We were already seeing this at $70: the market is largely unwilling to support games getting any more expensive right now. And even though we had $90 SNES games back in the mid-90s, without adjusting for inflation, I think we can also say quite definitively that the market expanded exponentially as prices got lower, relative to inflation and in absolute terms, in subsequent years. Increasing prices further is pricing out those people. Plus, we’ve got tons of low-cost options that can often be higher quality than the games charging $70+.
Sure, I’ve bought tons of games that are on Game Pass, because I like keeping the game when I’m done, and not having to rush to finish it before the subscription renews.
I recall them saying that their tech stack in the first game couldn’t handle the influx of players that they got at their peak, and that’s what led them to start with a rewrite.
I love Strive and tag fighters, so this should be way up my alley, but I’m concerned about a couple of things. First and foremost, it’s Sony published, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the online is going to work on Proton when it has to go through PSN. Second, there was a moment in the gameplay trailer that showed air teching, and that usually means hitstun decay, which is a mechanic I’m not a fan of. But at least if this one doesn’t work out for me, Invincible Vs will also be showing at Evo.
I don’t like hitstun decay for a few reasons. For one, it’s not easily observable. If you’ve got a combo limit meter (like Skullgirls, Killer Instinct, and the upcoming Invincible Vs), you can see how much the move you just used has gotten you closer to the limits of the combo. It’s not intuitive for a player to track how close they are to the combo dropping with hitstun decay. So because of this, you’re basically just memorizing combos. If you land a hit with a move, or in a situation, that you haven’t practiced, you have no idea how to guarantee that you can finish the combo, which means that if you’re improvising, you’re just quickly routing your combo into a knockdown. As a player, I hate memorization, and as a spectator, I hate watching a game that has just a few bread and butter combos and quick routes to knockdowns when they don’t know what to do. I do like one game with hitstun decay, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, which at least allows you to do “tech traps”, where I’m expecting my opponent to air tech, and if they do, I get a new combo for free, so there’s a mind game there that most games with hitstun decay, in my experience, don’t have.
Hitstun decay is, by and large, the most prevalent form of infinite combo prevention in games with big combos, but it’s the one I dislike most. Guilty Gear Strive, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken all use juggle decay, or gravity decay, where the opponent just falls harder and harder until eventually they hit the floor, and you can’t combo them anymore. This is, of course, much easier for everyone to observe. My favorite method though is just using a meter to limit combos, because it allows for something much closer to freeform jazz. Every combo in Killer Instinct is different, because if you use the same combo every time, the opponent can break it. In Skullgirls, you’re usually unable to do enough damage in a single combo with its limits, so instead you’re looking to tactically drop your combo and sneak in a new one, which is called a reset.
Ubisoft reports that around 58% of their PC revenue last year came from digital add-ons, and despite the fierce backlash, the company maintains that this model is both sustainable and future-proof.
So future-proof that they’re bleeding customers, and everyone can see it plain as day.
I don’t think Unreal Tournament 2004 would have been considered live service just because they occasionally gave out a free new map. It was a form of marketing for the thing they already made. TF2 at least was a product when they sold it up front before it was free to play, when it had no microtransactions and they weren’t the goal for getting paid for having made TF2.
I don’t think you’re going to find many sharing your definitions. GaaS has just been simply replaced by the term live service in how people talk about this stuff. Perhaps Valve showed their hand early with this interview, but the expectation we had as customers with early TF2 was very different back then. I definitely wouldn’t consider No Man’s Sky to be any form of service; it might be the industry’s best example of being a form of penance for what they promised their customers at the start.
The closure the article speaks to is also just not turning the game into a perpetual expectation that more is coming. Multiplayer games have always been built around being “endless”, but there was never the expectation that this Halo would be the last Halo and just keep getting updates when you bought it 20 years ago. That expectation has led to sustainability problems we’ve all seen and that the article calls out.
Nah, Fast and Furious’ days are numbered. They already broke the glass on the storyboard card that says, “Go to space”, and the only one left to break is, “Time Machine”.
