Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
And GamesBeat, and Aftermath, and NextLander. I think this is the only way game media survives. The corporate ownership doesn’t appear to work for anything other than the IGNs of the world.
For IGN, probably indefinitely. They do real journalism and real criticism over there, but their site is also a horrendous challenge to navigate due to ads, and there’s more Star Wars and Marvel on the front page than there are video games. Gamespot follows a similar model, and they’re still under Fandom, and that will probably work out…fine…ish…compared to trying to make Giant Bomb work under that banner.
Kinda Funny did exactly that, and IGN still stands taller. But I think that just speaks to how many competitors can possibly follow that same model, because they’re driven by ad revenue and SEO.
Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and...
Which Jeff? Jeff, Jeff, or Jeff? Jeff and Jeff are now co-owners, and Jeff has his own solo thing, being a family man, which seems to be how he wants to live his life these days.
A boss several steps up the chain decided to make changes to how the site operates that were incompatible with what Giant Bomb is, namely that they wanted an advertiser-friendly, “brand-safe” image with less swearing and streaming. This led to a number of key people leaving, at which point, the name Giant Bomb isn’t really worth anything to anyone. It’s been covered in tons of gaming circles this week alongside the similar destruction of Polygon, so I didn’t think it needed to be stated yet again as I was summarizing bullet points from a live stream.
Grubb’s got an excellent morning news show that he’ll be back to doing this coming week if you wanted to poke your head in and check it out. They’ve also got a number of shows that are a good laugh, like Blight Club, where they take turns playing awful video games all the way to credits.
Very true. Though at the same time, you probably could have found that context you were looking for by typing a couple of those words into your favorite search engine or Wikipedia.
The problems with Starfield aren’t so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here’s a sort of Let’s Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can’t simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.
I once paid $140 (just pre-pandemic inflation) for a meal with two drinks at a fancy restaurant for a friend’s bachelor party. It was delicious. At the same time, I realized that no one meal, no matter how good, was worth that price. I don’t know what the threshold is for how much I’ll pay for a single video game, but $80 is more palatable to me when the game asking for it isn’t Mario Kart.
I wish we lived in a world close to that one, and maybe someday we’ll get there. Guilty Gear Strive’s source code just got leaked in its entirety, so complete that it can just be loaded as is into the Unreal editor, and a lot of people see this as a bad thing rather than the game ascending to immortality.
Seems like there’s going to be a point where people are noticing the games they spent money on don’t work as they should anymore because the servers get shut down....
Yes, precisely. These days, when I consider buying a game, if it doesn’t have LAN, private servers, or direct connections, I treat the multiplayer as though it doesn’t exist, because one day it won’t.
They’ve been putting out annual releases for a long time, and Call of Duty used to still have LAN. It doesn’t look like Madden ever had LAN, from a quick search of the old covers, which would list the features the game supported, but it was pretty common even in console games back then.
“We think there’s a large audience for compelling stories that don’t require massive time commitments,” 2K president David Ismailer said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer a game like Mafia: The Old Country in our portfolio, and to provide a linear highly-polished narrative experience that can easily complement...
With the implementation of Patch v0.5.5 this week, we must make yet another compromise. From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals. Pals in the player’s team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide....
I’m unconvinced that the Nemesis system would have worked well in too many other settings, but one game patent that had a tangible effect on the industry was Bandai-Namco’s patent on loading screen mini games. Remember how you could make the Soul Calibur II characters yell stuff while the match loaded? Funny that we didn’t see it again until Street Fighter 6, isn’t it? Conveniently after a patent would have expired. We went through an entire era of games with load times that could have benefited from mini games, and by the time the patent expired, we had largely come up with ways to get rid of load screens altogether.
Maybe it is a lack of imagination on my part, but that mechanic seems to rely heavily on characters that can be killed and come back to life with a vengeance on a regular basis, which I don’t think makes sense in any of the settings you listed except for Borderlands, with its New-U stations, funny enough. You could adapt it into something where both you and an enemy are defeated non-lethally, I suppose, but that’s a concept that strangely doesn’t have a common template in video games.
Some AAA games are massively profitable. If you want to see which ones weren’t, look at the studios that got shut down or went through massive layoffs in the past few years. But if they’re not selling that many copies at $60, the thought that seemingly never crosses their minds is to stop spending $200M on a single project that’s make or break for the studio.
