For anyone curious, I politely asked a streamer to check for me, and this game seems to still have LAN, despite the lack of mention in their FAQ and the store page and the explicit removal in Borderlands 1 GOTY edition.
Through lawsuits, we did get to see what those payouts were in the past, and they’re all individually negotiated in lump sums, not determined by algorithm. And those payouts were from the good days. Reporting indicates those payouts have dropped off dramatically, which was followed by a drop-off of Xbox ports, since that seems to be the primary way Xbox players play games at all.
I’ve seen Mat Piscatella talking about this, and it seems like his take is, paraphrasing, “it values different games”. Some games see far more success with the broad access they get to subscriptions, and some see less, which seems to be corroborated by the author of this article.
Subscriptions have become the new four letter word, right? You can’t buy a product anymore.
I mean…you can for anything in Game Pass, but that’s not the case for Nintendo.
Without wishing to portray myself as a comprehensive researcher … I have come across one study of Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus that appears to bear elements … showing that in contrast to the music or movie and TV industry, these subscription services have not “substantially cannibalized existing revenue streams”.
And I think a lot of that has to do with how much longer we spend with a given game than any song or movie. And even in television, every current show is on some streaming service, and you really can’t buy those, but in games, it’s the opposite. With few exceptions, you can just about always buy the game, and they’re often not present on a subscription service. When games are sold, they tend to command a higher price, too.
Then, not mentioned in the article, are weird cases like Indiana Jones or Doom, where they’re quality games that don’t sell many copies despite impressive pedigrees, presumably because everyone knows they can get them on Game Pass. But then games like STALKER 2 or Clair Obscur, with low-ish review scores and basically no pedigree, respectively, sell plenty of copies despite being available for far cheaper on Game Pass. Some of this might be the association with Game Pass being for Microsoft-owned studios or something, and Microsoft is aiding that association by making fewer lucrative deals for third party studios.
I’m fairly sure every Battlefield game until BF3 had LAN and private servers, so it ought to work, yes. Bad Company 1 never got a PC version, so you’re at the mercy of what those consoles allowed for, but Bad Company 2 is on PC.
I liked Hollow Knight, but yes, it kind of was. Frequent destinations were far away from fast travel, and there was a low level area that they transformed into a high level area later in the game specifically so that crossing the map wouldn’t be a cake walk. I’d argue that earning the power to make an area like that into a cake walk is a core part of the fun.
They’ve been working on standalone VR for a while now, like the Quest, so it wouldn’t have to be called Index 2, since it’s not just an improved version of what they made before. A colloquial term for glasses is “frames”.
It’s still a good time to get a Steam Deck. Most games fit its spec just fine, it’s one of the cheaper handhelds on the market for the power you get out of it, and it has good battery life for that power, too.
They’ve been working on VR hardware for a while, but the market has kind of stalled out on what the technology is capable of. They’d have to be pretty confident that they can jumpstart it again with their own games if that’s what it is.
Yeah, I’ve noticed more hits coming out Europe lately, with the likes of Remedy, Larian, Warhorse, Hazelight, etc., and probably the reasons they could afford to make those games in the first place is that labor costs are far cheaper for a similar result. Where capital is flowing and creating employment, I’d imagine, is tightly correlated with that.