From the press releases at the time, it appears the new owners only have the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, not their other IPs like Ghostwire or Evil Within. If they had to be choosy, Hi-Fi Rush was the one worth getting.
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren’t open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There’s something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.
That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.
It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.