Just because a game has advertising doesn’t automatically make it a bad game. Need for Speed Underground 2 did this very well.
There was advertising for various real world business sponsors of the game, like Old Spice, Gillette, Best Buy, and various automotive related brands. But NFS U2 is literally peak, best of the best Need for Speed. How is this possible with advertising? Because it made the advertising part of the game world in an unintrustive way. Billboards along the sides of racetracks, Best Buy buildings in the scenery you drive around, these were great ways the developers incorporated ads into the game without them being intrusive or interrupting the game. It was also the correct genre of game for advertising, as this would not work so well if it was in a game like Skyrim, for example.
If another game needs to have ads in it, I am okay with it if they implement them in the same way NFS U2 did. No pop-ups, no " watch 3 ad videos for 2 gas droplets," none of that. Just a static image on a billboard, implemented in a manner that doesnt interrupt my game and that fits its genre.
They embarrassed EA, but more importantly Ubisoft. Open world games are pretty much all Ubisoft is known for these days.
I certainly think they can compete with Rockstar. Elden Ring is just a different genre from RDD or GTA. Had Elden Ring not been so difficult and had all the normie garbage like quest markers and other hand holders, it likely could have outsold GTA. But because From makes hard games (even though Elden Ring is their easiest game) and because they didn’t hold the players hand, people passed on some sales.
Of course Kotaku is going to report on it. They want in on the outrage of companies firing employees that has been happening lately.
They were throwing temper tantrums over the owner of Kotaku telling them that they needed to write more gaming guides/articles instead of the social culture outrage garbage they had been spewing that tarnished their reputation. Imagine working for a gaming media outlet, and then getting mad when the owner tells you that you need to focus on gaming articles.
Indeed. Its sad to see a reputable name go before something far less reputable, like Kotaku for example.
I guess it must be true, hate clicks and outrage do generate more revenue than real, genuine gaming articles written with pretty good journalistic integrity.
When a business is closing many of its stores and shutting down a subsidiary that has been around for 30+ years with a pretty reputable name (instead of selling it, for example), thats usually a sign that the business is going to go bye bye in the near future.
The article says that the “new” group is just mostly King (the developers of Candy Crush Saga) employees, and they will basically be working on Activision/Blizzard IP, it doesn’t say anything about them working on general Microsoft IP. It is likely Activitions massive back catalogue may finally have some games make a comeback.
It is a game that is difficult, made by a company that is widely known for making some of the highest difficulty games in gaming. And arguably, Elden Ring is their easiest game. This guy signed up for it. If he didn’t know, its his fault.
There is no lawsuit here, this gets thrown out instantly. FromSoftware makes games and they can make whatever they want. If people don’t want their games, then they won’t buy them.
Nah, the Bungie developed Halo games were great. Literally ruled the world. Bungie lost their way when they started mistreating their own major employees (the reason the number 7 is so prevalent in Bungie stuff). Poisoned the watering hole.
Joe Staten wrote out this whole world and plan for Destiny 1 and then Jason Jones scrapped it and Frankensteined it with his friends fantasy thing. And he locked Joe Staten out of the conversations about Destiny 1 after that. Joe Staten had written the Dreadnaught (which ended up in the Taken King expansion) as the end game area of the base game. That and what they did to Marty, you don’t do that without some serious internal problems.
Whatever they’re making now isn’t even Marathon. Some random game with the same name and a few references, but its a crappy live service looter shooter like Tarkov or whatever. I love Marathon, but this imposter deserves a fat L.
Microsoft did not restrict them such that they could not make a new IP or games other than Halo. Basically Microsoft didn’t really care what Bungie did as long as they released 5 Halo games and met their deadlines. Bungie chose not to make other games at that time because A) in the beginning, they loved Halo and wanted to keep making Halo, only tiring of it when they finished Halo 3 ODST, and B) they felt that their studio was big but not big enough at that point to handle making Halo games as good as they were while also making new IP at the same time. For example, Bungie were in the planning stages for Destiny while they were developing Halo 3 ODST, and began some prototyping for Destiny 1 while they were finishing up work on Halo Reach, as Destiny and Reach use the same game engine. But the team they formed to do that for all that time IIRC was around 50 people. For reference, Halo 1 had between 50-150 people working on it.
With Sony, its still too early to know the terms as former employees are likely still under NDA or such, but I would say it is highly likely that Sony did restrict their ability to work on other IP. The reasoning for this is that Bungie’s announcement says they’re losing a chunk of their employees so they can form a different internal Sony development studio (not a Bungie internal studio) to work on new IP. If Bungie was not restricted in a way that prevented them from working on new IP (like Microsoft which did not say no to new or other IP) then Bungie would have formed an internal studio to do this, not splitting off one to go under Sony.
Either way, Sony’s approach is very clearly more aggressive.
After all that they are eventually bought by Sony that now does almost the same thing MS was doing to them.
Not really. Microsoft did not absorb Bungie the way Sony is doing it. Bungie more or less remained untouched, like an independent studio under Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t mandate too much on them and that was part of their agreement with Microsoft. They had to do a certain amount of Halo games (I think it was 5) and in return Microsoft would more or less leave them alone. And then when the deal ended after Halo Reach, Bungie chose to not renew or sign a new deal with Microsoft. That’s pretty different from whatever is going on with Sony.
Get bent, Bungie. You deleted content I paid for, you get what you deserve. Bungie now is not the Bungie I loved. They got rid of and mistreated the people that were important to the magic of Halo, Myth, Marathon, and others.
I knew from the moment Sony announced Bungie was “independent,” that what it actually meant was “we are going to absorb them later, just not right now.”
Bungie vowed when they left Microsoft to self publish all their games. They vowed to never be “owned” by another company again. Funny, they haven’t self-published a single game since they made Myth II Soulblighter. Which, almost prophetically, initially launched with a bug so grievous that if you installed the game into any other directory than the default one, any attempt to uninstall the game would delete the contents of your entire hard drive, including all system necessary files. Everything. The recall was so bad that it almost bankrupted the company.