheld are two different things. I didn’t say I agree with the law. Why are you assuming my personal beliefs?
Right. So whoever did the update at Bethesda found it important to do that update. The developers of FO:London found it important to release their mod. If you ask the Bethesda employee they’d think their work was more important. If you ask the FO:L team they would say their work was more important. How do you determine whose importance was more important?
I think Fallout London adds more to the game and was wanted by more people. Democracy and utility seem to be agreed on this case, and those are the two measures I use to determine importance.
And I’m going to say more people wanted official ultrawide support. Now what? Are we supposed to poll every time someone wants to do something? If I feel like important for me to jaywalk and I step in front of a car and the driver feels it’s more important for them to not stop what then? Are we supposed to block traffic to until we figure out whose action is more important so they’d have right of way?
This is why we have laws, because everything does not need to be looked at case by case and sometimes we can collectively agree that one way is always better than the other way.
I don’t see Bethesda has doing anything about this project.
Like TESNexus did take down my Morroblivion main quest implementation back in 2010 (although someone else had already uploaded a half done version which was allowed to stay up? maybe they had sucked Arthmoor off or something.) I just moved to the Morroblivion forums after, nbd.
But you’ve been able to complete basically all of Morrowind in Oblivion for more than ten years, and I don’t think Bethesda has done anything. I think they threatened/scared the French guy who made the executable that converted everything, but backed off and never really bothered again.
Tbh, I could see them giving Morrowind away for free at some point - just like Daggerfall and Arena.
The way they might fuck people over is the endless Skyrim and Fallout updates I guess that break fucking everything. But not legally I don’t think. This gets people to buy more copies of Skyrim (and we know the modern gamer isn’t patient enough for Morrowind proper)
I honestly don’t know - I have no evidence one way or the other.
However, FO:London was in development for a long time (years?), and Bethesda decided to release a (edit:) mod-breaking patch right before its release, b/c the TV show got popular and they wanted to say the game was still in development?
Maybe it wasn’t specifically to “screw over some mod devs,” but it didn’t help the community one bit.
With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.
I like how many games they give away for free, but tbh I’ve never played any of them there. Some of those games I decided to buy later on Steam anyway just to do achievements (epic launcher doesn’t have achievements, cards, any meaningful statistics, etc).
Sorry if this comes across pedantic, but in case anybody isn’t aware there are some games that offer Achievements (Alan Wake 2 is one I know).
I do agree though, Epic just doesn’t have the features Steam does. I don’t think their barrage of free games idea is a bad one, but it feels like an afterthought when it’s just not as fun to play them there. (Better Linux support would be nice too, at least there’s Heroic.)
They have achievements on all games, it’s been the case for two years
Edit: to be more specific, on all games on-boarded after March 9th 2023 (need to have the same achievements as on other platforms) and available at the dev’s discretion since May 2022
I just checked this again, first for game I had there for free but bought later on Steam - City of Brass - and couldn’t find achievements anywhere. I then looked into Fortnite and League of Legends - also no achievements. I then found there is “my achievements” link somewhere in my profile, from where I could click “browse games with achievements” and turns out, from few dozens games I own there not a single one has achievements.
I admit that I should have been more specific, the change wasn’t retroactive, so I should have said that achievements have been available since early 2022 and since early 2023 games can’t release without the same achievements as other platforms
They’ve had achievements for over two years… I swear all the anti epic crowd knows nothing about what their launcher is like at this point and just keep repeating what they read back when it launched… Just like the Steam boycotters back in the early 2000s
I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.
I’m willing to bet all I own that most Steam users don’t care about their profile or people seeing the achievements they got but they still care about achievements as a form of optional challenges they wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.
Pretty sure you underestimate what the average gamers spend, you’re in a bubble if you use the social features and it makes it seem like most people do, Steam has 132m monthly active users.
Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.
I wasn’t even going to pay $449, let alone $600. I figured it would have been somewhere between $300-400, with 400 being on the high end of reasonable.
$449 I would have waited a bit. But $600??? I get it’s because of tarrifs, but that’s really going to hurt the systems long term sales numbers the same way covid hurt PS5’s lifetime sales numbers.
Yeah I’m not in it at either price point. I’ll for once be a patient gamer and wait until it’s reasonable or I’ll skip this one. I’m betting there’s lots like us.
