Stovetop

@Stovetop@lemmy.world

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

Stovetop,

I haven’t had a look at the original text from China, but wondering how much they accounted for. Any of these rules could be easily circumvented if they didn’t account for multiple scenarios.

Rewards for spending money within a game for the first time

“We don’t have a reward for spending money for the first time, but everyone does have a digital coupon for $5 off of their first $10 purchase when they make an account.”

Rewards for buying consecutive microtransactions

“The players don’t get any extras when they buy more of our digital currency, but every gacha pull does make the next 5 pulls a bit cheaper.”

Rewards for daily log-ins.

“No, we’re not giving rewards for daily log-ins, but players can buy this bonus that adds a gift-giving NPC to the main town for 30 days, who will trade a small parcel of premium currency for a single gold coin once per day.”

Stovetop,

I guess this list must exclude early access because I don’t see The Day Before listed.

Stovetop,

I can’t say Yoko Taro’s work has always landed for me, but I can appreciate the fact that he doesn’t ever half-ass his vision. You can’t really find many other games like Nier and Drakengard out there, so he’s got me interested in whatever he does next.

Steam year in review 2023 is up, if you want to get disappointed in how much you bought and how little of it you played. 😛 (store.steampowered.com) angielski

Personally, apparently 71% of my gaming time was spent on FFXIV. Although in my defense, most games I’ve played this year were on GOG or old free stuff from Epic I finally got around to.

Stovetop,

A lot of people stick with ongoing/live service games as their main mode of play. FFXIV is the majority of my playtime, with Baldur’s Gate 3 really being the only “this year” game I’ve played to a great extent.

Also plugging the Patient Gamers crowd that I find myself aligning more strongly with over time. Waiting to pick up games when they go on sale is not only easier on the wallet, but it is also a better experience overall with way too many developers these days releasing products on a “ship now, fix later” mindset.

Stovetop,

It had been mentioned previously. After Sony acquired Bungie, they put them to task on auditing a few other projects to figure out how to optimize the live service models of several upcoming games, with TLoU 2’s multiplayer mode being among them. After Bungie’s assessment was not overly favorable, the project was frozen (in news earlier this year) and now appears to have been officially canceled.

Stovetop,

Hoping they can get the multiplayer mod fixed after this update. Been playing bit by bit with a friend which has been fun, but it’s a travesty we have to rely on a mod because multiplayer wasn’t supported by default like basically every Tales game to come before.

Stovetop,

At this point I feel like Todd Howard moonlights at Naughty Dog.

Stovetop,

The problem is that it’s a measurement of trust.

  • New IP comes out, people are apprehensive if they know nothing about it.
  • Sequel to popular IP comes out, people trust it because they know and like the earlier game, and assume a sequel will be more of that.
  • And if a sequel ever deviates from the proven model of its predecessors, people lose their shit and send death threats to developers.

That’s why you see so much recycled garbage come out, because trying something new usually results in more risk and lower returns. Not always, but usually.

Stovetop,

I’d say probably not. Unless the graphics were the only thing holding you back, this update does not appear to have done anything to improve the gameplay loop, menu system, or story content.

Compared to previous Bethesda games, it actually ran rather well at launch even when missing the features added by this update. But I’d say there’s quite a lot more that needs to be done to call it a good game, with graphics/performance being the lowest priority on the list.

Stovetop, (edited )

People who are too poor for more than 1 TV to play games on but rich enough to buy another 1/2 of a PS5 to keep gaming when someone else wants to use the TV.

Edit: Also people who thought the Wii U was a good idea.

Stovetop, (edited )

You keep the PS5 wherever you want, and then when someone says they want to use the TV, you tell them to fuck off and go use the other one

Stovetop,

I’m amazing to live with.

Stovetop,

Western game dev certainly seems to be in a bad place. I think there are probably a few factors explaining what is happening now:

1: Overhiring during the pandemic. There was a lot of money flowing into tech during the earlier days of the pandemic, and companies were hiring and expanding like crazy. The economy settled, and now companies are laying people off left and right. Not even limited to game dev, as we saw this occur for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and pretty much everywhere else in tech.

2: The knock-on effect. When big developers start to lay off staff in bulk, other companies may be incentivized to copy that behavior. It’s easier to justify firing a bunch of employees when everyone else is doing it, and then when you have a surplus of people in the market for a new job, you can selectively hire new talent for cheaper.

3: More attention in reporting. If it wasn’t a trend, a studio laying off 30 employees might not otherwise be newsworthy. A lot of studios actually make it an unfortunate common practice to lay off their contractors/temps right at the end of dev cycles so that they don’t get any sales bonuses. But there’s a lot of layoffs happening, so even smaller ones are generating buzz, and with a lot of workers’ rights/pro-union sentiments going around following the successful strikes in Hollywood and the automotive industry, people are starting to pay more attention when workers are being treated unfairly or being taken advantage of elsewhere.

