This is a fairly lofty and unrealistic goal. Unfortunately, the right for companies to keep their source code private isn’t going to go away anytime soon and if they were legally compelled to release binaries, the setup for a modern cloud based online experience is not for the faint of heart.
A more realistic goal would be to say that all products should be usable offline (with exceptions for impossibilities like an instant messenger or something)
If the online servers don’t exist anymore, there should be a path to functionality without them. For everything, given the rise of iot especially. If there’s a path to functionality without the online service there’s a path to preserving the game
The worrying aspect is that they seem to be trying to make non gamepass users pay for the development of gamepass games.
Gamepass is a massive drain on Microsoft, and numbers appear to have flatlined and not enough to pay for all the games made by Bethesda, Id, obsidian, Activision, blizzard and so much more.
So now I think they want to get non gamepass users to pay for the development and have gamepass users get the same deal they always did. Which is imo setting the industry up for some very turbulent times in the future as the cost of gamepass is buried under this, and the Xbox platform is further weakened as it gets deeper into the “no one buys games” pit.
they don’t have the income from retail games any-more, if you’re an Xbox player, you almost certainly have gamepass. which means you aren’t paying for a single game they produce. A decade ago a new Halo would come out and that would be 100 million in revenue day one. Now it’s nothing.
They have to pay for the entire cost of development of multiple game studios. I’ll highlight the ones for relevance, these are studios they have to pay salaries for hundreds of people for every month, as well as all the other costs of development, and then get no payday. Gamepass has to (but doesn’t) pay for all of these: Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, Machine Games, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Studios, Blizzard, Treyarch, Infinity Ward, High Moon Studios, Toys for Bob, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Beenox, Radical Entertainment, Rare, 343 Industries, The Coalition, Mojang. Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment, InXile Entertainment, Double Fine
Then they have to licence all the other games on gamepass, all the third party stuff on there currently that microsoft does not own. Again, this means that they don’t make any money from game sales of those products, and also have to pay for them. Gamepass subscriptions currently probably covers this cost just about
Currently Gamepass can only exist thanks to microsoft azure and office 365. those to microsoft services pay for gamepass game development. This is why no other company does this, only microsoft can front the money from their other businesses.
I want to be extremely clear about this, game sales functionally do not exist. We are not going to be discussing the validity of if xbox gamers purchasing Xbox games. We know they are not.
New titles are not resulting in more console sales and subscribers, as those have flatlined.
They have indeed shifted to this model to make less money so that they can be the one making money in a decade. It’s extremely short-sighted to claim otherwise.
Update: The LinkedIn profile in question removed the references to the “30 million” milestone. Microsoft reiterated to us in a statement that 25 million remains the last official milestone.
literally from your article.
from another ign article
“We’re seeing slowing adoption of Xbox Game Pass even though Microsoft will claim otherwise thanks to the repositioning of Xbox Live Gold as Xbox Game Pass Core,” McWhirter says. “Our forecast estimates total Xbox Game Pass subscriptions (excluding Core/Live Gold) to be at 33.3 million at the end of 2023, which represents subscriber growth of just 13% - down from 15% in 2022. Piscatella notes too on X/Twitter that subscription services specifically aren’t growing as fast as they used to.
The past few years have had at least four reaident evil games in development at the same time.
Re3make, 4make, village, that weird multiplayer one all going at the same time. It’s really not as unusual as you are making it seem. People like resident evil more than ever right now.
I imagine the situation is similar to this, but maybe mobile or switch games involved.
What online multiplayer games play well over wifi/higher latency?
I'm thinking turn-based games may work okay in this respect, but which of those might you recommend besides Civ? Also what other types of games work better over wifi/higher latency than you might expect?
I know ideally you'd simply wire up your system to not have to fuss with either, but it's not always an option in some circumstances.
packet loss inherently creates latency. packets must be re-sent (at the baseline cost of the additional ping latency to the other side) and your client is running with an out-dated world state. In addition, packet loss usually comes in bursts so you’re losing all packets for an amount of time.
So I’ve worked in IT for around 18 years now and in that time I’ve worked for 2 gaming companies, I started my most recent a year ago, but I’m wondering if I should just jump ship for the tech industry again, I’m now waiting for the layoffs in our business unit. I’m an immigrant living on a work permit and losing my...
The tech industry is not doing much better. But in general, if you can find a job in tech vs. games, you’ll make more money, have more stability, and be treated better.
Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!...
Dragon Quest XI - I am a huge fan of the 8-bit and 16-bit DQ games. But I just couldn’t get into DQ11.The atrocious music probably didn’t help.
the (full price ofc) re-releases help with the music a lot. I got the game on release because its dragon quest of course I did, and put it down 12 hours or so in because I could not stand it anymore - mostly because of the blaring midi music.
picked up the re-release with orchestral music some years later and had a much better time with it. It’s nowhere near the best of the series, But it’s better than a fair few of them.
Microsoft is laying off 1900 people across the video game teams, including Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and Xbox, equating to approximately eight percent of its gaming workforce....
there is. this is at a large scale however. and involved cancelling projects. normally this happens because of redundancies in rolls (like QA for example, microsoft already has QA, marketing, stuff like that)
if you care about spoilers. IW will have spoilers for earlier games, that’s just how it’s going to be. but you probably already encountered most of them in LaD
These layoffs are always for shareholders as share prices go up when the layoffs happen. It’s not about cash flow. It’s purely about shareholders.
Share prices go up always affects c suite the most. They get better returns on the shares they own and also get large bonuses. Far from take responsibility, a ceo massively profits from layoffs.
I’ve always enjoyed watching what those laid-off employees end up moving onto.
almost all of the people currently being laid off in tech end up leaving the industry or being unemployed. there are no jobs, and there are massive waves of layoffs everywhere.
I really get fatigued sitting in my chair playing steam games, I almost pulled the trigger on one of these the other day with the intent of installing moonlight, and sunshine to stream to my TV. Anyone have any opinions? I saw there’s 2 versions, does it make sense to get the pro version? Can I use my PS5 controller on it?...
in addition to this, turn off the AI upscaling. it adds lag and makes everything look weird. good for video, bad for games. Geforce Now (which honestly, give that a shot too it’s pretty good for cloud streaming) automatically disables it but iirc other things don’t.
This is incredibly reaching and tantamounts to “retro studios hired someone who has jira skills” and maybe worked with a company that makes trailers. This isn’t at all reputable and shouldn’t be something we promote here.
Whilst I like more tools for people to be creative with, the promises in these rtx tools look less like they are enabling creativity and more like trying to lock mods to their cards and having the human input be more technical busywork than artistic endevour.
They are. The games industry is releasing a lot of hits in recent times, and there’s a lot of money flowing in. Just not as much as covid times and interest rates are high.
This has nothing to so with the actual industry and the people making games.
You might think the failure of Embracer would maybe make regulators start acting on the mass conglomerization of media companies instead of hand waving everything through assuming the free market will provide.
Most of the companies’ Embracer is closing aren’t even unprofitable. They were/are doing fine even if their games weren’t big hits. Embracer just can’t pay its bills.
. 20 years from now when you dig out your old copy of borderlands 3 and there’s no longer a download available, you think you’ll get to play through the game?
Yes, games often come with bugs, but a game that comes out unplayable or unbeatable on disk is extremely rare.
This is, of course, discounting the fact that as part of community preservation efforts, updates are preserved along with the games.
This is a good time to introduce survivorship bias. You are looking at what is still there. Not what has been removed, burried or was done via dms/non public comms.
Or maybe you are right and they are just making up the toxicity remarks.
The comments in here are really disappointing and a reflection of where this community has gone in general.
Excusing toxic gamer communities, accusing the developer of things for pointing it out? All because the game not in a good state is toxic in itself and really not what this community should be.
I’m expecting this community not to say that a company deserves a toxic community and that being toxic is a totally normal and expected thing.
A few months ago, even , this was a place where people would talk about the game news and not revel in your average Gamer toxicity.
Now it’s just, I guess, reddit, but worse because the toxic voices are louder in a smaller echo chamber. The people who don’t ascribe to this kind of thing leave. The toxic people are all that is left.
Whilst your opinion here is totally valid, it’s worth knowing that as a coop player of the mana games, you are a very, very small minority of players.
Almost everyone plays these games single-player, so they need to focus on that first. You’re right that the secret of mana means coop for a lot of people, but also, it’s worth understanding that almost everyone doesn’t experience that.
Adding a bit more to the discussion on whether game subscription can be “the future”, it looks like despite the heavy push made in the past decade, subscriptions only make up 10% of total video game spending in the US....
a subscription model isn’t necessarily the future or even what’s most profitable for a company to offer (as Sony was recently acknowledging).
