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.
I’d say it’s less about imagination than gameplay. I’m reminded of old action figures. Some of them were articulated at the knees, elbows, feet, wrists, and head. Very posable, but you could see all the joints. Then you had the bigger and more detailed figures, but they were barely more than statues. Looked great but you couldn’t really do anything with them.
And then you had themed Lego sets. Only a vague passing resemblance to the IP, but your imagination is the limit on what you do with them.
It only really makes sense when the remaster is trash
I gotta disagree. Even when the remaster is (arguably) better than the original, there’s a lot of value in the original art assets and the more rudimentary gameplay as a historical guidestone. For the same reason you wouldn’t tear up the original Mona Lisa because we’ve got a high resolution digital copy, you don’t just scrub copies of the original version of Pong from the internet because we have Wii Tennis.
That’s like saying “A hamburger is good, but I just can’t into bacon double cheeseburgers.”
I mean, I would say this unironically.
I’ll add that WC1 had fewer variances between factions. Orcs and Humans were almost identical. That made the game more akin to a real time digital chess than WC2, which made Orcs marginally more aggressive and Humans more defensive. I think WC2 is more fun because of the asymmetry, but that’s purely a question of taste. I’m not going to begrudge someone who has a fondness for the original.
I’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions on the WC3 Leaders mechanic, as it focuses gameplay around farming and single points of failure (losing a leader at the wrong moment often meant losing the game)
In that light, Starcraft was the pinnacle of PC RTS gaming and WC3 was an experimental variation that branched off into an RTS variant that would eventually congeal into DOTA, the pinnacle of PC MOBA gaming.
When I first got WC2, I discovered that my 1x CD couldn’t read from the disc fast enough for me to play it. The game would run for about five or ten minutes, then crash. I made it about half way through first campaign - 5 to 10 minutes at a time - before I was able to afford a 4x CD and play it normally.
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...
Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.
The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.
There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?
Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.
The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.
That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.
But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.
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
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Microsoft cancel Perfect Dark reboot and shut the developers down in the name of "continued success" (www.msn.com) angielski
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What're you buying?
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Chrono Trigger Remake Seemingly Confirmed By Yuji Horii (insider-gaming.com) angielski
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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
After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal (www.androidauthority.com) angielski
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Blizzard is delisting the OG Warcrafts from GOG, but GOG says it's gonna preserve them forever anyway, hands out a discount, and announces new policy for its preservation program to boot (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
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Steam's new disclaimer reminds everyone that you don't actually own your games, GOG moves in for the killshot: Its offline installers 'cannot be taken away from you' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Ubisofts stock tanked this morning ahead of the markets opening angielski
Ubisoft Cancels Press Previews of Assassin's Creed Shadows (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Something must be going on at Ubisoft. They cancelled their Tokyo Game Show stream without any explanation as well.
Gacha games are out of control. Gambling shouldn't be so widespread angielski
As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I...