It feels like game development timelines are so long these days that there’s very few games per hardware generation. I look back at the PS2’s library (to be fair, it was enormous even for its own time) and everything on the Switch feels tiny in comparison.
Also, even if the “new Nintendo Switch(i)” or whatever is backwards compatible, the rise of digital sales means I can’t play my switch games on the new console anyway.
If there aren't legit more Nintendo Switch games than there were PS2 games right now, I imagine that the Switch will just trample the PS2 before its end.
Indie games really skew that count, though to be fair they weren't really a thing back then. But speaking of major triple-A and mid-sized double-A studios, they have released games much more slowly compared to previous generations, and that's even easier to see in more powerful consoles like the PS5.
Sure, but why does that matter? Saying “indie games skew the count” implies that you don’t feel that indie games are “real” games. The big devs and publishers may have slowed down, but that’s because the games they wanted to make got bigger with more art, more music, bigger worlds, etc. Nowadays, the biggest “indie” dev teams are about the same size as the mid-size developers in the PS2 days.
Nah, that's definitely not what I meant. It's great that we get so many indie games. But if anything I feel like, other than Nintendo, the large studios are not making the most out of each generation before the next console is released.
Or you could do a 60 fps bloodborne remaster that people would actually play for orders of magnitude less money, but what do I know I’m just a plebe who didn’t lose 400 million dollars
Such a dumb move. This won’t help sales, but it certainly will hurt them (though, to be fair, probably not much). Sex sells. And the people who are offended by this wouldn’t have bought the game in the first place.
I’m just so annoyed by this recent resurgence of Puritan-esque prudishness. Humans are sexual beings! We shouldn’t be ashamed of or offended by sexuality; we should embrace it! And if people are worried about unequal representation, the solution is simple: put sexy men in the game, too, and maybe an option for players to toggle either. Everybody wins.
Yeah, I think the people arguing for this don’t understand the full context. You get extra points for taking the equivalent of upskirt photos of women who are being attacked by or in fear of being attacked by zombies. It’s textbook exploitation.
I can’t immediately think of a context where it would be better, but… it isn’t this.
I don’t know the game well - never played its original release and I likely won’t play this remake - but from what I understand, the women in question are zombies, so consent isn’t really a factor.
If anything, removing this feature slightly reduces immersion and significantly changes the main character’s personality. I can understand why someone who was a fan of the original would be hesitant to get the remake, since the main character is a different person, morally speaking.
It’s like Star Wars - Han shot first, and changing that doesn’t change the story in any real way, but it significantly changes Han’s character.
Sadly, this doesn’t mean anything. Executives can’t and won’t share highly confidential future plan data with non-executive employees who don’t immediately require the knowledge, because if even one of them leaks that info, it can (and in this case, certainly would) tank their stock price.
Stopping production is not a plan that requires years of dev work to do, it’s something that they can announce at any time and put into practice almost immediately, so they can and will claim (even internally) that Xbox is not going away right up to the moment they publicly announce they’re killing it.
I love Phil, but he doesn’t have the influence within MS to single-handedly save Xbox if the larger company leadership decides to kill it.
Y’all just have no idea how complicated the process is. In 2004 it was OK to just “ship a working game”, - in 2023 you have to include all of the software stacks you have partnering contracts with, deploy an entire cloud infrastructure to deliver updates and short purchases, design and launch automated targeted ads campaigns, pay union-busting lawyers, accommodate for all the “fun” senile execs want to put in the game, pay handsome compensation to these senile execs, pay more lawyers to bury workplace toxicity-related incidents. At the end of the day, you have to sustain the company somehow when 95% of your workforce goes on a sick leave after a 3-month-long crunch period. All of that takes money, time and effort. And y’all don’t get a lot of time in-between autumn release windows.
Hey, we’ve been at it for 20 years, and we have just managed two months of 16-hour workdays without anyone dying, it looks like it might be one of those projects we actually manage to ship - what an important internal milestone!
PS: I don’t actually work at Ubisoft, I love my life too much - this entire comment is a satire
“We hear you. I can relate to your struggles. We’d love to solve the problem. Of course, preservation is front and centre when all these decisions are made.” isn’t quite the same as “We’re working on a solution to preserve 360 games. We came up with the following solutions so far: […]. Let us know what you think. Stay tuned!”
I wouldn’t expect anything to come from this. Microsoft employees wrap a “fuck you” in a gift, gaslight the backlash, and tap dance. When the excrement makes abrupt contact with the rotating blades of the fan, the lead self-resigns with a long-wielded and non-apologetic notice. Another Microsoft employee takes over, and leads the team with the same mindset until the next incident.
