They very much can. I haven’t checked personally but just look at the average Digital Foundry video for all the tradeoffs and framerate drops. There is very much a market for getting a stable 1440/60 (or even 4k/160) that can then be upscaled/framegened to 4k/120 with the subsequent generation moving towards that. Similarly, higher fidelity assets DO make a difference when you are doing those side by sides.
That said: Demnstrating framerate is a real challenge. Which… is probably why Sony have been revamping the PSN Store over the past year or so. Sidestep youtube and their increasing use of generative content so that you can instead say “Wow. I can totally see the difference between Red Dead on PS5 and PS6!” and so forth.
Do I personally care? Not overly so. But most people are picking which console they buy based on performance (or, more often, which their friends have) but are buying the new console for the new Madden. And they’ll keep doing that… if they can afford a PS6.
can I buy it and share with many people so they can play it on their PC?
Yes
Or there’s something that prevent me to do that?
Not being a dick? And understanding that the reason a lot of studios use DRM is because of this mindset.
If so, I wonder why pirate sites like FitGirl still use cracked Steam version of games, why don’t just share GOG version?
Part of it is because a lot of highly anticipated releases never go to GoG because of exactly the above. But also? Steam DRM is a very solved problem. And most of the time it is solely related to distribution. Which gets us to…
since it’s DRM-free
CD Projekt’s PR was on fire when they pushed this marketing line. The reality is that GoG DOES have DRM. It is a fully server side model that restricts who can download what. Which… is also what Steam does (not necessarily the DRM model Valve offer on top of that). And it is basically exactly the same model that Stardock had with GOO back in the day. The idea is that you auth to download the game and any updates and, after that, do whatever you want.
And… that is still the model a LOT of games use even when they distribute on Steam.
Hold on mister moralism, why do I need to not be a dick?
That is a decision each person needs to make and it is clear you have never shied away from doing so.
I’ll pirate and I don’t give a single fuck
Cool. I also pirate some stuff. Doesn’t mean it isn’t a dicky move. Especially when it is an outlet trying to minimize the detriment to consumers
I play because I can
Got it. You take things because you can. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to what other kind of people have that mindset
If GOG provides DRM-free, well, good for me, bad for them.
Actually bad for all of us. Because while I have a lot of Thoughts on how CD Projekt manipulate the consumer base, at the end of the day they are selling a minimally invasive DRM and often going out of their way to let me grab the games of my youth without needing to resort to torrent sites or search archive.org.
The more poeple who pirate that and the more their installers end up on trackers, the less likely newer games are to release GoG builds. Which suck from both a “I can keep a copy of this if it ever gets edited or they go under” and from a “there might be more of these in the future” perspective.
It is similar to the people who exploit regional pricing. All you are doing is making things shittier for everyone else, including you.
we’re talking about stealing from insanely big companies that take advantage of people.
No. We’re talking about wanting a luxury item and not wanting to pay for it. Simple as that.
Gonna wait for a few influencers I like to check it out, but looks good? Seen a lot of forum peoples who took the plunge compare it very favorably to Zero Sievert.
But also kinda wary because apparently this was published (and developed by a team acquired by) Billibilli which is Chinese Youtube. And a LOT of those copies are believed to be Chinese region purchases. Doesn’t make it bad by any means but very much does paint a picture of “another meme game selling well”.
Browser games will never come back outside of proof of concept “hacking”. Even the exemplars the article listed, Celeste and Terrarria, are ports.
And a large part of that is because there is no longer a strong need for them. People wanting a quick way to kill time already have their phones in their pocket. Similarly, Steam et al make releasing even games at this scale borderline trivial. And the same tools that are used to make a “browser game” are used to make a “desktop game” and so forth.
It is similar to why we don’t see anywhere near the same amount of game mods we used to and most of the biggies are legacy projects that have been in development since the early 00s or are spiritual successors (think: Skyblivion and the like). The effort to make a TC/browser game is basically the same as making a “real” game… and using the same tools.
And that doesn’t go into The Internet being a very different place. Back in the 00s? Executing random code with a five year old version of flash would just mean you get porn pop-ups and need to reformat. Now? Viruses are specifically designed to encrypt all your personal data for ransomware or to silently wait until the next time you access your bank account and so forth. Let alone just stealing a steam account to buy a bunch of fifa bucks or whatever.
There were some cult classics that they wanted to release, but couldn’t find the copyright holders. After a while, they decided to go ahead and release that albums anyway, but put the royalties into escrow. When/if the rights holder came forward, their royalties would be waiting for them.
Yeah…
Having gone out for drinks with enough people who deal with financial fraud and the like, here is how that plays out:
Q1: Yeah, we are doing our due dilligence and all royalties go into this account
Q4: So they totally don’t know we have their money, right? Would any of them miss it if we just kept it?
Q5: We’ve updated our royalties program and sent out letters to everyone involved to let them know if they want to opt in to our new awesome program
Q6: Oops, we now only put a fraction of the royalties into this pool and the rest go into profits
Q8: Hey, Fred is retiring. Let’s just empty out the escrow account and blame it on him if anyone ever notices
There are a few orgs who have a claim to the rights. By going through their records/finances, it would not be hard to figure out who ACTUALLY owns that slip of paper and deserves what percentage of the royalties. But said orgs have no incentive to open up their books to an audit and no desire to potentially give money to one of the other orgs that they actively dislike.
And it gets even messier because the people who have the hard drives with the code and assets (assuming they even exist: See Icewind Dale 2) might not be the ones who own the rights to NOLF who might ALSO not be the ones who own the rights to Cate’s likeness in media because the early 2000s was around the time we were putting video game characters in maxim and playboy…
So the easy answer is “nobody knows who owns it” rather than “one of these three assholes owns it” considering that GoG et al want to convince said assholes to do them a solid.
Intriguing. I wonder after what length of time the world will “fill up” and it’ll be hard to find anywhere to start fresh? I guess this is something that the dev tries to tune consciously. In a similar vein, I wonder whether it will be best as a single player to start near someone else (to trade with
Basically never.
Using steamdb for concurrent steam users, there are currently 31M people online. Even if we take the peak for every day in October (assume it is about 40M each day), 40*31=1240 or 1.2 billion people.
The world population clock says we are at 8.2 billion with vast swathes of uninhabited and low population density land. Yes, we have some ridiculously dense population centers but much of that is based on resources and human interaction which would be similar constraints in a video game.
So the “meme” places and whatever is defined to have the best resources will be full up. But they will never run out of space even if this becomes a global phenomenon where everyone connects so they can wank about how pop culture in the 80s was the best.
