Fair enough. Still, games used to be vastly cheaper in my country and the asking price for the basic version of Starfield is 80 USD. There is no way any game is worth this much of my income.
Like I said. The price tag on Donkey Kong from 1994 says 799sek which in today’s market is worth 66 usd. I can’t be arsed to follow index and calculate how much that was in -94 but it’s a lot more than Starfield.
My only point here is that games haven’t really increased in price ever. Anyone claiming it has, is wrong. We can discuss the other parameters all day with (un)finished products, mtx, bugs, paid dlc etc. The fact still stands that games in 2023 haven’t vastly increased in price at all. And we have a lot of free options now as well that didn’t exist back in the ninetees.
In 1994 you were buying a physical, manufactured product which you owned.
Now you are temporarily licensing access to something that doesn’t exist, can’t be transferred or resold or backed up or modified, has unlimited reproduction potential for no cost, and sells at scales unimaginable in 1994 dwarfing all other consumer markets in total revenue.
The expense was probably quite considerable. Not only do you have to have the game ROM on a chip, you would also need Nintendo's lockout chip too. If your game had a battery save system (DKC did) you would also need to buy a RAM chip and watch battery too. That's ignoring any enhancement chips as DKC didn't use any (but many other late generation games did).
And all that before you get to the fact that the only who could officially make these boards was Nintendo. Meaning there isn't exactly much competition driving prices down. Sure, Nintendo couldn't quite take the piss the way they could in the NES days, as Sega was all too eager to try and attract new games for its console, but unless you wanted to completely remake your game, you're dealing with the big N's bullshit.
The boards could probably have been made much cheaper today than in the 90s, as ROM memory was expensive AF, even the couple-of-MB ones used in the consoles of the day.
There's a reason PS1 and Saturn games were massively cheaper to buy than N64 games.
If you buy a game today, does it come with a free SSD to install it in? Does it have a paper manual and a nice box? Is it even finished? Games aren’t cheaper, you’re just getting scammed.
Can't help but feel like that was a missed opportunity. Exploration being risky could lead the player to make meaningful choices with meaningful consequences. It certainly seemed to have that effect in Dark Souls (yes I just invoked Dark Souls please don't dogpile me).
Excited to play “multiplayer” again with my friend. Discord and streaming wasn’t possible for me back then so we just used Skype voice to describe what we found in each puzzle. Of course we’d give each other a chance to figure it out ourselves first, but we had so much fun for a couple weeks.
Monopoly doesn’t mean “Largest market share”. It’s a real term with a real meaning.
Monopoly:
the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
What, exactly, does Valve control? They don’t require exclusivity, they don’t require their DRM, they don’t require the use of their network system. Hell, they don’t even require you to to give them 30% if you sell your own key.
Valve is also not a publicly traded company, while this doesn’t mean you can fully trust them it does mean they aren’t required to seek profit at all costs. This allows then to do things like, support Linux, make their own hardware (twice after their first attempt was a failure), work on Proton, develope games that make them no money, etc.
Itch.io, GOG, EA, Epic, Windows Store, Game Pass, Humble Bundle, personal websites. These are all examples of places you can buy video games on computers.
Timmy Tencent’s propaganda is working on you if you think Valve is any sort of monopoly.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.
I don’t think Steam qualifies still. There are still plenty of competitors such as GOG, Green Man Gaming, itch.io, Epic, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, and so on.
The “significant durable market power” part is why I went on to explain how they don’t lock you into their ecosystem. How can Valve raise prices or exclude their competitors when they literally do not have any mechanisms in place to do any of those things?
I have no problem with someone getting paid for their work. In fact, I encourage people to get paid for their work. But if you decide to sabotage your own product for the sake of attacking people who refuse to pay for it, you just make your product worse for everyone who did pay for it and you do nothing to actually solve the piracy issue. In that case, you’re reaping what you sow.
The modder, PureDark is talking about putting in anti-theft mines into their mods. Exactly like the Mad Max game where you can’t win and it makes it impossibly difficult if you’re playing a cracked copy. Below is the quote from the article, emphasis mine.
PureDark also responded to how quickly the Starfield mod was cracked.
"It was expected since it was something I put together within a day or two, but I did get enough patrons so it’s done its job. So from now on I will place hidden mines in all my mods to make it harder for these people.
Wow a day or two of work and you earn probably 200k+ from it, crazy. Guess he is hurting for cash or he see’s the end of the cash train as other people start making equivalent mods. Or maybe he is afraid of bethesda/nividia/amd coming down on him.
It’s a day of work to implement the DRM, not the mod itself, which he did release day 1 for free on Nexus, only the frame gen version is behind the patreon wall, additionally he’s released many such DLSS+FG mods for various games (which all come with the sub) so he has a lot of experience implementing it and has clearly gotten it down pretty well.
Every game has its own challenges but Starfield was particularly easy (according to him) because of how FSR was implemented
That… is not at all specified what kind of “mine” it would be. You’re assuming it’s innocuous, everyone else is assuming it’s malicious. But we’re all making assumptions.
Which has never happened in the history of forever and I’m sure this will go just fine after he spent a whole two days implementing DRM in the first place.
Sorry, I dont mean to laugh, but where have you been?
The bulk of gamers only care about their instant gratification. If they actually were capable of taking a stand then there’d be a lot less awful companies pulling in billion dollar+ game releases.
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