Much as I’ve come to hate Xbox, this could be the beginning of signs of monopoly - they don’t have so much competition anymore, so they can do what they want. Certainly doesn’t help that unofficial controllers have never been good.
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
I remember distinctly Danganronpa’s problem with shock value.
I finished the first case of the third game, and thought “Wow! That was incredible! I hadn’t anticipated that ending at all!”
And then, once the dust on the case had settled, because of the effects of that change in circumstance, I had no interest in playing the rest of the game.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
The only Chinese game I’ve spent money on is a mystery game by an indie studio. And, in a bit of cultural irony, its premise is based on a famous Japanese franchise.
Don’t really intend to consider Chinese games much, or spend money on the F2P ones.
…Great, so you’re going to start giving just as much criticism to devs for writing debug logs every so often?
There’s an order of magnitude between a difficult task slowing operations, and pure inefficiency / bad coding doing it. Can you describe something that actually proves you know the slightest thing about how programming works?
The “slows down your game” bit has always been hotly contested. There are certainly occasions where a modified exe without Denuvo runs faster, combined with accusations that that specific game integrated Denuvo in a very poor last-minute implementation that calls it dozens of times a second.
I don’t work on video games, but my own experience with software engineering and release management suggests those sorts of murky answers are likely to be the norm.