I’m rapidly feeling like it’s pointless to bother learning when you can badly cobble something together with a chatbot and the managers of the world will ejaculate themselves dry about how good robots are, even when the bloody thing barely functions.
Rhetorical question: How much of your decade of development has been in a professional capacity
That has ALWAYS been true. A barely functioning Proof Of Concept has always been sexy. Someone has an idea, they make a barely functioning example of it working (often depending on stack overflow and asking others for help), show it to Management, and get money. With Management often thinking how they can either rapidly patent something in there or sell it off to a larger company.
Nothing there is new aside from “AI” replacing “ask Stack Overflow”.
And, just to be clear, that was also true in the hobbyist space. Think about how often you saw an article like “someone recreated PT in Unreal Engine!!!” (not to mention PT itself being the kind of project you give a new hire to learn the toolchain but…). Same with all those emulators that “added VR” and so forth. They are cool concepts that tend to not go anywhere or…
Once a POC becomes a Product? That is where knowledge matters. You no longer want the answer someone shat out while waiting for a belle claire video to download. You need to actually define your corner cases, improve performance, and build out a roadmap.
And… that ALSO isn’t about learning new tools and tech. A lot of that comes out of it, but that is where the difference between “computer programmer” and "software engineer’ comes into play. Because it becomes an engineering problem where you define and implement testing frameworks and build out the gitlab issues and so forth.
Like, a LOT of dumbfucks try to speedrun their way to management because it is more money. But the reality is that a good Engineer SHOULD become a manager as they “grow up”. Because you need people with technical ability to have a say in building out that roadmap and in allocating resources to different issues. Optimally you still get to code a lot (I am a huge fan of middle management in that regard) but… yeah.
Managers love that stuff because the thing they’ve asked for works but nothing outside of that one thing works, which doesn’t matter because they’re not testing it.
Yeah. That is a POC. It is what you use to get funding, have lawyers write up a patent, or shop around the company
A client asks for something, the agency owner says yes, and then the development lead cobbles something together over the course of a few hours with results from ChatGPT or Claude.
Again… that is a POC.
The thing works, but only for that specific request and cannot handle edge cases, and he doesn’t know how it works nor how to extend it, so he cobbles on more ChatGPT or Claude results.
So… what you are saying is they make something specifically meeting the requirements given to them by the client with no intention of long term support? And that, in the event that you provide long term support, the skillset required drastically changes? Possibly to a more Software Engineering based one?
I would like to think some of it is class consciousness. “AI” inherently means fewer jobs. But considering the world we live in, I sincerely doubt the vast majority of people speaking out against it give a shit because “I am just demonstrating my value so the leopards won’t eat my face” and so forth.
Most of it is performative bullshit. Influencers who DID get fucked over (or decided this is why they didn’t get the job they wanted) have talked loud and proud about how evil it is and that is kind of where the conversation ends. “AI” is evil and nobody cares to think what “AI” actually means. I’ll never get tired of giving a depressed smirk when I see the same people who were championing the use of “magic” Adobe tools complaining about “AI” taking graphics design jobs and so forth. Same with the folk who have dozens of blog posts about using tools to generate their docstrings suddenly getting angry that “AI” does that too.
Personally? I very much DO care about the labor side. Not because I don’t think “AI” can do the job of an intern or even most early career staff (spend some time mentoring early career staff… I wish I just had to worry about six toes on a foot or code that would delete our prod tables if I don’t review it well enough). But because the only way for those dumbass kids to learn is by doing the tasks we would be getting rid of and that is already leading to a VERY rapid brain drain as it is increasingly hard to find staff who can actually do the job of a Senior role.
Which is the other issue… “AI” can do some stuff VERY well. Other stuff it is horrible at. And even more stuff that it “does well” is dictated by managers and “Prompt Engineers” and not actually the domain experts who can say “Yeah… this is good. THAT is complete dog shit”.
And then there is the IP theft part of things. People… are once again stupid and don’t realize that the folk posting answers on Stack Overflow were just as likely to have read that blog post where you talked about your cool algorithm. Or how much art is literally traced from others with no attribution and becomes part of major marketing campaigns. And while I think a MUCH bigger reckoning needs to happen regarding IP law and attribution… “AI” is just a symptom of the real problem.
Alive is a strong word (I think the master servers were fucked a few days ago?) but here is hoping.
The reality is that Battlebit has no chance in a world where people, miraculously, like Battlefield again. But I actually REALLY liked it and preferred its balance and TTK. And it might be the only game where I have ever enjoyed proximity chat (with pubs) since that, combined with dragging wounded folk, just works so well for both drama and hilarity.
As someone who genuinely likes the Battlefield series (and has said in many a chat “do not play Conquest. It is shit. Play Rush”) and is REALLY annoyed that EA are so anti-Linux… Battlebit is easily up there with BC2 and BF3 in terms of being one of the most genuinely fun and balanced BFs.
Serious Sam 2 and Serious Sam (HD) The Second Encounter are two very different games. Second Encounter was already “modernized” as part of Fusion like a decade ago.
I’m rewatching Babylon 5 and it’s putting me in the mood for an immersive game where I get to command a spaceship and blast stuff with lasers or plasma cannons or whatever....
If you don’t mind a bit of a grindy ARPG aspect to it and REALLY annoying progression for traversal? Everspace 2 is probably THE best space combat in a modern release… which is sad but it is still actually really good and has some great set pieces. It is basically Freelancer 2, if that helps. If you just want shooty shooty boom boom then the original Everspace may be a better fit but… there is a reason so many of us slept on 2 after trying to like 1.
If you want something that is basically a love letter to Privateer? Rebel Galaxy Outlaw. I personally don’t vibe with it but I think that is because it is too close to what I expect to be using a HOTAS with (it is very much a gamepad/m+kb game) and the “vibes” of the Rebel Galaxy series are more “space redneck” than “space western”.
I have yet to actually get around to it (just been, what, eight or nine years now?) but I hear that some of the player origins in X4 are really good for getting into combat. I sincerely doubt that because the X series has always had REALLY good combat… broken up by 10 hours of trading so you can afford repairs and the missiles you use. But worth a look.
If you don’t mind getting out of a fighter and into a corvette or even a capital ship?
I REALLY like Cosmoteer but it is pretty grindy to start with. Space Pirates and Zombies, shitty acronym aside, has much better onboarding and similar gameplay but also much less control or a sense of “this is mine”.
And it is a love it or hate it kind of pseudo-series (really more like major functionality patches sold as a sequel) but check out Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2. You control capital ships in the 40k universe and Tindalos very much understood the assignment Just understand that 40k doesn’t pretend that space combat is anything other than romanticized WW1 naval fleet combat and it really feels like you are controlling ships of the line as it were.
