This one’s been in early access for a while, but it’s finally hitting 1.0. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a procedurally generated murder mystery immersive sim. A murder happens, you scan for evidence, track people by their address in the phone book, and make connections with red string yourself. When I played the demo a...
The community updates for these sorts of things never seem to be interested in controller support and split-screen, so when those things are well supported, that’s when I get excited.
If this deal went through in time to save Tango, as the press release states, this just must have been how long it took for the paperwork to go through.
They did to me too, but maybe it’s one of those things where you can’t talk about the deal for X, Y, and Z reasons, especially since it might not go through.
even those that are often do have a way to continue to run after the service ends
I’m going to guess you use a different definition than the rest of do if you came to this conclusion. Even still, we’ve got an enormous graveyard of games rendered nonfunctional once the servers were taken offline, and we can objectively measure those and see no way it’s going to slow down. Sony’s about to push out Concord this month. The two RTS games pushing themselves most as successors to StarCraft are both online-only. All three of these games will be completely unplayable and lost to time in just a few short years.
To the question about “why not boycott companies selling games this way?” he explains boycotts don’t work. But when Bud Light ran a pro LGBT ad, so many bigots switched beer that Bud Light had to apologize and fire their executives. It fell from #1 beer to #3 and the parent company is now switching their flagship beer from Bud Light to Michelob. Boycotts work.
I agree with you. A lot of people don’t realize the power they have in the marketplace. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is very obfuscated. Why would they tell you clearly that the game is going to stop functioning at some point in the future if they don’t have to? It would be terrible for business. They’ll put it in their EULAs, the things you only see after you’ve already purchased the game, and declining it means you can’t use the thing you bought. It might be in some small italics text on the store page that’s difficult to find. But if you’re looking at Diablo IV next to Titan Quest II, you as the consumer have very little indication that one of those games will live forever while the other lives on borrowed time.
Plus, yes, games are art that are worth preserving.
Helldivers said everyone would need a PSN account to play the game on PC and it got so much backlash that the company changed course in a few days.
It’s worth noting that, because this game can’t exist offline, this is a change they could impose on you after you’ve already bought it.
The response is “Shut down your game and never make another online-only game ever again”. He spends a lot of time talking about how games are works of art that need to be preserved for the sake of humanity and the good of consumers, and then he tells devs to shutdown their game and never make another one.
There was a gaming VPN program called Tunngle that I would use when Hamachi would fail me. It was surely collecting untold quantities of my personal data without my knowledge. When the GDPR passed, Tunngle decided to just close up shop rather than finding another way forward. That was a casualty of consumer protections, but it doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t worth protecting. He acknowledges the very real scenario that this is a non-starter for a lot of current games’ business models, and they’ll sooner shut down than comply, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making sure that people get what they expect to receive when they pay for a game: actual ownership.
This isn’t preservation of games anymore than…
I’m not touching that metaphor for all sorts of reasons that could derail this discussion, but yes, requiring that a game remains playable after the servers are shut down is preservation. Requiring them to put a label on it, like a surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes, describing exactly what it is they’re selling to me; that would be consumer protection. I’ll still happily take the preservation as one step further than that.
I honestly think that the better way of handling this is an awareness campaign (like is currently happening, keep the conversation going!) and boycott against the worst offenders, not a petition to create a new law.
Awareness is a huge problem, because, much like I stated earlier, games aren’t even required to inform me that I wouldn’t want to buy them, and it takes me a lot of work to find that out.
If a free market solution (which I like and prefer, by the way) was going to solve this, it would have done it by now.
What this means is that now you can play GOG games that previously required the (non-Linux native) GOG Galaxy client!
…for multiplayer.
And I’m not sure why these developers forgot how to add LAN and direct IP connections to their games, but it sure does muddy the experience of buying “DRM-free” games.
It’s a nontrivial thing to make a good product for your customers, but it should still be done. If only GOG had the market muscle to require this without shooting themselves in the foot, like when Apple pretty much universally made digital music purchases DRM-free.
EDIT: Wait, what does this mean?
as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections
What infrastructure? You need some port forwarding know-how, but other than that, you type in an address and go.
The unanimous game of the year did it just last year. No one uses seat belts or air bags until you have to either. LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc. are essential for when services like GOG’s or Steam’s are no longer functional or available. Without them, some part of the game will effectively always have DRM.
It’s convenient for players, who don’t need to know anything about networking to play, which is why we all use it despite its downsides. But it always has downsides. Steam networking goes down for regular weekly maintenance and kills your multiplayer session in a lot of cases. If you and a couple of friends are on a train or in a rural area with terrible internet, you can still play with LAN.
But these online connections are in fact DRM. If you need to connect to your store’s servers to play multiplayer, I imagine that reduces piracy compared to being able to copy paste the executable a few times and send it to a few friends that can all play together. Still, I want the guarantee that what I’m buying is built to last, which means no DRM, which means requiring that connection to my store’s servers is not it.