Oh, fair enough. But it’s still only going to have so much gas in the tank, and a cliff-hanger or sequel potential is very different than some continual expectation, either by consumers or the developers that the game can or should be updated forever.
I enjoy the Fast & Furious movies. The advantage to them releasing one movie at a time, or in games, one game at a time, is you can more accurately gauge the appetite for the next one, and they don’t have ongoing costs to keep the last one going. The ten F&F movies out there now are not in danger of disappearing if F&F11 bombs. The people who worked on those movies don’t have an expectation for or reliance on employment any longer than the time it takes to make one movie. And outside of Fast X, despite being pulpy and constantly recontextualizing and retconning old events, they all have their own endings with closure. Fast X does have a cliffhanger, and that is a bet that they made with their audience that they’ll be back, but the most likely scenario is that the next one offers closure. In some ways, cliffhangers can be closure themselves, too; I think more highly of Arcane season 1’s ending as closure for the series than I do of season 2, for instance. Meanwhile, the most likely scenario for a live service game is that it doesn’t have an ending or even exist anymore, only a few years in the future.
And all that said, it also doesn’t mean that I don’t understand your perspective, but I do see eye to eye with the author.
It can be an ongoing series, but you can get a sense of closure each time. Star Wars had closure in 1983 and 2005 and 2019 as they kept adding on to it, each time seeming like it was done; and each spin-off had closure by the time credits rolled.
They briefly got a Fierro into space so they could mess with a satellite. Somewhere around the fifth movie, they became very tongue in cheek action movies, with one character whose entire job is to break the fourth wall.
This story comes alongside numerous reports from the dev team that said the team felt it was ready. Plus it was only supposed to launch into early access.
The conversation around gen AI seems to go to putting people out of work or replacing tons of human effort, and I’m sure some companies are led by people with those naive dreams, but that My Summer Car example is exactly where my head goes when I think what the future of the technology is. It’s artwork that ought to be there, because the scene demands that there’s art on the walls, but what that artwork is basically doesn’t matter, so if gen AI can get the job done cheaply, it’s probably the right tool for the job. However, I’d have thought that the scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution were another prime use case for it too, but people rioted over that one. Even if it’s a good tool for the job, if it’s poison in the marketplace, it’s no longer a good tool to use.
I think when you’ve got a small enough team making something as multifaceted as a video game, there will be parts of it you find boring and relatively unimportant. If you can make it cheaper, you get that much closer to the possibility of breaking even. Parts of this can scale up to larger projects, but in the end, this is a matter of choosing your battles. There’s an adage that’s something like, “Your game is never done; you just stop working on it,” and the sooner you can stop working on it while still delivering a product that people are interested in, the more sustainable the whole endeavor becomes. Chunks of it will be filler or less important than other chunks, always. It’s why there’s a Unity and Unreal asset store; and why you can hear the same sound library used in Devil May Cry, Soul Calibur, and Dark Souls menus. Those parts of the game were less important to be specifically crafted for these games, and they chose other battles to care more about.
I’m not a fan of AI; I’m indifferent to it. What your capabilities are will vary based on which tools you’re using, and that can result in a very different scope of game. The part where it’s collaborating with another artist doesn’t matter to me if I can’t tell the difference, as long as the intellectual property rights of how the AI was trained are handled properly. I won’t be able to tell the difference in something like My Summer Car, because the prop artwork hanging in the room isn’t why I would be playing that game. If it has a tangible effect on the quality of the game, and I can tell the product is sub par because of the use of gen AI, that’s when it was the wrong tool for the job, or that it should have been cut. I personally wouldn’t care about how those scientists in Jurassic World look (there’s more important, attention-grabbing stuff in that game), but seemingly, plenty of people do. The reason I brought up small teams in particular is not just because of cost savings but because you’re less likely to have a specialist who excels at or enjoys every single part that makes up a video game.