The Zone of the Enders series is most remembered for ZoE1 being the game everyone bought to play the MGS2 demo.
And the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games on the PS1 tended to have the demo for the latest of the other unlocked with a button sequence on the main menu.
I want to say Final Fantasy also did that nonsense with one or more of their numbered installments?
And all of that forgets that, in the days prior to the internet (or, the internet arriving on consoles), it was very popular to subscribe to a magazine to get a monthly demo disc.
ZoE1 had moments of genius broken up by horrendous gameplay. It was very obvious they were trying to do classic “I don’t want to fight in this war. I just want to protect innocents” Gundam but also needed to have gameplay and challenges which just led to massive ludonarrative dissonance and REALLY annoying rating systems. The game itself was “fine” but suffered horribly from the re-release that added achievements to getting S ranks. Also the ending is some of the biggest blue balls in all of gaming.
Whereaas ZoE2 was a more modern (for the time) mecha in that you are a jaded and grizzled ex-soldier (Dingo Egret!) who knows he has lost his humanity long ago but is trying to regain it by being a protector instead of a killer. So you get to rock Jehuty in all its glory as you feel like The White Devil himself as you single-handedly win what feel like musou scale battles.
The PC (probably also PS4?) re-release also had a VR mode that I tried once that was really cool but also fairly “weird”. Not so much disorienting as just very clearly not a game designed for first person views outside of codec calls.
For those wondering about those blue balls. Obvious spoilers for ZoE1 and 2… and Jedi Survivor and Infamous 1+2 apparently.
spoilerZoE1 is all about Nohman (?) and his gang terrorizing a space colony in their hunt for the Orbital Frame Jehuty. You find out they have one of their own, Anubis, and it is the sister of Jehuty. I want to say it actively damages Jehuty’s systems to be near it and it is just on a completely different level when you finally clash with it. So… the ending sequence is all about running away from Anubis and the colony you just spent the entire game trying to save. As an anime? That shit would be FIRE. As a game? Jedi Survivor got away with it because Rogue One did all the work of reminding us how fucking terrifying Darth Vader is if you aren’t his son he actively does not want to hurt. That was more or less our first encounter with Anubis and it is just so anticlimactic. Which is why ZoE2 is an entire game about unlocking the potential of Jehuty so that you can fight Anubis. And when you do… it is so frigging good. Shades of Younger Toguro as you simultaneously use every single trick while also realizing that now you are the unstoppable godlike force. It was probably closer to ten years later than not, but I feel like Infamous 1+2 did a MUCH better job of it. 1 ends BEFORE you fight The Beast but is all about making sure you understand just how outclassed you are and why the events of the first game happened. 2 starts with The Beast and it beats the ever loving shit out of you and makes you realize that all the horror and suffering was for nothing before spending an entire game preparing you to actually stop the threat… until the sequel where Troy Baker is in brownface.
Terraria is… basically nothing like a factory game? You can do some crazy stuff with the logic gates but that is mostly a hold over from Terraria being so inspired by Minecraft. But Terraria also had an actual progression system while Minecraft was still almost entirely a sandbox game.
With Terraria? Go look up what defines a “room” (I think the next big patch will have the NPCs help you with that in game) and always have a spare “room” in any housing area. That is where new NPCs will move into.
And then just play the game. Explore caves. Look for loot. Get your poopy pushed in by a boss. Progress will unlock new NPCs who will, in turn, point you towards other activities that will reveal new bosses or encourage you to seek out and build outposts in new biomes and so forth.
Cancelled because a black man killing the Klan, after all the morons complaining about Yasuke, was going to be too controversial of a video game in our (Americans’) “unstable” country.
I never made it too far into RDR2, but RDR1 is a VERY white game. Like, frigging Tom Jane’s Gun did a better job of acknowledging there was melanin in The Wild West and that game… does not age well. Was RDR2 significantly different?
Because, inherently, a LOT of wild west stories are set in or around The Reconstruction and have The Civil War as a major aspect. In large part because that is what contributed to so many guns (and people who knew how to use them) in an environment where there were a lot of scores to settle and an expectation that the government would actively hinder anything.
Whereas this sounds like a continuation of the AssFlag DLC where you straight up murder slavers in Haiti. Which, in turn, is a logical fallout of the origins of The Assassins mostly being about personal freedom and humanity and The Templar being a controlling fascist force that goes way back to Ass Creed 1.
You know… the game where the real bad guys were actually the brown people who were manipulating everyone and King Richard was actually a pretty good guy with a really hot right hand woman.
Fair enough. I don’t recall people getting angry over the existence of black people in RDR2 but I also mostly just tune out the folk who can at all stand the controls of that game (one day I’ll try again).
Because I do think having actual people of color with even a modicum of agency makes a huge difference. Like, going back to RDR1, Bonnie is basically the epitome of “strong woman written by men”. There are so many hints that she is kind of a badass and she definitely has her moments, but basically anything of import is done by John and she increasingly is depicted as someone who needs her big strong outlaw to save her. Which is the same thing when you have Steve Rogers punch a klansman versus having Sam Wilson get his punch on.
Which, to get back to AssCreed, is funnily enough a recurring problem with the games from basically the end of Desmond up until Odyssey. AssFlag was a really fun game with really cool characters but it increasingly became obvious that Whitey McKenway (I am too lazy to look up his name) is almost a secondary character in the story about Mary Read and Anne Bonny and even Adewale (who did get a DLC that nobody played). Like, here are characters who have VERY personal stakes that can explore the societal problems inherent to the world and… we get snippets of their story while Whitey just works toward knocking someone up because he is Connor’s ancestor.
And that very much continued with the Egypt one where The Wife was a MUCH MUCH MUCH cooler character who actually drove the story while we played as The Husband whose claim to fame is he chopped off his finger to go back to something that had already been borderline retconned out of the series.
It feels like it's really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and...
Influencers (mostly vod and twitch based) have increasingly realized the way to move up to the next “tier” (or to maintain it) is to lead a “movement”. It is the logical extension of every new generation’s “All those people on X were corrupt and unethical and lying to you. Us here on Y are here to speak truth to you and will never let our opinions be bought. So make sure you like, comment, and subscribe and make sure to use my affiliate code in World of Tanks”
In a lot of ways? Concorde broke the gaming world. It was a game that drew a LOT of hate for having “non-sexy” female models and also suffered from being incredibly “meh” so nobody felt a real need to defend it. But it let the chuds actually “cancel” a game. Which aligned well with all of the various reasons Black Myth Wukong became The Most Important Video Game To Ever Exist.
