Yes, it’s a pretty big privacy concern, unfortunately Riot kinda already boiled that frog with Valorant. Not that Valorant was the first, but it was kinda the first one that people seemed to be okay with. Weirdly, Valorant only really got popular because CS:GO and Overwatch were getting stale, and neither Valve or Blizzard were doing much to keep their games fresh.
It’s also arguably a bigger problem for the bad publishers like Activision, who have been trashing their own reputations for so long that even if they buy a huge “World Premiere” ad spot at the Game Awards, once I see it’s an Activision game, my brain just automatically turns off any interest I might have had in a game, because I know that even if the trailer makes it look interesting, it will ultimately probably be a disappointment due to greedy management. There are plenty of good indie games to play, and if and when Activision does publish a good game, I’m much more likely to believe word of mouth of the people I trust, than the recommendations of publishers, who are generally just out to push a $90 deluxe edition preorder of whatever is coming out next week.
If someone told me 4-5 years ago, that the year we got really incredible sequels to both Breath of the Wild, and that cool new Spider-Man game on PS4, my most-enjoyed game would be an indie Lovecraftian light-horror fishing game, I wouldn’t have believed them.
Not a zoomer, but I loved Spider-Man, didn’t play BG3, but I still think BG3 should win. My Spider-Man 2 experience was too buggy for me to consider it for GOTY, the story was great, and if they had delayed the game until next year, I probably would have considered it a contender then.
BG3 was an event though, I’m not really into RPGs but it felt like that game was everywhere like Animal Crossing: New Horizons was in 2020.
You make a very good point about cutscenes. I’d love if there there was a frame gen & upscaler that exclusively worked on pre-rendered cutscenes to fix the issues in older games of cutscenes looking way worse than gameplay. I know for popular titles, there are sometimes mods that replace the cutscenes videos with upscaled versions, not having to fuss around with that could be really neat. But for gameplay, I’d much rather play at even 50fps native with variable refresh, without artifacts or additional latency, than a faked 120fps that still runs at 60hz of latency with added artifacting.
The next mainline Tomb Raider game is also going to be Unreal 5. That is if Embracer hasn’t bankrupted themselves or sold Edios/Crystal Dynamics before then (although I’d be thrilled if that happened).
That makes two delisted Marvel-IP games in my Steam library. I haven’t played Avengers yet, but I have a feeling that this probably isn’t as big of a loss as when Deadpool was delisted.
I recently played through Dredge, and enjoyed it so much I went ahead and spent the time to unlock all the achievements. I saw the news of this delay on Steam, and was really glad that pretty much all the comments there were praising the studio for not pushing something incomplete out just to hit a deadline, and encouraging them to take all the time they need.
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That’s probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they’ve been falling behind for the past few years and can’t afford to keep up. Not that I think it’s good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I’m more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.
Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?