Eh, this is a case of them offering a better deal than actually ever made sense, because they expected the volume of subscribers to make up for it, but that never manifested.
It’s also suspected that Yuzu was not “clean room” reversed engineered and built on code that they shouldn’t have had access to, which will allow Nintendo to pull down any fork of Yuzu but not Ryujinx.
I suspect Australia is responsible for Streets of Rogue changing “cocaine” into “sugar” as well, but I know Japan doesn’t allow things like beheadings in their games, which I thought was part of that DLC.
Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.
They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.
As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.
This has happened before, for games from other publishers, as per the article. I don’t remember all of the reasons for it, but if I’m not mistaken, this is why Shogun: Total War 2 has a blood DLC for a few dollars, so that they can make everything but the DLC available in Japan.
Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.
I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.
Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.
Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate’s sunsetting. Evo’s only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn’t getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.
Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.
It’s a great game, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.