ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The video starts by showing a side by side of original Arkham Asylum and Return to Arkham Asylum, talking about how the remaster ruined the art style. At first, they’re unlabeled, and I thought, “Oh yeah, that sucks, that is a bit worse.” Then they labeled them, and the one I thought looked better was the remaster. What’s more is I’ve only ever played the original PC release of Arkham Asylum, one of my favorite games, and the remaster looks the way I remember Arkham Asylum looking.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The money has been donated, and he linked receipts to where it’s gone.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

“News”. The first video from each of those guys was news. Their follow-up videos show why actual journalism is so important and convinced me to never watch their videos again, not Jirard’s, funny enough. As a non-expert, it seems like the only reason donating this much money is complicated is because they wanted eyes on exactly where it was being used.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

here is an explanation I came up with later that includes zero proof of any of it happenening so you’ll just have to trust me bro.

To be fair, that’s what a lot of the accusations against him were.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The Saudi part matters a lot, as they’ve been grabbing lots of the gaming industry in their diversification efforts.

It also moves what their incentives and goals are. They’ll still try to make money, which means Ultimate Team isn’t going away without legislation, but when they’re private, they can probably afford to burn through some war chest searching for new franchises to replace their defunct franchises, and perhaps public investors wouldn’t be interested in losing that money in the short term.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Truthfully, you’ll likely see very little change in the next few years, but they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see an advantage to it. The article outlines some of them.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I literally can’t. The article is speaking from the industry perspective of sustaining its jobs though.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I believe Gearbox has always done this royalty situation union-less. But that doesn’t spread out sales to other games that need customers. There are still going to be plenty of games that just don’t move a lot of copies because other games suck the oxygen out of the room.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The article is about how so many games are coming out that many of the companies making them are going under even when they make games that are evaluated as being good or great. I provided an anecdote about myself that probably contributes to it. I didn’t really share it to be about my attitude toward being able to play these games. I’ll be just fine.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Multiplayer games 20 years ago were also built to be more scalable to different numbers of players, and they mostly had bots and such, too. I might push back on how long they sustained huge player bases though. Those games were often sequeled very quickly, and most of the players would move to the next one, leaving behind a small percentage. At least the old game was always still playable for those who bought it, though.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It also comes at the cost of being paid less than the industry average, which isn’t high. But it wasn’t so much tooting Gearbox’s horn as it was pointing out that it doesn’t solve the problem stated in the article. It wasn’t about how well the employees at a successful studio are paid but rather how many studios are unsuccessful because of how much competition there is. The industry might generate absurd amounts of money, but a large percentage of that is still just going to a handful of games that gather all the attention rather than being spread around more uniformly, and I don’t think there’s really a way to spread it around.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’m sure it looked great when they made Borderlands 2, but they also made Battleborne. Borderlands 2 devs still get royalties to this day. And hey, Gearbox still gets some stuff right sometimes. The entire Borderlands series still supports LAN, which even the people who manage the Steam pages don’t seem to care about. They can be good in some ways and shitty in others. Life is rarely so simple.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Very true. And sometimes there’s an answer to those questions, even if we discount the games designed to disappear after a few years. You might be sensitive to spoilers, it might be the perfect game for you in the moment (like the right game for a handheld system just before a trip), your friends might want to play it with you or talk with you about it when you’re done, etc. But that competition with back catalogs absolutely exists.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Not every game costs $70. Expedition 33 in particular only costs $50 when it’s not on sale, unless you’re in a different region where $50 USD converts to $70 in your country.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’m only buying the games I’m going to play, and this article is about the industry’s problem.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That still isn’t what the article was about. It was about how there are so many games coming out that even critically acclaimed games can’t break even, even though critical acclaim generally helps move copies.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The things getting reviewed already have a selection bias that makes them more likely to review well. It’s not a problem that reviewers focus their time on the games that their audience is most interested in, as opposed to reviewing every asset flip published to Steam.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Distribution. It’s very easy to put your game on Steam next to Grand Theft Auto. You’ll have a much harder time getting your indie film in theaters or on a streaming service. High quality movies aren’t typically found on someone’s YouTube channel.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Lots of people here didn’t read the article and took the headline to be a personal problem rather than an economic one, lol.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It does shift review coverage, generally, toward the ones with the most advertising. Kane & Lynch is a weird one to pull out to support your argument, because despite the advertising, they got fairly poor reviews. (Also, as someone who’s played Kane & Lynch, those games are underrated.) The games with the big advertising budgets typically have a degree of confidence behind that spend, which again creates selection bias toward games more likely to review well, but that doesn’t mean that Redfall and Suicide Squad still can’t happen and review poorly.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Above 50%, but do you have any idea how much lower the bar can be for a bad video game than Redfall and Suicide Squad? Those are the games that typically aren’t getting coverage. Redfall and Suicide Squad, again, had some confidence behind them. When that much money is thrown behind a game and there’s no confidence in it, it usually doesn’t even come out.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s not only big budget. A number of indie games that I thought were superb didn’t go on to make enough money for that team to make another. Mimimi games made excellent games within their niche, but it wasn’t enough to keep finding funding, and they closed. A game like The Thaumaturge from last year has a similar scope, budget, and genre to Expedition 33, but I don’t know that they made enough to keep the studio going. Sword of the Sea this year released to excellent reviews but subpar sales. There are a lot of examples, but this is a snapshot.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

