Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
Yeah, Freelancer is very special. I really think it’s completely unappreciated for how open the world really is, because it’s very easy just to follow the storyline and never just sod off and explore the world. I recently was replaying it with a bunch of mods, and I went exploring the ice asteroid fields in the south end of New York system, and it’s so atmospheric and cool.
I’ve never actually played Warframe, mostly because I’m not really into competitive arena shooters (with CS:GO and Apex being notable exceptions, though I’ve long since left them behind), and from my short glances that’s how it appeared to me. Does it take place in space?
Navok noted that if a game costs $100 million to make over five years, it has to beat what the company could have returned investing a similar amount in the stock market over the same period. “For the 5 years prior to Feb 2024, the stock market averaged a rate of return of 14.5%. Investing that $100m in the stock market would net you a return of $201m, so this is our ROI baseline,” he explained.
This is why capitalism ruins everything. So it’s not even about making art that is profitable, it’s about beating out other investment opportunities that someone could have chosen, even if it meant the art didn’t get made.
That is so ass-backwards.
Investment should be about wanting to grow a company whose products you believe in, both to see returns when those products perform well, but also to enjoy the future products.
Someone whose attitude is “I don’t care about your products at all, I just care about cash ROI” will turn around and short your stock and disparage you, if they think it’ll net them more money. In other words, they won’t actually look out for the best interests of the company, and will always be looking out for opportunities to plunder the business for more profit.
And this is supposed to create a healthy market for goods? Please.
“The free market makes goods compete to see what customers prefer.” Apparently not.
Apparently it creates a situation where the products can be profitable and amazing and well-loved, but a bunch of wealthy assholes who don’t care about the products at all can decide the company isn’t up to their standards, and punish or kill it.
There was another post here on Beehaw about housing costs, where someone noted that “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work because wealthy people can “out-vote” you, on a level that even collectively you can’t compete with, and this really illustrates their point well.
Late edit:
I think it bears saying that under this model of ROI calculation, depending on how well other industries are doing, it is entirely possible that no video game could feasibly outperform the market for a given timeframe… so should the whole games industry just fucking shut down in that case?
I don’t know how to encourage investment without the stock market
I invest in stuff that’s not stocks all the time. When I give money to someone so that they will hopefully create a cool new product in the future (e.g. a video), I’m not paying for an individual product, I’m investing in them as a creator in hopes for future ROI. That’s Patreon.
We treat the addiction to wealth accrual different from any other addiction, in that we laud it, but make no mistake that it is addictive. Watching numbers in your account go up gives you a rush, just as sure as watching numbers in a video game.
When other addictions cause harm, we push people to get treatment, or at very least condemn the addiction. When someone is addicted to the accrual of wealth, even to the detriment of others, we call them, ‘genius’, ‘savvy’, ‘visionary’, or ‘shrewd’.
That could work if these firms were somehow competitors, but these aren’t Sony-aligned studios they’re buying, these are studios that were releasing games on Xbox.
This is definitely a case of, “what makes stock line go up? New games, Big names, More stuff!” Then later, “uh oh, did that and stock price not going up. Layoffs mean less cost, now stock line go up again!”
As someone who used to really like Phil, I agree with this. He’s clearly banking on his popularity as a “celebrity” within the gaming community to put a smiling spin on what is a clearly horrible business record.
The question here is not whether Microsoft does the same things that all businesses do (i.e. be evil Capitalist monstrosities that run people’s livelihoods over in the name of investor greed)- that much is obvious.
The question is whether Phil Spencer is actively enabling this behavior and also covering for it- which he is.
And that is why, as the article suggests, people need to stop treating him as anything other than a corporate representative who wants to extract as much value as he can before it all runs into the ground.
The article didn’t say he needs to go, they said people need to stop treating him as though he is actually on the side of consumers and employees, rather than investors.
The literal last line of the article is
I hope moving forward Xbox fans and the media hold Spencer more accountable for future mistakes, cuts, and failures.
PSP, followed by Gameboy Color, followed by Advance SP.
I recently got a Retroid4, and took an amazing trip down memory lane with Mana Khemia, MG:AC!D, FF Tactics Advanced/A2, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and a bunch of pkmn ROM hacks. All of them easily held up today.
