I have been watching the Prince of Persia game, but I would absolutely have glazed right over its release while entranced by Hades II, so yes, I agree with you, it’s a very smart decision on their part.
(Also, can I just say, holy shit is Hades II some good value. It’s basically two games worth of content in one. More than twice the size of Hades I. Utter insanity.)
You encounter the merchant where you can buy the MTX stuff in the first few hours of the game. You can’t even use the majority of them before reaching that point.
I would honestly bet money that they’d designed the game to not have microtransactions, then some executive at the 11th hour told them to find a way to include them, and they made them inconsequential as a sort of malicious compliance. Not that I think it’s OK to have them in the first place, it really soured me on the game initially. I think it’s considerably worse for including them, but they are completely meaningless.
It’d honestly be hilarious if all the creators just started rebranding their fan projects with Palworld Pals (or any other similar IP). Start shifting the discourse away from Pokemon. I’d love that.
To add to that, the DLC thing really pisses me off particularly because I bought the game last night, and there was no DLC. The DLC didn’t show up until a few hours later, and by that point it was too late to refund it. Kind of felt like a bait and switch, because normally I wouldn’t buy a game at launch if they did that shit.
For better or for worse capcom is doing this shit in nearly every one of their games so i kinda expected this shit And if we stop shitting on them for doing it, we let it become normalized.
Denuvo is a cancer This pretty much sums up the topic.
Optimisation. It is poor apparently. Nothing new really as far as pc games go. It’s actually a lot worse than that. It’s been a while since I played something that had this level of problems. The fact that it’s CPU-based performance is actually the bigger issue because it doesn’t matter how beefy your graphics card is, you’re still dropping a ton of frames in that city specifically. I can run the game at 144 FPS until I go to that city, then it drops to 40, which is just outrageous. Gaming PC build logic has for a long time been to prioritize a great graphics card over a great processor (assuming you’re building with a budget and not a ‘money is no object’ type build), because that’s what matters for games, but suddenly with this one specific game, the processor is the bottleneck.
This isn’t Steam specific; this applies to almost every digital marketplace. Yeah, it sucks, but there’s some things you just have to accept. When’s the last time you bought a physical copy of a PC game?
Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members’ libraries, even if they are online playing another game. If your family library has multiple copies of a game, multiple members of the family can play that game at the same time.
Well this is exceptionally exciting. This potentially solves 100% of my complaints with Family Sharing as it exists currently.
I strongly suspect that we just prefer different sorts of games. I wouldn’t expect 1 hour per $1 from a modern AAA FPS, but I also wouldn’t buy them anyway for the most part, so that doesn’t really affect my purchasing habits at all (nor would I factor into their cost analysis as a result). All of the FPS games I’ve bought lately have been $10-$15 “boomer shooters”.
Halo is a great example, actually, because even though Halo 1 is a relatively short game (I guess normal by FPS standards but in general it does not take long to beat, even on a first playthrough), I got way more than 60 hours of playtime out of it. Easily hundreds. A game doesn’t have to have a long storyline or whatever to offer a lot of play time. Sometimes having replayability, post-game achievements that are fun to work towards, or compelling multiplayer, for example, is all it takes.
Part of it, I think, comes down to the sort of games I typically play… if I’m buying a AAA action game, it’s something something like Sekiro, and I’ll absolutely expect to get my hours : dollars value out of it. (Incidentally, I played Sekiro for 62 hours after buying it for ~$48, so that one worked out fine.)
And to be clear, I’m not here for useless padding, either. If I lose interest before reaching the end of a game, it doesn’t matter if there was 60 hours of content there - I’ll judge it against however much time I spent before getting bored and uninstalling it. I’m also not against short games… I often prefer short games, but I also won’t pay $60 for them; I’ll check the estimated playtime and wait for an appropriate sale. I’m absolutely not advocating for every game to be 60 hours long.
There’ve definitely been games that I didn’t get my 1 hour / $1 from, and were still happy to have played… Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons comes to mind. I paid $15 IIRC and it’s over in 3 hours, but that stuck with me for a really long time. That’s my equivalent to going to see a movie (which I also do incredibly infrequently); it’s a “waste” from a purely monetary perspective but sometimes that’s okay, and I’m willing to splurge. I’ve seen 5 movies in a theater in >10 years, for the record. I would not consider it a good use of money, generally speaking.)
Hours per dollar isn’t a great metric for all sorts of reasons
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because I’ve been using that metric for many years to gauge how much I’ll spend on a game. If I’m only going to spend 20 hours on it, I’ll spend $20 or less. Part of that comes from the sort of games I play, but if I spent $60 on a game and finished it in 20 hours (‘Finished’ as in done playing the game, including whatever post-story content or multiplayer is engaging), I’d feel pretty bad about that purchase.