While I also dislike Epic, I feel that their going under would be a bad thing for the industry as a whole. There are only a few game distribution platforms of this size; Steam, Epic, Prime, GOG, and EA/Origin (not including Consoles). So there will be less competition and less innovation. They give out a ton of free games, and people may lose access to those licenses. They also employ(ed) a large number of people who are going to be jobless. I’d prefer they get their act together and be held accountable.
Epic has never been about innovation in the retail space. Sweeney talks a good game but it’s always been consistently out of his ass. He launched the Epic game store framing it as some sort of crusade on behalf of consumers, “Apple bad”, “Steam bad” but the reality is he just didn’t want to split money with others in the stack. I don’t blame him for that but his marketing was disingenuous and it’s quite obvious, now, that his business plan was inherently flawed.
His performative crusade against Apple has now led to 20% of the company looking for new jobs. We all stood by cheering, selling our souls for a bucket load of cheap games that, for the most part, we wouldn’t actually have paid for and will never get around to playing.
I don’t really care about EGS, I’m more concerned about Unreal Engine. If they keep dumping money into EGS exclusives and whatnot, it could impact UE investment, which would be bad for the industry.
I’m not following closely and haven’t gamed on PC in a while but:
Denovo is a technology that is supposed to prevent copying games (DRM). Not sure what it’s current state is or might be mixing it up with other DRM, but DRM is known for causing headaches for paying customers. Using excessive system resources, refusal to launch for legitimate paying customers, spyware/excessive data collected and sent to a corporation, etc. In some games, volunteers will patch bugs out of a game, and this will cause the game to think it’s cracked and refuse to launch.
Some DRM is “phone home” and can’t be played offline, so people in remote areas can’t play. And sometimes the company doesn’t want to keep servers online when the game has been out for 10 years, so people that purchased the game can no longer play.
In this case, the company let reviewers rate the game and got the initial scores and sales, then pushed the unpopular DRM update. It’s scummy. If you’re using it, then use it. Don’t bait and switch.
Finally finished up the first playthrough of Baldurs Gate with my buddy. Amazing game. Working my way through finalizing all the things in Starfield right now. Despite the many, MANY, flaws that game is just clicking with me right now. Will probably be returning to Factorio and Cyberpunk to play the DLC here shortly.
I mean the industry is already a cesspool. The consolidation is troubling from a failure of regulators. The games Industry deserves what it gets here though.
Microsoft still support AoE2 after all these years, while Activision more or less fucked the SC2 proscene so hard it’s amazing it’s still going as strong as it is.
Not to mention what they did to the classic WotLK launch. It couldn’t get any worse than that.
The servers were essentially 95-99% of either faction, and they locked migration several times seemingly on random. A lot of people got stuck on servers that were nigh unplayable because of the other faction dominating everything.
It even included paid server transfers on some servers for some weird reason. I got hardlocked on 98% alliance server while playing a tauren resto druid. Their customer service told me to “level another character on a server of my choosing”. Leveled to 80 out of sheer spite and then quit when my game time ran out.
Truly one of the biggest disappointments in my entire life. I know it’s just a game, but I had looked forward to getting to redo wrath since they first announced classic in general, and they completely ruined it.
Damn! That sounds horrible, I remember when WoW’s customer service was seemingly top notch, how far they have fallen. I guess it’s not surprising with how disappointing Diablo 4 was.
Slither.io is definitely my most played browsergame. It gets way more fun with a mod that lets you zoom out a little, as the bigger you get the worse the experience normally gets…
This article is absurd. Corridor made a tech demo to show what's possible with AI. They weren't suggesting that it should or shouldn't be how things are done in the gaming industry, just how it could be done. What sort of smoothbrain neanderthals take issue with a tech demo?
Do most of these kids parents not go to the gas station 1-2 times a week? Last I checked the pumps are always still loaded with people. I highly doubt a fucking shell sweepstakes in Fortnite is causing harm.
Then describe the innocent reason for adding a gas company in a video game? Like it doesn’t fit in universe at all, but arguably does have an indoctrining effect
So they’d tell their parents to fill up at Shell instead of Chevron or whatever. It’s not like kids are going to want more fossil fuels, they’ll just want to shop at the cool brand instead of the less cool brand.