So now all the influencers who want their own armies to harass and torment anyone they consider competition are trying to get in on that. Lots of verbiage shifts from “Wow, this game is horrible because those devs hate you. Unlike me who loves you” and more “Wow, this game is horrible and those devs don’t deserve to exist and people need to know not to waste their money on this” that translate to Call To Action style movements.
I like GN and Steve a lot and think they are ridiculously good at tech/data-based as well as consumer rights activism.
This… it is a fun video (if you like Steve) but he and his team are not qualified to talk about this topic. It is the same obnoxious youtuber “I am going to make forty jokes per minute and say every single quote in a nasty voice to show how bad they are”. Which, again, is fun but doesn’t convey much useful information and mostly just serves to spread “vibes based” news and borderline misinformation.
Most of the stuff on GNCA is pretty good and this kind of coverage is great for a quick blurb during the news show. But 27 minutes that doesn’t convey much (meaningful) information beyond a tweet… yeah.
I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don’t give a fuck (also the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between ethics and morality and insist whatever they do is Good so it is even less productive than slamming my hand in a cabinet).
But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don’t play the games. Because “Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say “Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is going to encourage people who don’t know how/don’t care to pirate things to buy it (and people are going to think you are an obnoxious edgelord).
And yeah, I’ll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective… not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don’t actually care enough to follow indie devs.
I understand the importance of actually performing rigorous studies (haven’t checked their methodology) but… no fucking shit?
GabeN is a pretty established Libertarian Tech Bro and Valve only moderates to the bare minimum requirement. Of course chuds are going to thrive under those circumstances.
Its why I STILL laugh my ass off when people go on an anti-Epic rant about how EGS doesn’t have forums or whatever. Like… you REALLY telling on your ass if you think the steam forums are something anyone should want more of.
I dunno. I increasingly think the answer is to burn it all down (on a lot of subjects). The idea of going to the store to ask questions or get recommendations feels like one of those “remember yesteryear?” that never actually happened. I NEVER had a good experience talking to a sales person in a Circuit City or Electronics Boutique (I’ll never stop being annoyed over going to pick up KOTOR 2 on launch day and having to tell the cashier, five different times, that I would not be buying WoW or Starcraft…).
Back in the day? I looked at boxes and if the price was right just got it. Otherwise I read through PC Gamer or EGM to find out what games were good.
These days? I look through the store front and if the price is right, I do a quick skim of the review scores and get it. Otherwise I have a few influencers I “trust” to review/showcase games for me. What IS new is that sometimes I go to a message board (generally reddit for volume) and ask if someone can point me at a youtube that goes deeper into a feature. But even that isn’t dissimilar from a schoolmate who probably became a neo nazi who couldn’t stop talking about how good IL-2 was.
So get rid of all the social media bullshit attached to store fronts and just require devs to put a link to their social media of choice for reporting bugs or whatever.
but also because he doesn’t believe in censorship.
Which is the problem.
Games have been banned (even before the current round of christofacist hell). So what rule says we can’t have “AOC Torture Sim 2025”? Is that the same rule as “Musk Torture Sim 2025”?
Okay, so unwritten rule that you can’t sell games about murdering actual human beings.
What about “Trans Raper 2025”?
The reality is that “being apolitical” IS being political. It is an inherently libertarian and conservative standpoint where you “don’t believe government should intervene” and “things are fine the way they are”. And creating an environment like that inherently benefits chuds who are much more detached when they talk about “I identify as an attack helicopter” and are super quick to criticize people for “getting emotional” when they care about their fucking right to exist.
Which is what the steam forums ARE. I had the misfortune of trying to debug Dragon’s Dogma 2 on Linux when it launched (actually ended up doing a LOT of testing and bug reporting). The forums were a cesspool of dog whistles and bigotry because the game had the audacity to have a character creator. And in between sifting through the hate to see who else had figured out what triggered a DRM activation, you know what I found getting moderated? No, not the bigotry and hate. The people who finally said “shut the fuck up”.
“Wheaton’s Rule Of The Internet” is the kind of thing that privileged white boys love to parrot around. But once you actually spend time giving a shit about anyone other than you, it all goes out the window and you start needing actual rules. And Valve have continued to not do that until there is a threat of legal action involved.
Which is why publishers should be able to take over moderation if they don’t like how the community is acting.
Mordhau is a game where the official forums had a long standing “show us your kni**a” thread and was full of bigotry and hatred. They only began to moderate after enough articles about it were getting popular at a time people remembered Chivalry 2 existed.
Let alone the Black Myth Wukong dev who was “mistranslated” when talking about all of the long history of misogyny and sexism coming from a studio that outright banned reviewers from talking about “feminism”
At the end of the day, it is Valve’s house. If there is a room full of nazis then clearly they are okay with it. End of story.
Libertarianism isn’t about leaving things alone, it’s about protecting rights.
Nintendo have also bumped their flagship game price up to 80 USD. I recall Sony doing the same (and see articles to that effect) but it looks like their games are still mostly at the 70 USD point?
Similarly, it is well worth noting that the Switch 2 announcement/deep dive videos specifically did NOT list the price or had vague reference to prices being announced regionally. This was primarily attributed to Liberation Day Tariffs but limited analyses do argue that the “base” price of the Switch 2 is higher than the Switch 1 which is consistent with increased engineering and overhead costs.
To my knowledge, Microsoft is the only platform ones who is bumping up their subscription fee cost. In large part because that seems to be all they have (in the gaming space). But all projections and leaks are that platform hardware costs are going to be significantly higher next generation (so like 2026/2027) and game prices are similarly expected to re-stabilize with “full” games being 80 USD as a baseline and all discount prices shifting accordingly.
Like, fuck Microsoft and this reeks of trying to grab the bag before closing (the xbox) shop considering how precarious everything is. But realize this is more bad optics and timing than anything else.
In large part because development is getting more and more expensive and game prices mostly have stagnated for decades (until semi-recently bumping up to 70 and now 80 USD).
The merging of xbox and windows is actually a REALLY REALLY good idea.
But I think it is less about being enthusiastic about R&D and more about… consoles are increasingly just computers. And mostly the R&D boils down to asking AMD (because Jensen is too busy burning benjies to soften his latest jacket) what APU they have in the pipes. And I would be shocked if the PS7 generation isn’t basically “here is a NUC with egpu support and a nice plastic case”… assuming we still have home computing then (that is a different and much darker conversation).
So it really does make perfect sense for MS to try and merge their Windows and XBOX OSes and, were they in a better position, I could see basically “just” selling Steam Machine style HTPCs as early as 2027.
Whereas Sony and Nintendo kind of ARE stuck still making actual consoles. Maybe Sony could bundle “Playstation” streaming and even light local gaming into a Bravia TV but… why would they?
