ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

If they’re not growing their platform beyond what the market was 15-20 years ago, is it lunacy?

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It takes more work and resources to do what they’re doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There aren’t exactly a wealth of games doing what Battlefield does outside of Battlefield itself.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That hardly makes it generic though.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Very untrue, but okay.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t think everyone does know that. There’s a very real, perhaps likely, chance that Game Pass is sustainable.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? “Everything is an Xbox”, and they’ll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they’ll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Microsoft didn’t have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn’t gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Their current pricing model is between $10 and $20 per month for somewhere north of 30M subscribers. The ability to get Game Pass for less than that was largely discontinued two years ago. You can conservatively estimate that to be $300M in revenue every month. Every two months, they can fund a Call of Duty game. Every month, they can more than fund one Starfield. That’s only Game Pass revenue without including game sales. I’ll also remind you that Microsoft publishes 6 of the top 10 PlayStation games last month; they’re still selling lots of games outside of Game Pass. “Excluding the [studios] they bought over the last 4-5 years” is a major omission. Their licensing deals for third parties on Game Pass have seen significantly less investment in the past few years; as their first party library increases, they’re less and less necessary. I’m also curious where you got that number for Starfield units sold, because my back of the napkin math puts it at more than 3M copies on Steam alone.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

Me too. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t refute what I said. It’s a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn’t. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it’s behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can’t convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?

EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as “an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future”, emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it’s counted in that same metric.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations’ units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don’t know that it has, but it’s possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation’s revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation’s own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There’s no L for me to take here.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Search “online tournament X” where X is the name of the game you want to play. Tampa Never Sleeps does tournaments for the likes of Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear Strive every week, for instance. They’re all free.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Why would I watch your channel when I could watch someone else’s? A good answer to that question is how you grow an audience. I watch a lot of fighting game content on YouTube, and I can find value in Maximilian Dood for being good at explaining the legacies of old games or what makes new ones tick; I can find value in commentary and breakdown from those who win major tournaments and break down the subtleties that I might have missed. But there are hundreds of channels YouTube wants to show me of people playing those same games with no reason for me to actually click on them in the first place.

I made what people seem to think are a couple of good video tutorials to teach Skullgirls quickly. It’s got a reputation of being exceptionally hard, but I disagree, and I thought I could explain them quickly. They worked, but the more general fighting game tutorials I made after that didn’t do so well. Maybe there isn’t as much demand for them as I thought, or maybe they just weren’t as good. Still, I was making something that I felt like people couldn’t easily get elsewhere.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There’s definitely some selection bias for me that made it easy to not even be interested in buying the types of games that won’t work on Linux, and that made my switch easier. I hope the solution that we eventually arrive at isn’t, “Here’s a custom kernel compatible with our anti-cheat,” but instead, “Here’s a way to play our game without kernel level anti-cheat.”

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

A little dramatic, but yes, I’m already not playing those games.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The Mac thing is two-fold. Apple moved to new architecture before it was primed and ready for gaming, and Valve has been slow to adapt Steam to it. Apple’s solution, which will not work, because Valve tried the same thing a decade ago, is to juice the market by funding ports. Apple’s putting far more money into it, because it’s such small potatoes on their balance sheet, but the result will be much the same. This isn’t a situation where getting a few heavy hitters will solve their library problem and get everyone else to fall in line. The problem is Apple and its platform are hostile to getting this sort of game on it.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I have that crackling thing sometimes too, but only on desktop and not on Steam Deck, so the issue lies in something that’s different between those two things. On my desktop, my usual use case is to have a bunch of programs open at any given time and put it to sleep at the end of the night rather than close everything and power off. While low spec games like Skullgirls are fine, if I boot up a higher spec game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II after waking my computer from sleep, I’ll get the crackling. If I just rebooted, the crackling is gone. I don’t understand the problem, but at least I have a workaround, and it’s better than Microsoft determining when I should reboot my computer. It’s my computer. I decide that.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I did fuss with it according to the directions in forums, and it didn’t change anything, but I also barely understood what I was doing.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Would that same command also work through Heroic, or do they handle that kind of thing differently? Sorry, sometimes things are so abstracted from us that we don’t have to think about what it’s doing under the hood.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Thanks, it’s worth a couple of experiments, at least.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I plan to! I usually get Prime for one month per year, around Christmas shopping season, so I’ll check it out then, along with Fallout season 2 and Reacher season 3.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Strive has excellent variety right now. Out of eight players, we had eight different characters. The nature of a tournament is that you’ll see repeats of the characters played by the people who stay in longer. The problem with a game like CvS2 is that you see those same characters over and over again throughout the pools stages, and you see very similar teams across the players in top 8. That Ramlethal player won the ArcSys world tour very recently, also.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Even this is only a guess. There are a lot of reasons why developers got away from this model, and there are one or two reasons why I’m the weirdo who wants us to return to it.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Season passes and updates are what they’re doing now rather than splitting their player base with a new SKU. But of course, that new SKU comes with advantages like being able to freeze the game at a certain point in its life.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