Unless SteamDeck counts, in which case it wins hands-down.
I think that calling BOtW similar to other full-scale console games of 2017 like Sniper Elite 4, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Nier Automata, Prey, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, RE7, or AssCreed Origins, is a biiiiiiig stretch.
It was a huge jump for Nintendo (it was basically putting GameCube-level games on a handheld), but it was still far behind other consoles. Witcher 3 (2015) even eventually released on the Switch in 2019, and it was massively graphically gimped compared to ahemreal consoles.
I didn’t say it’s not good, I said it’s not equivalent to console releases of that year. Graphics isn’t everything, and I still enjoy playing Pax Imperia and Nox, but that doesn’t change that it was a handheld game, not a console game. Pokemon Red/Blue were also some of the best selling games the year they released, but that doesn’t make the Gameboy equivalent as a console to PSX or N64 either.
I fired up 7DTD a couple months ago, and I definitely did not feel like it was anywhere close to being done. Releasing out of EA feels like they just want to be done with it.
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
the consensus I’ve gotten is that the MTXs are largely meaningless because they’re so easy to get in-game
I would push back on this a bit. Some of these items are easy to acquire small quantities of, but are not available in infinite amounts, such as (as far as I know) the fast travel tokens. I am 20-ish hours in, and I think I have 8 fast travel tokens, which means that I really just don’t use them, and hoard them for emergencies.
Convenience is addictive, and people absolutely will have trouble not pouring tens or hundreds of dollars into MTX once they get a taste of the convenience it offers. Ask ESO users how many don’t have ESO Plus; it’s incredibly common to have, because it gives you free fast travel and a dedicated, infinite inventory for crafting materials. It’s weaponized convenience.
Other items in DD2 I’ve used CheatEngine to dupe, but I think most people (and obviously, no one on console) aren’t going to be able to figure out hex editors, and shouldn’t have to.
The media focusing on these fringe groups lends legitimacy to them and puts a spotlight on them, which in turn draws people on their side but unaware of them, to them.
By attacking it when your attacks can’t actually harm the group per se, all you’re really doing is giving it visibility. No one’s saying it’s creating racists/ bigots, but it is giving them a more powerful platform, since they’re no longer just a bunch of bigoted individuals, but are now Gamergate™, whose dumb ideas the media will publish articles about.
No one writes articles about stupid crap that people say on /b/ as individuals, but Gamergate, Q-Anon, Pizzagate, MAPs, etc all have had many tens if not hundreds of articles written about them, and they’re all just 4-chan campaigns.
These Right wing campaigns don’t have a platform on which to advance a narrative. 4-chan and Truth Social and 8-chan and Parlor/Gab/whatever aren’t frequented by most ‘normal’ folks, and the only reason these campaigns reached mass audience is because news media puffs them up for clicks.
There are many more hundreds of right-wing troll/ hate campaigns that go nowhere, because they never manage to catch the attention of the media.
It’s nice to see someone acknowledge that it started it as an actual, important conversation about the shady monetary influence that game publishers have on gaming news sites. That’s what made the hijacking and eventual media branding of Gamergate even worse, because the media bought into their narrative that there were the same conversations, by the same people, and everyone sort of threw the baby out with the 4-chan-brigaded bathwater.
If you look up histories of Gamergate now, sites like Vox actually talk how it began on 4-chan and later 8-chan as a troll campaign, but no one ever really talks about what it was they were hijacking.
I think a lot of those conversations, like publishers’ power over reviews via withholding review copies (as perhaps most famously, Bethesda did to Kotaku), and what it meant as a reader to trust the sites that hadn’t been blacklisted, got totally forgotten after the dust had settled.
It also says a lot about our mass media, and it’s willingness to elevate and legitimize troll campaigns for the clicks.
Who is talking about 1.0? The last Letter from the Chairman, published 4 days ago, is all about Alpha 4.0, not 1.0. All of the recent ISCs and SCLs have been about 3.23 and 4.0 features.
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old?
You mean, like most of us Millennial gamers are now (30+)? The youngest Millennials, born in 1996, will be 30 in 2 years.
These games clearly took inspiration from 90s FPS games, which 👌, but they were played mostly by Gen Xers and Millenials, not Boomers.