But yeah. I will be amazed if the XBOX Brand/division exists (meaningfully) by as early as 2029.
We obviously can only infer based on PR and past actions, but I don’t consider the ASUS whatever the fucks to be a threat to Valve.
Valve are not XBOX. They are Windows. They have their own branded hardware that sets a baseline but it is very much not in their interests to be the only source for that hardware. We have already see the Steam Deck take a very niche market (that was basically just Win GPD and Aya Neo) and turn it into one where you have a wide range of specs and very standardized interfaces and capabilities.
And, much like how Microsoft gets money from running Windows on a Surface or a Thinkpad, so too does Valve get money from buying Steam games on a Steam Deck or an Aya Neo or a MSI Claw or whatever.
But yes. As consumers, I am deeply worried about what happens when Sony has no actual competition other than “you can build your own PC but that is so very very hard so just give us money instead”. Especially since people can never stop glazing Nintendo and insisting they “aren’t competing with anyone” even as the exact same games run at significantly lower resolution and frame rate (and even their first party games run like trash).
To be clear. I am also increasingly queasy as more and more “normies” think “Linux is SteamOS” and am afraid we might have an Android or Mac level fork in a decade. But, at least short term, I love that I can actually be “a gamer” and still spend 100% of my personal PC time in Linux.
Mentioned it in one of the other threads about this but it bears repeating:
BG3 did not come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a case of Wizards of the Coast giving money to a random studio and getting a masterpiece out.
Baldurs Gate 3, as a product, was officially in development since approximately 2019. It released into early access on Steam in 2020 and 1.0 in 2023. It received repeated injections of cash through things like fricking google stadia over that period.
But also? Baldurs Gate 3 didn’t begin development in 2019. Larian had been pestering/pitching the Wizards since freaking 2014 when they were still working on the kickstarted Divinity Original Sin 1. And Larian, as a studio, had been making CRPGs since 2002’s Divine Divinity.
BG3 was agame with 3 years of active development and 21 years of experience and expertise.
When studios get shuttered because they aren’t immediately profitable? You inherently have people who decide “I am done with this shit” and either were successful enough to enter early retirement or transition to related industries. You lose the experience that makes a “three year game” possible. Sometimes that is a high profile creative lead. But more often that is the people who don’t get to go on stage at the keighleys but who are interpreting said creative leads and actually making the mechanics and story beats we all love.
Fuck EA. They are a horrible company that has mismanaged so many IPs and engaged in decades of worker abuse. But understand that we are also likely losing hundreds, if not thousands, of experienced game developers which will make future games from other studios worse.
And before people say “fuck that, I like indie games”: Clair Obscur is the poster child of that and for very good reason. Maybe do some research as to who those core 30 people are (hint: They mostly were head hunted from Ubi et al) and where their money came from. And then think about what happens when there aren’t major studios to head hunt from.
I mean… if we want to talk about mismanagement, budgeting and delivery dates are barely a factor in game dev. With even a halfway decent publisher/stakeholder, the system of deliverables means that you tend to get into a case where the game is “done” by the time it was supposed to be and you are “just” focused on bugfixing and polishing. So you crunch until your staff are suicidal and then ship it and people criticize the “unfinished” area while loving the rest of it.
The bigger issue is that the entire industry is more or less run in a start-up mindset. The competent project managers are mostly ignored in favor of the rockstar devs. MBA who spent hundreds of hours firming up jira tasks and translating between gitlab issues and said tasks? Get bent you stupid stooge, you are trying to ruin games. In a quick video blurb because you worked on the foliage in one of the boss arenas? How would you like a dump truck of money to run your own studio?
And that is why we constantly see shit like Blizzard (when we actually look) where “locker room culture” is so prevalent and people just want to hire other people like them. They have no idea how to lead a project or deal with any kind of friction. But they are a genius Auteur until they crash and burn.
They’ve been making a lot of effort to expand the “old” FGC (so basically Street Fighter) outside of Japan for a few years now. It hasn’t really taken hold (and I am going to pretend it is because everyone is like me and gets off on watching Guilty Gear!) and we see more and more Saudi money being pumped into “Western” FGC events.
So I can see an argument for doubling down on their core audience to lock that in.
And… PPVs ARE kind of making a comeback in The West. People are increasingly annoyed by “needing so many streaming services”. And, at least in pro wrestling, AEW have kind of been cleaning up with their 4-6 PPVs a year. The HBO Max deal helps a lot for people to watch the weekly show but… it is fricking HBO Max and a lot of folk are still taking the route of “I skip Dynamite and just watch the PPVs”. And the human trafficking front known as WWE are starting to shift back that way as a result of, among other things, their ESPN deal. Companies have been desperate for more and more “event television” as streaming takes over (hence why AEW and WWE can get such lucrative tv contracts) and nothing is more “event” than paying 30-70 bucks to sit around the TV on a Saturday night.
So I think it is less “a few greedy execs want to burn away the goodwill” and more… the overall industry trends.
Part of it is that studios tend to price their games closer to what they are “worth”. So you have far fewer “This is a 20 dollar game we are gonna try to sell for 50”. They just put it at 20 to begin with (or get there pretty quick after launch). Which means that the same “get this for 10 bucks” is now 50% off instead of 80% off and so forth
Part of it is that game dev has gotten more expensive at all scales and all selling Big Rigs 1 for 5 dollars will do is prevent people from buying Big Rigs 6 for 30
Part of it is that… as you get older you are more likely to buy the games you want when they are “good enough” rather than waiting until EVERYTHING is at a max discount so you can spread the money you got from the banana stand over the summer as far as possible.
Which ALSO means that you have a huge backlog and it is a lot easier to say “Do I really need this?”
New guns and an encounter design built around forcing you to be much more aggressive. 2 did it with the addition of the Archvile and Pain Elemental who were enemy spawners that would drain all your ammo if you just bunkered down near a corner. Eternal does it with the much greater emphasis on using special moves in combat to restore resource.
I haven’t tried Dark Ages yet because of BDS and all that. But from what I have seen? Not super excited. Eternal is honestly one of my all time top 20 games because it just felt so good once you flowed. Taking that away and emphasizing blocking/reflecting is just… lame?
And one of the biggest tips to vibe with DOOM Eternal: Play at least the first mission on Ultraviolence. The normal difficulty curve is such that you can mostly ignore all the new features and combos until you hit a wall and suddenly need them. Whereas UV forces you to engage with them as they are introduced so that it all kind of just flows. Feel free to knock it back down if you are sane and don’t feel like realizing you are physically exhausted after a single DLC level, but the game really benefits from jumping into the deep end to start.