The games don’t drop in price, but the consoles do. There’s even a chance the price could go down for the holiday season, even if it’s something miniscule. This launch price is the early adopter tax.
Tariffs are not just for new products (new models). As soon as the current ps5 stock of a retailer is gone, they have to order new ones and pay a tariff. Then they make it more expensive for the consumer.
lets say Walmart now sells a ps5 for $400, but in a month they have to order new ones, from China. The order is more expensive than the one last month because of the tariffs, so they pay like 40% more. Walmart will now sell the ps5 for about $550 to you.
I’m honestly surprised they haven’t jacked up the prices already! Partly because Capitalism^TM^ — but also because I fully expect for big retailers like Walmart to have 30-90 day payment terms with vendors, and some of those invoices potentially being subject to these tariffs.
…stop being right! I got angry reading that, but when I clicked reply to yell at you, I realized it was all emotional backlash on my end. I couldn’t formulate a thought process to show why you’re wrong. Because you’re not wrong. I just hate that you’re right!
I’m fucking done with Rockstar after GTA5. Took a great franchise and fucking ruined it with online mode. One of my first sessions ended up with a hacker teleporting everyone to a single location on the map and dropping millions on everyone.
Also, I can’t play Vice City (still my favorite) on PC without the Social Club bullshit or downloading a cracked version (I gave up on pirated software), despite it being a single player game. Just another company I’m happy to boycott forever.
You should try playing Vice City on a PS2 emulator. Connect your emulator with retroachievements.org and try to get all the achievements. If you can find a legit PS2 copy, it won’t be piracy.
That’s a good wisdom! I still have my original PS2 disc packed away, but I’d have to get a DVD drive for my PC (I haven’t had one for years). They’re cheap enough, and I’ve got a few other games as well. Thanks!
I only ever bought RDR2 from them, which is still bringing me a lot of enjoyment, and after seeing how they squandered RDR online for the heinous crime of not printing money fast enough, I don’t think I’ll be buying anything from them for the foreseeable future.
That’s my big problem with the online mode as well. They could have actually made it fun but it’s totally unplayable because they don’t do anything about hackers while at the same time even by legitimate means giving players access to fucking sci-fi death machines.
I’m so sick of spawning in and instantly getting blown up by a flying motorcycle with infinite rockets. That’s not even fun gameplay for the person the flying motorcycle.
A remaster for the first two wouldn’t be enough, I figure. I played daggerfall unity and it just does not hold up. A full on remake would be interesting, but they’d have to go hard, and reconceptualize a lot.
I think Avowed is the smoothest (strictly comparative) game on UE5 I've played in a long time. I get 120fps locked on epic and no shader compilation stutters (1440p, 7900XTX and 7800X3D, FSR quality) outside of cities. As soon as I enter a city and move my camera/character, it dips to 50fps with my GPU barely being used and CPU spiking, which really doesn't make much sense to me considering the aren't a lot of NPCs in town and they don't move/have routines
The issue there is 4K, even with upscalers it's a massive rendering job for GPUs. Realistically, only the 4090 and 5090 could run in high settings at 4K (with or without upscaling). I had a 4K monitor with my 7900 XTX and decided to dial back to 1440p (and got a n OLED screen too) so I could run my games at max on 120 or 144 FPS, because at 4K I would get anything between 50 and 100 fps with a mix of high and medium settings
Even if they do, I feel like both projects will have different enough approach to things to avoid making the other obsolete. Maybe… possibly.
I’ll certainly take the unofficial remake over the Bethesda one due to lower requirements and lack of Creation Club. That, and I’m just more interested in the fan interpretation of Cyrodiil to be honest.
I really hope so! It seems like such a no brainer, get a studio to remake the bulk of it and keep creative control. I came into TES world in Skyrim and would love to go back through them but I’m a snob for a modern looking game now.
I am always suprised that people expected anything differently.
Epic was from the start doing things the wrong way, and I will not support any store that has exclusives.
Making a good gaming platform that could rival Steam would take A LOT of time and money and dare I say - no company is willing to lose that for a chance of one day perhaps being only slightly worse competitor that still can’t convince people to migrate.
There are only a few companies that could even hope to take on Valve, at this stage. The likes of EA and others. But by definition, their company culture means they’ll never be able to take on Valve.