It’s worth remembering that the goal of subscription services like gamepass is not to be the most profitable avenue. The goal is marketshare.
Microsoft lost, and Microsoft lost hard. Reportedly, the CEO wanted to exit gaming entirely after the Xbox One. They didn’t based solely on the new business plan, which was to disrupt the market. Kill the existing model by offering super low-cost subscriptions (paid for by Azure and Office 365) and become the new encumbant of a new industry where you can jack up the prices and lower the cos(and quality) over a decade trying to chase profitability.
Subscriptions are not about revenue generation as every subscription model out there lowers revenue massively. It’s about holding a larger share of the market so you can make money in other ways.
It’s 2024 and you can’t buy any individual movie or TV show you want, you have to buy access to literal Netflix or others as a subscription. Op is saying games are heading towards that.
I would argue that there are three kinds of game subscriptions right now
gamepass, paid for by azure/office. goal to turn the industry into a subscription service based industry like everything else has been converted into
trying-to-keep-up-with-gamepass: this is ps+ (extra|premium), it exists as a failing effort to keep up with gamepass. it has to make money and thus users don’t see value in it. it either costs too much or doesn’t provide enough for the cost
fifa subscription
the last one has existed for a long time and doesn’t really factor into the discussions people are having today. it’s not really relevant. the other two are both a factor of each other and relevant to what we are talking about.
where there’s demand, they still let you become its permanent owner. (
this is not true. in-fact it is seen as a marketing tool for the subscription services. market-forces do not naturally lead to the outcome you are describing.
it is also not the “exception” that something isn’t available, it’s an exception when a subscription service does release a purchasable option.
Indeed it’s getting more and more common that not only will shows/movies be unavailable for purchase, but deleted from the subscriptions too.
Would be massively surprised if this means anything else other than CoD which they got regulators worried about a little bit. they just want to reduce the eyeballs.
I feel like whenever i “tanked” a city in cities skylines, it was because of some awkwardness in the traffic system that comes about from chaos theory rather than anything city builderey, just not really about that.
You can be a firm believer of that if you like, but it’s not a realistic belief and hasn’t been for a very long time.
For close to two decades, games have been made with dlc plans as a part of them. Sometimes, because the entire monetary system is based on the idea, sometimes because it’s a factor in monetization but not the whole thing.
A realistic take is to look at the content that’s being offered and ask if I am getting a complete experience for the money I am paying. Is it worth the cost.
It’s 2024, and games have dlc now. Be mad at games that don’t offer a complete experience for what you pay for, but be realistic in your aspirations.
Sometimes, it bothers me that this community has been taken over by the pc gaming bros. I guess it’s reflective of lemmy as a whole. After the burst of new users, you got a lot of diversity systemwide.
But that’s gone again now, and we are just left with the overly technical people who are going to circlejerk about the same things over and over.
Lemmy just didn’t stick, and this is what we have left.
Sales follow the tradition of supply and demand. Products come out at their highest price because of expectations and hype. Then, as interest wanes, the publisher continues to make some sales by reducing price to tempt the less interested parties....
I’ve played games that thanks to patching, do not resemble the game I played any-more. TF2 is a good example of that, I can’t go back and play the game I played, it doesn’t exist any-more.
I think they made a classic mode, but that’s just one stage, I want to play the game I played the most which was a few updates in, but before it got silly.
According to SAG AFTRA, the deal will “enable Replica to engage SAG-AFTRA members under a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. Licensed voices can be used in video game development and other interactive media projects from pre-production to final release.”...
No. It was a massive flop. well received by players and critics alike, but a massive flop. ‘Seventh best selling game in one region for five seconds’ for a game like that is really really bad.
It’s a good game. It flopped so hard it made squarenix decide to get out of the western style market entirely, selling off the entire western arm of the company for a super low price just to be done with it, It was disastrous
It’s worth remembering that this guy says anything that’s in the current trend because just saying those things helps share prices. Then nothing comes of it.
FF16 wasn’t stuffed full of nfts or crypto or even microtransactions even though the president makes comments about this stuff.
If AI can’t find its market (which for all the hype it hasn’t thus far), then yes. Alternatively AI finds its market and it just becomes a norm that’s expected so no one will mention it at all
no, it’s every market when it’s actually a part of those markets, delivering value and funding itself. It is not doing that today. It may do that tomorrow, but not today.