You should be worried if you at all care about video games. Yes, EA sucks. But even a decade or so ago they were pretty much one of the big two and are still one of the biggest “developer” houses.
Because we already saw this play out with Embracer et al and increasingly with Microsoft. Video games are a horrible investment. If you make a "good game"and do all of your PR right and get REALLY lucky? Yeah, you can buy a yacht or twenty. But that comes after 2-8 years of expensive development with many points where you have to just keep throwing money at it in the hopes of success.
And EA was one of those companies that could get away with that because their sports games are so popular that they can fund development of the entire company AND still make a solid profit.
Because
it could end with EA in the gutter and their dead franchises in the hands of companies that still know how to make games
That isn’t how this works. You don’t say “Wow. Development is really expensive and has no guaranteed ROI. Let’s fund external development that we have even less control over”.
As Swen et al constantly remind people: Baldurs Gate 3 is not a model that studios can follow. It was a once in a lifetime convergence of circumstances. Larian had been making CRPGs for close to two decades at that point and had used multiple kickstarters to modernize their stack in a genre that had mostly been forgotten. And they STILL needed 3 years of early access and a LOT of marketing money (BG3 was a fricking keypoint of Stadia for crying out loud).
That isn’t what Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Mirror’s Edge will get. At best they will get cheap remasters by Nightdive (which would actually be nice but…). More likely they will get the kind of “Are you sure this isn’t a mobile game? From the 2010s?” that we see plaguing Warhammer 40k and the like.
No, it really isn’t. Rather than just regurgitate what the “video game devs hate you but I love you so give me money” twitch streamers continue to say, actually listen to some developers.
Xalavier Nelson Jr has been pretty vocal about how incredibly hard it is to be an indie dev these days. And Strange Scaffold (his studio) is pretty much exactly what everyone says they want: They release REALLY interesting games on budget with no DLC. And people “wait for sales”. Which makes pitch meetings REALLY difficult which, in turn, makes getting more funding to keep making games REALLY difficult. And that is for a very established studio with a solid portfolio. Let alone actual new developers who are finding their funding cut or cancelled over the past five or six years.
I’ll also add on: What you are seeing are not “AAA games”. At this point? You basically have the GTAs and Call of Duties and Star Citizen and MAYBE some of the higher profile Sony games that fit that bucket. The AAA market more or less died with THQ where they released a string of games that were REALLY good but just couldn’t justify the development costs.
What we are mostly seeing are what would historically be considered AA/A games. Large scale games made by (ass pulling) O(10) headcounts with a LOT of money and MAYBE a support studio or very heavy contractor usage if they are more AA. And that is the market that is increasingly being destroyed. Which mostly leaves the “B Game” studios and the “I spent the past 10 years making this in my free time” indie studios and… I shouldn’t have to explain why the latter is not sustainable.
And just to highlight this: Geoff Keighley has decided his latest obsession is bragging about how small studios are because he is, and always has been, an obnoxious prick who actively hurts the industry. And one of his favorite things to bang on is Sandfall’s Clair Obscur. Which is a truly amazing game… that increasingly can’t be made anymore.
Founded by devs who had been heavily trained by the Ubisoft pipeline and all the benefits of working for a massive super studio. Questionable amounts of funding from Kepler Interactive in 2023 (right before the pandemic) that was used to headhunt LOTS of developers from major super-studios/publishers. And then they used said funding to hire “dozens” more contractors.
Clair Obscur is an “indie” game in the sense that Sandfall don’t have long term obligations. But it was made by easily over a hundred people with major publisher investments. And, much like with my example of Larian above, much of the staff and techniques were trained on other games over the course of literally decades. Like, we ALL shat on Mindseye and the idea that “someone who looked at GTA is gonna make a GTA” and so forth. That IS what Clair Obscur was. It was just successful (in large part because more traditional JRPGs are on the decline and many people in The West had been ignoring it… so even more parallels to BG3).
As more and more of those publishers die off or are only interested in VERY short term investments? That money goes out the window. And as the major studios/super-studios like EA get shuttered? That pipeline that allowed Broche et al to understand enough about large scale project management to make their own games goes out the window. And more and more developers leave the industry because they need to live. Which means all the “I’ve been animating for 12 years” are gone and it is just the fiver crowd who need to “build out a portfolio” for one of the very few remaining jobs.
Like, your point about being an indie developer being hard is, well, just ask anyone who was making indie games 1, 2, or even 3 decades ago. It’s always been a lottery where 1-3 games a year hit it big and the rest can only barely fund themselves.
No, it really hasn’t. At least, on the PC side.
if we go back to the 80s and 90s? SO much of what has defined video games actually were indie games. You just needed to call up a magazine and ask if you could put your game on their demo disk (often actually a floppy at those points…) or let the ten people on usenet know you had a BBS with games on it. Probably the most famous example of that is fricking DOOM but so much of what EA would acquire, fail to make a good sequel to, and kill, came out of that mindset.
Then the early 00s were heavily characterized by mods being heavily platformed by the larger studios (a decent number of modern day studios actually came out of Make Something Unreal), demo discs getting even bigger (because now they were CDs), and the rise of The Internet meaning that it was possible for small publishers (fucking Strategy First) to do direct to consumer sales and games like Mount & Blade and later Minecraft being directly sold as direct downloads to sickos.
Then we had Steam and… okay let’s ignore the Steam Greenlight program because that was just bad. But it mostly removed the barrier and made direct to consumer sales almost trivial. And it made it REALLY “easy” to show that you had a solid game to make that pitch meeting for the “last few years” of development a lot easier. More on that in a bit.
And as games became more expensive to create (if you tried to sell Soldat today… well, just go look at Soldat on Steam), publishers were more and more needed. Sometimes as blatant “Embracer published this” and sometimes as “just” investments that never really get disclosed but leads to weirdness where one pissy investor means a game can never be sold again.
Which gets back to the 2020s. Economic uncertainty and the realization that “just fund this studio for 10 years” guarantees nothing have made it a wasteland. Again, plenty of developers have been very open about this. NoClip even did a series of lite documentaries about their attempts to go through the process of making a game and it is bleak (Danny repeatedly compared it to being on Tinder… Which raises a few questions but I am sure somebody told him how much being single sucks). There is less and less money to go around and it is more and more going to the surest of sure things. All but guaranteed to make back the money and then some? Yeah, but this studio is promising us a 5x return so…
Which gets to Hooded Horse et al. I fucking LOVE Hooded Horse and Kitfox and so forth (still not sure how Microprose suddenly came out of nowhere to become just as big a part of my entertainment as they were… 30 years ago). It is also very worth understanding that they are mostly swooping in on games that have been in development for 4-10 years and just need some money to dedicate time to polishing things up and making assets (Caves of Qud and Dwarf Fortress are great examples of this). Or are devs/studios with MASSIVE pedigrees and, quite often, the rights to remaster/re-sell their back catalog (this is more a Microprose thing).
