“How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?”
The industry should’ve already learned this lesson from the MMO crash, of everyone trying to replicate WoW’s success and then later realizing that a business model of investing a ton of money to try and compete for both consumers’ time and money is a bad idea.
I’d just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000’s thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you’re willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren’t nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn’t take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (www.statista.com/…/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).
In terms of specific games, I don’t have any that aren’t already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.
I feel the same. Something about having agency in the game has never really made them scary for me, but I guess horror movies don’t do it for me either so I guess it’s just not my thing. I loved RE4, though; horror aside it’s such a good game.
I was assuming this was a quote from an interview with a leading question like “what do you think about players who claim to know what went wrong in the development of Starfield?” And the quote was out of context to make him look bad.
But this was a Twitter thread. It’s a completely unforced error, no one was making him do this.
In general, fantasy isn’t my favorite setting, but this looks pretty cool and will definitely be keeping my eye on it. I’m curious if it’ll keep NMS’s general minimalist story structure or do something more akin to GTA with set built story elements/missions, and then a sandbox to explore in between
I think those are all good points, but I think they’re also potentially surmountable ones; I think the key would be to be as restrictive as necessary for which mods are allowed to charge. If only a small fraction of the most clear cut and expansive mods can charge, maybe even hand-picked by the developer, I think that’s still a better state than it was before.
Some potential examples: a mod isn’t allowed to charge if it has any mod dependency. Games supporting paid mods must support opt-out updates (steam already supports this easily via "beta branches) and mods have at least one version available to consumers that are guaranteed to work. Depending on the mod, it could be possible to do some automated regression testing, similar to how the Steam Deck verification works.
That’s an interesting idea to me, particularly regarding preservation of games of bankrupted companies. I’d still be in favor of a central registrar as opposed to NFTs, just because of the huge inefficiencies and environmental impact of that (essentially useless) computation.
There would need to be some governing authority dictating that companies need to honor the download of games not purchased from them (essentially the government of each country that has this as a law). It would make sense to me that that same government could host a service to keep track of the transactions. Or, more likely, the government just mandates the companies to play nice and exchange purchase data with each other. Sure, in some sense you’re letting the wolves run the henhouse, but it also isn’t that different from a game company refusing to give you a game you purchased from them. They could do that, but you would take legal action against them. Same thing here.
I fully acknowledge that it’s a grey area, but I’ve personally always considered resale of digital goods (goods which can be obtained purely digitally, even if sold in a physical medium) to be unethical, although legal. If I’m going to pay money to it, I want the money to go to the person who created it, not to someone else who happened to purchase it or, worse, some company that provides no value other than encouraging those transactions.
To me, resale on physical goods is ethical because there are two core differences with those which could be acquired purely digitally. Physical goods degrade with use, providing reduced value compared to new goods. And it is better for unwanted physical goods to continue to provide value for someone than for it to enter a landfill.