Back of the napkin math on a number of them says that a number of them probably took a bath on what was put into them. I get the cynicism, and in many cases you’re right, but it’s been a bad time for video games lately. An industry-wide number of how many billions of dollars video games make is almost entirely coming from only a handful of games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Games like Star Wars Outlaws and Forspoken probably did lose a ton of money. Games like Concord, Avengers, and Suicide Squad lost so much money that it was impossible to not notice it, and they were each to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are a lot of games out there, and the dollars tend to flow to very few of them, relatively speaking. But I’d still argue the solution is to cut costs, not increase prices.
It’s true, there are outliers like that. But if you’re looking at shutdown studios or massive layoffs at random, it’s going to be because the game they made lost money. In Hi-Fi Rush’s case, to the best anyone can tell, it’s because Satya Nadella changed the direction of Microsoft at a time when Tango Gameworks was starting a new project, which means there’s the least sunk costs on a project that was going to be several years away from returning a profit.
That boom also just led to a market with way more games in it every year. With more supply and less demand, you can’t spend as much making the game and expect to be a success unless you’ve got a sure thing. So the higher prices will only be afforded by the games that would have been a success charging less than $70.
A small portion of the Rivals team was laid off for similar reasons to Hi-Fi Rush in that the CEO changed the direction of the company. This would still be an outlier compared to the rest of the industry. Respawn got hit with layoffs because their live service isn’t making anywhere near as much money as it used to, and live services need to keep making tons of money to justify new content for them; yes, this is wholly unsustainable. A live service team getting laid off has nothing to do with whether or not it was a hit and everything to do with whether or not it’s still a hit.
I’m disagreeing with the idea that Hi-Fi Rush and the one branch of the Marvel Rivals team being let go are a regular occurrence. In general, teams are being let go because their games aren’t making money. Their games aren’t making money because there are too many games out there that are also spending too much money on their production, and they’re being subsidized by a consumer base that’s stretched too thin to make it all work for everyone that was in the industry as little as 3 years ago.
I’m struggling with this too, about 1/3 of the way through the main quest. They tutorialize you on feints and defensive mechanics, but you can’t really punish aggression like you can in a fighting game, and the NPC never falls for my feints, basically ever. Getting through a melee fight feels like luck. The last one I got through was because I managed to impale him with three arrows before the sword fight actually started.
One’s mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.
I don’t think a lot of people are going to double dip this time. This game will sell consoles, but it’s not going to make up for the deficit the console market has compared to how many PS3s and Xbox 360s were out there in 2013.
I’m not sure what support you’re talking about, and I’ve never delved into mods for GTA V, but the rest are just sensible business decisions, at least up until now; we’ll see how the different modern dynamic between consoles and PC plays out this time, but I think it’s the last time they’ll do it. As with all these exclusivity deals that are quickly dying out, that PC version will come, and that’s when I’ll play it.
I don’t know why you’re being nasty to me. I genuinely wasn’t sure why someone would have an issue with Rockstar. If they don’t want to make story DLC for GTA V, it’s much the same as Valve not making a Portal 3. I can just move on and play something else. Focusing on a console release first and foremost, especially for a project as ambitious as this, made a lot more sense in the past, and maybe was still common wisdom when the project got rolling. It will stop due to natural market forces. Speaking of natural market forces, it’s exactly why RDR2 Online would be abandoned: there weren’t enough people to care about it compared to its costs. Modding isn’t really my world, so I wouldn’t exactly be privy to those shenanigans, but that sucks.
I’m with them; my 1080p TV still gets the job done and looks great to me. Maybe I’d be more invested in cinema if cinema cared more about what I want. I can’t even walk into brick and mortar and buy a movie anymore, and it’s not like there’s a GOG for movies.
Personally, I don’t think that’s worth getting mad over, especially not in this saturated market right now where there’s always something great to play. Valve worked on Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead many times since their last iterations, but you have to give creatives time to throw out what’s not working. And plenty of game developers I like work on plenty of stuff I’m not interested in. I just wait for them to come back around to the stuff I am interested in. In the case of live service stuff, it sucks, but Rockstar’s hardly unique there.
Gotcha. No worries. I’m more disappointed that basically everyone in the industry stopped making crime stories except for Yakuza, but we’ve got two coming this year, at least, in MindsEye and Mafia: The Old Country.