No one plays the old version now because we have no choice. Plenty of people would have preferred to go back to Tekken season 1 and Dragon Ball FighterZ season 2, but we didn’t get that option.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That it was! It’s a shame Justin doesn’t really compete anymore. That’s how well he does in a game he doesn’t really practice like he did back in the day. That man could pick up a fighting game at Evo that he’s never played before, and he’d still get out of pools.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

It’s an all-timer as far as video game stories and production value, but the railroading that they did to players did irk a great deal of us, as chronicled in that Nakey Jakey video. They set up so many dynamic systems for the player to interact with and then basically dictated that you couldn’t get creative with them during the story missions. Deviating even slightly from the intended path would be a mission failed.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

The video evidence in that essay will do more justice than any of my anecdotes, but even things that seemed like possible ways to handle a story mission were not what the developers intended and resulted in a mission failed, like trying to take the high ground in a valley, or trying to sneak in through a window instead of entering from the ground floor.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Half of Halo 4 was the best story they ever put in a Halo game. The other half was embarrassingly formulaic sci-fi.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Halo 5 makes the whole story worthless

It really did.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I mostly just hated that the story was largely delivered via info dump and nearly every character was a terrible person to the point of being grating. I don’t have to enjoy every video game, but I wish I at least understood why this one got this much acclaim.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Because they were. Maybe not the first 6 people verbatim, but of the characters you have a significant amount of dialogue with, the only one who didn’t give me this impression was your partner. You run into the asshole kid, the other cops over the radio are assholes, the guy on the wall to the docks is an asshole, and beyond that, I didn’t take notes, but it annoyed the hell out of me.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Oh, my player character was definitely on the list of asshole characters that made the game grating. And even if his actions before the story began precipitated everyone else being an asshole, it didn’t make the game less annoying to experience it fresh as the player.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

They’re just going to roll people onto servers slowly to make sure they can handle the capacity. And it’s only on PlayStation because they fear the piracy that happened with fighting game betas in the past.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

They all take seven years to make, so there aren’t as many of them.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

There have been some great games with development times that long. But for crying out loud, if you’re not making a surefire success, make a smaller game so it’s less risky.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t see how this thing possibly competes with a handheld PC. It’ll play the same games approximately just as well but with a tiny fraction of the library, and unless something changes, online play won’t even be free.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance II right now, and it’s excellent. Baldur’s Gate 3 took 6 years, though they attribute a good portion of that to an Eastern European war and a pandemic. Given other side projects, it’s a bit nebulous exactly how long Indiana Jones and Great Circle took that team to make, but it was somewhere between 5 and 7 years, and I loved it. I’m not exactly a fan of Nintendo lately, but people sure do love Donkey Kong Bananza, and that team had been working on that game more or less since Mario Odyssey’s release in 2017.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

That’s surely what they’re planning, especially since the architecture won’t be very different this time around, but that still pales in comparison to the value you’d get from a PC handheld for what will likely be an extremely similar price.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

I don’t think the Windows license factors into the math much at all, but otherwise agreed.

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Correct me if I’m wrong: they all complied because action from the payment processors was imminent, and GOG and Itch have both made public statements about next steps that Valve hasn’t, which doesn’t mean that Valve isn’t taking next steps. Did I miss anything?

ampersandrew, 3 miesiące temu

Nah, this isn’t a memorization type of game, or at least not so much based on the other games this developer has made. You’re basically just going to press Light then Medium then Heavy, or you can just mash on any one of those three buttons in order to do a combo. And largely, everyone has pretty similar reaction times when you’re familiar enough with a game to know what might be coming; in general, you mostly just want to hold down-back until your opponent does a big slow move.