Yeah, I’m a parent and I take my kids with me to the gas pump quite often. We shop at Costco and fill up before or after. I honestly don’t see an issue at all, my kids know gas pollutes (I tell them frequently even though they’re in elementary school), and they know why I continue to buy gas (EVs are too expensive, inconvenient for longer trips, and have a fire hazard).
So no, I don’t have a problem with fossil fuels being a thing in games. I do have a problem with advertisements in games generally, and ads marketed to kids specifically. So if this was an ad for a socially acceptable business (take your pick), I’d still be opposed. Keep that nonsense away from my kids.
Feels like Epic should shoulder some of the blame here as well, considering they allowed the fossil fuel company in the game at all. Fuck both of these companies.
Imo microsoft is trying to pump gamepass sub numbers and supposedly its not enough (despite the size). I think they will consider merging the World of Warcraft sub to gamepass to boost sub count for the investors.
I work on a product that strives for Section 508 compliance, despite the fact that any improvement we make will only be used by fewer than 1% of our userbase.
Yes, we can and do exactly fault developers for ignoring users with disabilities.
Catering, and ignoring. are two completely different words with two completely different meanings. Did you read the article?
Everything they touch on is so incredibly vague that there is no way to make out what the problem actually is.
“fast-paced gameplay (34 per cent)”
34% complained about the gameplay being too fast-paced. What where they playing? No one knows. Could be sitting playing Call of Duty and raging about being 360 no scoped for all we know.
The article is vague on everything. And that’s always on purpose. They’re vague on purpose to maximize outrage. Oh this sounds horrible, look at this, the devs are not catering to disabled players. Should we mention that the kid with 1 hand is upset he can’t play CS:GO competitively? Nah, just call it “lack of customisable control options”
I’m sorry, but 99.99% is a laughable hyperbole. A huuuuge number of people have disabilities and disabilities are extremely diverse. A simple example is colour blindness. Google says 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colour blind. Video games frequently do use colour in a way that makes colour blindness a problem and colour blind modes are an accessibility option.
Google also says 15% of the world has some degree of hearing impairment. That’s admittedly biased towards seniors, but I can find numbers that say 9% of 20-39 year old Canadians have detectable hearing losses. Captions are an accessibility option.
And those are just two examples. There’s tons of disabilities out there. Even when an individual disability might only be 0.1% of the population, add them all together and there’s a substantial number of people who are left out by lack of one accessibility option or another. Aside from obvious disabilities, there’s also just general worsening of reaction times as people age.
Just because someone has a disability, doesn’t mean it’s game-breaking. Yes, 8% of men are red/green colour-blind. But that doesn’t mean 100% of those can’t tell the colours apart. You can be more or less colour-blind. Or so my friend says, because he is colour-blind, but have never experienced that to be an issue in games. Red for him doesn’t look like red does to me. But he still knows what red is. And believe it or not. Most developers don’t exactly use a colour-blind test palette for their gameplay or menus.
Subtitles have been around since at least the playstation2 era. I feel like you would almost struggle to find a modern game that doesn’t have subtitles these days.
You may think my hyperbole is laughable but your response does nothing but follow suit. If you suffer from bad hearing, I’m sorry to say that you might not be able to fully experience a game with speakers. Might want to get a pair of headphones, so that you can 1. Amplify the volume if needed. and 2. raise or lower frequencies you can’t hear, into a range that you can hear. It’s going to sound a little distorted perhaps but at least you will be able to hear it. I’m sure developers do their best to create captions that are important. But I don’t think you understand just what a monumental task it would be to create an automated system for full CC captions of the ambience in a game.
And I’m sorry, did you just list lack of reflexes and reaction time as a disability to gaming? If you don’t have any arms, basketball might just not be for you. If you suffer from bad reaction time. Maybe pick a game that doesn’t rely on reaction time. That’s not on the devs. That’s on you.
While I argue your response is an equity Vs equality issue and your basketball argument kind of conflicts your previous statement, there is the the huge difference of individual cost per game to cater to a/all disability. As you mention automation of these systems aren’t really feasible and although guidelines can be put in place. They are still a significant investment of time and money. You can implement them into an engine but you still need the game to integrate it and although some things might be easy across multiple games (colour blind overlays) some won’t (mechanic driven considerations).
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