Szukaj

tankplanker, rok temu do games w Leaked email reveals Phil Spencer's damning verdict on AAA games: 'Most publishers are riding the success of franchises created 10+ years ago'

Because the first job of anybody who is responsible for green lighting game development at these huge publishers is to not get fired. Making a game that only just breaks even or even worse makes a loss puts you at risk of getting fired. Even a relatively small game from a large publisher costs a ton to develop and market and has increased risk that nobody will actually buy and play it, at least in the most profitable first few months.

Franchises are so popular with this crowd is because they do not have to worry about name recognition. Hardest thing about getting a brand new title out is just getting people to know it exists and then to be excited about it. Franchises you hardly have to to do any work for that, you know you are going to get press and gamer interest, they sell themselves right up until they release and people get the chance to see if its a house of cards or not.

Its that front loading of sales that they are after, the shops having to buy in stock, idiots who pre order or buy before its clear if the game is broken in someway. Its the most profitable time as the game is at its most expensive, and it enables rapid repayment of the development costs. Games that start slow and have a very long tail of sales do not interest them anywhere near as much as they have already moved onto the next project and already been judged on the initial (under) performance of the game.

mammut, rok temu (edited rok temu) do games w Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.

Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.

I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.

Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).

So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.

OrnluWolfjarl, rok temu do gaming w Leaked Xbox Boss Email Perfectly Explains Why Game Publishers Are Eating Themselves Alive

The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.

And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).

For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).

JackbyDev, rok temu do games w Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.

Itsamelemmy, rok temu do games w Star Wars Fans Launch Class Action Lawsuit Over Cancelled KOTOR 2 DLC

I was actually wondering if anything like this had happened before when I bought starfield. Starfield and a lot of games will have a deluxe version that you can buy that includes the dlc when it comes out, for cheaper than buying the base game and dlc separately. I was curious if any game that pre sold dlc like that failed to release the expansions and if so, what the outcome was.

whofearsthenight, rok temu do games w I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal

They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.

That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.

So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.

dingus, rok temu do gaming w Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Review Thread

I think it would be interesting to compare these reviews to the same publications reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 in it’s pre-release review period.

pjhenry1216, rok temu do games w Microsoft completely misjudged Baldur’s Gate 3

Sony and Microsoft used to pay for exclusives without buying the studios. So there's no real meat to the argument that "oh, the games were always exclusive because first party" or whatever. The consoles didn't really buy that many game studios until relatively recently in gaming history. They would pay a studio to not release on other platforms. This whole buying studios thing was just cheaper in the long run. So there's no real argument to be made about Sony just making better first party games. That's what they do now given that they own the studios. Both companies are guilty of buying out studios.

Exclusives pre-dating the PS1 was more out of lack of technology. No cross platform tech really existed. There wasn't a lot of crossover. Many platforms didn't last more than a generation or two. There wasn't even much cross over in the kind of games. If you liked fighting games, you bought a Sega over Nintendo for example. With the PlayStation, they competed against Sega first, Nintendo as more an afterthought. Xbox came in later to compete against PlayStation 2. The Nintendo 64 was just a different class, and even later, the GameCube. With Xbox and PlayStation, they had similar amounts of power and restraints (an N64 cartridge could not compete from a technical perspective against the storage of discs, plus multi-disc games could exist, not really feasible with cartridges) plus abstraction technology was more advanced and one could more easily write cross platform code. Now, you either had to pay for an exclusive or simply hope they only had the intent to target one platform (whether through preference or resource limitations). So the console wars really started to heat up after the death of Dreamcast and mainly between Sony and MS. Exclusivity wasn't via first party existed, but not to s great extent beyond their flagship games.

So, tldr, exclusivity has always been acquired via money and buying them. It's easy to say it's about developing better first party once those studios were bought outright to begin with. That's how most first party titles exist now.

d3Xt3r, rok temu (edited rok temu) do gaming w I am so pumped for Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk 2077 v2.0!

I’m one of the foolish ones that actually pre-ordered the game. Was super hyped for it too, did a countdown till midnight so that I can start playing at launch, and I even live streamed it (and also had a few other streams going on two laptops). Took the day off to play the game as well.