Well, AI is largely a solution in search of a problem at this point in time, but I’m very glad that people found ways to make games that got beyond telling stories with colored rectangles, because I don’t think I have it in me to play more than one of those. Fortunately, better tools and options can exist so that there’s not some arbitrary reason to choose to do less when you could have done more. The actual value of gen AI right now is propped up by investments and not actual profitability, so we’ll see where its value falls in the marketplace once gravity pulls it back down. I expect the better option will still often be just the asset store when the dust settles. And this isn’t some total disregard for what art we fill our lives with. There’s art that people care very deeply about in My Summer Car, just not the framed pictures hanging on the wall.
The earliest this project could have started was 2018, after they made Dragon Ball FighterZ. Before that, ArcSys was on no one’s radar. The code that Tokon is definitely, without a shadow of a doubt built on debuted in Strive in beta form approximately 1 year ago, meaning that the project was probably not in ArcSys’ hands until after Strive launched, in 2021, at the absolute earliest. Sony had limited partnership arrangements with ArcSys at this point already, with PlayStation themed color palettes for characters in the game. But 2021 is also still likely to be too early, because Dragon Ball was still getting considerable attention, and GranBlue had just launched fresh into a world where it needed to be reworked for rollback immediately, because the market demanded it, eventually resulting in GranBlue Fantasy Versus Rising. So my best bet is that it started development in 2022.
This is in line with the other Windows handhelds’ pricing, which are still doing half as well as the Steam Deck despite having to run an interface as awful as desktop Windows.
It’s not locked to the Xbox ecosystem; it’s a Windows PC with a better UI for a controller to navigate. And I really don’t see this being any more locked down than Asus’ previous Ally stuff.
This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games....
Reminds me of this post on Bluesky. These ads were wild at the time, too; even some that predate this era. There was Fear Effect, which was basically marketed entirely on the back of the game featuring lesbians when that was taboo. There was Rayman standing at the urinals with a guy in 9-5 business attire presumably staring at Rayman’s dick. The Neo Geo “You need a pair of these” steel balls “to play one of these” ad. Plus the shockingly racist European white PSP ad; that was a billboard, not a magazine ad, but it had “video game magazine ad energy”, in this case with “(negative)” at the end of it.
That Tainted Grail game that just came out this year is supposedly the indie Elder Scrolls. Maybe you’d argue that’s AA, but that’s still a symptom of how our standards have shifted. Games like Resident Evil are also abundant these days; not so much like Resident Evil 4 in particular, but RE4 was an experiment that split the difference between old Resident Evil and modern third person shooters.
The indie and AA scene have finally started catching up to those tastes of mine that AAA left behind in the racing genre, for what it’s worth. What are you looking for?
Mostly the former. You got a better variety of courses rather than Paradise reusing a lot of the same pieces of something that distinctly looked like only one city, and a menu was just a quicker way to get in and out of the part of the game you wanted to play.
I loved it, but I rarely use it anymore these days. Often enough, trying to remap the inputs on it errors out in the Steam Input interface, and I’ve gotten tired of fighting with it. I also never used the left pad for anything and would have preferred an actual D-pad. The right trackpad, especially when paired with gyro controls, is so much better than a right stick for every function you could use a right stick for, and I’ve put it through its paces; but that only works when you can map an actual mouse. Often times, the game will explicitly switch between “controller mode” and “mouse and keyboard” mode, and I hate playing with a controller but seeing keyboard glyphs. Also, due to my preferences, and where the market has headed lately, there have been very few games coming out where I need to “aim”, which is where the Steam controller beat a traditional Xbox controller by the widest margin. So unfortunately, between the software being a pain and there not being a compelling reason to bother putting up with it, I haven’t been using my Steam controller lately.
An additional post on BlueSky from Danny O’Dwyer indicates that NoClip was actively in the middle of filming a documentary about the making of this game.
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
Loot boxes, for example, aren’t inherently predatory; they can add an exciting and rewarding surprise element when balanced with noble intentions.
When you sell them, they’re unregulated gambling that children can access.
When designing a battle pass, a designer must answer questions like “How much faster should a premium player progress compared to a F2P player?” and “How long should it take for a player to finish the battle pass?” I’ve seen designers balance it fairly, like by requiring 30 minutes of daily play to complete the free track or $5 to unlock the premium pass.