I’m a middle-Millennial (1988), and Doom was well before my time as a gamer. I was 5 years old in 1993. Halo (2001) was more my generation, just barely. The oldest Millennials in 1993 were 12 years old, which was not the target age group for Doom.
GenX? Sure, they played Doom, but Boomers were by far the larger age group playing “Mature” games at that time. Video games have never been just for children.
This is just the same thing EA did with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Exec management wanted out of AAA singleplayer games, so they set the ME:A team up for failure, and then used that failure to justify the change to the shareholders.
WB wants out of large budget games, so they created a flop to justify it.
This sucks hard. They likely knew they could not overcome Nintendo’s infinite money for legal proceedings, and if they lost they could have been on the hook for far more than this settlement amount.
The upside is this has no legal impact, but the downside is they were the best-positioned group to take this to trial.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
People need to make sure they pull the code off of github and put it up on other sites, preferably private repos. Github has already dealt with other ‘banned’ projects by going through all forks and even re-uploads of them and cleaning house.
Over on Hackernews, a dev from a German emulator project that Nintendo shut down was saying that their settlement included a similarly large sum of money, but it was only actually to be paid if the other conditions of the settlement weren’t met, and that if they were, the “debt” was dropped after x years, basically insurance to ensure compliance.
It’s been abundantly clear for a long time that Geoff is only in it for himself and his baby The Game Awards. He has never been a ‘rock-the-boat’ kinda guy, and insomuch as game companies have shown themselves to be incredibly petty and vengeful, I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to think that some companies might boycott TGAs if called out, but 1) he’s not even calling the industry out indirectly, and 2) that’s still a choice on his part to prioritize his own pet project over the livelihoods of the people he claims TGA is there to celebrate.
Morrowind had (and still has) just as vibrant a modding community as ES4 or 5. Tamriel Rebuilt alone is still the largest modding project for any Elder Scrolls game.
All of that expertise was developed on and for Morrowind.
We don’t have the SF version of the Creation Kit yet, but all previous versions are largely similar, and FO4 modders will likely have no issue working on SF.
PARIS & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Capgemini and Unity (NYSE: U), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced an expansion of their strategic alliance that will see Capgemini take on Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services arm. Per the agreement, Unity’s...
Note that this isn’t really related to gaming: Capgemini, formerly Capgemini Ernst & Young, is a consulting company similar to Accenture. The proserv team they’re acquiring from Unity is focused on business services, not video game development.
Yet somehow less absurd than the Colonel in MGS2 trying to stop Raiden from reaching the final boss by talking to the player and telling them to put down the controller and go outside to enjoy nature. :D
He’s always gonna be weird, but he used to be more fun about it.
I think he’s moved away from absurdism, and more towards surrealism: less existential and more fantastical or dream-like: Amelie and BTs and BBs, versus FOXHOUND or the Sons of Liberty.
I’ve just been through a recent round of layoffs, though I luckily avoided sacking, and let me tell you the collective hurt that layoffs cause, even among those who remain, makes me think that each person leaving should get to punch each deciding executive once.
So, I’m going to get a retroid pocket 4 pro. Its the best option I found. What are some (fdroid) games I can look into? I plan of stuffing it with ROMs too....
You act like 2017 is old, like we’re not all still playing FF Tactics Advance, and Pokemon Fire Red, and Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones and having a blast like it’s 2004.
Sadly, this doesn’t mean anything. Executives can’t and won’t share highly confidential future plan data with non-executive employees who don’t immediately require the knowledge, because if even one of them leaks that info, it can (and in this case, certainly would) tank their stock price.
Stopping production is not a plan that requires years of dev work to do, it’s something that they can announce at any time and put into practice almost immediately, so they can and will claim (even internally) that Xbox is not going away right up to the moment they publicly announce they’re killing it.
I love Phil, but he doesn’t have the influence within MS to single-handedly save Xbox if the larger company leadership decides to kill it.
I love Derail Valley, though I absolutely suck at it. I don’t want to look up spoilers online, but I have been playing for 3 months and I still haven’t found the slug, and I am still mostly hauling stuff around with 3 DE-2s. I’m excited for when they add in NPC trains, though I have no clue how that will work with the current map.
