TSG_Asmodeus

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 dni temu

Till they stop making money off skin/etc sales.

TSG_Asmodeus, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

I get journalists hate Xbox, but Xbox needs to exist as a consumer option.

I don’t understand, is this a thing? “All journalists hate Xbox” I mean. I’ve never heard this before. Like there’s a mandate that journalists have to hate the Xbox?

EDIT: I’ll eat the downvotes, I just want to understand what the fuck they’re talking about

TSG_Asmodeus, miesiąc temu

Yeah the comment felt like bizarre astroturfing – Why would ‘gaming journalists’ specifically not want Xbox to succeed, but want Playstation to? Like somehow a Sony monopoly is great for… journalists? A very strange take.

XBOX has been underwhelming for a while and journalists will report on that, and they will focus on those bad parts and certainly also sometimes make it sound worse than it really is, because it brings in clicks.

I worked at Microsoft and I can assure you, they deserve every bit of hate they get. And it really is that bad. There was a point with the Xbox One where Sony was beating ‘us’ in every single market we were actively tracking except specific parts of the US. Yet we had directive after directive for clearly nonsensical ideas like targeting Japan for console sales.

I also worked (third party) with Sony and they aren’t much better, but they at least understand how to get their consoles bought. Microsoft hasn’t known how to do that since the 360.

TSG_Asmodeus, miesiąc temu

As someone with an avatar of the Q from Quake 1, I can avidly say that writing was not better in the past.

Just off the top of my head from the last decade:

-Baldurs gate 3 -Firewatch -Return of the Obra Dinn -Disco Elysium -Tyranny -Shadowrun Dragonfall -Red Dead Redemption 2 -Witcher 3 -Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice -Life is Strange -Prey (2017) -The Red Strings Club

Seriously, go check the story to Perfect Dark. Hilarious? Yes. A “good story”? No.

There are myriad issues in gaming now that weren’t there in the past, but good writing is (thankfully) still around.

TSG_Asmodeus, miesiąc temu

Remember that the people actually doing the work don’t decide who to make deals with.

TSG_Asmodeus, miesiąc temu

Laid off workers don’t have the ability to choose these options though. You’re talking about management/marketing decisions.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.

You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.

Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.

So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

To be 100% fair here, that anecdote I used was a mobile game, but the same thing does happen in larger PC/Console game titles, it’s just not 75% of (player) paid revenue.

This is especially so in games that have battlepasses – far fewer people buy those every time thank you’d think, and the ones who do are a small percentage of total players, but make up a lions share of the total revenue earned from said battlepass. Those are also the people (the every pass ones) who buy everything in the shop. 50 dollar cape or whatever, they buy it on release.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

I highly recommend Amid Evil. I wasn’t even a big Hexen/Heretic fan, but it’s fantastic. It has the record for highest screenshots->playtime of any game I’ve played on steam.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

I refuse to spoil anything, but I think I took a screenshot every 30 seconds on the last map. It helps you manage to traverse every single square foot of space in the map over the course of completing it.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu (edited 3 miesiące temu)

I still can’t look past the rootkit anticheat for a goddamn co-op game.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

Yes.

nProtect GameGuard (sometimes called GG) is an anti-cheating rootkit developed by INCA Internet.

TSG_Asmodeus, 3 miesiące temu

No one with even the bare minimum Sec+ cert would call it a rootkit

That’s what it’s page on wikipedia says.

nProtect GameGuard (sometimes called GG) is an anti-cheating rootkit developed by INCA Internet.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

Yeah exactly, my first thought was “Doom is still in the public discourse.”

Not to mention, oh what’s that game that broke earnings numbers on steam, oh yeah, Cyberpunk 2077? Rough launch aside, the game literally printed money, and is a great RPG and a great FPS.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

The terms have changed a bit over time, but generally “AAA” now means (in the industry) a large studio makes a game with a large marketing budget. If you think of those games that are published by EA, but made by one of their smaller studios and has a smaller marketing budget, that’s “AA”.

Much like “alpha” and “beta”, the meanings are changing so quickly it’s hard to keep up with what the industry means and what players mean.

I’m so old when I started in games “alpha” meant a feature complete game with a few crash bugs, and beta meant no (25% repro, or whatever the studio chose) crash bugs and all assets added and working.

Now it’s basically “alpha” means a demo, and “beta” means they’re buying time for GM release.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

This started happening when studios got bigger and marketing controlled release dates. By the 2010s or so, the actual devs had zero say. So some idiot owner would promise a game in 18 months, half the ideas would be removed due to time, and a rushed product went out.

“Games as a service” was just corporate speak for how to streamline putting out a game with less components and then adding them over time.

Unfortunately it worked, and players bought in.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

I appreciate what you’re getting at, but I also think you forget how grey Duke 3d was.

I agree Quake was too brown and grey, but the idea it was ‘visually hot garbage’ is definitely an outside take. We finally had 3d models that weren’t sprites, not to mention how impressive prerendered Lightmaps were for the time.

I will agree that GLQuake was when the graphics really were at their best.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

Stunt Race FX really stood out to me, even now I remember being impressed by the visuals.

TSG_Asmodeus, 4 miesiące temu

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished.

