So this is basically an observation about raising prices. But I think there’s a misconception on social media that you have to be reading the news and on your soapbox to alert people to those things.
Pricing has always very readily affected people’s spending behavior. Not just people that follow gaming news, but people browsing GameStop for whatever’s new. We’ve even seen that - stats are showing people spent much less on games this year. Some people are even spending less through the option of going for a subscription rather than buying 8 games through the year. The publisher plan is certainly to tune up that cost with time, but personally, I don’t think that plan has a high chance of success.
And there’s a very worrying reality on the publisher side that gamers have many alternatives, especially as quality falls in these AAA products. You can imagine someone starved for a Soulslike might’ve spent $70 on generic copycat “Folly of the Dodgeroll 7”, if not for seeing Hollow Knight Silksong for $20 one shelf over.
So basically, I never hated the subscription model itself as a “weapon of capitalism”; just the constant attempts to shrinkflate as has been happening to most else.
I have different reasons I hate MS and Game Pass specifically, but I was never convinced by this argument.
It works on the argument of “We would like to stop offering direct purchase models, and require consumers to play by subscription.” But no one has done that. No one has really come close to doing that.
People argue the price will steadily go up; and that’s one of the reasons I don’t play Game Pass anymore. I knew that I wouldn’t maintain access to the games on there, which is why I bought the ones I wanted to keep playing - not very many.
Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.
This excuse stopped working the day I opened a tough-as-nails game like Furi, saw it had a difficulty menu, said “That’s nice”, and went back to challenging myself against the bosses on default settings.
It’s such a huge cop-out of self control, and especially falls to acknowledge that the forms of difficulty in a game are often varied - and someone might suck at only one of them.
I never actually liked FromSoft’s themselves, but several Soulslikes I really enjoyed did away with runbacks, or always had checkpoints right before bosses.
I really just want people to start evaluating each design decision Dark Souls made on its own - stop worshipping the whole as being perfect, because it most definitely is not. So many of the knowledge checks (poise, anyone?) are just there for experienced players to lord over confused shrubs.
This could very much represent troubles not just in video game development, but project development in an investor-driven market entirely.
Everyone is focused on short-term wins and profits - so they can demonstrate they’re a fantastic manager making incredible things. They hire 1000 people, then show the grandiose things they made with those people in 2 years so they can take more investment. But the way creative work goes, there are far better ways to play that lottery - they just don’t involve as much active management, and are far less showy.
As a publisher, you could just start 50 small studios of only 10 employees each, with occasional external support as needed to each one, and give all of them 5 years to develop. That would equate to the same or much lesser cost as some of these gigantic multi-outsourced projects, but it means investments are left for longer. And of course, few of them would be a “Hollow Knight” or “Minecraft”, but just enough of them would likely succeed to pay for all the others.
You can see similar concerns in R&D and other similar fields across industries, that give randomized and unpredictable benefit when every manager is watching every quarter’s earnings.
I’m gonna be real with you: I don’t like Dark Souls. It felt poorly designed and obtuse with no payoff. But, it took me a long time to learn it’s completely unconstructive to bash it in places where people are admiring it. Whether I like it or not, other people do.
If you must, give a word of caution so people know what to expect. “It’s a Metroidvania, I didn’t like it because it’s very black and white, and goes hard on difficulty.”
Sometimes it’s an unfortunate demo effect where the devs have a form of gameplay they prefer that just doesn’t impress investors on a big screen. So, they shift toward the run-and-gun playstyle.
I seem to remember getting surprised by some AAAs in this way, where I expected them to be brainless action, then find myself strategizing in ways that E3 didn’t show since those bits are slower paced. Haven’t watched the video just yet though.
Much as I love XIV’s story, I really needed to break up story progression with other content, just for variety. I leveled up all crafters, did many daily raids, etc.
That video is completely out of date. I watched a sampling of the bugs they were showing, and none of them appear for me, even when playing with bots.
I remember it being shared on release, and its focus on things like physics within maps was a very specific thing - after Half-Life 2 many games gave up on physics especially in online, because it was more likely to lead to glitchy and unexpected behavior than emergent gameplay.
There’s so much in that video you’d have to pick out what matters to make your case, but to take melee reactions: B4B didn’t want the shove to be so powerful or delay the horde much, so it made sense zombies wouldn’t fall to the ground from one shove; the animation length would end up locking up the difficulty.
Death reactions is another gameplay choice. With automatic weapons, I wasted alot of ammo in L4D2 simply because it wasn’t instantly clear an enemy was dead - they were just playing out their lengthy Oscar death. Sometimes it’s a tradeoff between showcasing the enemy design, and showcasing the weapon’s effects when dozens of other enemies are bearing down.
I feel like a growing solution would be to simulcast to Twitch as well as other platforms, and hopefully slowly encourage users to view via the other platforms.
Kudos to the OP - I stopped watching Twitch when Bezos went full Nazi, but couldn’t get YouTube off my list.
Maybe it matches with my hate of L4D’s high-level-focused Versus mode, but I couldn’t make it past two games of Evolve, while I’ve played a lot more B4B.
That’s honestly exactly what’s kept me away from CRPGs. The premise often seems to be based around something like ruined worlds or corrupt empires (both, in Wasteland’s case), with little hope for massive change. The old poster child, Fallout, runs its whole train off of treating endless grim fighting as an absurd thing to not even care about, with its tagline “War never changes”. Fun sometimes, but never meaningful.