Definitely more so in the last one. Dual Destinies was mostly Phoenix and Athena, and yeah, a small bit of Apollo. and Apollo kinda got his limelight stolen in his own game anyway
Funny how they called the collection “Apollo Justice : Ace Attorney” when two games in it literally put “Phoenix Wright” back in the title.
At first the idea was it’d be training an actual “replica” of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for “more than friends”, and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don’t want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.
Doesn’t even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided “love” wasn’t part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their “virtual companion” suddenly lobotomized, and there’s nothing they could do about it.
Maximum score (4 stars, 5 stars, 10/10, 100%, whatever they’re calling it) not meaning the game is perfect is not at all a problem to me. There are games I absolutely love and would recommend to just about anyone and even then I don’t think they’re “perfect”.
The thing that bothers me most is how average scores specifically for games are basically never used, and below average scores are just a handful of the most broken things ever.
It’s so absurd that on metacritic for games, “average” goes from 50 to 74%. In movies it goes from 40 to 64. I don’t know for everyone else, but I don’t consider 7 out of 10 an “average” mark. And a game so broken it almost doesn’t run at all doesn’t deserve 5/10 (really, I’ve seen some).
Anyway, review scores are silly. Read the guys’ opinions, see why they like it and why they don’t. Someone’s absolute favorite masterpiece is someone else’s most unplayable shit.
I know there are workarounds, but this is true. There are very little games I buy (at least directly) through steam nowadays, because I didn’t like what it became after the Greenlight/Direct debacle and I didn’t want my library to be that dependent of them anymore.
I have playnite as a unified game library launcher (with GoG, itch.io, humble, Ubi, EA, even Amazon Prime and freaking EGS just for the free games), so where I get my games from doesn’t matter much for me now.
But workshop integration is basically the only thing that makes me want a Steam copy for a game.
Though among the games in that case, there were Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, and for both if you get a copy directly from the developers, you get DRM-free and a Steam key. So, that’s what I did.
I guess it really depends how it’s done. I don’t think an actual cut of the proceeds is fair either, but stuff like having a low entry point and scaling your tool’s cost a bit according to the project success can be a good idea.
That said after they’d try to pull a stunt like they did I definitely wouldn’t trust them anymore.
Another article mentioned that this guy is now working for Tencent (announced in 2022). Before becoming yet another Galactus in the industry, Tencent is originally an online service provider and (mostly) an ad company.
What about barbarians trying to ruin the glorious video game empire now?
Funny how this small detail doesn’t show up in that article, where he’s only “ex-Sony boss”.
Even ignoring he’s now working for freaking Tencent, how far are we supposed to go? Even his former company Sony was technically “non-endemic” for video games before the 90s. So was Microsoft.
Nintendo was selling playing cards long before video games, and Namco was building mall coin-op rides before arcade machines. Though I guess those two and Sony were at least in the entertainment business. But in any case they weren’t created as video game companies (of course given when they were created, they couldn’t).