We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
But people forget about the DLC that is expected of the consumer to buy for the “full experience”. Some games don’t have a complete story if you don’t buy the DLC or you can’t access all the features without DLC, such as multiplayer games that don’t let you play with your friends if you don’t have that specific DLC pack.
So not only is it a $70 price up front, they also want you to spend, at least, an extra $30 on the new DLC season pass or buy the DLC separately at a slightly higher cost over time. Also not including the special edition packs with extras, either physical or digital, that add to that initial $70. Ubisoft is the biggest asshole in this space, going as high as $120 for a day 1 release.
I think they only expect a subset of their consumers to get the DLC; most people don’t care if they got the full experience. If you’re playing with your friends, they’ve got the option to play with you DLC-less in every case I can think of. In something like a fighting game, they’ve just got a character that you don’t, or in something like Civilization, if they know they’re playing with you, they host the version of the game that doesn’t include the DLC you don’t have. The entry price exists because they know nowhere near everyone will go for their most expensive edition.
I don’t doubt that game studio business models have gotten scummier, but I never liked the phrase “The full experience”.
There’s a few Bioware games I can cite where it was a terrible setup that added story-critical quests through DLC, but most often, a “special edition” or even the season passes tend to add very optional, often-ugly, costumes to games that already offer a number of costumes with the base game.
Saying it often makes people picture that they don’t get an ending to their story, or are locked out of abilities. There are live service games with that issue - the “hero model” being a frequent offender, but in the best of those games, the game’s base price is low and even the guide authors will acknowledge few people should feel the need to buy every character.
Game prices have been higher before, but the economy is kind of fucked right now (personally, as a Brazilian, buying foreign games was already fucked, but still).
How’s Brazilian regional pricing doing so far? I heard some countries are getting the short end of the stick now because of some users VPN routing to another country for deals.
Consoles are a walled garden - the only reason they can do what they do is because of the lack of options for the customer to use their hardware.
PCs are the only gaming platform (apart from perhaps smartphones) that have an open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms. You don’t have to publish with Sony and Microsoft, and the majority don’t.
Unless your console has homebrew, you will always be screwed by the platform holder.
Sorry, I’m not following the A-to-B on your comment in relation to this topic. Sony isn’t charging $80 for games, and even $70 games regardless of consoles aren’t doing so hot. Microsoft hasn’t done console exclusives for a decade.
I’m referring to that consoles can set the price period. You don’t have another marketplace (except for the used physical market, if you console supports it) to acquire first or third party games. Therefore, those who own the market can set the price as high as they’d like.
I remember when console prices were standardized at 60 USD during the 7th generation. On steam I’ve never paid more than 40, with the majority of my library costing under 20.
But this game is on Steam, and $80 is a price point companies are flirting with regardless of their ownership of the storefront, like Grand Theft Auto, for instance.
I bought the outer worlds for $10 on a steam summer sale. The original list price and the price a customer pays tends to be much lower on PC (many wishlist and wait), and piracy is an option.
open framework untouchable by publishers or game platforms
Splitting hairs here, but Steam is a pseudo monopoly at this point. Sure, one can not publish a game there, but that’s hard. And on multi-store releases, I don’t think publishers are allowed to undercut it on other platforms.
Which is fine since (even though 30% is not cheap) Steam is behaving and working well…
And then the next storefront or launcher will come along. Or GOG/Epic start making moves that appeal to a wider demographic. Or indies publish on their own sites (Vintage Story). Or someone releases a simplistic cracking tool for Steam’s DRM.
There’s a lot more options than you think for those who aren’t happy with the status quo. Going back full circle, on consoles, you are SOL in that situation. PC never had that issue.
Yeah it’s so sad seeing studio after studio being closed down. So many commenters thought Microsoft will revive old IPs after buying studio after studio.
Now it seems like those IPs will just rot at Microsoft in their intellectual property graveyard.