The end goal for all of them, unlike fanfics, is to sell enough copies to make their development costs back and be able to make another game. Even if you discount the stuff that no one has heard of, the point of the article is that there’s so much competition that even making a game that does well critically isn’t enough to save it; and it used to.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

But how on earth do you get people who only buy and play 4 or fewer games per year to look at those indie games instead of one of the same big games that all of their friends are playing? That demographic is why Grand Theft Auto, EA FC, Assassin’s Creed, etc. is so big, because they capture the people who don’t play many games. There is technically enough money to support the entire industry, but that’s not really how consumer patterns have ever worked; most of it always goes to a select few.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Agree to disagree, I suppose, but for the person whose only game every year is Assassin’s Creed, I don’t think you’re going to convince them that they should play Silksong or Expedition 33 and that they’d prefer them if only they knew about them. Even if the games aren’t multiplayer, it’s often a common touchstone for a group of friends to talk about and bond over. You or I might rail about handholding in one game that the mass market plays, but that handholding is a large part of why those games are mass market. The indie stuff we find more appealing are often answering a need, for a much smaller base of potentially interested people, who are sick of the mass market stuff, because we play more games in general.

As for a solution for your personal problem finding indie games, I know it’s one that Second Wind has been putting effort into addressing. This may sound odd, but in multiple cases, I’ve found niche games to scratch a certain itch I’ve had just by going to the Steam search and filtering by tags, and at least that cut down the research time dramatically. I understand the frustration though, because I’m having a similar hard time finding out if a game is built to last with things like offline multiplayer, and it’s something that reviewers often don’t care enough to mention at all.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

How did they settle on AC?

How did you lose interest in Assassin’s Creed? Maybe you didn’t, but I did. Call of Duty, too. Part of the reason why is why those people still come back to it, like sanding off rough edges that were maybe desirable to us. The top dog franchises will change from time to time, but I don’t think you’ll be able to will that change into existence with a recommendation. The Game Awards do have a tangible effect on sales and can make that change, but only up to a few games per year, at most.

I think what I’m looking for is something that goes over the top new games from the last month or something, with deeper dives between those videos.

It’s a fairly recent effort from Second Wind, with similar gripes as to what you mentioned, which is why I brought it up. This is specifically the show that they do that I was thinking of, seemingly twice per month, and there’s also Yahtzee Tries.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Yeah, but 2003 graphics are an improvement on 1999 graphics.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There should be exactly the toggle that the article asks for given this criticism. I don’t know how likely it is, because it seems like whatever engine they fed this game into just handles lighting very differently. Deus Ex is a great game, but I’m personally of the opinion that it’s quite ugly, and just about anything you do to the graphics are an improvement. The mod that the article compares it to doesn’t look better, just slightly different. In either case, the reason that both look better than the original, and why we pulled out the year 2003, is that the technology in cutting edge graphics didn’t really change until mid-to-late 2004, and the advancements in between were basically just more polygons and better textures, which is all you can reasonably expect in a remaster. More than that is a lot more work and gets you into remake territory.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Hey, that’s fair. If you already have the old version of the game, this one’s going to have limited appeal for you, most likely. As is the case with most remasters.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

What excuse? I was stating an objective fact.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Controls improvements alone are low-hanging fruit for Deus Ex.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The PS2 version is surely severely compromised compared to the PC version. Even the sequel designed with the Xbox in mind had to cut back on a lot of things to make it fit on a more powerful console.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The fan mods aren’t exactly accessible to PlayStation players. What would you want to see in a Deus Ex remaster that a mod couldn’t do? Mods are capable of a great deal, but there’s a lot of value to having things preconfigured to modern standards out of the box.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