Which gets back to the role of major studios.
Valve, for example, when making Half Life, realized their game sucked when they were most of the way through development because they were learning as they went. So they scrapped most of what they built and what they remade is what we know as HL1, and that’s well over 2 decades ago
HL1 was published by Sierra and fronted by former Microsoft devs (you ever wonder why GabeN gets off on sticking it to Windows?). They had a start-up funded by independently wealthy developers and, according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Deve…, one million (1990s) dollars advance and STILL involved going into potentially serious debt to make.
Which, again: Technical abilities developed on someone else’s dime. Good chunk of cash from getting in early on the rise of frigging Microsoft. And publishers who would throw (doing rough inflation math) about 2 million dollars at a project because “why not”.
And… you know how publishers got the money to do that? Sierra was a frigging powerhouse in the 90s. So much of the adventure genre was kinda just them and they had already branched out to strategy, party games, delicious copaganda, etc. Like… en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_Sierra_Entertainment_v…
Everyone loves the idea of someone making something truly ground breaking in their basement with scraps. The reality is that we mostly see evolutions and deep dives on existing games. But what people often forget is that the thing that takes a game to the next level is almost always very experienced developers. And… most of them tend to have some time at a major studio under their belt where they can learn the dos and don’ts and so forth. Get rid of those major studios and suddenly everyone is dependent on finding the right online tutorial and not realizing that the old hats who make said tutorials and come in to “take things to the next level” are all retiring or changing industries for the same reasons those major studios are getting gutted.
And also… the reality is that the Terrarias and Quds of the world are incredibly rare. Mostly we get complete jank fests that barely function and are clearly just someone’s wank fantasy.
I am not saying people need to feel horrible over the death of EA (although… you probably SHOULD considering how many people they employ and how they still make some certified bangers). But this “Fuck it, this massive industry pillar collapsing will have no impact on the industry as a whole” is just plain naivety.
What is a really fun gameplay mechanic or experience you had/have while playing an underated, unknown game? Or a game that might be known but not known for having fun in the way you do with it....
Yeah. Back during the pandemic Abby Russell played RE4 on Giant Bomb and chat was pretty much constantly losing it over how much ammo she was using. But the game’s drop tables accounted for that and she basically was just playing Gears of War for all intents and purposes.
Was fascinating since basically everyone who has ever played that game focused on headshots and conservation rather than just unloading.
But it also speaks to how this is usually implemented. It is more about making every playstyle viable rather than actively getting the hammer and nails if it sees you are getting a bit too excited during a combat sequence.
I haven’t checked Deus Ex specifically but my general experience is that Wine actually makes older games easier to run. In large part because you aren’t having Windows 10 use compatibility mode to Windows 8’s Vista’s 98 compatibility mode and are instead just tricking it into thinking those libraries are just there.
That said, I have no issue with the remaster. If it is good? Awesome. I’m willing to throw another 20 bucks down the hole if I want to replay that without needing to google for unofficial patches. And if it is crap? I don’t buy it.
Here I am playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, when it dawns on me. Lara is a sociopath. She is a killing machine who barely even speaks on it, it’s nothing to her at this point. She doesn’t care about her health, injury nor pain. She just wants artifacts and to uncover ancient mysteries. I like her character but damn she is...
Shadow definitely went off the deep end as it tried to up the stakes. Most of her personal motivation (frantic survival and then the mystery of her father’s death) were out the window and it was just a nebulous “I want to stop the bad guys”. And… it plays with it but it is very clear the intent is that she is unleashing the apocalypse as she steals these artifacts before the Bad Guys can. Whether the Bad Guys would have still done it without her is, of course, up to the viewer. It’s Indy and the Ark/Grail.
But I think the game overall does a good job of getting to the status quo and establishing Lara as having a Very British reason for looting everything and shooting every dinosaur she ever sees. If she doesn’t steal it, err, have it gifted to her, then somebody much worse will and they’ll be a lot meaner about it.
On the scale of “it belongs in a museum”: She is definitely much more psychotic than Indiana Jones. But she ain’t got nothing on Nathan Drake.
Personally? I loved the first of the reboot trilogy (actually strongly disliked every Tomb Raider up to that). I felt the second wore out its welcome by the end. And I actively disliked the third but it was short enough I finished it. But I think that is also why I will probably never bother to play Uncharted 4. I am just done with humping walls looking for yellow paint and waiting to see when my character reaches for something so I know to hit the jump button.
DC’s Poison Ivy is always one of the best examples of this.
I want to say she is from the 70s? And “evil lady eco terrorist” is both sexy and evil. Except, as time went on, more and more of the readers/viewers started to REALLY like the lady who murders the patriarchy while destroying chemical factories and oil refineries to protect the planet. So she became more of a plant monster and DC Editorial learned how many of us are into bondage and so forth. Which has led to the modern day where she is basically an anti-villain, at best, alongside her lesbian lover Harley. Although the Harley Quinn show did a great job of playing with that with everyone more or less thinking her an annoying goodie two shoes even though she is torturing and murdering children and whatever else her background atrocity of the week is.
But a lesser known example that might actually be one of my favorite movies at this point is Donnie Yen’s Raging Fire. Yen plays the hero cop, as he always does, who is older but has morals and butts heads with his bosses who are too political. Except that, years prior to the movie, he was on a case with his protege and partner and they were told to do whatever it took to find a rich business man. Oh noes! His entire unit accidentally kills a suspect and now then Oh Noes, Donnie narced on them because of his morals so they went to prison and had a REAL bad time.
And now they are out and killing the corrupt cops and business people who betrayed them. Also it is basically Heat (right down to getting caught because the psycho killed a hooker) and the movie does a REAL good job of showing why Tse’s criminal is the way he is and why Yen’s cop is pushed to his breaking point and outright fighting the system he is supposed to uphold when his loved ones are in danger.
Until the final sequence which is the bank robbery from Heat. Except the writers realized the CCP is REALLY not going to like a movie that is this anti-cop so suddenly they are mowing down civilians left and right and lobbing grenades everywhere just to make sure you understand these ex-cops are actually the bad guys. And Donnie Yen and his CCP mouthpiece ass still has it.
Its a deeply problematic movie, like most of Donnie Yen’s post 2010s work, but it is also incredibly fascinating when you think of it from the perspective of sympathetic villains and state mandated “tone”. Also, like ALL of Donnie Yen’s work, it is a beautiful spectacle of martial arts coming from a guy who is even more frustratingly charming than Tom Cruise.
