This just in: Shitty and unethical company known for shitty, unethical practices and absolutely bonkers PR statements like “AAAA games” unsurprisingly continues to be shitty and unethical company. There’s not more at 11 because that’s all there is to it.
Steam suspicously absent from this conversation, but I’m willing to be patient and see.
It’s a positive attitude for Spencer to take, but would have to see it in practice to be able to make judgment on if he really stands behind those words or if he is simply making a strategic business decision whose real motives are simply masked by these words.
The latter is par for the course for corporations, so we don’t have a lot to lean on in favor of him truly holding these values, sadly. One can hope, however, that miracles can and do happen.
Excellent breakdown. This almost definitely only applies to the Deluxe Edition that is a physical copy.
Steam explicitly doesn’t let you give your account away or sell it, likely because they service so many different companies, that it would be impossible to handle the licensing changeover for all your games. It’s still frustrating, but it also makes a little sense, considering each game is often owned by a series of different companies.
Now Nintendo is going to start going after the smaller guys, who definitely can’t afford to fight.
The plus side is Ryujinx is Free Open Source Software so a million forks can begun being made right now. Yuzu had closed source aspects, which was its downfall in replication from this point forward. Ryujinx will likely have thousands of clone repositories made after today alone.
I’m interested in them mostly because my NES, SNES, Genesis and OG GameBoy all still work, and it would be nice to be able to still use my cartridges once they finally bite the dust. I got real lucky with the NES getting refurbished by Nintendo of America in the early 2000’s before they released the Wii and were still servicing all their old consoles.
So yeah, I’m curious about how functional they are, for sure.
These kind of protests are almost exclusively what the Yes Men do! They got their start when they were making a parody website of the WTO (Then GATT) and suddenly had a bunch of serious industry people mistaking their parody site for the real one and sending them emails inviting them to conferences. Thus Andy Bichlbaum and the Yes Men were born! They always go way beyond absurd to try to capture people’s attention, but most often with groups of “experts” everyone takes them all to seriously.
The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games.
Quality reference. Also, in reverse, companies such as Larian prove that trust works.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the buggiest messes I’ve ever played. In that, it gives me warm fuzzy memories of the originals, which were similarly buggy monstrosities.
Despite the bugginess, the deep involvement of Larian with the community at every step of the games development and release proves that trust can get you nothing but accolades, even when your game is a buggy mess for six months post-release.
I’m okay with the post-release bugginess because I can trust that Larian actually cares about resolving those things.
The rising costs of developing blockbuster games has also raised the stakes. “When you’re talking about a budget that’s $100mn plus, even for a big company, if you miss with two or three of those then commercially you’re on the ropes,” Harding-Rolls said.
Oh boo hoo, is the only type of game you can think of to release is a"blockbuster" type game?
Because last I checked, small titles regularly do quite well, like Hi-Fi Rush did so well compared to the fucking bomb that is Starfield. Same company, small game vs. big game. Small game did well, big game tanked.
I have yet to see anyone ask “But is it actually fun?” about, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.
Maybe part of the reason why is because games like Hogwarts Legacy don’t respect player agency and spend their time forcing you to play the game the way the developers wanted, while Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to experiment and try to break guardrails.
Hogwarts Legacy literally won’t let you jump over a fence that your legs are visibly taller than. I only finished that game because I wanted to be able to write correctly about how deeply that game disrespects player choice and is all-in on “you play our game the way we intended, or you don’t play.”