The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is removing CSGO from steam. Especially when CSGO had more features, it’s just a weird move. Why is Valve copying blizzard?
Also, the CSGO reviews now show up under CS2? Is it a new game or not? They shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.
I could feel every traction loss and wipe out that would have happened in that video through my entire body. And the feeling of my hands slipping and a metal edge jamming under my fingernails.
It absolutely sucks, but many of the standard calls of “it’s always been shit” and “boycott” aren’t really doing anything outside of virtue signalling or trying to hold a moral view to a company that couldn’t give a fuck about the 0.001% of people that action these views.
Regarding software engineering, I’ve often said that “if the games industry doesn’t unionise, there’s no hope for the rest of the tech industry”, and I still stand by that. While there are obvious complications in forming unions in a global market, I truly believe that the US is often the barrier towards workers rights. If American workers can unionise, you can bet that those in Europe would do so too.
I’m British, so I don’t have a great understanding of French law, but do they have unions in the same way, or are they similar to works councils in Germany? I know French law is protective of workers, so wonder if it’s as divisive as it would be in the West.
Union is actually mandatory in France if the company is more than 50 people iirc. But depending on the place, and especially in computer related work, very, very few people participate in the union.
Unions often suffer very bad reputation, and people are very often afraid either that they will act against their company interest or antagonise their bosses. I think about 15% of workers are unionised in France.
Too many devs think they’re above unionizing. It’s going to be very difficult to pull off. They won’t be interested until it’s too late.
Bottom line is that tech is chock full of greedy fucking people who only care about what they’re getting paid this year.
I don’t think the gaming industry could lead on this issue though. It’s tech companies like FAANG that really lead the market and that’s where people refuse to organize.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a software engineer at a FAANG company, and the split is very apparent. There are either people that would love to see a union (but know their employer would happily fire 100k+ people for even trying it), alongside people that believe unions are the devil. There was a shift in the last 12 months due to the mass layoffs and the nature of how someone with a decade or more of loyal work can be locked out and fired immediately without so much as a “goodbye”, but there is still a huge number of people that view tech as a “survival of the fittest” thing. I work with some people that even love the idea of URA and the “weakest” people in the team losing their jobs.
Game dev is an interesting thing, though. For decades now, even smaller companies (at the time) like Rare were built from the mentality that you cannot just work 50 hours a week to make a good game, or that once a release is complete, you move on to your next gig. That culture has existed throughout corporate, not just in tech, which is why I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a true effort towards unionising industry-wide. Hell, I would’ve thought that the Activision issues from a while ago would have spurred something too.
Let’s see how it is received. That game is not modern-gamer friendly.
But the even more important question: Did they keep the In Extremo concert in?
Edit: Read through the YouTube comments. Apparently it’s littered with bugs and the concert is gone. So I guess it’s a little bit true to the original release.
Also layoffs temporarily raise the stock price, it’s probably more costly in the long run… but who cares as long as the numbers go up for a bit and everyone gets bonuses.
Especially when you’re mostly stock compensated. Just make the numbers go up long enough to see your share prices soar, browse around for a different job in the meantime. Sell your stocks at a high, exit the company as it implodes behind you. Rinse and repeat.
For me, the visuals are a huge part of gaming, i simply don’t like the style of most indie games go for. The “artsy” stylistic graphics, the 80’s inspired pixel graphics, the simple polygon graphic is all indie games seem to choose between these days, and in personally hate looking at it.
I agree, I’m looking for immersion and story. That said, I’m also willing to wait a few months for devs to fix all the bugs they should have removed before the rushed release dates.
"Choose" isn't really an accurate term to use in your comment though, is it? Obviously high-realism AAA game graphics are going to come with a high budget outside the realm of possibility for the average indie dev, unless they have some super talented people with a passion for the project working for cheap.
A lot of us are willing to make this concession or adjust expectations for an experience that has great gameplay, soundtrack, story, etc. as easily as reading subtitles to enjoy a foreign film. The imagination can do plenty of the heavy lifting.
There’s a few indie titles that are developed by one person and maybe a handful of part timers or freelance people. Turbo Overkill and HROT(Single dev working is Pascal). Most of the time, the retro art style works to the design of the game. Ion Fury uses a opensource fork of the Build Engine(Duke Nuken 3d) and leans heavily into the 90’s idea of Cyberpunk and 90’s pop culture in general. Dusk is a Quake-like, but I had more immersion in the smooth gameplay then I would in a HD game where the hardware can’t keep up with the optimized graphics engine.
Meh. Today’s realistic graphics is tomorrow’s retro graphics. If a game was fun ten years ago, it’s fun today. If it was only playable ten years ago because of the graphics, but isn’t it playable today, it wasn’t fun in the first place.
This I do not understand. I am sure a ton of people pre-ordered Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty even though we know how it launched. (And I love the game, I followed all the news, but even I could wait for a fckin day to wait for the reviews)
The strategy to this is to buy so much crap on Steam and Humble Bundle that you don’t have time to pre-order AAA games.
For example, I love Borderlands series, and I have so many games to play that I could easily wait for TTW to be on sale - lo and behold, 10 bucks in a Humble Monthly with all the DLCs, and extra 7 games with it aswell. Banger.
It baffles me how anyone can stand to preorder any game with the market being so oversaturated. There are SO MANY great games on a constant $20 or less sale rotation you'll probably never have a chance to play if you're a full-time working adult. I'm worried about grabbing a highly acclaimed title that's been out for 5 years before it fades into obscurity, and I have to stumble upon a shout-out 3 years later to be reminded of its existence. Not about some stupid launch skin bonus, or OST mp3s you'll never click open.
Larian is an unusual case. It's indie but it's huge. They aren't funded by or marketing through a bigger publishing company so IMO that's still indie. But they're hundreds of people so not really small, and BG3 can by all means be considered a AAA game because the difference in quality and scale is indistinguishable from AAA published games.
I still play AAA games occasionally, but I’ve enjoyed gaming so much more since I got more selective with them.
ToTK was worthwhile, but even for the newest entry in my favorite series since childhood, (from a developer with a pretty good track record for their games) I still waited a week to see if any launch bugs needed to be ironed out.
I can’t even remember the last AAA game I bought before that.
They still have not fixed the absolutely terrible dis-occlusion artifacts that were present in FSR 2 and, in fact, it seems to have gotten worse with frame generation. Here’s an example of what the artifacts look like:
youtube.com
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