Steam itself can be DRM but isn’t always. I would use GOG Galaxy if I could, but they don’t let me. What bums me out is that it’s required for multiplayer functionality in some cases, and I can no longer just assume that the entire library of GOG fits my values the way that it used to. A lot of this information I’m looking for is often not clearly communicated on store pages and requires lots of extra research.
There are just a ton of ways to skin that cat. You can do things like object replication, where the server is authoritative and sends updates states to every player, but even then, you might want to have something like aiming in a 3D game done locally so that it feels responsive and then update it with the server’s understanding of what’s possible just in case things get out of whack. In the fighting game space, there’s rollback, where each player has a complete up to date simulation of what the game is doing, and they only send inputs back and forth; then if something is out of date, it resimulates the last couple of frames, invisibly, until it’s done catching up, all within the span of 1 frame. However, this approach tends to be less graceful when it comes to people coming and going, because you need to synchronize the game state before you start sharing information back and forth. The network infrastructure for something like Dark Souls, where you’re dynamically pulling in players, messages, and recordings of players’ ghosts, will be different still. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but the most common ones do tend to be available in one-size-fits-most.
It’s not exactly an advertised feature when a game is DRM free on Steam, so this list may not be comprehensive or accurate for every game. DRM is optional on Steam. You can copy these game directories out of Steam and run them on a totally separate computer with Steam not even installed, and they’ll still work.
And I’d have just made my username &rew if they let me, but this is the one I use when that one is taken or they have limitations on special characters. With the special character, it has the benefit of fitting in old-school four character clan tags as well as Smash Melee names (and I don’t like going by Drew).
Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
What the petition says is what it’s asking for. What we want may be different. What European parliament drafts, if we’re so lucky, will be what’s actually the law. The concerns in the petition are quite clearly about how this applies to EU consumer protections, and many of us are interested in that plus the bonus that this will grant to preservation by proxy.
The answer is to allow people to host it themselves. If you’ve got a Discord server and people who want to experience a game with you, you could get 40 people together to do a WoW raid long after it stopped being profitable for Blizzard. In a case like Pokemon Go, either that stuff is determined algorithmically or there’s a game master with their finger on the button to trigger the event; users could run that too.
I just played through the first game earlier this year with a friend of mine. It’s fun but dated in a lot of ways, so it will be cool to play a modernized version of that, especially when it comes to designing for controllers from the outset. The ability mod system looks really cool and reminds me of that game Superfuse that isn’t going over well right now in early access.
Maybe they could make an action game like Devil May Cry but with something like a rhythm game element to it. Do they have any existing IP that that could fit? Or a team that could make it?
Most games these days have short marketing cycles. If you’ve played The Outer Worlds or Pillars of Eternity, you’ve got a very good idea of what this game is.
One is a first-person real-time RPG, so if you want to know what it plays like and what the size of that game is, it’s The Outer Worlds. If you want to know what kind of fiction and tone it’s set in, or what the mechanics of certain spells are, your point of reference is Pillars of Eternity.
There was a time where it was worth the money because it was far and away better than any free online offering. That time was probably up to about 2010. Now that servers are paid for with digital game sales, it would behoove them to drop the fee. Instead, I think they’re just about to change the console market as we know it.
Also accurate. But it’s looking like we’ll still have $500 machines called Xboxes and PlayStations, except they’ll just be fancy PCs. That’s my guess anyway.
Sony’s already not carrying on. They’ve started putting their games on PC, which is a market that is, for the first time, larger than their console for the same game releases. Nintendo’s got another generation of hardware before they’ll need to change anything.
Yeah, I’ll bet PS6 is business as usual but with an eye toward the future. Microsoft is already hinting that their next Xbox(es) are just going to be PCs, with talk of handhelds and additional storefronts.
I might impulsively buy whatever Nintendo’s next console is just for Zelda or Metroid, even though Nintendo as a company pisses me off.
Stay strong, brother. They only get to keep pissing you off because you keep handing them your money. There’s no shortage of metroidvania games right now, and even Zelda has a decent number of competitors now.
That’s what they say publicly, yes. Because if they tell their customers right now that they plan to dramatically shorten that window, they’re shooting themselves in the foot early.
They are no longer going to be any form of independent from Sony/PlayStation anymore. The Final Shape’s sales were never going to be able to prevent this from happening, says Jeff Grubb on his morning news show (paraphrased).
Finally, on 27th July, Blow noted the “whole industry is having a hard time” and then, when asked how many of his development team are working on the compiler for programming language Jai, Blow replied: “None, because we can’t afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad.”...
Or the people who care about it already have it. It doesn’t have archaic controls or graphics or whatnot, so the need to buy a new version is way lower than the likes of a Resident Evil remake.