Stovetop,

Wait, what Arkane game was released this year?

Stovetop,

Oh god I completely forgot about that pile of live service garbage.

Stovetop,

I don’t think Scorn belongs on any Lovecraft lists. Its main influence is pretty direct, namely H. R. Giger.

Stovetop,

UESP has also been the best information resource for Elder Scrolls since forever but that doesn’t stop Fandom’s Elder Scrolls Wiki from being the first result if you Google “Dunmer”.

Stovetop,

I call bullshit on that.

Stovetop,

Except this game’s development has been a trainwreck since Day 1. There were many opportunities to release it earlier as a good game, but Ubisoft keeps changing their mind on what dumb monetization model they want to weasel in there.

Stovetop, (edited )

Does this apply only to the EU? The definitions on the site give UK/EU-specific limitations in terms of currency and applicable regions, and I cannot seem find a comparable release on the NA site.

Edit: Did a bit more digging online and found a North American version of these terms as well, not posted in their news section but is listed in the customer support site.

Stovetop,

When the game’s story is told without words, the soundtrack does a lot of legwork delivering such an emotional impact.

Few games have moved me to tears, but Journey is one of them.

Stovetop,

What AAA studio managers hear:

“So you mean I only need two devs now to do the work of 10? Sounds great!”

“And no, we’re not going to lower the price of our games.”

Stovetop,

As long as you don’t give into despair, everything will be fine!

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Used AI For A Dead Voice Actor’s Performance, With Permission (www.forbes.com) angielski

There are uses of AI that are proving to be more than black and white. While voice actors, have protested their performances being fed into AI against their will, we are now seeing an example of this being done, with permission, in a very unique case.

Stovetop,

I dunno, once you’re dead nothing else really matters anymore, does it? You’re not a person anymore, so why would your opinion matter? If my family can use my legacy to make money for themselves, I would just be happy knowing they’d be a bit better off once I’m gone. And if they choose to protect the right to use my voice/likeness after I’m gone, I’d prefer that they do so because of their own personal beliefs, not because they believe they have to do so for my sake.

Stovetop, (edited )

GOG is barely profitable, though, and that was back when CDPR was the golden child of the games industry. I don’t think it counts as much of a revenue stream for the company.

Square Enix's producers are an asset, not a problem, former senior exec says (www.axios.com) angielski

Final Fantasy maker Square Enix is right to bring more of its games to Microsoft's Xbox and keep taking risks on new games, a former senior executive at the company tells Axios. However, he said it should not heed critics who say the company is too dependent on star game producers.

Stovetop,

Is the new one as obsessed with NFTs? I thought they had started backing off of that after the change in management.

Stovetop,

This is a nothingburger clickbait article.

Mods are still allowed, they just unselected all of them from the load list with the patch installation and left it up to players to re-enable them manually. It’s the right move to avoid people wondering why the game is horrendously broken should many of their now incompatible mods try to load.

Stovetop,

Man’s probably been on a downward spiral ever since he lost the ability to block people on Twitter.

Loved his games in the past, but I don’t think he’s made anything good in a while, and I’m curious to know if there’s any other studio willing to take in such a diva of a game developer. Wish him the best of luck.

Stovetop,

And what still blows my mind is that the game supports cross save, but shared campaign progression is where we draw the line?

God forbid a game about sharing an adventure with your friends in a traveling caravan actually allows you to share an adventure and be a part of the caravan.

Stovetop, (edited )

“Updated”, not removed.

This is still completely unacceptable. They just changed the threshold so as to not charge devs whose games don’t sell at all. It does nothing to address any of the other concerns.

Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.

Okay, fine, we won’t bankrupt you if your game doesn’t sell.

The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.

Okay fine, you won’t retroactively bill us. But you still never answered how we can trust the install numbers that your tool supposedly collects, whether we will be billed for people pirating the game, whether botnets can immediately spike up our costs out of spite, how this affects Game Pass/PS+/donated licenses, etc.

And where are the assurances that you won’t randomly decide to update the policy again in the future? I also can’t imagine they’ll let people keep using the version of Unity without runtime fees in perpetuity.

Stovetop,

Sensationalist media will grab at anything, really.

I mean, the Nintendo thing started with an email Phil Spencer replied to titled “random thought,” and the email was basically a lot of “Yeah that sounds great, but here’s why it’s not going to happen. But sure, though, it would be nice to own Nintendo, and I know a guy who’s been trading some of their stock if you wanted to maybe buy some.”

Stovetop,

Well we all knew that much at least. It was originally announced to be released in 2022 but they pushed it back almost a full year to 2023. Guessing when development slowed due to salvage work needed for Fallout 76 and then likely a mandate from Microsoft to polish it more before release.

Stovetop,

So they are going for the Apple trashcan look, is that it?

Stovetop,

Thumbnail working as designed to grab attention.