Basically the idea is that only the last shot matters. Nathan isn’t actually getting shot by a full magazine from a FAL. He is getting grazed and shitting himself. And when you finally die? THAT is the bullet that hit. Which actually makes a lot more sense since the damage indicators (aside from Nate face tanking a 50 BMG…) tend to line up more with how video games portray suppression and the like. And it is why a single pistol shot to the leg in a cutscene leads to 20 minutes of slow walking and a time skip.
The Steam Deck was pushed specifically by an online storefront as a “first party console” for the purposes of being, if not a loss leader, something approximating it.
ASUS is not Microsoft. They were going to release a handheld format gaming laptop regardless. They just took some cash from MS to change the plastic on one of their buttons. Once they sell this, that is it for profits (aside from all the spyware ASUS bundles in). The GPDs and Aya Neos had the same problem. And these are significantly more powerful than a Steam Deck at this point.
I would need to dig through the marketing and cross reference AMD’s latest naming nonsense. But 1k for a gaming laptop is a shockingly good deal and the MSI Claw A8 has the same processor and, as of the Toms Guide article I found, was priced at £849.
Personally? I don’t think there is much point in getting something ridiculously powerful as a gameboy and find the Steam Deck to be a great sweet spot where I can play the games I want to play natively but also stream (locally or from a cloud service) if I REALLY need to play something Bigger on there. But I also never really saw a point to gaming laptops for similar reasons.
But the people who do want a gaming laptop? This is what you are looking at.
Fuck pitchford and all that. But this is an increasing problem that most games have. Shaders are getting more and more expensive and compiling them on the fly… when it works it works and when it doesn’t it is horrible. But having a mandatory “sit and watch this load screen for three minutes” starts you off with a HORRIBLE first impression during the period where it is easiest to get a refund.
It is why MS are setting up their convoluted, and destined to fail, system to add those to the downloads. Since people have increasingly been realizing that Proton/Linux weirdly have an advantage in this… that again mostly manifests during the first 30-40 minutes of benchmarking while writing a blog post.
I mean, they do (for most games) on Linux. “Allow background processing of vulkan shaders” in Downloads.
The issue is that they can only do so much without support of the games themselves. My, very limited, understanding is they distribute “good enough” shaders with games and then the background processing is optimizing those for the user’s computer. But getting those “good enough” shaders is already a mess.
Yes, there are issues with updates and cached shaders… I mean, look at the topic of the thread. But the vast majority of the time there are zero issues and, again, this has been one of the biggest causes of a lot of the “This game runs better on Linux than Windows!!!” because the fly by night org just rushed into a single scene and took very few samples.
Which is even more jarring when you realize they have been leaving Erika Ishii to be a lightning rod for all the chud hate basically since this was announced. No support for the face of their game but abrahamic god forbid someone make an incredibly mild “mario and luigi” joke.
Which is even more fucked (and yet actually makes perfect sense) when you remember this is the same studio that did a game about a Native American rebelling against a fascist corporation that took over Seattle. And then you remember they had Troy Baker voice said Native American and… yeah.
Real shame. I liked Ghost of Tsushima a fair bit (even if it was very clearly written by weebs, for weebs) and was planning to grab this as a goofing around game. But I guess sucker punch just saved me probably 80 bucks or whatever this was going for.
Ex PlayStation exec says Sony can't keep "increasing the graphics power" with new consoles after tech plateau, but PS5 has already "made almost every game a better game" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
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Escape from Tarkov's Duck-Themed Competitor Sold 200,000+ Copies in 24 Hours (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Escape from Tarkov’s duck-themed competitor, Escape from Duckov, is soaring on Steam since being released days ago.
A New Golden Age Of Browser Games (hackaday.com) angielski
GOG Has Had To Hire Private Investigators To Track Down IP Rights Holders (www.thegamer.com) angielski
From Detroit to Deadlock: Quantic Dream are making a MOBA (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Many developers leave GZDoom due to leader conflicts and fork it into UZDoom (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
BattleBit Remastered is surprisingly alive - a huge Operation Overhaul update test arrives in November (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Serious Sam 2 celebrates 20th anniversary with a massive update (store.steampowered.com) angielski
this wasn’t on my bingo list....
Space battle games for casual player? angielski
I’m rewatching Babylon 5 and it’s putting me in the mood for an immersive game where I get to command a spaceship and blast stuff with lasers or plasma cannons or whatever....
Anyone remember Heroes of Might & Magic 3? A remake is coming (store.steampowered.com) angielski
… and it looks perfect
Today's featured article on Wikipedia: Terraria (en.wikipedia.org) angielski
Scoop: Ubisoft cancelled a post-Civil War Assassin’s Creed last year (www.gamefile.news) angielski
Cancelled because a black man killing the Klan, after all the morons complaining about Yasuke, was going to be too controversial of a video game in our (Americans’) “unstable” country.
Is it me or does it seem like review bombing on Steam has become so much worse recently? angielski
It feels like it's really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and...
The Shady Acquisition of EA Games (youtu.be) angielski
I finally decided to go full piracy against big companies angielski
Tired of this abusive business model that big companies use on games....
New Steam study alleges that Valve's store is home to extreme right-wing "wars" (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Amid EA's unpopular $55 billion buyout, Baldur's Gate 3 director takes time "to remind people that making games faster and cheaper while charging more has never worked before" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Fans Left Speechless as Capcom Locks Street Fighter 6 Finals Behind Paywall (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
Steam Autumn Sale 2025 Has Begun (store.steampowered.com) angielski
What are you buying?
It's official: EA is going private. (bsky.app) angielski
In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
Fun yet unknown gameplay MECHANICS? (POLL) (www.youtube.com) angielski
What is a really fun gameplay mechanic or experience you had/have while playing an underated, unknown game? Or a game that might be known but not known for having fun in the way you do with it....
[Whitelight] You Don't Hate Remasters Enough (www.youtube.com) angielski
Lara Croft is a Sociopath angielski
Here I am playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, when it dawns on me. Lara is a sociopath. She is a killing machine who barely even speaks on it, it’s nothing to her at this point. She doesn’t care about her health, injury nor pain. She just wants artifacts and to uncover ancient mysteries. I like her character but damn she is...
Asus ROG Xbox Ally Gaming Handhelds Cost Up to $999.99, Preorders Open Now (www.pcmag.com) angielski
Borderlands 4 Dev Gearbox Asks PC Gamers to Wait 15 Minutes for Shaders to Compile in the Background While Playing After Reports Indicate Recent Update Causes Stuttering - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Premium experience for premium gamers /s
Ghost of Yotei | Review Thread (89/100 OpenCritic) angielski
Game Information...