Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.
All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.
It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.
It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.
How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.
Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.
It's a scifi roguelike where you lead a team of prospectors to try to recover valuables from across space to make enough money to retire.
Kind of in an odd spot source-wise, as the recent source code technically isn't open/available (last open releases were 10+ years ago), so it may no longer really fit, but seemed worth mentioning nevertheless.
Kind of mixed on this one for me. On one hand it’s a win against microtransactions, since a big name like Marvel isn’t enough for people to buy it, so much that it has to be delisted. I think that’s a huge win and I think it’s worth mentioning.
On the other, preservation is a thing and I’m wondering if this game could somehow still be played if it’s taken off the store. Granted I’m not familiar with this game so I don’t know if physical copies work, or if they’re just codes with a plastic shell. Or even if this game would be playable once the servers go down. I know it’s not the best game to keep around, but history deserves preservation, etc
I disagree. I think games are definitely worth preserving, even if they aren’t that fun. Regardless, this game has historical significance and should at the very least be playable after it’s delisted.
What is and isn’t worth preserving is not something that can be known at the time of preserving. The point of preservation is so things can be accessed later if and when they’re needed. Even shitty games like Avengers may be relevant in many ways in the future, even if just to reference as ‘a shitty game’.
I recently saw this video about the British Library. They collect everything that’s published in the UK (books, magazines, papers, leaflets, flyers, …). One of the librarians makes a pretty good case about the use of collecting and preserving everything. Even (or especially) the things you don’t think are worth preserving.
“Good” is not the metric for preserving things. “Important” is. Marvel’s Avengers is important to preserve because this failure is a major historical milestone.
Like, imagine if somehow every copy of ET for the Atari 2600 vanished. Would anything fun be lost? Of course not. But would we lose some critical context in an important historical event? Yes. Very much so.
Fortunately, Atari games aren’t the kind of ephemeral media where we have to worry about that like cloud-service games or pre-code cellulite films.
Is preservation of GaaS actually important though? We’re not talking about niche shovelware that somebody is nostalgic for, we’re talking about preserving a thing that wasn’t meant to ever be preserved, that hurt the gaming industry and represented gaming’s modern backsliding into corporate greed.
Isn’t Skyrim one of those games where you can mess around for a bit and eventually come back and proceed like nothing ever happened?
In Fallout 4 you can use the Nuka World DLC to push the Minutemen to whatever settlement you left Preston in or the Castle but I think there’s always the option for redemption because they are the fail safe faction. I figured Skyrim would have something similar.
I stole a book for a quest with a shitton of witnesses, ran away, got out of town because of the guards having patching issues, stopped at my home and dumped my mostly-stolen inventory and returned and turned myself into the guards paying 40 gold to redeem myself for stealing a priceless book. Skyrim is a masterpiece of realism I tell you!
I’m excited for party animals but honestly a bit miffed that they added microtransactions to it. Premium cash store with a battle pass, hooray… At least it’ll be great fun with friends.
I already sold my physical copy and I really don’t regret it at all.
My group of friends and I where really excited and played through the story together, but the endgame just wasn’t fun. I don’t know what exactly it was, but we kinda stoped playing.
The new season and “patches” didn’t really improve it a lot imho… a shame, really!
The game feels unfinished. The seasons forcing you to reset so shortly after the game just launched only to replay content you just went through in order to get season rewards that don’t even pay for the next season’s pass feels punitive.
I haven’t played since the first season launched, and likely won’t until they release the expansions. It just doesn’t have enough to keep the game interesting in the meantime, which is a shame because mechanically it’s a much better game than D3, but suffers the same problems with being a single player / co-op PvE game that Blizzard is desperately trying to make into an MMO.
I have room in my life for exactly one gacha game, which I don’t spend money on. Sometimes this is a fun little distraction, even though progress is slow without buying currency. This is how I felt about Record Keeper before they shut down the global version. I love FF7 so I’m giving this a shot, but it’s been a week and I’m struggling. There are so many superimposed mechanics that it feels like a new player starting a free to play game at year 5 or 6 of its life, after they’ve steadily added new mechanics, currencies, and other powercreep for years. But it hasn’t been out for years, it’s been out for a week and there are already so many things to keep track of. It feels like work.
Also, the “automatic” battle AI is VERY good. Better than I am. And you can double the speed so the battles go quicker. At first I was relieved because it meant I didn’t have to pay attention while grinding, but why am I doing this at all if I’m not even playing it?
Imo the anger is a bit misdirected. Making a toned down version of the game takes equal the amount of resources, if not more compared to other ports. Performance wise the switch always has been a toaster, even compared to the last gen of consoles. There probably are now phones with more graphical power, so ports to hardware that is so far behind is difficult.
I’ve ported games to switch and there is a lot of extra loops to go through to make it even remotely run at decent frame rates.