How is this going to affect battery life? Some of us don’t have the switch connected to power 24/7. Sounds like a bad idea for an underpowered handheld device.
I remember back in the 90s PC mags had the same issues, simple numerical ratings don’t mean shit.
The only score I follow is Steams user satisfies rating thing. the top voted complaints or praises tell me more about the state of a game than anything else ever could.
the advtage the steam system has is first the bought game/gifted game situation, as well as the more important factor, the recent opinion score, as at amy given momemt a game can get good because of a major change (e. g payday 2 reverting all the pay 2 win content the original publisher mandated) or gone to shit because of greed or a bad patch.
the problem users have is finding a curator that has a similar taste in games that they do. If I was a fan of JRPGs, im not going to care about the opinion on some person who doesnt really play jrpgs. at the same time, if you like some niche genre, to the general public, that niche is always less popular, so itll get worse ratings thanit should compared to people who enjoy said niche.
i mean…you could always buy the add-on disc drive? Assuming that it is still compatible with the Pro, not sure why it wouldn’t be. They get to fleece physical media heads for an extra $80, that’s a win for Sony.
awesome! just double-check that it’s compatible with the new one before dropping the extra $80! Nothing about the Pro is official yet, so we still gotta wait and see.
The kicker is that owning the disk entitles you to a piece of plastic, and not much more at the moment. When servers go down, or day one patches are no longer available, the disk becomes no better than a coaster for many modern games.
Yeah… i don’t understand why this is a good move. Sacrificing an element that would noticably improve a core aspect of the games design for the sake of not looking at a picture for a few seconds on startup? Seems completely backwards if you ask me.
You need to toake into account that we're talking about a Kirby game here, which are all 2/2.5/sometimes 3D platformers. So The real effect of Dolby in such a thing would have been close to zero.
That came out on GameCube back when we were all still using composite cables that didn’t support surround anyway.
Edit: Apparently I was misinformed, still KAR was such a casual arcadey game that I’m sure it got more benefit out of quick startup than it would have from surround support.
Exactly. Until around 2005 with the advent of affordable HDTVs and the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, anything more than what came stock with your TV, which was usually standard definition picture and stereo sound, was something of a luxury. Sound bars were only really starting to become a popular thing.
This is not true at all and demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how surround sound worked.
Nintendo 64 games like Donkey Kong 64 and Conker’s Bad Fur Day supported surround sound. Even Star Fox on the SNES supported surround sound. All through composite cables.
It works by encoding multiple channels into two channels, so it can then decode those channels to send the proper signal to the proper speaker. For Dolby specifically, you need a Pro Logic compatible receiver, which could decode that signal. If you don’t have a Pro Logic compatible receiver then you will only hear stereo output.
oh, it was the racing game? I must have gone through the text too quickly then. Yet, if we're pragmatic: How many people would have really enjoyed that game (which wasn't stellar to begin with) more with properly encoded surround sound, and how many would have enjoyed it a tad less because of the annoying logo spam on startup? I don't think Surround-Sound-enjoyers were the target audience for that one.
Yeah I did consider that when I made my comment. And keep in mind I do see where they’re coming from. It’s not like I’m calling them stupid for this decision. I personally just see it as a massive overcorrection for something that will, in the grand scheme, have virtually no effect on the quality of the game for literally anyone besides the person who made this decision.
I know it’s not the best comparison, but to me it would be like if RTX support required an RTX logo, and a major studio just removed RTX from their game, not for any performance or quality issues, but solely for a logo. Again, it just seems like an overcorrection for a non-issue. I’ll admit, I sometimes get annoyed by intro logos, but never enough to the point where I’d think it’s worth removing features to get rid of them.
I got the impression that “removing” means removing before it was really implemented. Like, it was planned and decided upon, but it wasn't ready. He checked the license and went “nope, not having it” and scrapped the feature. It doesn't truly become clear in the text, of course, but that's how I read this.
You realize this is Lemmy, and on Lemmy you have to hate every business and every product produced by a business apparently, right? If it isn’t FOSS, then you aren’t allowed to like it.
This is Sakurai’s explanation, and it seems reasonable to me:
“I feel very sorry for making the user wait,” he explained. “If you take one second from each user, that means you’ll be taking 10,000 seconds from 10,000 people. The more this repeats over the years, the more time you will cause players to lose."
I remember one of l Hank Green’s older videos when he added up all the viewtime from all of their videos and realized it was longer than the average human lifespan. Of course, he immediately framed it as “We’ve killed a man!”
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