Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
And as far as legally playing their old games in the modern era, your options are to find an old physical copy or subscribe to a subscription service. There is no option to buy games individually. Even back when they did that, your purchases never carried over to their next console. They're awful.
They also straight up refuse to discount anything meaningfully ever. And actively harass anyone streaming gameplay of their games without their permission, and are extremely litigious about emulation that's clearly established as perfectly legal, among a bunch of other shit.
Nintendo accosting influencers who stream games is in this legal grey are. The people Vice gaming spoke about how their legal department cautioned streaming games. They said at the time there is no case law that covers this issue. And it is not known who how the courts would rule.
That's why "to some extent". Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I'm not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.
But you can't deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.
Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.
Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.
Caring about the product is not incompatible with making profit, but it is incompatible with maximizing profit, because then your design priorities must shift to emphasize functionality and entertainment to cutting costs and expanding monetization opportunities.
It's easy to see in gacha games. Even the best of them have to have to obstruct fun to make money, from the way they limit gameplay options so that people will gamble for them to the way that they gate progression behind repetitive daily grind so that people will keep coming back out of habit and FOMO.
Even beyond the monetization itself, great games require a willingness to take time experimenting and polishing, time which would seem like wasted wages to more money oriented companies. Sometimes it pays off, like Larian, but sometimes it doesn't, like the old Clover Studio.
I'm not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I'm sure it's much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped.. but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I'm not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.
Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I'm convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing "yet another one" in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.
Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics... but I don't believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I'd argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy...
It definitely should not. Gamers use it because there are a range of genres of game. JRPG's ala Monster Hunter and Disgaea are pretty much a 300 hour minimum. There is no way GTA ever produces something worth 300 hours of gameplay, the closest they've gotten is their Online versions which frankly, would be horrible if they were priced per hour.
Racing games would have very little merit in price per hour. Sports games probably in between.
Then there's the whole fact that pacing can be implemented at the whims of the creators. It takes 4 hours to get energy so you can continue? Well, that 4 hours of paid playtime baybee, payyup!
How about games with little to no story? Should the new CoD only be $25 because it's campaign sucks? It's short after all. Or will they try and include multiplayer time, you know, something independent and timeless. Will they become arcades and start charging you per round?
Horrible, horrible idea. No matter hour you look at it, hours per game are only good for gamers with specific intentions, be it their limited time, their desire to 100%, or to see if it simply respects their time in the first place.
Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It's very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.
It's yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don't need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.
And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It's very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.
It's layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can't tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.
Joking aside, length of a game is a terrible metric for price. I always consider how much time I spend playing a game compared to the price for the ROI. But a lot of games just add filler content that is copy and paste missions.
Contracting feels like the wrong word. It’s not gaining less money. It’s gaining more. Just companies are now converting their buyouts to simply IP grabs.
Live service games that were fully developed are being cancelled at the finish line because they don't think they'll make that money back. Companies like Bioware have laid off a bunch of developers in advance of marquis releases, but if everything was rosy, they'd definitely want those developers around through launch. Smaller studios have been hit too.
Erroneous bans, they intend to reverse them once AMD implements a fix:
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban. @AMD
There's no such thing as a non-binary person any more than there is such a thing as personal pronouns. The game can't make a character into something that literally doesn't exist.
Well the mod you want will not align genetic gender to they’re perceived gender. Also were playing a game that introduces magic… I’m sure you can suspend your believe for pronounce.
The mod does what it's supposed to by removing the nonsensical concept of personal pronouns that doesn't objectively exist in the real world. A slightly more involved mod would rename body types A and B to male and female and set the appropriate pronouns accordingly. I'll post that, too, when it comes out.
No such thing as objectivity, we live in the abstract and we give meaning. Pronounced are more of a respectful approach, if your friend said “don’t call me “(insert what ever)” I find it is disrespectful”, you’d stop, same for disabilities, where I’m from we had lots of derogatory names for disabled people and most people will not use those names as its disrespectful.
You are witnessing the natural progression of language, kick and scream all you want but well be there with you or without you
Yes they are objective but every year a new dictionary comes out with new words and meanings, this is humanity turning the abstract into meaning. I’d like to see you get by with the vocabulary of a 16th century Brit.
I am. The billions of English speakers in the third world overwhelmingly reject western degeneracy and cultural imperialism. Nobody's buying what you're selling.
I mean, the absurdity of your argument that a sci-fi space rpg can’t meet your standards of “reality” because of a mere ignorable, pre-existing and commonly used pronoun aside, I’m going to have to step in on this particularly low-hanging morsel…
The rules of English grammar are objective.
If English grammatical rules were objective, we’d all still be talking the way people did way before Shakespeare. Actually, Shakespeare’s writings wouldn’t exist today if English grammar wasn’t at all subjective because he flat out made up a ton of words and phrases we still use today. Also, you’ve heard of poetry, right?
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5)
Which grammar rule changed since Shakespeare's time? The reason students can still read and understand Shakespeare's works is that the grammar remains the same. Congratulations, you owned yourself.
Ironically, one of the biggest changes from Shakespeare’s time and now concerned pronouns. We stopped using “thou/thee” as the informal 2nd person and began to only use what had been the formal 2nd person, “you,” and stopped using the verb conjugations for them.
Meanwhile, the 3rd person singular “they” has been in use since Chaucer’s time.
If you don’t understand how “we lost an entire pronoun and the verb inflection that went with it” is in fact grammar, I don’t even know what to tell you.
Just off the top of my head: In some US dialects, rather than a single word changing between negative and positive form (e.g. “I didn’t take any pictures”), instead an entire sentence is shifted into a negative mode (“I didn’t take no pictures”). Traditional grammar rules would dictate that as a double negative, implying the speaker did in fact take pictures, but only an idiot would actually choose interpret it that way.
Next, we have the impact of the internet. “lol” might occasionally be spoken aloud in many circumstances as a substitute for “that’s funny” or something similar. Colloquial written English is all over the place. We now not only use “lol”, but “fwiw,” “afaik,” and many others.
Then there’s emoji. We’re basically using glyphs to express ideas, not unlike how kanji works, and traditional rules of grammar don’t always apply when you’re expressing an idea through pictures, though it’s interesting when it does. Animated GIFs and memes often butcher grammar rules without sacrificing any understanding of intent.
A simple google search turns up many more examples than I could possibly be aware of.
Now it’s your turn. Feel free to explain why you think using “they” as a singular pronoun applies as a grammar rule violation in the 21st century. If you can’t use more than a typical snarky one or two-liner, you should just consider this argument lost and rethink your life.
I appreciate that many older games are still available on Steam either "maintained" as in the article or "remastered". Someday soon I will buy Total Annihilation...again...on Steam this time.
But I do not understand why games are seen as disposable, temporary media. Sure the latest titles are flashy but there are plenty of fucking awesome older games that are still fun to play. And as physical media disappears it becomes much more important for the gaming industry to stop pulling the ladder up behind themselves. History matters. Old <> bad.
There should be an equivalent to the classic rock stations for video games. I greatly appreciate the efforts of the MAME, archive.org and Mr. Lee to keep the classics alive.
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