Hopefully you’re referring to Visa/Paypal, not Itch.
One place that comes to mind is Verotel. I barely know them, but supposedly one of their star attributes is their use for adult businesses. Likely someone else knows them better.
I just picked up Beyond Galaxyland in a Fanatical bundle. I have not played it yet, so tentative recommendation, but reviews are indicating it may be a hidden gem.
For an older one I really liked: Cosmic Star Heroine. Pixel art, great soundtrack especially for bosses, and fantastic combat mechanics. It’s all very uniquely designed to encourage high-risk gameplay and variety on every turn, pushing moments where you buff yourself up for one or two supremely powerful strikes in a fight, or even sacrifice a character to KO the last enemy (all characters heal to full after every fight)
For even older: As someone who had that same kind of music-swelling nostalgia around FF7, I managed to win back that feeling when I played “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky”. It’s a two-part game (sold as two units), that begins a giant series of games, but I only played it out of curiosity. Even though I didn’t fully enjoy later games, Trails had both a lot of enjoyable and unique elements to its combat, and a very emotionally written story that occasionally throws in silliness to retain charm. Though the game itself is old, it got a series of patches by a “master porting engineer” at Falcom that adds features like an experimental fast-forward mode to help with long battle animations.
On grinding, one great thing about the games is their XP system. They grant a lot more XP anytime you’re underleveled for enemies, and much less when you’re overleveled - helping to equalize the experience after just a few fights, many of which can be short thanks to fast forwarding. But, the story is still long overall.
You’ll see a Trails 3, which is very optional in my view. Weirdly, it’s a bit more of a “lore dump” for future games than closing off any major plot threads. To me it was a little bit of a signal of them taking their “Marvel universe” style of world a bit too far.
There’s even an argument that SKG is a good financial motive for studios. Consumer electronics/entertainment spending is down, and it’s not hard to connect the idea that people are less enthused about video games when they aren’t sure they get to keep them. Which are you more likely to buy: Snake oil from a merchant on a turbo-driven truck ready to leave town? Or multiple panel-certified medicine from an extremely tightly-regulated industry.
A) Honest mistake. I appreciated people pointing out the country of origin.
B) While the specifics of my comment were off the mark, even with this group being Australian, this group affects world commerce, and American politics has strong influence on that world in turn. Just like how president of the USA would have a big effect on the levels of violence and cruelty in Gaza. Visa is an American corporation, and they’re clearly quite on board with this censorship influence.
If GTA V is allowed, I’m pretty certain most of what we’ve seen from NSFW games is as well. Regardless, a payment company should not be acting as judge for such things, just as media companies should not act as judge on copyright infringement on YouTube.
That seems like a great idea. Now that so many games are much less demanding on your gaming machine than others (playing a Phoenix Wright game, or Stardew Valley, or Minecraft), holding back a bit of power makes a lot of sense. If implemented right, I imagine you wouldn’t see any effect from this on most games.
I don’t doubt that game studio business models have gotten scummier, but I never liked the phrase “The full experience”.
There’s a few Bioware games I can cite where it was a terrible setup that added story-critical quests through DLC, but most often, a “special edition” or even the season passes tend to add very optional, often-ugly, costumes to games that already offer a number of costumes with the base game.
Saying it often makes people picture that they don’t get an ending to their story, or are locked out of abilities. There are live service games with that issue - the “hero model” being a frequent offender, but in the best of those games, the game’s base price is low and even the guide authors will acknowledge few people should feel the need to buy every character.
Their other good thing in my eyes is not overextending.
They have been profitable for a long time, and built up a reserve. Shitty CEOs would demand they use those reserves to branch out into a VR division. Make a room-sized toy, a massively online Second Life space, a chain of theme parks. Anything to show they’re hiring, growing, and that the ROI will triple every few years.
Obviously, had they done any of that, they’d be doing a lot more firing now because they’d have no reserves once all those plans go belly up.
So, it’s likely helpful their culture is quartered in Japan where the long term health of the company is treasured and short term gains are not worshipped so much.
The worst bit is reflecting on how the first movie portrayed it all.
A horrific empire, but a secret mysterious force, not believed in by many, that can help you fight it. Classic warriors using heavy swords in an age of laser rifles.
I don’t even really know what the message around the force was in The Last Jedi. I didn’t even bother watching Force Awakens.
I remember playing the demo for Remake. The guard scorpion took an age and multiple cycles to beat; apparently it’s not meant to, but something about its damage mechanics was just incredibly unclear to me. I was using magic and abilities how it said it wanted me to, but in an action game, those mechanics get much harder to parse. Would’ve preferred turn-taking.
I thought about doing this, but my plan would be to attach a thumbnail on every piece of AI art declaring “Placeholder AI work”. Then release the game for free that way to gauge interest.
Even if it’s literally just “money at stake” some countries would have reason to be concerned - because so many zero-IQ MBAs are pushing industries into a hot crash for short term gains that bankrupt any long term growth.
Gamers having no faith that the games they buy remain theirs is one of many things that can drive down spending; though it will never happen on such a granular scale publishers would take action on it.
I feel a bit of shame that back in the Win7, Xbox Series S era of Microsoft I was sort of cheering them on as an underdog in several markets.
But it does seem like every large company is driving these zero sum efforts now. Anyone that high up is chomping for workforce reduction.
If larger-scale changes don’t prove possible, I still want Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism act as a way for majority workforce in a company to declare “No, this way is insane, fire whoever suggested it” earlier rather than later.