I still don’t see a way that this could ever be anything other than creating an incentive to play the game for reasons beyond the game being fun, no matter how “fair” it is to the person needing to spend money or not. They’re still artificially creating another body in the matchmaking pool that creates value for someone more willing to part with their dollar. If your player base dries up when you stop offering your battle pass incentives, I’d say that was some artificial retention, and it’s kind of gross.
I definitely didn’t need more reasons to hate live services. The business model has always affected the game design, and a lot of the author’s bullet points could be seen as far back as the arcades, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a better business model for all parties than “sell a good product at a fair price”.
I think the incentives matter. Diablo II is about making number go up, but Diablo IV has an active incentive to slow you down and make that number go up at a certain rate so that they can upsell you again later. And rather than taking a hardline position, I’d at least ask the question out loud: Is it possible to have a business model for a game other than selling a good product at a fair price and not have it eventually evolve into something gross? Maybe the old shareware model, which is basically just a demo, but other than that, I’m not sure.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that all of this desire to suck up our attention has made it more difficult for the same developers to market their next game, since their potential customers are all preoccupied with something they haven’t stopped playing. It’s extremely natural for most people to fall off of a game after its initial release, and it’s definitely going to happen once they take their thumbs off the scales.
I’ve been looking for deathmatch shooters for a long time, like what we got from the late 90s to the mid 10s. There are very very few. I don’t care if I or anyone else move on quickly, because I primarily want to play with my friends, and the deathmatch mode typically came alongside a campaign and maybe co-op modes. That’s not a prisoner’s dilemma, and the market hasn’t really been making games like that anymore. Same for things like arcade racers akin to F-Zero or Burnout.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
Microsoft concedes that 'The Outer Worlds 2' retail price was too high — Xbox says it "will keep our full priced holiday releases at $69.99," with refunds incoming (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Stop Killing Games is facing a complaint in the EU that uses nonsense logic to accuse the movement's founder of failing to disclose financial contributions he never made: 'It's not paranoia if they re (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Splitgate 2 Will ‘Go Back to Beta’ to Undergo a Massive Rework Amid More Layoffs and Splitgate 1 Shutdown (www.ign.com) angielski
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls debuts at Evo 2025 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Stop Killing Games reaches its goal of 1.4M signatures, covering the risk of valid signatures going under 1M angielski
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/...
Ubisoft: Microtransactions make games more fun (www.gamereactor.eu) angielski
Has the live-service dream crashed back down to earth? | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Novels and Movies Offer Closure. Video Games Should Too. [The New York Times] (www.nytimes.com) angielski
New gaming website "This Week in Video Games" launched by Skill Up (thisweekinvideogames.com) angielski
>>This video’s first part
‘Subnautica 2’ Leaders Say Krafton Sabotaged Game Over Payout [new events in the Subnautica 2 story] (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
You know that personal film project they claimed one of the founders was distracted by? It was a Subnautica film they asked him to make.
7,818 titles on Steam disclose generative AI usage, or 7% of Steam's total library of 114,126 games, up from ~1,000 titles in April 2024 (www.totallyhuman.io) angielski
A New Guilty Gear Game Has Been Canceled (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Not actually cancelled but “back to the drawing board”. It’s weird how 4 or 5 years between entries actually feels short these days.
ROG Xbox Ally Is $700 And Xbox Ally X Is $1050 (fandomwire.com) angielski
Vintage gaming advertising pictures: a gallery angielski
This is probably going to seem wildly low-effort compared to my usual posts here, but I’ve found a bit of a treasure trove of print media gaming ads from magazines and sites. And they’re amazing. I found it so fun to see what companies used to do to promote their games....
EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects (www.notebookcheck.net) angielski
The Steam controller was ahead of its time angielski
The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too....
Romero Games has not shut down, in talks with other publishers over cancelled game (bsky.app) angielski
An additional post on BlueSky from Danny O’Dwyer indicates that NoClip was actively in the middle of filming a documentary about the making of this game.
Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales angielski
https://i.imgur.com/qEsdvgq.png...