Someone else made a comment about what will happen when Gabe steps down and I suddenly realize what a short-term golden age we’re likely living in, even with all the bullshit.
Making a platform that was simply a copy of all of Steam’s features would certainly take a lot of time. That’s why to break into the space a new platform would need to actually innovate a killer feature that brings early adopters to it even without having all the bells and whistles Steam has. Then the user base can and will grow as you fill in the gaps so the ‘sacrifice’ of using your platform is lessened.
All exclusive games do is build resentment in your customers at being forced to use an inferior product.
Of course they will, they make too much money off people buying replacements. Since the games also got an increase in price, I expect the joy-cons bought separately will also be marked up by a non-trivial margin.
they make too much money off people buying replacements.
Didn’t they start offering free repairs at some point due to it being such a widespread issue? Or did they stop doing that at some point?
Between the damage to their reputation it would cause (knowingly releasing a very flawed product despite having already publicly apologized for it years ago) and the potential for more class-action lawsuits down the line, it seems like it’d be profoundly shortsighted for them to do this.
But maybe the profits from selling replacements outweighs all that in their eyes. I sure hope not. One would hope the profits from a considerably more expensive console and moderately more expensive games would be enough.
I don’t know for sure if it was ever a thing in the USA. A cursory search only showed mention of Europe offering that repair. I didn’t even bother checking and just went straight for the hall-effect replacement sticks when I had joy-cons that drifted, probably a bunch of other people in that same boat.
IMO, the profits from this would still come even if they offer repairs. I’d venture to guess many out-of-the-loop parents would just buy the replacements ‘cause they probably think their kid is abusing it somehow. The good ol’ “sigh 'n buy” phenomenon to keep the kiddos entertained.
Nope. I’ve sent several pairs of Joycons (at least 4 sets) to be repaired by Nintendo absolutely free of charge. Never had an issue though I remember the process being a little convoluted.
Still though, from the fact you had to send in 4 times means that replacing mine from the get go with hall-effect was much less hassle. Sounds like the new controllers will be exactly the same quality, joystick-wise, since you had such a great experience. Why change the process?
They initially also only did it in places that consumer protection laws would force them to. Some markets (at least initially) didn’t get the same benefit.
I used it a few years ago, and it was fine and i didnt have to pay anything. I wish Sony offered this because I’m on my 4th ps5 controller…
If it’s not fixed in the new one, they can screw off… it’s bad enough they got away with it, but to totally redesign everything and still say yes we’ll keep the defective parts going forward is a big no from me.
The monetization director should never say anything ever and should be beaten with a stick if he tries, but the standpoint the article is writing from is clear:
the unveiling of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which quickly gained controversy for numerous allegations that Ubisoft was mispresenting Japanese heritage through unpopular artistic design choices.
“unpopular artistic design choice”, hm? What does that mean?
Neither the author’s writing nor the quote from the director actually name it specifically, but we can infer that it’s probably talking about Yasuke, which means that unfortunately this ghoul director is probably completely right and this author is no better than a concern troll.
He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.
Full quoteI rarely post on social media, but today I am sad. Ashamed and sad. > >The gaming industry is rough at the moment, we all know it. > >But seeing how “gamers” react on social medias, wishing ill-fate to companies and people alike is sad. (And not only towards Ubisoft) > >Even though it is always the vocal minority that express themselves on social media, I was hurt, hurt and ashamed to be a part of this community. > >What is even more revolting, is coming on Linkedin and seeing the same comments from people within the industry. > >On top of exposing yourself as a clearly non-decent human being, you are affecting thousands of employees that are already impacted by all the hate despite doing their best to deliver incredible experiences. > >How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me. > >We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.
Ubisoft as a company deserved to fail though. It sure sucks for the poor bastards working there but something tells me the tune would be a lot different if this was just another round of layoffs.
I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.
I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.
He literally says “How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the product does not please you is beyond me.” I’m not saying he never mentioned employees or hate towards them, but his statement definitely comes off as purposefully misleading. Is there hate on the internet? Yes. People are sometimes hateful, but he even mentioned it being a vocal minority. To post something like this while there’s active backlash against the company and their games when he admitted to not posting much makes his intentions pretty clear. The majority of the “hate” is towards the company not the employees, but by being a concern troll he gets to lump in valid criticism of the company with a minority of people being hateful to the employees (some of which are directly responsible for the bad decisions of the company btw).
