You’re inferring a whole lot from a mock-up of gameplay that isn’t actually gameplay. A single player Naughty Dog game has a huge leg up over Concord in that you can play it regardless of how many other people bought it. Just saying “from the makers of The Last of Us” buys a few million copies sold where Concord didn’t clear 50k. If you want actual candidates for the next Concord, it’s going to be Marathon and, even more likely, Fairgame$.
Well, this is misleading. My mind goes to the likes of Sony first party titles in reading this headline, but the examples that the article uses as a metric for “PlayStation exclusive” are more like the games that either were paid to not go to Xbox or didn’t see the fiscal sense in doing so. It doesn’t rule out first party titles, but that’s far from the most likely. Of Sony’s first party games, the ones most likely to come to Xbox, if at all, are the live service games, and that’s looking increasingly like a strategy that Sony regrets anyway, so why even bother with Xbox when it’s not going to move the needle?
It may very well be, but the impetus in the article of Outer Worlds 2 and Square Enix/Ubisoft’s strategies seem to be the wrong way to draw that conclusion. Square Enix is pivoting because being Sony exclusive wasn’t working. Ubisoft has pretty much always done simultaneous launches, so I’m not sure why they’re even listed here. The first Outer Worlds was third party before Microsoft acquired Obsidian and was published by 2K, so who knows if any agreements had to be honored or were more expensive to break.
Kunitsu-Gami was this year. Like it or not, Exoprimal was last year. And Capcom’s got a ton of IP that would work really well in the modern era and/or deserve compatibility with modern x64 hardware. I’d personally love to see Viewtiful Joe and Darkstalkers come back.
I’m no stranger to this in fighting games. It doesn’t mean you’re a second class citizen per se. It means they don’t want people to hold on to the beta version for months between the beta and the release, and they don’t know how to stop it.
That is a perfectly valid use case for a video game that I paid for though. I do exactly that with games like 007: Agent Under Fire (in split-screen), and I played games like Rainbow Six 3 long after the official servers weren’t there anymore. Agent Under Fire in particular is a lot of fun with all of the modifiers on, like moon gravity, and I wouldn’t mind playing some multiplayer games with friends with cheats like that one on; things that you wouldn’t want on in a ranked queue, but things that I should 100% be able to do with the product that I paid for.
A lot of cheats send completely legitimate information back to the server, and that’s what they’re seeking to stop with the client side implementation; I don’t think it has anything to do with costs. I haven’t heard of any data mining happening, and surely someone would have caught it with wire shark by now, but there are enough things that we know for sure about kernel level anti cheats to make it offensive.
Unless they deviate substantially from how they build games in genres like shooters, server side anti-cheat isn’t going to catch everything that kernel level anti cheat does. However, kernel level anti cheat doesn’t catch hardware cheating anyway, so if cheating is always going to be imperfect, we ought to stop short of the kernel.
They see it as a threat to their business model. Without any other option, you have to be on the latest version, seeing the latest skins, and you’re unable to bypass their store and mod them in yourself. If I can help it, not giving me the option to run the server myself will be a threat to their business model.
In the wake of Crowdstrike, Microsoft was going to allow for additional avenues for hooks into the OS that don’t reach as deep into the kernel level, but they never said they were removing the hooks that Crowdstrike or anti-cheat use, as far as I can tell. One solution for PC handhelds is to run whatever modified version of Windows that Microsoft is cooking up, so that you get the console-like interface without compromising on the anti-cheat compatibility. The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.
It’s a very recent development, but the consumer actually does have enough information just from the store page these days to know that a game uses kernel level software. The thing that still sucks is that it can be retroactive. In those cases, I suppose we just ask for a refund.
I’m against them being able to ban you from playing online in its entirety, which is something they can do because most online games don’t let you run the servers yourself anymore. Sure, if someone cheats on official servers, ban them from the official servers. They should still be able to play, cheating or not, on the server they run themselves, but that’s not an option we even have most of the time.