I think different people have different reasons for disliking it.
For me it’s the writing. Specifically: the first half does it very best to make you hate a specific character, then the the second half has you play that character. I get what the writers were trying to do. The problem I have with it that is doesn’t make for a fun game. I don’t want to play a character I hate.
The writers were so intent on making a specific point that they forgot that they were making a video game. A video game is different from e.g. a movie in that the player is a part of the story, they take on the role of the character they are playing.
For this to work there has to be some part of the character the player can identify with. When playing Ellie, the player can identify with the rage she’s feeling. For Abby, there’s nothing to identify with. She’s mad that Joel killed her father but Joel was entirely justified in killing him. Her father was a bad person and deserved to die.
It makes it very hard for me to put myself in her shoes. As a result I just didn’t enjoy playing as her and quit the game after realizing that it wasn’t just a short section but the entire second half of the game.
Let me guess, you haven’t written a single line of production code in your life?
Writing code is hard, writing bug-free code is neigh impossible. To give some perspective: the seL4 kernel is a formally proven microkernel, meaning they can actually prove is conforms to it’s specification. It took 3 years to write and prove this. It comprises 8,700 lines of C code and 600 lines of assembler. 9,300 lines or code in 3 years.
It is only feasible to do this for small bits of very critical code, like a microkernel. Even NASA doesn’t write code in this way.
If you wanted to do this, a game like Super Mario Bros. would probably not even be for sale, as they would still be working on it. It would probably sell for a couple of million dollars per copy.
Commercial software has in average 1 to 5 bugs per 1000 lines of code. Very critical and well tested software (think the software controlling aircraft) has maybe as little as 1 bug per 10,000 lines (and this will cost an absolute fortune to write and test).
Games have millions of lines of code and are certainly not critical. The idea that games can be bug-free is beyond absurd. Even a low number of bugs is a ridiculous ask. Or are you saying you’re willing to pay $10,000+ for a game?
But that’s gone again now, and we are just left with the overly technical people who are going to circlejerk about the same things over and over.
I’m one of those ‘overly technical’ people and have zero interest in PC gaming. I prefer my PS5. I don’t want to mess around with computers too much in my spare time when I already do that for 40+ hours a week at work.
There was no rule, but it was basically the only convenient way. Receiving e-mail on a phone was not at all common, typing a long URL on phone was a PITA and paying for stuff online was not something a lot of people were familiar with.
WIndows CE phones and the like were so niche there was no point in even developing apps specifically for them.
Also note that the above would usually only work in one country, if you wanted to sell internationally you’d have to make arrangements for a shortcode and RB-SMS for each country you wanted to sell in. Never mind the advertising campaigns. Apple taking care of that, with basically global reach and different kinds of payment methods without you having to worry about any of it was quite revolutionary.
I’ve been developing mobile apps since before the iPhone was a thing. I remember when the App Store was announced, including the 30% cut for Apple. There was a lot of excitement around the fact that developers could keep 70%.
Before app stores, this is how you distributed and charged for a mobile app: customers would send a text message with a keyword to a so called shortcode, depending on country this was a 4 or 5 digit phone number. For example, you would send ‘NAMEOFGAME’ to 12345. The user would then get a text message back with a link to download the game. The message they got back was a so called reverse-billing SMS (also known as premium SMS). This message would be billed to the customer, at a certain rate that you as the sender of the SMS could configure. This basically meant customers paid for games through their phone bill.
How this worked from the developer’s side:
You generally didn’t own the short code, it was shared with many users, you had to pay a monthly fee for the use of that keyword. Companies who owned a ‘nice’ shortcode (like e.g. 12345) would charge more for it than those who owned a more difficult to remember one. This would cost you at least €100 a month per keyword (the same as you pay for an app store account per year, for an unlimited number of apps)
For this amount all the operator did was forward the message to you, you had to have your own server to process the messages. Your server then had to call an API at the telco to send an premium SMS back with the link. (a so called WAP push message). The telco would usually keep 50% of the total cost to the customer. Send a €3.00 SMS , you get €1.50, the telco gets €1.50. For sending 140 bytes to a phone.
The link you sent pointed to your own server, where you had to host the files for the game for the user to download.
Note that there was no store, no way for users to discover your game, so you had to advertise it as well. The telco’s took 50% for billing the customer, while you had to everything else. Of course the development tools for mobile apps were absolute shit as well.
So when Apple announced that they would let you keep 70%, would take care of hosting, payments, would provide a nice user friendly app store where people could actually find your app and provide decent development tools for you to build apps in, that was a fucking huge win.
I don’t think games like Ori, Hades, Hi-Fi rush, Call of the sea, Persona 5, etc are trash
I’m not saying they are trash, they are either really old or just decent games. I would say it’s mostly games I would rate a 7 or 8 out of 10. But with limited time available for gaming, there are enough games that I would rate a 9 or 10 to fill the available time. So why would I not just exclusively play only very top tier games?
GamePass is nice if you’re 16, can’t afford to buy full price games and have lots of free time. You get a lot of play time out of a limited budget with decent enough games.
But when you’re 40+ with a full time job, you make a different trade-off. You have much less free time but a higher income. You then tend to go for quality over quantity. Make every hour you can spend gaming count.
I will simply never have the time to play again to 90% of my games. It’s just impossible (even if I stopped playing new games today, I am not sure I will be able to do so before I die). Since it’s way cheaper to play this way, I don’t see the point of buying new games anymore
My reason is kind of the opposite: I have very little time to play games, so I choose quality over quantity. What I see on GamePass is an endless supply of mediocrity. I’d rather buy a few really good games at full price than spend the little time I have playing whatever Microsoft padded their catalog with.