Maybe you disagree, but bad companies deserve to fail, and people responsible for harmful decisions the company makes should be held accountable. I think it’s ok for people to say that. I don’t want anyone anywhere to be treated poorly, but he seems to care more about the hate hurting their bottom line than actually hurting the people there. His statement would have read very differently otherwise.
“I understand if you are upset with decisions made by companies, including ours, but please do not direct hate towards individuals trying to do their jobs. If you take issue with the behavior of an individual, you should be able to express that while still respecting the person.” Or something like that.
People don’t hate these companies because they “don’t cater to them”. They love or loved the games, but these companies then turn around and try to screw their own fans out of every cent, nugget of personal data, and free time, that they have. There is no anger like the anger of a true fan.
To get that pissed, you had to have cared quite a lot to begin with.
The rest, are simply indifferent.
That, is why people are upset enough to experience schadenfreude when their stocks and releases fail. Because that is an event that SHOULD be proving to these companies that if they keep pushing the bullshit, they soon won’t be catering to anyone anymore. Hence it’s something that gives fans hope that they will pull their shit together and get back to doing right by their own franchises and talent.
And we are not all in the same boat. Some of us just want good games.
Even when companies like Ubi make good games, they come with a shitload of strings like “but the monetisation is unethical” or “the devs were forced to crunch” or “the company leadership did nothing about a festering company culture of criminal mysogyny”.
Simply by operating as ruthlessly as they do, these companies are slowly convincing the world they are “non-decent” institutions. Such institutions need massive restructuring, when the don’t deserve complete disassembly.
And angering your fans is a process that only goes one way. Every fan you piss off enough to make them swear to never again give you a chance, is one you probably wont ever have as a customer again.
Yeah, some will be malicious enough to cheer at the individuals getting screwed over when megacorps eat shit. But every sane person is cheering because there is now a large pool of talent looking to do something good with their skill, out from under the thumb of managers demanding every mechanic be optimized for monetization, rather than gameplay.
This person isn’t wrong to be disgusted with people who cheer at jobs being lost, but he is also MASSIVELY out of touch with how his own company is operating, and how it is coming to be viewed by the world as a result.
No matter what he meant, he sounds like he’s trying to paint the people with legitimate gripes about the way he handles the company as the harrassers when he is a huge driver of the problem.
It’s like Republicans complaining about the quality of current public schooling and blaming ‘woke’ policies when they’ve been the ones cutting school funding for decades, and they know it. It’s feigned concern.
So what you’re saying is you’re victim blaming the people the director here is expressing sympathy for?
There is a huge harassment campaign based around flagrant racism, and there are probably some racists who are more excited to attack ubisoft because it’s a shitty company in general, but that’s just icing on the cake when the main content is racism and someone who doesn’t have a horse in that race isn’t going to be involved in the same way.
It sure seems to me like you’re trying to find a way of talking around the racist harassment campaign like the author in the OOP does. Really makes you think.
I couldn’t possibly know your motivations, nor the author’s, I just find your choice to whitewash racism disreputable. Maybe you just have such a burning hatred for EA that you think that it’s expedient to run cover for racists – I think you wouldn’t be alone in that mindset, though not in good company either – but I think it’s silly to waste time on such speculation into the internal state of some random account. All I am concerned with is the result.
Coming from their director of monetization, all I hear is “waaah waaah booo waaah”
All this nickel and diming is super profitable and it shows. Just because it makes them fuckloads of money doesn’t mean we should applaud it, because it awful for the customers.
The man is mad that people don’t like how he monetizes Ubisoft games and game mechanics. He is upset at the messages he gets when he upsets a game to inject a micro transaction. He is part of the wave of business professionals that don’t see game players as people - we are just cash waiting to be harvested from idle wallets. This is what quid-pro-quo looks like; he is seeing what we look like to him and he doesn’t like it. He wants to be a person with a name and friends and credibility that allows mistakes to be made in good faith. We want to have fun, sometimes with friends and other times alone, in a game world where we can be a person with a name, friends, and have the ability to explore. We both want the same thing.
So why is he treating people like cattle instead of people who are trying to have fun with the system they have been given? Fuck this narcissistic piece of executive hypocrisy. He doesn’t deserve peace until he exits the industry or finds a way to be actually useful.
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