The steam deck is definitely my best purchase in a long time. So many games in my library that I can play now if I don’t want to sit at my PC after working at my PC.
Not might be. Will be. They could charge $50 a month and get away with it. That’s what the Nintendo fanbase has proven. For me. Ultimate is worth $25 a month. Once it goes over that I’m out. I’ll stick to ps plus on its own.
I swear “review bombing” has to be an astroturfed term to delegitimize criticism when companies do shitty things.
It shifts the blame from the companies doing a shit thing (lacing their game with DRM/anti-cheat malware, making them run like shit unless you enable AI slop upscaling, shoveling AI “”“art”“” assets, MTX, etc.) to the customers that are rightly mad about the shit thing.
The problem is that giving a bad review for performance is kind of (not exactly) like giving bad reviews to something that arrives broken. You never even used the thing how can you give it a 1 if you objectively cannot judge the items on its merits? Likewise you’re not judging the game itself but rather the fact that it does not run well on your hardware. Obviously the developers have responsibility for this, but if you’re a console player or have good hardware the criticism might not sound like a legitimate assessment of the game on its merits.
I agree, I’m just saying that the “vibes” of it are like that of giving a 1 star to an item that arrived broken, which is why people will call it review bombing etc.
If an ordered item arrives broken once, it’s a shitty delivery company. 1-star probably isn’t warranted unless the company is shitty about replacing it.
If an ordered item arrives broken regularly, it’s a problem that the company should’ve fixed.
If a game doesn’t work on one person’s machine, maybe they’ve got a bunch of malware installed or something.
If it doesn’t work on many people’s machines that meet the recommended specs, the company is at fault and deserves bad reviews.
You never even used the thing how can you give it a 1 if you objectively cannot judge the items on its merits?
First of all, if you look at the negative reviews, many of them have tens and even hundreds hours of playtime. Secondly, your question doesn’t make sense even on its own. Other customers deserve to know that the product they’re considering to purchase likely won’t work. Quality is a key characteristic of a product.
It was a rhetorical question and was referring to the case of a broken physical item. Not to the game. The bad reviews make sense, I was just trying to describe the vibes and why people might call it review bombing
Maybe they could make an action game like Devil May Cry but with something like a rhythm game element to it. Do they have any existing IP that that could fit? Or a team that could make it?
The article says that the “new” group is just mostly King (the developers of Candy Crush Saga) employees, and they will basically be working on Activision/Blizzard IP, it doesn’t say anything about them working on general Microsoft IP. It is likely Activitions massive back catalogue may finally have some games make a comeback.
Hopefully, the delay is to improve the existing experience. Too many times it has been because the original vision was scrapped after a decade of work and they restart development with a different direction in mind, culminating in a mediocre game.
Lol, enshittification came faster than expected. At least Netflix was successful before the price hike, and then decided to be greedy because their user base was willing to pay.
On the other side of the fence, Xbox Series consoles tanked harder than XOne (which was already a colossal failure) and Game Pass subscribers fell short of corporate expectations every year since its inception. And they decide that this is the best time to double the price of the service? Good luck with that decision, Microsoft.
Who is gonna pay $15/month for a catalog of old games? Old games are already cheap enough that you can buy them directly and still “profit” over keeping an ongoing subscription. And $20/month for day one games? At that price, you’re better off just buying the damn game. GP was already hard to justify at its previous price, but this new price point is egregious.
That’s the “Quadruple A” studio right? The one that was supposed to have “unlimited budget” so it could create “groundbreaking video game experiences”?
And they ended up not releasing anything before they’re shut down. A+ management there, Microsoft.
Most obvious use for it would be to have “life-like” npc’s with somewhat believable lives and backstories. Still, it’ll be interesting (and potentially hilarious) to see how they can be manipulated etc.
The diagram proposes it be used in other aspects too, such as in dynamically altering the game narrative.
i.e. you feed into the LLM “okay, this is the current state of the game and characters, what would be interesting to happen next?” and then the game state changes based on that assessment.
