Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.
I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.
There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead.
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?
It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That’s one theory.
Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.
Virtually every JRPG has a straight romance subplot, typically staring the main character. Every FF since… six? Every Dragon Quest. Every Persona. Kingdom Hearts. Fucking Mario Brothers has a straight romance in it.
Like you think Doom Guy is straight because he’s clearly a Christian?
I think you can head-cannon that the two dudes in Time Crisis are having hard core steamy Special Agent on Special Agent lovemakings in between chapters. Fine and good.
But when Arno & Elise kiss in Assassin’s Creed Unity? I’m sorry, but nobody needs to see that heteronormative degenerate filth. Kids are playing that game. What are they going to grow up thinking?
If you sleep through all the romantic subplots of the last 40 years of RPGs, but you wake up offended when you discover that Ellie and Riley Kiss at the end of The Last of Us: Left Behind, you’re working from a double standard.
you mean that since they didn’t call out people complaining about a lack of gay representation they shouldn’t call out everyone complaining now that the complaints go both ways?
It’s why I’m excited for a certain JRPG remake that puts one such relation (between a guy and a girl) front and center, so much so that it becomes a driving element of the story.
Are we talking about FF7 or something else?
IMO, a good romantic plot sneaks up on you after you’ve invested in the characters.
President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations.
In approving a recommendation Thursday by the Administration’s top economic officials, the White House decided to put the tariffs into effect about April 17, less than two weeks before Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is scheduled to begin a visit to the United States aimed at easing trade frictions.
The tariffs will be targeted to bring in as much as $300 million and designed to punish such firms as NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Oki Corp. by either pricing some of their goods out of the American market or by forcing them to accept substantial losses on U.S. sales.
Japan / Korea were early instances of US industrial outsourcing. The consequences of the project was an economic boom during late 70s/early 80s in both countries, such that American politicians feared Japan and Korea would return to the world stage as independent regional powers. Reagan’s tariffs, the subsequent opening of Japanese import markets, and the further industrial outsourcing to China, the Philippines, and the rest of the South Pacific labor markets effectively clipped the wings of the Japanese/Korean wage laborer.
You could argue this was part of the “agreement” between Eastern Zaibatsu executives and Western investment banks. But I’d hardly call it a “measured response”. I certainly wouldn’t call it a policy that served the best interests of either Eastern or Western wage labor.
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally
People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.
“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.
The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.
These rational responses result in a vicious deteriorating cycle of distrust and division. Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences. But the system isn’t optimal - people suffer disproportionately the longer these rational actions continue.
The problem with “good games” is that you can only make them a few times before people stop getting excited.
Mario was a good game. A cloned, reskinned Mario knock off is derivative and hack.
At some point, you need to incorporate new technology, new art, and new game mechanics in order to draw in the crowds. Otherwise, why would I feel the urge to put down money for Starcraft 35 when I’ve got Starcraft 1 & 2 back home?
Right. It’s a system of economic exchange, not a moral position. There are ways around this system, but they’re time consuming and annoying to accomplish. So the vendors tend to take the path of least resistance when setting their internal policies. You were taught about Free Markets as this perfect, frictionless vacuum of interactions between buyers and sellers, but it doesn’t work that way and never did.
For some reason, people seem to confuse being naive and gullible with being moral and upstanding.
…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand
Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century
Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away
More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”
Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.
Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.
Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones
What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?
Putin wouldn’t be President of Russia if the US and the USSR had been able to settle their differences without a 60 year long series of proxy wars and regime changes. Neither would Trump, for that matter.
I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.
Hard truths.
Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that’s a bad idea?
Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?
NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist’s attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don’t build controllers this way ten years earlier.
Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.
Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.
I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.
Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.
But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb
That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.
But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I would still consider the Steam Deck a “failure” if it couldn’t move enough units to justify its production cost, but it looks like they’re still churning them out, so… eh, it’s not great but its fine.
I would argue that merely comparing generic PC sales to Switch sales also misses the mark. At the very least, you’d focus on unique Steam installs or Active Steam Accounts if you’re really interested in counting the success of Steam relative to Nintendo.
Even then, what you’re really competing with isn’t “SteamDeck sales v. Switch sales”. I’d say its “SteamDeck sales per $1 advertising spent v. …” Given that Nintendo spent around $730M in advertising last year and Valve spent under $100M, it seems that Nintendo has to spend roughly $50/unit to move a Switch relative to Valve coming in closer to $40/unit.
It’s very difficult to compare popularity under two wildly divergent marketing strategies.
