I was kinda hoping the enoughmuskspam community would be focused on talking about innovative tech/engineering work happening at other companies. I guess that’s more the point of “futurology”, but still…
His companies are fine. (minus Twitter) SpaceX and Tesla are great he just needs to keep his fucking mouth shut and do his job. The man is cringe and is taking his billionaire status too hard.
All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.
I mostly agree. Games of all types can co-exist and knowing this doesn't ruin enjoyment of the games that I do play.
Like Skyrim modding for example, there's so many mods that display fanservice, nudity and even intercourse. Does that ruin the game for me? Not at all. In fact, I still play it despite that knowledge. I simply choose not to use mods that I don't want to use.
Or a certain magicky wizarding game, that game can exist too without wishing death on people who want to play it. Doesn't mean I have to play it, nor does it ruin gaming for me.
Instead, the logical thing to do would be to pass on this game and find another. I fully understand that BG3 is one of the games of our lifetime, but it's not the game for me. (Of which there are many)
As someone who grew up watching my father crawl through dungeons (I think he enjoyed IWD more than BG), it's great to see Baldur's Gate at the forefront. Hopefully more of my childhood favourite RPGs will come back. I'd love to see Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter Nights brought back.
The wizarding game upsets me. I grew up with that series and it is literally a game I would have loved to play as a kid, but I don't want to support the TERF. Low-key hoping it comes to ps+ so I can get it without giving them money.
Nobody really expects RPG's to be as big and deep as BG3, they just want a complete game that works without shitty microtransactions everywhere and always online for no reason. Plus, having interesting characters and storylines, quests that can be solved in more than one way, and gameplay that's actually formed by taking player feedback and listening to it is what people reacted well to, among other things. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't even have Denuvo!
If there's one thing that I hope competitors learn from Larian and BG3, it's that respecting your players and giving them what they want leads to success. Similar to Elden Ring and from software, like that video mentioned. Now compare BG3 to Diablo 4 and Immortal, or the upcoming Starfield and you'll see why people love it. It's not about specs or scope, it's about designing a game to be actually FUN.
It's not about specs or scope, it's about designing a game to be actually FUN.
This is the key point that these publishers and studios are trying to avoid.
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on designing microtransaction psychologically manipulative money sinks (dark designs)?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on creating addiction in the player-base so that they keep playing the game (and spending money)?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit DLC (not actual new content)?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit to satisfy shareholders?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on shit the devs don't want, but executives do?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit padding for marketing purposes?
How much of most AAA budgets are spent on bullshit DRM?
And keep in mind, by budgets here, I mean both the dollar amount AND time spent by devs that could be spent elsewhere (which is part of the dollar amount since salaries, but I wanted to make it clear that time spent is also important).
Some of the absolute best games in the industry have literally none of that, and people still want to play and buy them years after release because gasp they're actually fun, but these publishers and devs don't want to compare to those, because they WANT the industry to be a bunch of "GAAS" bullshit that's basically a vacuum pushed into people's wallets, cause hey, if it worked for Candy Crush....
Nintendo has IP lawyers. They have to, at their scale, because they will constantly be bombarded by patent trolls, licensing companies etc. trying to extract profit out of Nintendo. So, like any other large business, they hire IP lawyers to protect themselves.
Most patent disagreements are resolved by cross-licensing. That’s where one business says, in response to a law suit, “oh, but you’re actually using 6 of our patents, so maybe we can come to an agreement”. A patent is both a shield and a sword. Even against trolls they can be useful, as they can be used to argue against troll arguments, if it gets to court, or pull in other business to the defense, if helpful.
IP lawyers know this. So they extract every patent they can out of everything a company does, as a way to build up the IP bank.
So, I highly doubt “Nintendo wants to prevent others” bla bla. It’s just IP lawyers doing their job.
I’ve sat in MANY discovery sessions with IP lawyers where they push and prod at software I, or my team, have written. “So, what you’ve effectively done is written a unique data structure to connect elements in memory?!”, “no, it’s a linked list, next question please”.