I just need to be able to buy and download DRM-free movies. Outside of that, I don’t care what it looks like. Movie studios put so much DRM on my Blu Rays that they’re a pain to rip (but notably, not impossible to rip), and “digital copies” of movies are just long term rentals. Meanwhile the movie industry is on fire while their old revenue streams dry up, and they’re scratching their heads as to where they went wrong.
Given the swathes of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.
Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.
Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I’ve ever played, but to be fair, it wasn’t exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn’t really take off either.
There are also a handful of indie games that I’ve played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what’s there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.
EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker’s Toolkit’s game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They’re very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.
I would say it’s a game that requires you to play tactically rather than rushing through it. Especially early game, the traps are very reminiscent of Spelunky, and it’s clear where a lot of their inspiration came from, but Vagante gives you even more mechanics to deal with traps, like magic rings that let you go through walls and floors, for instance, but you won’t necessarily find them every run. Noita has caught my attention here and there, but I just never made time to try it.
I’m not really a streaming kind of guy. Early on in the game, you’re mostly looking out for floor switches and spikes. You can hold the walk modifier to make sure you always climb down a ledge, which helps to make sure you don’t accidentally land in a spike pit, and you can throw just about anything on floor switches to trigger them before you get there so that they’re no longer a threat. You could check out a YouTube let’s play and see how they deal with them, or you could just accept that the game is pretty cheap, so worst case, you’re not out much money if you don’t like it.
It lowers the threshold of how many copies need to sell before a given game breaks even on its budget. It also lowers the number of copies it will sell, because some percentage of people who would have bought a game at the lower price no longer find it to be worth what they’re charging for it.
Central banks can adjust the inputs to the formula that result in inflation or deflation, but not the result. It can be a difficult target to hit, as you can see if you followed the news in the past 3-4 years.
It was a nontrivial cost that factored into the price, and the switch to digital is a large part of why game prices were so inflation resistant for so long.
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
Half-Life: Alyx showed that Valve still knows how to make a great campaign shooter, and it’s not like we’re spoiled for choice in that genre right now. At this point, a solid Half-Life sequel that doesn’t push the envelope would still be amazing.
You’d lose a lot of the effect in mouse and keyboard anyway. Each combat encounter has to be tuned very differently from non-VR. But the point is that they still have a very good understanding of how to make this kind of game.
Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game (www.gamereactor.eu) angielski
Giant Bomb is now 100% independent - Giant Bomb (www.giantbomb.com) angielski
Giant Bomb, a web site about video games, has been purchased from Fandom angielski
Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and...
Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"I don't know" how much Borderlands 4 will cost, Gearbox boss says, but it had "more than twice the development budget for Borderlands 3" and "it might be" $80 like some Nintendo and Xbox games (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Will all these multiplayer games being released without support for LAN or hosting our own servers no longer be multiplayer when the company shuts down the servers? angielski
Seems like there’s going to be a point where people are noticing the games they spent money on don’t work as they should anymore because the servers get shut down....
Mafia: The Old Country release date and $50 price point confirmed | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
“We think there’s a large audience for compelling stories that don’t require massive time commitments,” 2K president David Ismailer said in a statement. “We’re excited to offer a game like Mafia: The Old Country in our portfolio, and to provide a linear highly-polished narrative experience that can easily complement...
Palworld confirms ‘disappointing’ game changes forced by Pokémon lawsuit (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
With the implementation of Patch v0.5.5 this week, we must make yet another compromise. From this patch onward, gliding will be performed using a glider rather than with Pals. Pals in the player’s team will still provide passive buffs to gliding, but players will now need to have a glider in their inventory in order to glide....
On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
CD Projekt exec says "the right thing to do" is release a real Nintendo Switch 2 cartridge for Cyberpunk 2077, not a game-key card, in message to other studios: "Do not underestimate the physical edit (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2 (www.youtube.com) angielski
What is your favorite indie game? angielski
Given the swathes of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
deleted_by_moderator
Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts (arstechnica.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/29113065
Half Life 3 (wccftech.com) angielski
Could it be true? We’ve all been waiting so long I’m very skeptical anytime I see articles like this but this actually looks good?
Chrono Trigger Remake Seemingly Confirmed By Yuji Horii (insider-gaming.com) angielski