The publisher could have made the switch version cheaper, but they probably invested more resources into it than porting it between xbox and playstation, so i can kind of understand why they didn’t.
The argument “it looks worse so it should be cheaper” is kind of questionable, when the console they are buying it for just doesn’t allow for much better considering the art direction. If the switch was as powerful as the ps5 or current xbox, they would have made the game look as good as it is on all the other platforms.
A valid question is if this needed a switch port at all, and considering the backlash, the publishers are probably asking themselves the same question.
Aren’t most Switch games still $60, though? Just flipping through the US E-store, the only game I saw at $70 was Tears of the Kingdom, and this version of Mortal Kombat is not going to compare favorably to that.
But typically publishers are not making the price on release based on what platform you run it on. It looks worse, but that isn’t really the game’s fault. It has the same amount of cost attached to it as any other port of the game, if not more. On the other hand, from the consumer perspective, I can 100% understand why someone wouldn’t want to spend $70 on this.
In the end, will it be worth the money they put in to port this game to less-than last gen? I have no idea.
The argument “it looks worse so it should be cheaper” is kind of questionable, when the console they are buying it for just doesn’t allow for much better considering the art direction.
I disagree.
When you have to pay the same or more for something less then that's simply not justified for the consumer. If the console can't handle anything better and is that expensive to port over, then you should simply not port your game over to it. If that's a general Switch problem, then the Switch maybe shouldn't be a thing either. I thought that's how markets are supposed to work, no?
But it’s not something less, it’s something less, in your device. That’s the distinction.
If the console can’t handle anything better and is that expensive to port over, then you should simply not port your game over to it
If enough people want to play it on the switch, the investment is worth it.
I thought that’s how markets are supposed to work, no?
Well, if it were up to you maybe, but if there’s enough people that will buy it just to play it on the switch, then the markets are working as intended.
The Switch is also a whole generation older than the PS5 and latest X1 Series X (or whatever it’s really called). Important thing to factor in when understanding why the Switch port is so compromised. They aren’t scaling games down from more powerful consoles of the same generation anymore, they’re porting games from much more powerful consoles of the next generation.
Still trying to shoehorn in a "runtime fee". That's not going to work and with this model it's pointless anyway. Just make it a 4% revenue for sales after $1 million. Same end results (actually potentially more in fees) without all the runtime issues. Make it apply only to a specific version and later and after a certain date and then you also don't have the retroactive problem and the massive blowback.
It works for that market too even without install fees, you just make it a percentage of revenue generated from microtransactions. It's still tied to the game.
Quick math shows that's irrelevant with a 4% revenue cap, as I pointed out in my original comment, and at best they will be paid the same as just doing a 4% revenue fee. More likely they will get some amount less than 4% from most devs.
The only reason I see for them going this route instead is to claim they are still royalty free, install fees aren't royalties. Which is BS anyway.
Tes 3: Morrowind, every NPCs can be killed and of course if you kill some of them before they got usefull to progress the main quest you are locked.
At their death there is a notification message like “you fucked up, you can reload or continue to play in this world forever doomed”. BUT, in my first playthrough some broken mod I installed was hiding this message …
Also, in the same game you could lose quest item and be unable to finish the main quest. But that kind of require you to be stupid on purpose, because it’s obvious what item are important.
EDIT: found the in game message: " With this character’s death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
Hey man, Morrowind quests don’t hold your hand! It’s not like there’s a minimap and some big ass marker over his head saying “don’t kill and rob this half naked dude who looks like a skooma addict in his tiny studio apartment because he’s secretly the spy master for the main faction in the game”! I was young! I chose violence!
It was some small QoL changes in the UI and menus, recommended by my friend who recommended me the game. I don’t remember exactly the changes but there was nothing big added or changed in the gameplay
Good news. You can still beat the game if the “thread of prophecy is severed”, but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get “almost back on track”. And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
Yes indeed, I know what you are talking about. But I would not really consider that the “normal” ending as described by OP. Even if the ending scene itself is exactly the same, it’s a very different path and clearly a much harder one.
I stuck with Gamepass because I am a PC gamer. I toyed with PSN but the PS5 controller was not natively recognized by the client at the time I was testing it, which is dumb as fuck. Steam will pick up the controller and use their drivers for most games, but the PSN service just didn’t work with the PS5 controller natively.
Yeah I used to play on PC too but some of the AAA titles had terrible ports that required more performance in my opinion than needed and it was cheaper to switch to ps5 there is no perfect solution I guess lol but the ps5 can play those titles with damn good graphics and not drop many frames but on my PC framrate just sucked and I got sick of windows bull shit as well.
The games making over a million are the ones who can afford the new rates. This is so regressive. It should get more expensive as your sales go up, not down. Small devs should be charged less than big studios
games
Aktywne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.