“It gave me space to breathe a little more,” she said. “I remember a moment where I did get harassed, I don’t know what it was, but it was either a Twitter [message] or an email. And [when I saw it], I was like, Oh, that hurts. And then I was like, Wait a minute. That hurts. That’s cool. Being able to feel again, that’s a form of healing.” And by stepping away for a bit, she hopes to keep giving herself more and more space to grow.
I learned a lot from Anita Sarkeesian’s work, and it was a nice thing to see, growing up as a girl who had to justify my existence in the space, despite gaming making up a huge portion of my youth
The point is punishing the people who pay money for this sh*t, apparently (and they will, because for everybody who refuses to buy something that comes with malware bundled in there will be at least two screaming "SHUT UP AND TAKE OUR MONEY!")
I consistently get far more hours of playtime per dollar spent with indie games I buy for $5-$15 than $60 AAA games. (I say $60, not $70, because I haven’t bought anything at $70, and don’t intend to start.)
If they want to charge $70 for games, maybe release them in a complete state and don’t include microtransactions and offer post-launch support for a decent period of time. Their ‘Video games haven’t changed price since the 90s! The price isn’t keeping up with inflation!’ argument is a crock of shit because in the 90s, you bought a game and that was that. There’d maybe be a $40 expansion a year later that roughly doubled the content in the game. There were no $60 games with $150+ of day 1 DLC.
Outside of Wow, I never found a AAA game that can hold my attention past 100 hours, hell 40 is a strech. Its almost never worth it at full price let alone 70.
I have a handful of $30 1000+ hour indy games I may be playing 20 years from now.
I have a difficult time with this announcement from Capcom specifically, because the only AAA games I’ve consistently gotten 300-1000+ hours from have been Monster Hunter games, and I really don’t want the enshitification to claim MHWilds. If it releases at $70 and without excessive microtransactions, I’ll have a really hard time not buying it at that price. On the other hand, if they do have those microtransactions and a $70 price tag, I’ll probably just ignore it, as much as I’ll hate doing so.
It’s been a slippery slope but I personally don’t mind current MH (World & Rise) microtransactions because they aren’t at all necessary for the game not prevent any kind of unlock.
Otoh, if they cracked down on modding because they weren’t selling cosmetics…
Hours per dollar isn't a great metric for all sorts of reasons, but I do fully understand typically getting more value for your dollar out of indie games. That's not the only thing that makes this an apples and oranges comparison though. Games in the 90s and 00s were often cranked out in 9-18 months, with a number of developers in the single and double digits, compared to a lot of productions today taking hundreds of people to develop for 5 years before they come to market. Capcom in particular hasn't been getting too crazy with development timelines, because their projects usually aren't overscoped compared to their competitors, but we're still talking way more salaries to pay for a much longer period of time to create a single video game these days. Rather than DLC, it was designing games around strategy guides, hint hotlines, and coin operation in the arcades, resulting in decisions like making the first level really easy and the next level really hard, so you couldn't finish it with one rental, and you'd need to pay for additional materials to find out the obtuse answers to problems in the game. Duck Tales may have sold 1.67 million copies while its break even point was way, way, way lower than it is for the likes of Dragon's Dogma 2, which might need to sell that many copies to make back the money it took to create it, and it's not even a foregone conclusion that it will sell that many either.
Hours per dollar isn’t a great metric for all sorts of reasons
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much I’ll spend on a game. If I’m only going to spend 20 hours on it, I’ll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (‘Finished’ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), I’d feel pretty bad about that purchase.
I think the hours you get out of it is a valid component of the value you get out of a game, but it's trivial to make a game longer, and a tight 5-10 hour game can frequently be more valuable to me than a 70 hour game, a lot of Capcom's games among them. Part of the reason Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones are getting slammed in reviews right now is because they made games that could be played for hundreds of hours, and that happened at the expense of making great games that you'd be done with in 15 hours. When is the last time you bought a movie or went to the theater? I'll wager a guess it cost you more than $3 even if it was really long.
And all hours are not created equal either. An action game that takes 50 hours would probably be exhausting, but a turn based game like an RPG or a 4X would feel right at home there, since you're spending a lot of time in menus making slower decisions.
Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically play… if I’m buying a AAA action game, it’s something something like Sekiro, and I’ll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, I’m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesn’t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - I’ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. I’m also not against short games… I often prefer short games, but I also won’t pay $60 for them; I’ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. I’m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
There’ve definitely been games that I didn’t get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have played… Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and it’s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. That’s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); it’s a “waste” from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes that’s okay, and I’m willing to splurge. I’ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
How we each choose to spend our money is very much a personal decision, and if you feel you need more length out of a game in order to get your money's worth, no one can really tell you you're wrong. Something to consider though is that your dollars spent decides what gets made in the future. If enough people feel the way you do, it's no wonder so many games are designed to be repetitive time sucks instead of tighter, better paced experiences, because they're not making their money back on a 15 hour AAA game if everyone waits for it to drop in price to $15 first. Personally, I've seen plenty of my favorite franchises become worse off for being larger, longer experiences (that also cost them more time and money to make, meaning these games come out less frequently), and I'd love for them to return to the excellent games they used to be when they were leaner. Halo going open world hurts the most.
Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesn’t have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.
Sure, but plenty of my other favorite FPS campaigns don't have that, and I definitely won't get 60 hours of playtime out of them, but they're still my favorites. It's been a long time since we got a great FPS campaign, and I hope it's not because the market those games are targeting have a $1/hr threshold to meet. $1/hr is also a fairly arbitrary metric in the face of inflation, because it essentially means that games need to keep being made on scrappier and scrappier budgets as time goes on in order to meet it. It's a fool's errand to try to convince someone that their opinion is wrong, so hopefully that's not what it sounds like I'm doing, but personally, I find it to be a poor measure of the value of a game or any kind of entertainment for that matter.
I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldn’t expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldn’t buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesn’t really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games I’ve bought lately have been $10-$15 “boomer shooters”.
I don't buy modern AAA FPS either, but that's because they've been chasing those longer play times lately, or they end up not particularly interesting like Immortals of Aveum and then blame the market for not buying their game. I'm waiting for the indie scene to get past boomer shooters and start emulating the era just after that, and I'll gladly pay more than $15 to have it. There are a couple of candidates, but nothing for sure.
In the shooter space, just things I'm hopeful for, but I don't know how likely it is they'll scratch that itch. I've got my eyes on Mouse, Core Decay, and Phantom Fury.
@mike591 I'm excited for this game because they've built up a lot of sensible gameplay elements so early on in development. The social system seems more interesting than The Sims 4, where you could become best friends and marry someone on the same day you met them (I've done this so often, even with conflicting personality traits). It takes both time and effort to befriend the other Paras! That is what I desire from a social sim, investing time into creating the story for my character and having that time feel meaningful.
The Homeworld 3 demo is impressive and I'm really enjoying Lightyear Frontier as well. Definitely going to buy both when they come out in March. I've been hooked on the Homeworld universe since I started playing it in the 90's (25 years ago! lol I'm old) so it's been quite a long wait but it looks like BBI have done a great job. I've loved them since Hardspace Shipbreaker so I knew this would be something special.
If you're the type who wants to unwind from the hyper-realistic art style of most mainstream games nowadays, while also exploring modern Filipino life and culture through the eyes of a young adult student, the Until Then demo might be up your alley. Aside from the pixelated art style coming from the devs themselves, who are also wholly Filipino themselves, there's quite a substantial attention to detail when it comes to the greater Metro Manila and the suburban locations around, including our local circuses. Oh, and there's also quite a bit of mysteriousness and some philospophy to it, as vaguely evidenced by its Playstation 5 trailer.
An issue with the soundtrack is the only thing that makes sense, but unfortunately I don't know if 2K would be willing to spend the money to renew the license and keep the game on Steam. At least it's still for sale on GOG, like the article mentions, and it's eighty percent off.
No problem. Unfortunately, looks like GOG had to delist it as well. Seems the only way to play it now is through a physical copy and Xbox backwards compatibility.
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