One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
Any game works as a LAN game. That’s the advantage of being a LAN game. Of course, when you build a game like that, you know not to assume that you’ll always have 10 players in a match, and you build it to scale to that. If they released it with LAN and a deathmatch mode for any number of players, even if they did no rebalancing on the character designs to account for it and the there were obvious top tiers and low tiers, I’d still buy it.
The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.
Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.
A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they’re approaching a monopoly, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting there by monopolistic practices.
Then it arguably isn’t that either. They give you full instructions on how to repair and upgrade it, and they partnered with iFixIt. People have modded in more storage, battery life, and better screens. Personally, I think I draw the line at the part where it runs the same executables as any other PC, so I’ll call it a PC.
There’s so much Baldur’s Gate 3 there already. If you never cut anything, the game is never “finished”. I think they made the right call. I’d like to see what they’ve got in them next. Perhaps a CRPG with a Starfield-esque setting. Most CRPGs lean on the post-apocalypse sorts of settings.
Now we’re in philosophical territory with questions like, “What is a console?” It runs PC games, but you can navigate it with a controller. It has most console features but is malleable enough to have most PC features.
PC is already larger than active users on both PlayStations combined, and it didn’t used to be that way. Given the Steam Deck and what Microsoft have been saying about handhelds and their next console(s), you’re looking at a very real possibility that the next Xbox is just a PC with a different UI, like the Steam Deck.
The new-gen console is actually trending 7 per cent ahead of the PS4 in the United States launch aligned.
And how much do you think the drop in Xbox is? It’s way more than 7 percent. The problem for Sony isn’t that its console is dying; it’s that they’re approaching market saturation. They’ve got their market cornered in a way that they never have, and they’ve only got a 7 percent lead off of the last generation. Peak dollars spent on consoles was back in 2009, when all three consoles were in very healthy competition. Many PS4 users are happy to stay on PS4, because the games they play are over 10 years old, like Grand Theft Auto V and Minecraft, so there’s no need to upgrade.
Meanwhile, a console that launched with some idea of every game running at 60 FPS is now compromising on that (it was inevitable, but people believed otherwise). Games that used to be console exclusive are now coming out on PC, where you don’t need to pay a subscription fee to play online and your library always comes with the assumption that every game you have will be forward compatible. Even if you buy the new PlayStation, there’s no promise that your old games will run at better resolutions and frame rates. The controller you bought 10 years ago still works on PC, but Sony says you need to buy the new one, even if the game you’re playing uses none of its new features. The VR system you bought before doesn’t play the new VR games. For all sorts of economic realities, not the least of which are certification processes and licensing fees, there’s a good chance that game you really want to play is on PC long before it’s on console, in early access or otherwise. There are no competing storefronts for digital releases, so you can only pay what Sony says you have to pay. Consoles also aren’t even significantly cheaper than an equivalent PC anymore, and they run basically the same hardware under the hood, so the reasons for a console as we know them today to exist are fewer and fewer as time goes on.
You say they engage in monopolistic practices, but did you cite one? You dismissed a lot of the same points from the video that I did, but I don’t see what supports your point that they’re behaving as a monopolist.
not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.
Proton is actually super easy for a competitor to set up standalone. There’s nothing stopping the likes of GOG from just distributing Proton or Wine with their Windows executables for Linux customers, if they wanted, and they can even obfuscate it and make it invisible to the player like Steam does. The big trick that Valve pulled out of their hat for Proton, which again is not monopolistic, is that they re-encode videos that use Microsoft’s proprietary video codecs, since they can’t legally share the DLL that enables playback of those videos. To do what Valve does here is replicable, but it comes at a cost to the distributor. I can’t speak to the effort involved in setting up a competing VR platform, but it seems to be of less and less concern at this point.
I launched it from Heroic, but these same steps will work without it. Run winetricks in your Wine prefix, install a DLL or component, and select both vcrun2019 and vcrun2022 and hit OK to let them install.
I followed some steps for another game and found that you can look at SteamDB to see what other dependency depots the game uses. I also try to update the PC Gaming Wiki with fixes like this whenever I find them.
Thanks. I think I’m still considering multiplayer to be nonexistent for any game without proper LAN support, but this will be great for preserving everything else.