They did redo the models and lighting effects; I can’t speak to the animations.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Maybe where the consensus is, but I know which of those two I’d rather play.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I never played this game back in the day, but in a world where it has voice acting and a PC port, this is the one I’ll likely try. I have no idea when that might be, since it’s already a struggle to keep up with game releases, but someday, for sure.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Fascinating story. The narrative at the time was that casual games were just too lucrative to bother with SiN sequels after Emergence, but of course, the truth has a lot more nuance.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Marketing cycles are short now. This will be the show aligned with Tokyo Games Show to show off games releasing in the last part of the year and maybe teasing a few high-profile games for next year.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

The kinds of games Sony makes have gotten bigger and taken longer to make. Taking longer to make means you get fewer of them. There were three Uncharted games and The Last of Us between 2007 and 2013. Naughty Dog today hasn’t put out a new game since the PS4. When Sony spends $300M on Spider-Man 2 but they’ve actually sold fewer PS5s than they sold PS4s at the same point in the console lifecycle, you need to start getting your money back in other ways, like porting the game to PC. Helldivers II is a Sony joint, but the vast, vast majority of its sales came from PC, not PlayStation, and now it’s even on Xbox.

Exclusives are just going to be less and less of a going concern as time goes on. As for what Sony’s studios are cooking, Sucker Punch has a game this year, Intergalactic from Naughty Dog is at least a year away (but probably more), Sony Santa Monica still has their sci-fi project that Alanah Pearce wrote for that still hasn’t been announced (so likely at least a year away), Guerilla “just” put out Horizon: Forbidden West in 2022 (meaning at least another year on their next game), etc. At this point, all of the pent up projects from these studios are looking like they’re going to attempt to sell a PS6, with the same cross-gen situation we got for the PS5, where it comes out on both. Combine that with the talk about there being two SKUs of PS6, one of which being a handheld, acting as a Series S to the regular PS6’s Series X, and that’s what Sony’s output looks like to me. That, plus the collapse of Bungie following Marathon’s release and the collapse of Haven Studios regardless of whether or not Fairgames even comes out.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

This headline feels like a trap. Yes, Valve is the arbiter of what passes through the Steam store. Part of that involves checking for malware which, while their record isn’t flawless, they’ve let very little of it through given the sheer volume of games published to Steam every year. The consequences were terrible here, and I hope that can be rectified somehow. But the implication of this is that Valve makes this sort of error all the time through their “incompetence”, which they don’t, and the point of phrasing it this way seems to be to call anyone stating otherwise some kind of defender of a multibillion dollar company. It seems like a far better use of everyone’s time to be mad at the scammer here. Supporting and profiting from child gambling via Counter-Strike is a much better reason to be mad at Valve than the mistakes or other gaps in their vetting process that will be slightly tighter as a result of this mishap.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

Reporting from outside sources has covered what Steam’s vetting process is. They check to see if the game runs, if it has the features that the publishers/developers claim it has on the side bar, and they check for malware. Often times this is outsourced, but the buck does stop with Valve. The thing with any security measure though is that anything can be circumvented, and preventing the same vector of attack in the future is an arms race. And another way to read what you said about how many instances of malware there are is that it affects 0.02% of games released this year so far, and they’re not the games that customers are most likely to buy in the first place like your Borderlands or Battlefields.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

There are tons of scenarios where I can see it being useful, and I can often see a clear difference between it and release, but the problem I’ve got now is that there are so many finished games I could be spending my time and money on right now that it’s hard to justify buying an early access game. I think the last one I bought was Palworld, which I played for about 20 hours right when it came out, and now I’m waiting for 1.0 rather than the iterative feedback that early access thrives on. They’ve still got plenty of people to get that feedback from, but that’s the biggest early access release since Minecraft, so it’s an outlier.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

It’s been a hot minute, but what I really liked about Far Cry 3 and 4 was that if you wanted a certain upgrade, you set your own goal as a player for a certain type of mission, and I really enjoyed that. I remember seeing in the marketing for FC5 that they changed that, and it killed my interest. I’m not sure what there is to take issue with story missions moving the story forward.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I liked the story missions for being one-off unique challenges and set pieces. I liked the outposts a lot, so I did as many of them as I wanted to, which may or may not have been all of them. As far as rising and falling action goes, I didn’t see outposts as a great way to support that, so it made plenty of sense to me to structure the game the way they did. That said, I didn’t play FC5, so OP can feel free to check that one out on your recommendation as well.

ampersandrew, 4 miesiące temu

I did not mean to imply that the architecture changed in PS2 slim compared to the original PS2, only that were able to make better, cheaper, cooler, smaller versions of that same architecture.