When the C-suite says “innovation” they tend to mean either “things other companies did that this company hasn’t done yet” or “obvious stuff that we should have done already but didn’t”.
I have lost all interest in playing any future Bethesda games because of their engine. It was pretty crap (but acceptable) back in 2011. Now it feels like a scam to pay for their games. Like one of those “GameStation 5” you can buy on Wish.
Sony literally pulled the game from the PlayStation Store because of the low quality. At that point it’s not just a subjective opinion but fact, so I resent the claim that I’m bending the truth.
Yes, the issue was with last gen consoles. I don’t think that matters to the point I am making, nor that it worked for you personally on your setup. It worked okay for me too, but I was on a high-end PC.
I think renting should be renting, and purchasing should be purchasing. I’m okay with renting and what that entails (e.g. they might remove the service in the future and I won’t ever own the game). I’m also fine with buying games, and for some games that have a lot of sentimental value or replayability I do want to own them.
What I’m not okay with is the current state of affairs, where they make it seem as if you buy the game and you pay full price, but legally it’s only “licensed” to you and the license can be revoked at any time. It’s all the disadvantages you describe with renting, but with the price of buying. So that’s what I had in mind with my comment: I’d be content instead of angry if they offered a rental service with honest terms of service and a fair price, instead of the bullshit they’re pulling right now.
If there was a proper rental service I would likely rent a lot of games that I wanted to try out. Then I would go to GOG to buy DRM-free versions of the games I want to keep for a long time. Games like Civ5, RimWorld and Cyberpunk 2077. I think I wouldn’t need to rent a game for three years to figure out that I want to buy it, more like a month.
The problem is that they advertise it a certain way and sell preorders, and then the game doesn’t live up to what they advertised. Worse, they didn’t allow anyone to review the console versions which were so unplayable that Sony removed it from the store. It would have been fine if people knew exactly what they were paying for, but they were misled.
Sure, it was unmet expectations but even if the expectation was just 'it works", they still didn’t meet it. And that’s kind of the bare minimum to even be legal when you’re charging money for it. I disagree that the console versions were 7/10 on release - more like 1/10.
For most games, I’m fine with renting my games. If they charge a reasonable continuous rental fee and not a crazy one-off price that will make the game available for some unspecified amount of time at the publisher’s discretion. For example, I could imagine paying $2 / month to play Assassin’s Creed. And if it turns out to be boring I can just stop renting it.
What the hell. Just a couple of months ago Valve was saying a new Steam Deck was unlikely for the foreseeable future, and I bought one based on that information.
The thing that kept turning me off with Cities Skylines was that the range of city services was too small and citizens weren’t using public transportation enough. It felt unrealistic and dumb compared to real life where I live. To get police station, fire station, schools, parks etc all in range of your residents you have to build so much that there’s no room left for the residents. It seems an impossible equation to solve.
For example in real life, my kids take the bus to the other side of town (6 km away) to go to school; in Cities Skylines they need the school to be at most something like two blocks away. I used to walk 3 km to school when I was a kid. And in real life not everybody needs to go by car or even own one. They can walk on the side of the road. But if you are in a car and an ambulance comes up, you move to the side let it through. In Skylines it can take months (!) for an ambulance to reach its destination, because of traffic.
In short, I can’t apply real-world solutions to problems in the game and that makes it not fun for me. Does the sequel have improvements in this regard?
My only argument against your opinion, is that he actually has a trackable history of poor performance as a CEO and a trackable record of very bad monetization schemes.
…which could be because he has offered this service to many boards in the past.
Yes, but then that’s my choice to reduce my working hours, not something my union should force on me. It’s patronizing. All ~100 employees disagreed with the union on this. IMO that’s a sign that they are overreaching and forget who they are working for. They need to realize when they are done and just sit back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished, instead of mindlessly optimizing for the wrong target. At any rate, if this is the kind of stuff they pull I won’t want to support them, because to my mind they are making things worse, not better.