Billboard ads can cost hundreds of thousands depending on the location and duration (e.g. Times Square, NY). TV ads, YT ads, streaming services ads, and search engine ads likely add up too. Big streamers will likely take quite a bit too. Maybe they’ll do a press conference to promote their game, which can be incredibly expensive location-wise.
But I agree, I can’t comprehend how it can be that expensive either.
Don’t forget marketing: be it movies or games, marketing likes to cost as much as the production of the media itself.
Sadly it seems to be necessary as many people just won’t know about some piece of media without it. Streamers play games they are paid to play, “reviewers” cover games they are paid to cover or know about through the hype generated by ads.
There’s similar legal issues with the “right to a private copy” many European countries have. Those laws were made to allow people to make a copy of their media, in case the original breaks. Important to note is that those private copies weren’t allowed to be distributed to anyone, not even lent to a friend.
This worked well at the time for cassettes and VHS, which did break occasionally.
But at some point most CDs came with copy protection, which got broken pretty quickly. But at least in Germany, they are still considered “working copy protection” and thus are illegal to circumvent, even for a otherwise legal private copy.
The same is the case with Switch games: Copyright owners use copy protection to make otherwise legal use cases illegal.
E.g. Nintendo made it so that Switch games can only be played by decrypting the ROMs, which is illegal for anyone except Nintendo.
At least that’s their standpoint which was never tested in court but it’s not unlikely that it’d be accepted.
Analogue likely doesn’t emulate the hardware at the transistor level, as it’s far more difficult than doing what most software emulators do.
From an interesting (altough non-conclusive) HN-thread:
Without seeing the code, it’s impossible to know where Analog’s implementation falls on the spectrum of software emulation vs hardware simulation. There is nothing magical about FPGAs that automatically makes anything developed with them a 1:1 representation of real hardware. In fact, there are plenty of instances where the FPGA version of a particular console is literally just a representation of a popular emulator only in verilog/vhdl. In many instances, even the best FPGA implementations of some systems are still only simulating system level behavior. Off the top of my head, one famously difficult case is audio, where many chips have analog circuitry that cannot be fully simulated. [1]
I disagree with the notion that it’s better for the cheaters to have an easier time (and less chance of being detected), but you’re right, BattleEye doesn’t solve the cheating problem for GTA.
Rockstar should fix their netcode and run game server on dedicated server, instead of their customers PC’s. I’d think decting aimbot isn’t the biggest issue, while cheaters are able to break entire lobbies…
IMO no game should require client side anti cheat except for shooters, where looking through walls and aimbot is actually difficult to detect server side. At least for those is it possible to find valid arguments (except for being lazy).
Cheat makers are likely behind this, asthey have monetary incentives to do so. If its Linux users I’d feel bad because stopping others from playing just because they can’t, is extremely bad behaviour.
It’s one year cooldown after joining a family share. I.e. if you leave half a year after joining, you have to wait another half a year to join another family share.
Adults can leave a family at any time, however, they will need to wait 1 year from when they joined the previous family to create or join a new family.
I wonder whether they’ll only release an OLED Switch, or if they’ll sell the LED Switch first again.
As an enthusiast I’d be pretty pissed knowing to either wait a few years for the OLED or having to buy a second switch at some point. Reason being I can’t imagine going back to an LED after gaming on an OLED for years. My phone constantly shows me what my Steam Deck is missing.
Iirc they also use BattleEye in addition to EAC, so depending on their implementation it might not be as simple (unless they put in some work).
Epic talks about anti-cheat on Linux not being good enough for them since they aren’t kernel level. Which might be fair since Fortnite is big, altough most people probably won’t change their OS while cheats are also available on Windows anyway. At the end of the day Fortnite is only one of many games which don’t support anti cheat on Linux for whatever reason.
Yes, but especially for 3D games this often leads to worse performance and bugs, since the developer still has to be able to test the build. The big reason proton is so great is that Valve is responsible for fixing games on proton, while the dev just has to support a single (Windows) build.
Obviously some devs also fix a bug only found with proton, but it’s something they optionally do, without taking responsibility for fixing all bugs.
If it was so simple for a game studio to release on all platforms, we’d have macOS x86 & macOS ARM builds too.
Iirc they did make changes to the engine, which would have required paying an external developer to port it again. It’s sad to see but it’s the reality of native games without a Linux dev in-house.
What I’m more angry about is how they didn’t make the proton version default, instead they kept the useless offline Linux native port. I’ve read too many comments thinking Rocket League online doesn’t work on Linux.
I don’t like this decision, since I know the lack of support for different platforms than Windows as someone playing on Linux. Valve invests into proton and thus game support on Steam Deck and ChromeOS, so I’d have thought they’d make sure CS runs on macOS too.