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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Big tech monopoly is bad”, but somehow “Valve monopoly is good for the customer”.
I had this discussion with some friends of mine lately. Valve is definitely not perfect, but the steps they’ve taken to be better than their competition, often in the consumer’s favor, is so far and away better than the likes of the other entrenched market leaders: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. I’m not a fan of them tying Steam Input and Steam VR, among other things, to…Steam, naturally…when they should be independent libraries, but would Sony and Microsoft have started to abandon their walled garden ecosystem strategy of exclusives without Valve leading the way? Not a chance.
Predatory pricing? Not a problem. It’s the industry standard.
But like…it is the industry standard, and it’s definitely not the definition of the word, “predatory”. If they offer the best deal in town, it’s still a good deal. Epic is offering better than that, but if it was so easy to match, you’d see the other platforms doing so as well, including those also trying to compete with Steam, meaning maybe the dollars don’t really make sense in Epic’s world.
Steam is dismantling the entire concept of digital ownership
The hell they are. For one, not every Steam game has DRM. For another, when I buy a game on Steam, any game, I certainly “own” more than when I buy a “digital copy” of a movie or a TV show, of which there is no avenue to actually legally obtain the file that contains the movie. It’s only streaming.
[Before Steam] it was possible to buy a game and just play it without internet access
Perhaps the video author is too young to remember, but online authentication on PC games definitely came before a single third party sold their games on Steam. MMORPGs predate Steam for that matter.
Honestly, this whole video seems to come from someone who’s too young to have lived through this and only read about it. We became happy Steam customers because it was better than what came before. Valve is not responsible for standardizing any of this nonsense and did in fact get to where they are by being better than everyone claiming to be their competition.
For many games sold on Steam, Valve takes a flat 30% cut. Why 30%? I don’t know.
Exactly my point. They picked 30% because they were confident it would scale to cover their costs and because it was a better rate than what the developer could stand to make in brick-and-mortar.
The cost of running an online store is essentially zero.
No, it’s very much not.
Now all of the other tech companies are getting sued for…[these monopolistic practices]…
Because they’re exhibiting monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. It’s a much harder case to say that Steam has engaged in monopolistic practices compared to Apple requiring that all software on their devices comes from their store. Which is why the Wolfire case is not a slam dunk.
A lot of the other bad faith arguments here are derived from the incorrect idea that running a digital store costs nothing.
I do shop on GOG for lots of the reasons that the video raises, but it’s often still a worse experience than buying on Steam. For instance, I’m on Linux, so while GOG’s refund policy is exceptional, I have to do a lot of legwork to get a game like The Thaumaturge to run in Wine, a game that’s Steam Deck verified and just works on Steam. And the only way I was able to deduce the steps to get it working was by taking a peak at SteamDB to see what the game’s dependencies are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
“Even if I don’t ever buy anything” is why I doubt it’s going to work out. Epic is publicly right now saying that it’s great at acquiring users. Yeah, I’ll bet it is. People love free stuff. Is it great at turning those users into paying customers? Even at wholesale rates, I’ve gotten hundreds of games for free from Epic, which means they spent thousands of dollars on me, and I can’t foresee an instance where I’ll ever give them a cent back.
Speaking for myself, if the only selling point was that they revised systems that I already liked, I’d probably pass on Civ 7. Navigable rivers isn’t really enough for me.
All of their funding is coming from the same sources though. Embracer makes 20 offline games and 3 live service games (these are not the real numbers, but just as an example), and that still affects the value of the investment that they can expect to take in from people investing in the video game industry. Now they can’t make a substantial amount of their payroll, and they lay off half of their work force. Embracer may have been the poster child for the crash the industry is seeing, but they’re not alone.
I already attend local tournaments for Skullgirls, Street Fighter 6, and Guilty Gear Strive. If you’re looking to improve in fighting games, you’ll never get better faster than by going to locals.
What’s your nearest major city? Work with the TOs of the most similar game’s local and make it a side bracket with a small pot bonus or something, and see who shows up. Otherwise, there are majors like Combo Breaker and, this year, East Coast Throwdown running the game as an official tournament.
You could probably make that work with Strive. Just make sure you’re helping them out and pulling your own weight. I know CEOtaku runs Skullgirls, and I know there are some SG players in the state, but I can’t speak for how much of a hike they are from Orlando. I think there’s hope for you yet. Otherwise, you can approximate the experience with online tournaments, as there’s one almost every night of the week.
Rival Schools is a strange omission given that Project Justice is in here, but otherwise, this collection is awesome! Capcom probably could have gotten greedy and charged more for the likes of MvC2 and Power Stone, but these collections are knocking it out of the park in value.
The virtual rival thing could be cool. There’s a lot of room for it to go wrong, and we’re no worse off if it does. But replay takeover is huge. This is the holy grail of fighting game training mode features. You can go into a replay of a match and correct the things you did wrong or find answers to situations that are...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone’s waiting for a Silksong release date. I am too, if for no reason other than Fantasy Critic. I do still expect this game to release this year, given it got age rated in some territories back in February, but if it does release this year, it’s strange that it’s taken this long to get a release date. Every showcase where Silksong doesn’t have a release date is one where people are underwhelmed by any other game shown off.
As for games I’m looking forward to release dates for far more, I’d love to see them for:
Commandos: Origins (not so much the indie showcase but maybe in the partner direct)
Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
The Masterplan is a true heist game. You know that fantasy of playing out a heist from Heat? This is that game. It’s top down, and you control all of the members of the crew. You pick your time to initiate the heist, you hold up people at gunpoint, you prevent them from being a hero, and you try your best to get out with the best score that you can. It’s a real bummer that this team never got to make another game.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
A large part of what’s wrong with Concord is the development time that it took, and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to try to make game development leaner and more sustainable.
