How many releases is a very different number than how much profit. Only a few of Microsoft’s releases likely account for a sizable percentage of the entire industry’s profits in a given year. The fact is that investors saw dollar signs, and the industry expanded to a level that the market doesn’t actually sustain. How many metroidvanias do you want to play in a given year? And given that Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out this year, how likely are you to play Tales of Kenzera: Zau after you’ve bought and played those? Mass layoffs are not a good thing, but it’s a mathematical consequence of how much companies are permitted to expand relative to what people actually buy.
If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.
I don’t know how you got from A to B on the Porsche. Embracer was funded largely by debt that they were expecting to get bailed out of by an investment that didn’t happen; the classic leveraged investment gone wrong. Microsoft absolutely could stomach whatever losses they face, especially since that was the whole idea a few years back when they started Game Pass, so them deciding to not follow through on that and tighten their belts now is a situation unique to them. At large, across the industry, are tons of companies making big bets like Suicide Squad or Concord or Warhaven that follow a live service template that’s been tapped out of customers and don’t work out, and even smaller companies following the traditional publisher model like Mimimi are so exhausted hunting for funding for their next game, just barely making it by on copies sold, that they decide instead to close up shop. That’ll happen when customer dollars are spread out around more games.
I know it’s not an option for consoles. Since the 7th gen, it was always moving in this direction. It’s probably one of dozens of reasons that PC overtook consoles in market share.
A friend of mine bought one at MSRP to add to his collection along with the likes of Anthem and Babylon’s Fall. He also picked up Suicide Squad for this reason, but he found that he unironically really enjoys that game while it’s still operational.
There’s another thread here that I posted covering this already, but it’s important to note that the game is DRM-free from Itch, and you’re free to back up the game. It sucks that they can delist the game even if you paid for it, but your digital library really is forever as long as you make backups yourself. That’s way better than the alternative where the store hosts it forever but you can’t back it up yourself (like Steam).
I have far more confidence that unzipping a file will continue to work into the future than this project that may fall out of sync with some future update on Steam.
Rumors have it this event will announce the PS5 Pro. I know the PS5 has been out for years now but does anyone feel like a pro version might be unnecessary? Current gen games already look great and run fine*...
Lots of people feel this way. This thing is going to come in at a price around $650 or $700, sell pretty much exclusively to the people who need the latest high-end PlayStation regardless, and then free up a bit of inventory of second hand vanilla PS5s. It’s a way to justify keeping prices high, because they can’t afford to lower them.
Luckily it’s DRM-free. Back up your installers. I wanted to call attention to this, because in a very unusual move, it’s being removed even for people who own a copy, whereas usually stores will only remove a game from sale and still host the files for existing owners to download.
I only own the game through itch.io, which I got through one of those charity bundles, and they contacted me by e-mail. Then people contacted GamingOnLinux about it, and at least right now, it seems to only be limited to itch.io.
EDIT: I actually do have the game via GOG as well, which is news to me, and I did not receive a similar notification about it.
With the release of “The Final Shape,” the main storyline has concluded, and it seems like the developers are now just churning out random content and seasonal passes without a clear direction for the game’s future. I’m genuinely curious about what motivates players to stick around. Are there aspects of the game that...
For me and many others, it was a very divisive one, so I’m not so surprised by that. I guess Eurogamer is staffed by a lot of the game’s detractors, which is possible. Hell, if it was me making the list, #1 with a bullet would be Skullgirls, but that’s not here either.
If I have to tell every single unit where to go, who to shoot and when to hide, I’m not playing a shooter, I’m playing a strategy game in first person.
Yeah, that’s what I’m here for. Another way to look at it is this: remember how much “All Ghillied Up” wowed people when they showed it off at E3, and then again when people got to play it? I wanted to be the guy telling the player what to do, not just following a series of instructions. You’re right that when a game like Wildlands has to resort to wallhacks, there’s a lot of satisfaction that evaporates with it, and that’s why there might be a market for a game made the old-school way.
Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.
To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.
