It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
I wish we lived in a world close to that one, and maybe someday we’ll get there. Guilty Gear Strive’s source code just got leaked in its entirety, so complete that it can just be loaded as is into the Unreal editor, and a lot of people see this as a bad thing rather than the game ascending to immortality.
I once paid $140 (just pre-pandemic inflation) for a meal with two drinks at a fancy restaurant for a friend’s bachelor party. It was delicious. At the same time, I realized that no one meal, no matter how good, was worth that price. I don’t know what the threshold is for how much I’ll pay for a single video game, but $80 is more palatable to me when the game asking for it isn’t Mario Kart.
They’ve been putting out annual releases for a long time, and Call of Duty used to still have LAN. It doesn’t look like Madden ever had LAN, from a quick search of the old covers, which would list the features the game supported, but it was pretty common even in console games back then.
Yes, precisely. These days, when I consider buying a game, if it doesn’t have LAN, private servers, or direct connections, I treat the multiplayer as though it doesn’t exist, because one day it won’t.
I’m struggling with this too, about 1/3 of the way through the main quest. They tutorialize you on feints and defensive mechanics, but you can’t really punish aggression like you can in a fighting game, and the NPC never falls for my feints, basically ever. Getting through a melee fight feels like luck. The last one I got through was because I managed to impale him with three arrows before the sword fight actually started.
I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
Maybe it is a lack of imagination on my part, but that mechanic seems to rely heavily on characters that can be killed and come back to life with a vengeance on a regular basis, which I don’t think makes sense in any of the settings you listed except for Borderlands, with its New-U stations, funny enough. You could adapt it into something where both you and an enemy are defeated non-lethally, I suppose, but that’s a concept that strangely doesn’t have a common template in video games.
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
I’m unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco’s patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn’t see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn’t it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.
I just need to be able to buy and download DRM-free movies. Outside of that, I don’t care what it looks like. Movie studios put so much DRM on my Blu Rays that they’re a pain to rip (but notably, not impossible to rip), and “digital copies” of movies are just long term rentals. Meanwhile the movie industry is on fire while their old revenue streams dry up, and they’re scratching their heads as to where they went wrong.
It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.