As written, this is a tough one to answer. I’m well served in most genres bar a few, and I probably wouldn’t want to see new entries from the people who made the old ones. For instance, I miss stealth games and Splinter Cell, but I wouldn’t want Ubisoft to make it. I would love to see a new Metal Arms, but Blizzard (and now also Microsoft) owns that one. I miss racing games like Burnout and F-Zero, but I wouldn’t trust EA or Nintendo to make a successor that makes me happy. So really, I think I want new stuff that’s more of a spiritual successor type of deal.
I’d love to find a $40 PVP FPS. That has split-screen and lets me host my own server. Tuned to work with small groups and large groups. This one is just tied to a server that I don’t control and will inevitably die a painful death.
I know most are probably talking about Path of Exile II or Diablo IV’s latest expansion, but those are online-only, and I don’t care even a little bit about “seasonal” content, so this is the one I’m excited for.
I just played through it for the first time recently, as my first foray into this genre, and I did feel like the game sorely needed a dodge move, which of course every new entry in this genre now has.
Like for many other people, Valve single player experiences were one of my favorite of all time growing up. I considered both Half-Life and Portal to be masterpieces. It’s true they’ve always been distracted with multiplayer games as well, things like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress and I did play them for sure, because I...
When your game isn’t live service multiplayer, your incentives change to putting out more sequels rather than iterating on the same game. So your revenue per game goes down, but there’s no reason it can’t necessarily be as lucrative overall.
It’s not confusion. Your perspective is survivorship bias. For every Rocket League, there are 10 Concords. That’s why the entire industry is imploding right now. Everyone thinks their game will be Fortnite, but only so many games can be Fortnite, and a lot of that even comes down to luck, so you’ve got games like Avengers and Suicide Squad losing hundreds of millions of dollars each instead of making games for half or a quarter of their budgets that would have recouped their costs and then some.
Well then I guess your recommendation would be to keep trying to be Rocket League, even though statistically you’re going to leave a crater in the ground formed by hundreds of millions of dollars and the better part of a decade of work? Keep in mind there are single player games that make more money than Rocket League too, if we’re going to cherry pick.
I’m with you, but they’ve got a very generous 30 day refund policy, no matter how many hours played, if it doesn’t work. So far, I’ve only had to use it once, on Phantom Fury, which is Verified on Steam but had issues in the tutorial through GOG; some day I’ll pick up the Steam version and see if it does any better. I also buy my GOG games through Heroic launcher, which has a referral link so that some of the revenue of my sale goes toward the development of Heroic. That way GOG knows that if they want all of the revenue from my sale, it’s clear what they have to do to earn it.
And as a reminder, there are Linux native games on GOG. I just played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on the native Linux version from GOG.
An important update on Concord - Being taken offline September 6th, refunds to be issued (blog.playstation.com) angielski
One Year Later, Larian Reflects On Baldur's Gate 3's Success, Future Plans, And Canceling DLC: "Ever Since, We've Felt Better" (www.ign.com) angielski
Failing Manufacturers Are Pushing the Narrative That Consoles Are Dying, Says Ex-Xbox Exec (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
Can you trust Valve? Honest criticism of Steam. (www.youtube.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemy.lol/post/30531009...
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com) angielski
I’m genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student’s first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year),...
Age of Mythology - Game Torrent angielski
Civilization 7 dev on Ages system and series shakeup: "It's going to be the hardest thing for fans to get adjusted to" (www.ggrecon.com) angielski
GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- Nintendo Switch Edition - Reveal Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Blue Protocol to be discontinued in Japan, will no longer release in the west. (blue-protocol.com) angielski
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Capcom Fighting Collection 2 – Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Anyone know how to beat mission wild horses, tamed passions in read dead redemtion 1? angielski
I’m stuck at part when you have to lead those horses and can’t find solution nowhere on internet
HiFight via Twitter: Virtual Rival and Replay Takeover coming to SF6 with Terry patch (x.com) angielski
The virtual rival thing could be cool. There’s a lot of room for it to go wrong, and we’re no worse off if it does. But replay takeover is huge. This is the holy grail of fighting game training mode features. You can go into a replay of a match and correct the things you did wrong or find answers to situations that are...
Nintendo: Join us tomorrow, August 27 at 7am PT, for an Indie World Showcase followed by a Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase! angielski
Source: nitter.privacydev.net/…/1828070146117644476
Star Wars Outlaws - Review Thread angielski
Game Information...
Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before angielski
This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options....
What are some game series you would like to see revived? And if possible, which entry should the new game follow from? angielski
For example, for me, I would love a new Populous game based from what was done in Populous 3. That, and a new SimCity based on SimCity 4!
When will they learn? When will they learn, that their actions have consequences? (lemmy.world)
Titan Quest II hands on gameplay (Fextralife at Gamescom) (www.youtube.com) angielski
I know most are probably talking about Path of Exile II or Diablo IV’s latest expansion, but those are online-only, and I don’t care even a little bit about “seasonal” content, so this is the one I’m excited for.
It genuinely upsets me that Valve spent their time and resources on another Dota variation angielski
Like for many other people, Valve single player experiences were one of my favorite of all time growing up. I considered both Half-Life and Portal to be masterpieces. It’s true they’ve always been distracted with multiplayer games as well, things like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress and I did play them for sure, because I...
Gearbox founder says Epic Games Store hopes were “misplaced or overly optimistic” (arstechnica.com) angielski