The clock hit 00:00 and less than 30 minutes into the game, I ran into my first bug. I stuck was in a dialog loop and couldn’t get out no matter what I tried, so was for forced to load an earlier save. Then I got stuck somewhere else, or something funky would happen. I’d never been so utterly disappointed in a game until Cyberpunk came along. So anyways, I was so put off by it that I’d decided not to play it any further, until they patched it all up. So the first patch came along, but this time I decided to read the reviews first - still plenty of bugs. Thought I’d wait for the next one, noope, still buggy. And the next one. And the next. And then I decided to ignore the game completely, until not only they fixed the bugs, but also added QoL stuff into the game. Like better AI, better peds, better driving etc. Make the city more immersive. I mean, I had waited for so long, so might as well wait and play until it’s at it’s best version.

So, not only will I not play now, nor when 2.0 comes out, I’ll play it only when Phantom Liberty is out, and will enjoy the game, for the first-ish time, the way it was meant to be played.

Assuming of course that Phantom Liberty isn’t a dud, but having learnt from my previous experience, I might wait a bit after it comes out and see if they release a post-launch patch or something first.

Never again pre-ordering a game… unless it’s a Zelda.

Corkyskog, rok temu (edited rok temu) do games w Former BioWare manager wishes Dragon Age had kept a 'PC-centric' and 'modding-driven' identity like Neverwinter Nights

Why did the genre go on life support? I have been missing a couch co-op game since the days of PS2, my wife and I used to love playing together. Speaking of old RPGs, anyone know if there are any plans to reboot Champions of Norath? That used to be our favorite game.

I also get confused by all these RPG prefixes, probably too old. In my day I would walk into the gamestop or Babbages and just say “got any new good RPG games” then they would point me to one of the Final Fantasy games, and then I would say “actually I mean, do you have any new hack and slash RPG games?” Then they would say “no, but you can pre-order Call of Duty” and then I would rifle through the bargain bin, and then leave. Good times.

Which means I have essentially been asking for Baldurs Gate 3 for 18 years now (Champions 2 was released in 2005, a year after BG2).

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy, rok temu (edited rok temu) do gaming w Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – Official Cinematic Trailer

for anyone wondering the pre-ordering “bonus” is early access to a car

so might as well wait for it to be released

also, it’s £24.99 on steam atm

Tearcell, rok temu do gaming w Phil Spencer: "getting [acquiring] Nintendo would be a career moment for me"; Nintendo's future "exists off of their own hardware"

@ampersandrew @UrLogicFails worst thing I could think of would be yearly bland releases barely worth playing and gutting the innovation they bring.

It's not like every release is brilliant or great (looking at you pokemon violet/scarlet), but look at what happened to Blizzard pre and post acquisition.

Yewb, rok temu do games w Payday 3 developer drops Denuvo from the game before it's even out

Dude that pre release beta was terrible almost everything was inferior to payday2 there is zero chance if me buying this game.

all-knight-party, rok temu do games w Starfield review - a game about exploration, without exploration

The issue would be believing anything not explicitly said or shown in a pre release showcase. You don't expect anything not extremely, extremely obvious or you just let yourself down and then blame the studio for underdelivering.

A bunch of that is of course the fault of marketing itself, but this goes for almost anything marketed ever, beyond video games.

Cypher, rok temu do games w Todd Howard asked on-air why Bethesda didn't optimise Starfield for PC: 'We did [...] you may need to upgrade your PC'

They tried that once with Oblivion

They advertised that with Oblivion’s AI but never delivered on half the claims.

Go look at the pre-release claims of the Radiant AI and what was actually delivered.

CosmoNova, rok temu do games w Baldur's Gate 3's success is not about setting a new "standard"

Some of the things you just mentioned are actually things Baldur‘s Gate 3 did, though. Namely Twitch drops, pre-order bonuses and (arguably) unreasonably priced purchased options with their day 1 DLC. The latter is especially baffling since Larian Studios makes a big deal of not paywalling extra content while doing exactly that from the start. It‘s also guilty of having quite a lengthy early access phase prior it‘s release.

The success does not come from lack of bullshit, but from delivering a good, polished product regardless.

Waker, rok temu do games w Diablo 4 GM confirms “annual expansions” for the game

You’re right. I didn’t even buy it pre order because I hate doing that and never will. So, after the game was launched, I watched some streams, the game seemed fun and no really big complaints anywhere. A couple of friends also bought the game, and told me it was fun.

And, to be honest, they weren’t wrong. The game WAS fun… Until you end the story and it’s just boring.

I played on both betas too and did enjoy the gameplay and such. Couldn’t wait for more of the story…

So that’s how I ended up buying it 1week or so after release.