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).
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
I’ve noticed AI tends to give everyone light blue eyes. Back when I used YouTube, I noticed people use AI to generate thumbnails and all people with brown eyes had blue eyes which confused me.
Before and on release date, most sales are to a minority of highly engaged gamers that then create reviews and hype. Ubisoft needs that hype as they know the majority of the profit they will make is from sales after the release when the general public reads those reviews and then decide to spend their dollar on the game because the reviews were good. Also the majority of the general public won’t pirate anyway…
But once it’s out it’s out. I at least understand the logic of DRM from launch because it delays cracks, but once you’ve released without DRM it’s out there lol.
I don’t know how the launch went but these days the release version of games is usually a buggy mess with half the content stripped out of it so they can sell it later as DLC or a season pass
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