Today AI is in the investor-funded, throw everything against the wall stage. the hope is that something will stick and become what drives that industry in the future. It hasn’t found that yet. AI could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice.
I know everyone loves Valve, but it feels super weird to be celebrating a monopoly so much and so ferociously. (I know Steam isn’t a technical monopoly. We don’t need to have that discussion)
Gaben is old, and he’s gonna retire. It’ll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn’t in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn’t going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
There is a very good chance that the PC platform will be a really horrible place because of the lack of consumer choice in which they can purchase and play games.
It's often the only good way for new generations to experience the classics (startrek.website) angielski
We're listening and we hear you. We've been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned. (twitter.com) angielski
There are "five Resident Evil games in development right now, including Resident Evil 9", leaker claims (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 - Official Gameplay Trailer (youtu.be) angielski
I feel like I should leave the gaming industry angielski
So I’ve worked in IT for around 18 years now and in that time I’ve worked for 2 gaming companies, I started my most recent a year ago, but I’m wondering if I should just jump ship for the tech industry again, I’m now waiting for the layoffs in our business unit. I’m an immigrant living on a work permit and losing my...
Which games do you dislike, but the rest of the world loves them? angielski
Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!...
Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition comes to PC on March 21 (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Microsoft to lay off 1900 people across Xbox and Activision Blizzard | Eurogamer (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Microsoft is laying off 1900 people across the video game teams, including Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and Xbox, equating to approximately eight percent of its gaming workforce....
[minor story spoiler] Playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth before finishing original Yakuza Series? angielski
Some of the reviews of this game mention a major story line…...
An Important Update about Riot’s Future (www.riotgames.com) angielski
TLDR: Riot is downscaling. The severance package is great but it’s another round of layoffs in the industry....
NVidia Shield For Streaming Steam Games Opinions? angielski
I really get fatigued sitting in my chair playing steam games, I almost pulled the trigger on one of these the other day with the intent of installing moonlight, and sunshine to stream to my TV. Anyone have any opinions? I saw there’s 2 versions, does it make sense to get the pro version? Can I use my PS5 controller on it?...
[Speculation] Metroid Prime 4 Dev LinkedIn profile and listing could hint reveal would be coming soon (gamevro.com) angielski
Nvidia's cross-game modding tools RTX Remix now in open beta (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
It’ll be interesting to see what gets made out of this. Remastering old games with modding sounds awesome.
Games industry leaders braced 'for up to two years of pain' (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
Piranha Bytes, devs of Gothic and Elex, are next on Embracer's chopping block (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Legendary Half-Life YouTuber plans class-action lawsuit against Ubisoft for killing The Crew (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Cities: Skylines 2 developers have noticed 'a growing tendency of toxicity in our community' (www.techradar.com) angielski
Developers of Cities: Skylines 2 have noticed a growing toxicity in their community, which is affecting engagement and creativity....
Visions of Mana - Game Overview | Xbox Dev Direct 2024 (www.youtube.com) angielski
Veteran Videogame Analyst: Subscription growth has flattened [in video games] (files.catbox.moe) angielski
Adding a bit more to the discussion on whether game subscription can be “the future”, it looks like despite the heavy push made in the past decade, subscriptions only make up 10% of total video game spending in the US....
Microsoft Confirms Plans To Release Xbox First Party Games “Across All Platforms”, Including PlayStation (twistedvoxel.com) angielski
Prison Architect 2 - Official Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
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This console generation seems skippable angielski
I’ve never skipped a console gen starting from Super NES, PS1 through 4 plus the Switch Oled 5 years after launch of the OG Switch...
Many players have become "patient gamers". What are games people might miss out on by waiting for sales? angielski
Sales follow the tradition of supply and demand. Products come out at their highest price because of expectations and hype. Then, as interest wanes, the publisher continues to make some sales by reducing price to tempt the less interested parties....
Video game actors speak out after union announces AI voice deal (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
According to SAG AFTRA, the deal will “enable Replica to engage SAG-AFTRA members under a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. Licensed voices can be used in video game development and other interactive media projects from pre-production to final release.”...
Steamworks Development - AI Content on Steam (steamcommunity.com) angielski
Key points:...
Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Steam keeps on winning (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
From the opinion piece:...