Stovetop,

The thing I always thought would be in the Switch’s benefit is if the dock itself also contained hardware. On the small handheld screen, the quality looks fine enough at lower resolutions, but then looks pretty bad when blown up on a 4K TV. If the dock had additional expandable hardware to boost performance when docked, that could go a long way to help it keep up.

Stovetop,

Starfield and Final Fantasy 14. Both have been hard to find time for with general lack of time in life.

  • Starfield: still enjoying it a lot. I know it is going to bore me eventually, but for now the exploration and personal narrative I’ve been rolling with have been enough to keep me interested.
  • FF14: My static fell apart and we’ve given up on Savage raiding for this tier. There is a huge backlog of activities I haven’t been able to do this whole time while Savage prog occupied 90% of my time in-game, but now I can’t choose where to start.

Unity ...It Just Keeps Get Worse (youtu.be) angielski

To say it’s been a bad week for Unity is the understatement of 2023. First they announced a terrible new Pricing scheme, then their customers revolted, as the week goes on though, it gets worse and worse for Unity, from threats from an employee shutting down their offices, to more studios threatening to leave, to scummy secret...

Stovetop, (edited )

They’re pretty different.

Unity is planning to charge a flat fee of $0.20 per install over the entire life of a game. A Triple-A developer can release a game for $70 and it earns ten million dollars. Assuming every customer installs the game maybe three separate times on average over their lifespan, Unity’s gonna take maybe about $85,000 in total in runtime fees. If the game had been developed in Unreal, Epic would have taken $450,000.

But let’s say an indie dev makes a great game in Unity, sells it for $5, and it goes viral (like Vampire Survivors). They make ten million dollars, Unity takes 20 cents per install, and assuming the same install rate, the bill comes to $1.2 million, over 14x what the AAA developer is paying. Epic would have still charged $450,000.

With the AAA example, Epic’s 5% may seem steep for games that cost a lot per unit, but at least when a game stops making money, they stop charging money.

For Unity’s runtime fee, though, as people buy new PCs/consoles/phones and install their library of games to them over and over, the developer keeps getting billed with no profit coming in. Effectively, the more games they have out there in the wild, the greater a financial burden a developer has. They’ll be living in fear of some Reddit post sending 10,000 people in /r/gaming down a sudden nostalgia trip and wake up to a $2000 bill the next day with seemingly no explanation.

And this is to say nothing of the problematic nature of how Unity would even accurately assess the install count of a game, or differentiate paid copies from promotional or pirated copies (which I doubt they will). Or if a developer wants to bankrupt a rival developer, how they could just rent a click farm in Malaysia to install a game over and over again and rack up a bill too high to afford.

Stovetop,

If that’s the case, I guess we have to thank…the Mario movie? For strengthening the core brand more than Paper Mario supposedly weakens it?

Stovetop,

This almost fell under the radar today in the wake of the Paper Mario TTYD hype. Given that Super Mario RPG is the predecessor to Paper Mario in a number of ways, it’s an interesting time to be a fan of this type of game.

Stovetop,

Their next game would be a current project.

Stovetop,

This. We’re only just now feeling the sting more keenly in a number of ways because companies are desperate to stay the course with increased profits year over year despite there being a massive global economic slump.

The 2010’s were full of venture capital pumping money into companies, and when we asked, “How is this business profitable,” they’d respond “Just trust us, bro.” Well, now the well has dried up, the venture capitalists are here to collect, and we all get to be surprisedpikachuface.jpg watching this trainwreck unfold in slow motion.

Stovetop,

Going to be a bittersweet watch. RIP all Unity games in the announcement.

Stovetop,

What EA sees:

Hasn’t BioWare been having a shit ton of problems these past few years? Hope we can make some good money after we fire everyone and close the studio.

Stovetop,

To summarize:

  • Mario
  • Mario
  • Mario
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Bad Mario
  • Mario

I am LOVING Baldurs Gate 3 angielski

I’m just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party, but I searched on here and didn’t see much follow up discussion about it after the review thread. I’m also trying to submit more to Lemmy so the communities can grow, so I thought I’d bring it back up now that it has been out for a few weeks....

Stovetop,

It’s not even out yet on some platforms.

Stovetop,

Yeah, at least Microsoft is invested heavily in backwards compatibility, is still allowing people to download purchases they’ve made, and are continuing to offer backwards compatible Xbox games for Series X.

I mentioned this in another thread, but this is less Nintendo closing down a store full of games that cannot be found anywhere else, and more like Steam dropping support for Windows 7.

Stovetop,

It sucks to lose access to digital content on the original console, but I am at least glad that they are continuing to offer access to digital Xbox 360 games/DLC that are backwards compatible on Series X, and that folks can still download content they own.

This is akin to Steam declaring that it will no longer support Windows 7. Which is actually happening at the end of this year.

Stovetop,

I’d second this. The full collection of pixel remaster games is actually phenomenal and a really good way to jump into the early titles.

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