They’re trying to soften the blow by adding new features to each tier, but it’s still just to disguise a price hike. More games are coming to the $15 tier, but it still won’t be day and date releases. First party games come to the $15 tier “within a year”, but that’s even excluding Call of Duty.
Even if you play every day one release, there’s hardly one of those per month. The math used to work out, for a long time, that one month of Game Pass was about 1/4 of the cost of a full priced new release, so going for a subscription made some kind of sense for a certain kind of consumer. This is a hard sell.
The plan was to become the Netflix of video games, which they’re about 85-90% short of, so a price increase isn’t going to help that, and they know it.
Sounds like how a lot of us use streaming television these days, too. The price hikes change the dynamic, for sure. And I also liked Avowed more than Expedition 33.
The whole point of running an event like this in the first place is that’s an enormous ad for the video game that they sell. Putting up a paywall in front of it just seems counter productive.
I’m not sure that’s the likeliest situation, given the Saudis’ stake in so many other gaming companies. If memory serves, they’ve got in the neighborhood of a 10% stake in Nintendo and outright ownership of SNK.
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.
Jirard Khalil gives an in-depth breakdown of what happened with the open hands non profit. I’ve been waiting a year for this video and I am happy to see Jirard again. Everyone will have to decide for themselves but I accept what he has to say and look forward to supporting his content again.
“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.
A group of investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund could unveil a deal for the publisher best known for its sports games as soon as next week, WSJ said.
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.
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.
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m testing out making a megathread instead of posting individual trailers. I will update this thread with links to trailers and announcements that will be shown. Watch state of play here. enjoy the show~...
Updates to Xbox Game Pass: Introducing Essential, Premium, and Ultimate Plans - Xbox Wire [prices going up] (news.xbox.com) angielski
They’re trying to soften the blow by adding new features to each tier, but it’s still just to disguise a price hike. More games are coming to the $15 tier, but it still won’t be day and date releases. First party games come to the $15 tier “within a year”, but that’s even excluding Call of Duty.
Fans Left Speechless as Capcom Locks Street Fighter 6 Finals Behind Paywall (www.pushsquare.com) angielski
It's official: EA is going private. (bsky.app) angielski
In a deal involving a company owned by Jared Kushner, a company that is basically just the Saudis, and $20B of debt.
[Whitelight] You Don't Hate Remasters Enough (www.youtube.com) angielski
Completionist gives answers (youtu.be) angielski
Jirard Khalil gives an in-depth breakdown of what happened with the open hands non profit. I’ve been waiting a year for this video and I am happy to see Jirard again. Everyone will have to decide for themselves but I accept what he has to say and look forward to supporting his content again.
Electronic Arts nears roughly $50 billion deal to go private, WSJ reports (www.reuters.com) angielski
A group of investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund could unveil a deal for the publisher best known for its sports games as soon as next week, WSJ said.
The Video-Game Industry Has a Problem: There Are Too Many Games (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
It’s true. Reviewers rave about a game, I pick it up and play it, and they’re raving about a new one before I’ve finished that last one. I’ve got a list of 20+ games that came out this year that I still haven’t gotten around to. I might get through 5 of them before the new year. And you know, if wouldn’t hurt my...
Everyone thinks the Deus Ex remaster looks awful and they're right: 'They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
PlayStation State of Play (Sept. 24, 2025) | MEGATHREAD angielski
I’m testing out making a megathread instead of posting individual trailers. I will update this thread with links to trailers and announcements that will be shown. Watch state of play here. enjoy the show~...