Setting aside the feasibility of implementing this typically overreaching and broad tech patent, I can see this eventually being useful in immersive sim games like Deus Ex and such.
In immersive sims the dream has always been to give the player infinite freedom, but games can’t provide infinite freedom because every possibility has to be programmed and accounted for, and dialog written. Would be amazing if the game itself could dynamically adjust based on player behaviour.
But honestly, to your point about breaking it, I think that’s why we still haven’t seen LLMs deployed in big titles apart from some private tech demos - studios and publishers are afraid of the prospect of abuse.
As soon as such a game landed you can bet your ass people will be working immediately to break it and get it to do inappropriate things (because that’s fun!) and publishers are terrified about that, because it will totally happen no matter how many safety rails you try to put in.
I mean the real challenge is you still need to program all the different states. The LLM can help generate narrative, but that doesn’t change interactivness with the world. A great example is the Skyrim LLM mod a while back. In that user’s would “convince” an NPC to join them, but there would need to be programming behind the scenes that allows people to be recruited and the LLM dialouge would need to know to trigger that. There is the possibility of some interesting things, but it’s going to be hard to work it out.
It would be difficult, yes. I’m a software developer myself and have been working with LLMs on personal projects recently, so I’ve got some context on the challenges involved.
The hype around LLMs is obviously all “Yeah just throw AI at the problem! AI can do it!” but the reality is that you will always need a good amount of normal coding to wrap around that and make the LLM inputs and outputs sane and interoperable with the rest of your system. So I’m very aware.
My real wonder is that with an appropriate implementation, how much of the classical aspects of the game could you ultimately and eventually move to LLMs, which is what the patent seems to be suggesting.
For example, if you used LLM only for character dialogue and nothing else, it would go something like this:
You talk to an NPC and insult them
The convo is assessed and it tweaks some hidden classically programmed reputation and faction variables
You go to the base of a faction associated
Those variables determine the faction is hostile
But you could potentially use LLMs to manage more aspects directly, and that could look like this:
You talk to an NPC and insult them
An LLM summary of your actions is written to a world log
You go to the base of the faction associated
The controller LLM parses the entire world log for your actions relevant to the faction and determines the result as hostility, including extracting reasoning for that which members of the faction can confront you on if spoken to
Now that’s already a lot of work and the only bit of classic programming we really took out is how the rep system is managed. But we gained some flexibility in that the source of your relationship with the faction could come from any action anywhere, including ones the game designers never even dreamed up, not just certain things which were pre-known to update it.
Where decisions actually interact with the game world will always need to be classically programmed (like being hostile and what that means and how it causes the characters to act, do they shoot you, what it means to ‘shoot’ and ‘move’ etc) and there will need to be a way to interface with that, but LLMs could introduce some level of flexibility in places where that wasn’t possible before.
A reaulting problem though is that the more you give to LLMs, the more the entire thing is likely to unravel and become incoherent, without doing even more work to prevent that, and there will still be cracks.
Is it ultimately feasible? I don’t know, but it will be interesting for whoever gets to try.
Yeah, that’s exactly how I see it too. The biggest challenge to me is even if you can do it, can you make it feel reasonable and consistent.
In games today you know that there are good/bad options in a given scenario. With LLMs anything you do could cause an impact to a faction.
The other big issue is you run into user input. How many players want to be typing or speaking full conversations? Maybe it works for some games, but you only really get the full “flexibility” if users are fully interacting. This could greatly limit the games where LLMs could make an impact.
You can start to monitor actions, and not dialouge, and process events/actions through an LLM, but not sure how much LLMs would make that easier versus just programming those interactions.
Another big one is generation of inappropriate or sexual content. No publisher will dare to ship something when the next week there’s going to be videos all over social media of their game characters saying and doing wildly inappropriate stuff (as hilarious as that would be for us as players!)
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