This is exciting! A gaming handheld from a great open source hardware company that makes SBCs like the RP5. It looks to have all the quality features and combines the best of all the handhelds I’ve seen. This has me really excited....
The price ranges can truly vary pretty wildly, but based on the specs listed and the size I’d wager $499 barebones (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) to maybe $650 for the maxed-out version (32GB RAM, 2TB SSD).
Thoughts on Space Games, Part 1: Top-5 AAA Games angielski
Hey everyone, I’m a big player of Space Games of all forms, and this mini-genre (or ‘theme’, if you prefer) really has a TON of range and depth, and is a very fertile ground for indie and unique projects. I was recently playing a game called Avorion, after owning it for years without ever really engaging with it, and...
For The First Time In A Decade, Nobody Is Working On Cyberpunk 2077 (kotaku.com)
I’ve been waiting for new game plus to replay, but it sounds like that just may not be in the works.
Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets | Game World Observer (gameworldobserver.com)
GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement (www.gamesindustry.biz)
If you’re a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
It's Time To Stop Giving Xbox Boss Phil Spencer A Pass (Opinion) (kotaku.com)
What is your favourite game console?
It sounds dumb but my pick would be the SNES. There’s just something about 16 bit games I love....
Maybe hot take: as a handheld, the regular switch is an awful handheld
Have you ever held a switch? Its long, flat and the controllers suck. Awful dpad and bad sticks....
Why are there two different genres both called ARPG?
ARPG aka Action Role Playing Game....
7 Days to Die is finally leaving early access, but console players will have to buy the 1.0 version again (www.eurogamer.net)
kingdom come: deliverance II reveal (yt.drgnz.club)
i avoid hype but as a massive fan of the original kcd and the honesty of this reveal, im hyped! wont be pre-ordering though, never pre-order its bad for the industry and consumers.
Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX
So there’s obviously been a lot of existing discourse on DD2’s micro transactions, and I’m curious to get the thoughts of people here....
deleted_by_author
Apex Legends finals got hacked; Star Citizen goes 1.0; Marcus Lehto: nothing positive about EA. (peervideo.club)
also Youtube
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
New Rimworld DLC: Anomaly (twitter.com)
What are some good PSP games?
I wanna get into non Nintendo stuff. What are some good PSP games in generals....
The game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater (ff8isthe.best) angielski
“It‘s kind of depressing”: WB Discovery pulls indie game for “business changes” (arstechnica.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/168Vn...
Warner Bros. Discusses "Volatile" AAA Console Games, Will Lean Into Free-To-Play And Mobile (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Switch emulator Yuzu shuts down as creator agrees to pay Nintendo $2.4m (www.eurogamer.net)
Citra will also be shutting down :(
[Opinion piece] The games industry deserves a better spokesperson than Geoff Keighley (videogames.si.com) angielski
[Opinion piece] Starfield Killed My Hype For The Elder Scrolls 6 (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Capgemini to acquire Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services arm to accelerate enterprises’ digital transformation through real-time 3D technology (www.businesswire.com)
PARIS & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Capgemini and Unity (NYSE: U), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced an expansion of their strategic alliance that will see Capgemini take on Unity’s Digital Twin Professional Services arm. Per the agreement, Unity’s...
Let's discuss: Metal Gear angielski
As the previous post of this type was quite successful here, I would like to continue....
Embracer CEO says layoffs are "something that everyone needs to get through" (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
lol....
Need advice for android gaming
So, I’m going to get a retroid pocket 4 pro. Its the best option I found. What are some (fdroid) games I can look into? I plan of stuffing it with ROMs too....
Reuters claims Nintendo Switch 2 is expected later this year (www.eurogamer.net)
Phil Spencer has reportedly reassured employees Microsoft ‘won’t stop making Xbox consoles’ (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Come Join the Derail Valley Community! angielski
Any Derail Valley players here?...
New Manjaro Linux Gaming Handheld from OrangePi (neo.manjaro.org) angielski
This is exciting! A gaming handheld from a great open source hardware company that makes SBCs like the RP5. It looks to have all the quality features and combines the best of all the handhelds I’ve seen. This has me really excited....