I think storefronts should take an extra 10% cut of any early access title sold, added to a pool to be later returned to the developer as a payout once the game officially launches. That way they still get some cash inflow while development is still ongoing but there’s financial incentive to actually finish the game eventually.
There should be a law allowing full refunds of a game if its core service is taken offline without implementing a workaround. It should be treated the same way as planned obsolescence.
Companies aren’t motivated to allow self-hosting at launch because there’s no money in it. And they’re not motivated to implement self hosting after they’ve made their money and then take the service down because there’s no money in it.
Implement the workaround, open source the software, or force the publisher to issue a refund to anyone who requests one. That should be the standard.
I don’t think Fable is releasing this year, they’ve still shown barely anything and it was missing entirely from their recent developer direct of high profile 2025 games.
That is…actually far better than I thought it would be. It’s clearly not ready yet, but I could see the potential.
The AI model is too happy to serve the whims of the player, but if there was a better model that could actually be hooked in to me hanics like personality scores or reputation, I could see that as an interesting gameplay system. It also needs more checks on what they are and aren’t supposed to know (e.g. why would a Skyrim NPC associate the name Batman with heroism, or why would they know who Gandalf is?).
A (digital) setup like Westworld is probably in the cards someday. Hopefully with more checks in place to keep the AI from rising up though!
Live service games that become successful can make billions of dollars, so everyone is trying to be the next big one. Having a ton of concurrent live service projects is the “throw shit at a wall and see what sticks” strategy. They expect most to fail but hope that the 1 that succeeds makes up for it and then some.
Sadly I think this is the new normal. You could buy a decent GPU, or you could buy an entire game console. Unless you have some other reason to need a strong PC, it just doesn’t seem worth the investment.
At least Intel are trying to keep their prices low. Until they either catch on, in which case they’ll raise prices to match, or they fade out and leave everyone with unsupported hardware.
Looking at that one, they have it labeled as “showcase” so they’ll probably do a limited collection of content in the game to demonstrate particular tricks and strategies but not the whole thing.