I think his use case is that the new language allows for more rapid iteration in development. Years ago now, I saw his demo of the language, and it compiled so quickly that it may as well have been done by the time he pressed Enter. For all the gains he got from that, it still hasn’t helped him release a game by now, but I do see the problem he’s trying to solve, and I do think it’s worth solving.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a Unity game, last I checked, and it’s not getting done any faster. As per The Witness, it’s probably far more about how he’s retooling puzzles rather than his language, if I had to guess. Plus, it’s not just iterating within the editor; this thing exported a build in well under a second. I worked on a Unity game a few years ago, and it definitely took me far longer than that. It even had a bug for a bit there where we couldn’t see the game when run via the editor on Linux, so the only way we could test it was by exporting a build until we got an update to Unity.
I’m Just curious about, do you prefer RPGs (Role-Playing Games) or FPS (First-Person Shooters)? Personally, I love getting lost in the story and character development of RPGs, but the fast-paced action of FPS games is hard to resist. What about you? Which one do you enjoy more and why? Let’s hear your thoughts!
I’m a big fan of both, but FPS games that are up my alley have dried up in recent years. I was eating good between 1998 and 2017, but now FPS games must be either live service or boomer shooters. By contrast, there’s no shortage of the kinds of RPGs I like now that we’re through that genre’s dark ages in the late 00s and early 10s.
Which RPGs are you playing that don’t have interesting stories to tell? Also, I feel like most FPS campaigns since Half-Life 2 have had similar or better facial animations.
It’s exclusivity from one place instead of to another, which is pretty wild. Not the first time they’ve done it either, because they had that deal with Ubisoft.
The situation where the player is meant to guess is exactly where you’re most likely to get a legitimate perfect parry; that’s what the mechanic is there for. Those situations are often auto timed. It’s in neutral where the cheats stick out.
I may be preaching to the choir, but if the tradeoff you’re willing to make is to defend against cheats by installing a rootkit, that won’t even make cheating impossible as some kind of consolation, you should go back to the drawing board and try again.
In consumerism it’s known that there’s overreach, and I won’t buy their bullshit when a company has far too much control over my machine just because I want to play a video game.
Fighting games, as a genre, are already designed in such a way that reduces cheating. Every action you take makes you vulnerable, and cheats are usually built around automatic responses. Cheaters can often enough still lose just because the cheater wants to press buttons too and not let the computer do literally all of the work. Cheaters exist in games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter, but they’re so rare and obvious that they become fodder for YouTube content.
Shadows of Doubt - Release Date Announce Trailer (September 26th v1.0 and consoles) (www.youtube.com) angielski
This one’s been in early access for a while, but it’s finally hitting 1.0. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a procedurally generated murder mystery immersive sim. A murder happens, you scan for evidence, track people by their address in the phone book, and make connections with red string yourself. When I played the demo a...
Doom and Doom II get a ‘definitive’ rerelease that’s packed with upgrades (www.theverge.com) angielski
4K, 120 FPS, and more
Krafton acquires Tango Gameworks and Hi-Fi Rush IP from Xbox (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Giant FAQ on The European Initiative to Stop Destroying Games! (youtu.be) angielski
Link to sign EU initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home...
Splitgate 2 | Official Gameplay Reveal (www.youtube.com) angielski
Next Heroic Games Launcher release to include initial GOG Galaxy support (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Louis Rossmann's response to harsh criticism of "Stop Killing Games" from Thor of @PirateSoftware (www.youtube.com) angielski
New Darksiders game teased by THQ Nordic (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
Titan Quest II | Showcase 2024 Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Game Informer shuts down after 33 years (www.gematsu.com) angielski
Microsoft and Activision have formed a new team within Blizzard to work on smaller 'AA' games based on existing IP (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Avowed is getting delayed to early 2025 angielski
Source: twitter.com/klobrille/status/1819042520321401194
Xbox Console Sales Continue To Crater With Massive 42% Revenue Drop - Slashdot (games.slashdot.org) angielski
"The New Path for Bungie", 220 people, 17% of Bungie, laid off (www.bungie.net) angielski
They are no longer going to be any form of independent from Sony/PlayStation anymore. The Final Shape’s sales were never going to be able to prevent this from happening, says Jeff Grubb on his morning news show (paraphrased).
Braid: Anniversary Edition "sold like dog s***", says creator Jonathan Blow (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Finally, on 27th July, Blow noted the “whole industry is having a hard time” and then, when asked how many of his development team are working on the compiler for programming language Jai, Blow replied: “None, because we can’t afford to pay anyone because the sales are bad.”...
Do you prefer RPGs or FPS games? angielski
I’m Just curious about, do you prefer RPGs (Role-Playing Games) or FPS (First-Person Shooters)? Personally, I love getting lost in the story and character development of RPGs, but the fast-paced action of FPS games is hard to resist. What about you? Which one do you enjoy more and why? Let’s hear your thoughts!
World of Goo 2 - Official Trailer 2 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Riot's fighting game 2XKO will use Vanguard anti-cheat (www.vg247.com) angielski
Whelp…I’m out. (I expected this to happen before they said anything though, honestly.)