It is September now which means my wife has decided it is fall and time to celebrate 2 months of Halloween. Anyone have and spooky game recommendations?
Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.
They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.
Maybe not. If that’s the case, I’ll live. They’ve brought their past PC releases to GOG until very recently, so if they see sales drop off, they might continue to do that or relax the PSN requirement. We’ll see.
After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that...
A 1 out of 10 for Starfield is ridiculous; either hyperbole, or you haven’t played many video games before to see what a 1 out of 10 would truly be. I was very disappointed by it too, but level set a bit here.
Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.
Your opinion is your opinion, but I don’t think the scale of the company or its resources matter one iota. Games made by a single person have been better than those made by thousands of people, and that’s without putting my thumb on the scale in either direction. I don’t even agree that Starfield is linear, but even if it was, that doesn’t make a game bad. If you’re calling Starfield a 1 out of 10, there’s no room to go down from there on that scale, which is absurd to me, because that means you’d have to cram Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D on the same part of that scale.
Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.
It definitely does not matter. You build a game that you’re capable of making. If it felt like they were making a game that needed a bigger budget to realize the design they were shooting for, that will affect my opinion of it. Games like Halo Infinite spent so much money on the game making it “big” that it actually made the game worse than if they’d spent less on it and kept it smaller. I don’t give a damn how much they spent making it. We had a whole era of RPGs in the 2010s that were made for a tiny fraction of the development cost of what was coming out of BioWare, but they were better RPGs without having to give them any sort of pity scale to arrive at that conclusion.
I brought up Superman 64 because it’s known to be one of the worst games ever made. When you know how bad a game can actually be, Starfield has no business being a 1 out of 10.
And I’m saying that if you throw in a quick deathmatch mode, it’s playable with only one friend. And when a game has LAN, that means that you can play with a gaming VPN regardless of the presence of official servers.
Introducing Steam Families (youtu.be)
Video Game Developers Are Leaving The Industry And Doing Something, Anything Else (aftermath.site)
Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling (www.theverge.com)
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
Satisfactory 1.0 (www.satisfactorygame.com)
No one wanted these PS5 Concord discs until Sony stopped making them (arstechnica.com)
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The future of Minecraft’s development (www.minecraft.net)
Tune in tomorrow for a PlayStation 5 Technical Presentation hosted by Mark Cerny (blog.playstation.com)
Rumors have it this event will announce the PS5 Pro. I know the PS5 has been out for years now but does anyone feel like a pro version might be unnecessary? Current gen games already look great and run fine*...
Oxenfree is being completely removed from itch.io in October (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Luckily it’s DRM-free. Back up your installers. I wanted to call attention to this, because in a very unusual move, it’s being removed even for people who own a copy, whereas usually stores will only remove a game from sale and still host the files for existing owners to download.
Why Do People Still Play Destiny 2?
With the release of “The Final Shape,” the main storyline has concluded, and it seems like the developers are now just churning out random content and seasonal passes without a clear direction for the game’s future. I’m genuinely curious about what motivates players to stick around. Are there aspects of the game that...
The Eurogamer 100 (www.eurogamer.net)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/19546060...
Dagger Directive Brings The Old School Tactical Shooter Style In Announcement Trailer (gamermatters.com)
Denmark is the 5th country to pass the #StopKillingGames EU threshold - 340K out of 1M signatures in total!
Link to sign EU initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home...
"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"
Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
Spooky Games
It is September now which means my wife has decided it is fall and time to celebrate 2 months of Halloween. Anyone have and spooky game recommendations?
Astro Bot | Review Thread (95 OpenCritic)
Game Information...
Is Elder Scrolls 6 doomed to fail? I can't see how it will work
After the massive blunder of Starfield, I cannot see how Elder scrolls 6 could possibly be successful. Everything points to the fact that they knew that the game was not even half finished, in my opinion, with major glaring issues, and they decided to just send it off anyway. The difference between this game and Oblivion is that...
An important update on Concord - Being taken offline September 6th, refunds to be issued (blog.playstation.com)