But I don’t feel that Steam alone accounts for PC gaming.
If we’re putting the SteamDeck against Nintendo, I’d say the natural comparison is Steam exclusives against Nintendo exclusives.
Even on my Steam Deck, I use GOG, Epic, and itch.io quite regularly.
Sure. Because it is functionally just a computer with a Valve-branded Linux distro. But there are PC games ported to Mobile. I’m not going to count all Android phones to the “PC” side of the aisle just because I can install Balatro on my OnePlus.
The whole reason the Steam Deck exists is to compete as a portable full sized hand-held console comparable to the Switch. If you’re not talking about portable consoles, you’re not really talking apples-to-apples. Anyone crammed into the coach end on an airplane can tell you the quality of life difference between a gaming laptop and a hand-held.
I’ve had a great time with Remake and Rebirth. They put a lot more into it than some of the earlier spit-shines on 2D classics, which wouldn’t have worked for a game that was kinda in between generations of art and technique. But they’re really dragging this shit out. And I really don’t need a ChronoTrigger Integrade.
The franchise and the world have abundant potential. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something really creative and exciting with it. It just feels like the modders already did exactly that, only to have their work thrown in the trash.
14 crashed and burned until they brought in the A-Team to reboot it.
I’d say that had a much bigger impact on Dev cycle than a successful release on the first try with 7Remake.
If nothing else, successful releases produce more talented Devs, while failures burn them. And that gets us back to 15, which was an outright dumpster fire.
$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.
What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.
Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.
Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.
there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.
As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
The dream of the '10s/20s game industry was VR. Hyper-realistic settings were supposed to supplant the real world. Ready Player One was what big development studios genuinely thought they were aiming for.
They lost sight of video games as an abstraction and drank too much of their own cyberpunk kool-aid. So we had this fixation on Ray Tracing and AI-driven NPC interactions that gradually lost sight of the gameplay loop and the broader iterative social dynamics of online play.
That hasn’t eliminated development in these spheres, but it has bifricated the space between game novelty and game immersion. If you want the next Starcraft or Earthbound or Counterstrike, you need to look towards the indie studios and their low-graphics / highly experimental dev studios (where games like Stardew Valley and Undertale and Balatro live). The AAA studios are just turning out 100 hour long movies with a few obnoxious gameplay elements sprinkled in.
Idk. Breath of the Wild felt more like a tech demo than a full game. Tears of the Kingdom felt more fleshed out, but even then… the wideness of the world belied its shallowness in a lot of places. Ocarina of Time had a smaller overall map, but ever region had this very bespokely crafted setting and culture and strategy. By the time you got to Twilight Princess, you had this history to the setting and this weight to this iteration of the Zelda setting.
What could you really do in BotW that you couldn’t do in Twilight? The graphics got a tweak. The amount of running around you did went way up. But the game itself? Zelda really peaked with Majorem’s Mask. So much of this new stuff is more fluff than substance.
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Sexualized video games are not causing harm to male or female players, according to research (www.psypost.org) angielski
This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0747563222001637
Whine harder you assholes angielski
Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow (www.theverge.com) angielski
Warner Bros. Games is working on another live-service game, despite Suicide Squad flop (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Warner Bros, famous for such hits as Multiversus, Suicide Squad, and that harry potter quidditch game has decided that 99% of gamblers quit before they hit big.
Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy. angielski
https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/3d4d3bb4-67c7-40fd-9458-238f50f665f2.jpeg...
PAPERS, PLEASE - The Short Film (www.youtube.com) angielski
This is the official short film adaptation of the classic video game Papers Please....
The Steam controller was ahead of its time angielski
The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too....
Microsoft cancel Perfect Dark reboot and shut the developers down in the name of "continued success" (www.msn.com) angielski
Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Steam Summer Sale 2025 has begun! (store.steampowered.com) angielski
What're you buying?
Netflix is delisting some of its best indie games (www.theverge.com) angielski
Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers (www.videogamer.com) angielski
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Chrono Trigger Remake Seemingly Confirmed By Yuji Horii (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Microsoft is raising prices on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games worldwide (www.theverge.com) angielski
Xbox first party titles expected to hit $80 USD this holiday; Game Pass pricing currently unchanged.
Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and Bioware have to offer (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
It was just yesterday... (lemmy.world) angielski
Small, incremental improvements don't make shockwaves like the old massive tech leaps used to. (lemmy.world) angielski
Balatro wins formal appeal to reclassify poker game as PEGI 12 (www.eurogamer.net) angielski