ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.

It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If they said that, Microsoft wouldn’t allow them to work in game development.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Most Unreal 5 games only hit 30 FPS on consoles right now.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Fault is too strong a word. This is the performance they can reasonably get with the effects and fidelity they’re after for their vision. They could get higher frame rates by toning that down, but that’s the tradeoff they decided on. It happens every console generation.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

When I buy a product, I expect it to continue to work unless I break it myself.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I have no authority over anything, so yes, they can. What I’d like to see is an option to buy an offline copy of the game and any add-ons I bought, but no one does that. What Stop Killing Games is looking for is for the server to be made available after the game’s end of life so that you can continue to use anything you paid for.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Honestly, you could do far worse than this. There’s some stuff in here that looks awesome.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Well, he’s a professor, and we saw him drawing on the board in the trailer…

But this is also from the people who made Wolfenstein: The New Order and New Colossus, so I’m sure this will be great.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Obsidian’s got a rock solid track record, and The Outer Worlds was great, so I think the odds are good on Avowed.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I hear good things about what they did for AoE2 on controller, and the genre was long overdue for someone to solve that problem. I’ve got some hand and wrist issues these days after working at a computer for so many years, and I’ll always prefer a controller when possible.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Trickle-down economics is far older than Trump’s presidency.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

You’re thinking about it wrong. How much content it has is not the problem. The problem is we’ve seen gameplay and it looks nothing like its predecessor.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Consumers have always owned their media.

That’s not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that’s disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS “best of” tapes and whatnot, but you’d never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we’re at a spot where you can buy a “digital copy” of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your “copy” of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you’ll get through in a month. That’s just simple economics. It’s usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she’s a member of the other party and likely doesn’t care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it’s better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It’s funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there’s no competition I can go to instead.

I don’t see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they’re not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo’s online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I don’t think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that they’d have been better off without Game Pass.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

You can still own your games without a physical copy if you buy them DRM-free.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’ve barely heard about it, and here in the US, I would not call it highly anticipated, but perhaps the story is different in China.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Epic isn’t making money on exclusives. Square Enix isn’t making money on exclusives. Sony probably isn’t even making money on third party exclusives. Thankfully, market forces have ensured that it was never going to be exclusive.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The loss leader strategy hasn’t worked, is what I meant. They said in an article in the past few days, quite explicitly, that that strategy isn’t even working for whatever ill-advised loss leader strategy they’re up to in order to acquire users.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what’s in front of you.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

EverQuest required a subscription fee every month and created a gold rush. The shutdowns come when you don’t find the gold that they did.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If not GoldenEye, then I believe Perfect Dark would let you plug in two controllers for a dual analog control scheme.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Minecraft is far more responsible for the survival crafting genre that followed in its wake.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Be careful; you’re stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to “the Berlin Interpretation”, where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it’s not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you’re typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or “sidegrades” that are neither better nor worse.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

What’s the timeline on that mod versus the Battle Royale mod for DayZ? Because as far as I could tell, the DayZ mod is the true progenitor, but DayZ was itself inspired by Minecraft.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It is, and I don’t think it’s even the first game to require a subscription fee. It was just so successful at it that everyone wanted that monthly recurring revenue. When it doesn’t work, they’d often rather see the game cease to exist.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

And unfortunately, not one of them did it better.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Mortal Kombat did not come first. It was quite openly inspired by Street Fighter II.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They might be closest, but they’re still pretty far off. One of the core pillars of Arkham combat is that it would punish you for button mashing by dropping your combo, meaning you not only gain fewer points at the end of combat but also lose access to your instant finishers, which are all too valuable for taking out the toughest opponents. Spider-Man is happy to let you mindlessly mash, and it’s far worse off for it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I did like the magnetic nature of Arkham, and since Mordor lacked it, they let you hold your combo streak for longer, which also made it too easy.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I felt it was more about the “free flow” in the free flow combat system in Arkham. You want it to all chain together, and Arkham made sure you only hit the buttons you needed to exactly as many times as you needed to. Mordor let you keep your combo going even though it had been like 10 seconds since the last time you did anything, which wasn’t exactly flowing at that point. That combo system was a great fit for Batman, and it would fit in nicely with Jason Bourne or John Wick as well, and I’m not sure Lord of the Rings was the best fit for it, but it doesn’t seem like many are trying to do that combat style anymore.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’m not even the biggest Hollow Knight fan, but as long as Fantasy Critic exists, I cannot forget about Silksong.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Because it’s got bigger problems, like being free to play, always online, and not long for this world at the rate it’s going.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Also, this is not the first time that I’ve posted a YouTube link and the thumbnail didn’t display, so I’m not sure what’s happening there.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

But perhaps a good community rule would be to make threads that are conducive to discussion rather than single answers that can be found with a quick web search.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Those games are so littered with trash mobs that I definitely didn’t have the stamina for 100%.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Try some unpopular games.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That game won’t release until at least 5 years after this one.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

For what you’re hoping for, they likely haven’t. That game is basically just pre-production at this point while all hands are on deck for Dragon Age.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

Nah, France and Spain. We only need 7 countries to pass their thresholds, and after that, only raw numbers matter. We need the big population centers, and France and Spain are way behind Germany.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

If you’re there, perhaps you can signal boost?

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I think he also did Doom 3, but I don’t think he was involved in Doom 2. Doom 1 was mostly just playing fast and loose with copyright law. The iconic E1M1 theme song is just a MIDI version of some song from Slayer.

ampersandrew, 2 miesiące temu

I just tried GZDoom from Flathub to try to see if these things were there, because they weren’t last I checked (which was admittedly a long time ago). The game couldn’t find my WADs after a few tries of trying to get it to work, even after using Flatseal. Flathub reviews indicate that those who managed to get it running were having trouble getting the game to recognize their controller. The Steam version just works. Having community source ports is great, but there’s value in the company updating their official version.