I remember doing this Battle of Britain and TIE Fighter! Man, memories.

TSG_Asmodeus, 5 miesięcy temu

It absolutely blows my mind to see ADOM refered to as “modern”. Thank you, I feel less old.

TSG_Asmodeus, 5 miesięcy temu

One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.

I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:

2021 - 23 million

2022 - 25 million

2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.

If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?

It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.

TSG_Asmodeus, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)

EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.

TSG_Asmodeus, 5 miesięcy temu

If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.

Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.

You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.

That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.

You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.

TSG_Asmodeus, 5 miesięcy temu

I just go by reviews, usually from people I know. The only real difference between AA/A and Indie titles now really is marketing budget and size of team. Not much else is different. You also run into issues about what counts as indie now: it used to mean without a publisher, but it seems to have morphed into ‘a smaller company.’

But yeah, just look up reviews. Games like FTL, Hades, and so on tend to become known by word of mouth.

TSG_Asmodeus, 6 miesięcy temu

Think Quick! immediately comes to mind as the an early one I played a lot of, followed by Mines of Titan.

I am not sure I could go through the 90’s games that left lasting impressions on me. I guess Homeworld, Sacrifice, Marathon, Alpha Centauri, and Chrono Trigger have occupied a massive amount of my mind for ages now, haha.

TSG_Asmodeus, 6 miesięcy temu (edited 6 miesięcy temu)

Honestly though, how do you even follow it up? That game had a ridiculous dev team.

• Akira Toriyama - creator/Artist of Dragon Ball
• Nobuo Uematsu - Writer of (many) Final Fantasy scores
• Yūji Horii - game designer and scenario writer from Dragon Quest
• Hironobu Sakaguchi - Game director/designer/producer of Final Fantasy
• Kazuhiko Aoki - (Getting this whole gang together)

TSG_Asmodeus, 6 miesięcy temu

I love tribes - I even still have the same mousepad from when I played it last - but I want to warn people this is being made by Prophecy Games, who have straight up abandoned their last game. Starsiege Deadzone, put out in July, is already dead. Take a look at the steam charts for proof. I want Tribes more than most other old IPs, but we have to be real cautious with our hype, so to speak.

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

The problem is an hour of what. Me wandering around trying to find something described vaguely and being frustrated, is not the same as an hour of well written and interesting dialogue.

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

If you think that giant companies don’t look at social media responses to their games in order to make future decisions, I have a bridge to sell you.

I’ve been part of Community Management at a major studio, and I was told to stop ‘wasting their time’ with customer feedback, so which bridge is it?

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

Morrowind has good writing in it too, though. I think we can all agree nobody should be paying ‘dollars per hour’ while wandering completely lost and annoyed ;)

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

Or hell, what if I play the game for 20 minutes and hate it? Do they pay me? Do I give them 25 cents?

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

I can deflect the doxxing slightly by saying it’s more than one. The first rhymes with Wicrosoft and the other is too small and would definitely doxx me. However I have friends all over the industry, and can confirm identical reactions from places with names similar to Acti… mizion, Sledge…wammer Ztudios, 434… endustries, Pioware… Grames?

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

But we already have the ultimate spycraft fantasy game.

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

They probably spend fractions of a percent of their profits on moderation. We’re talking like 0.01%. Half the time it’s cycling college grads through 18 month contracts that they terminate so they can pay them less and less each time (Source: Worked at Microsoft, and they’re infamous for this. Hell, QA for Microsoft’s game division make about 50 cents above minimum wage in BC.)

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

Yeah holy crap, a bunch are sentences like: Fixed an issue that would cause spoiler (MAJOR PLOT POINT) to occur later than expected

I think they meant to spoiler tag them and forgot.

TSG_Asmodeus, 7 miesięcy temu

At the very top of the document, it says:

SPOILERS - Please bear in mind some of the entries below might contain spoilers, proceed at your own risk

But it doesn’t separate them, or have any cover whatsoever. So if I want to find out if a quest that’s bugged for me is fixed, or other issues, I do have to read it at some point.

This is why I think they meant to spoiler tag it and didn’t (I edited it to remove actual spoiler content):

The ‘(GOAL)’ background goal for Soldiers will now unlock correctly after you spoiler kill (ENEMY) and escape the (AREA).

TSG_Asmodeus, 8 miesięcy temu

I’ve worked for those (sized) companies and employee pay is not as much as you’d think. Not to mention higher sales don’t equal more pay (for the actual workers.)

Source: just shy of 20 years in gaming.

TSG_Asmodeus, 8 miesięcy temu

In the meantime, check out Amid Evil for an absolutely fantastic Heretic/Hexen like game.

I have more screenshots saved on steam in one playthrough of that game than any other game I’ve played.

TSG_Asmodeus, 8 miesięcy temu

With rockets, was it?

TSG_Asmodeus, 9 miesięcy temu

I’m really excited to play with all these changes. I have just shy of 200 hours for 2 playthroughs, and virtually every change they’ve made here seems like it’ll improve things a lot.

TSG_Asmodeus, 9 miesięcy temu

They closed the WON network in November I believe it was, which is when I had to make my steam account.

TSG_Asmodeus, 10 miesięcy temu

“I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.”