I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I'm glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.
Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I'm really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn't, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I'm not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.
Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.
Vr is very price prohibitive and Oculus/Facebook sell headsets at a loss to make their marketshare. Its not great but if you want to "try vr" especially something you hear will make you physically sick to use and you might not even like. Its just logical to spend the least amount of money on it for a "proper headset". Like if you value your privacy that is fine and completely understandable but lets be honest here, most people don't. Especially with the popularization of social media and smart phones like we can even apply the same logic with your argument with phones like why would you buy a device that has so many cameras and microphones and wave it around your home and toilet. Hell I think the phone is actually worse since most people bring them everywhere while a headset is a bit more constrained on where you can take it.
I mean not really. Again the index is a great headset but look at how long people actually use their headsets for. Is it better to throw your money into a pit that is $400 or $1000. VR is a weird since you either love it or hate it. Most people are going to hate it and many people aren't really into the idea of reselling their stuff. This isn't to say facebook good or some nonsense like that but from a prospective customer's standpoint why spend so much money on something you might not even like. You don't have to drill any holes in your walls to put up base stations while inside out tracking isn't great it gets the job done and again its far more convenient. I like the option to have base stations but again realistically putting in so much work for something you might only spend a week or month on is not a great investment of your money or time. If you like VR, I would highly suggest getting a better headset than a quest or oculus headset but a newcomer I will 100% suggest a quest over anything else especially a used model to save them extra cash.
Are we going to ignore that VR adoption is basically held up by Oculus/facebook. I hate facebook and their support for their titles on the VR space are dreadful for instance it is unacceptable what they did with Echo Arena but you can literally look at the steam hardware survey and see that Oculus/facebook makeup nearly 70% (67.4% to be more accurate) of VR headsets in the market today for PCVR. Who the fuck is funding many VR game devs right now? I can tell you it ain't many publishers and the biggest one right now is Facebook as much as I hate to say it. Facebook absolutely is a crutch VR needs to survive in this market but we gamers should make use of them for as long as possible then ditch them whenever its convenient for us.
Hell the PSVR2 looking very juicy if that has great PCVR support and it doesn't require any ps5 nonsense to work but PSVR2 is a perfect example of how VR is not in a great place and a big part of it is price related. Like VR nuts (like I) would gladly pay higher tier prices for a good headset but to some average joe, they see a headset that costs as much as a fucking console that only works with a limited number of games. Hell the thing can even make you sick trying to use it. Most people aren't going to pay 1000+ dollars to try VR to see if they "like it", hell they aren't even paying $550.
Again I'm not here to advocate for Facebook but I will sure as hell make use of their investments in VR because they are sort of throwing that money in a fire pit with how the market is. Facebook plans on trying to fill that fire pit with so much money it becomes a bridge that is profitable and it might be in the future but right now if you want someone to try VR, a oculus headset is probably the best bang for your buck headset especially if you buy it used since realistically most people are going to play with it for a month then be done with it and try to hock the thing.
Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand "new" copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many "new" copies around. Also I can't fault publishers from just "deleting" a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven't sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren't even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.
You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.
With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn't mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn't be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.
I mean it isn't but sort of is at the same time. It firstly depends on what kind of kickstarter it is. There are many ways where its just a system for a publisher to gauge interest in the project. Those are typically just preorders however many others are just throwing money into a well and hoping something comes of it. I get people's hatred of crowdfunding and it can easily be a trap. Where a ton of people are just there to get the money and leg it or who are simply too incompetent to use the funds properly. Hell even experienced developer can be too incompetent, double fine studios/Tim Schafer is a poster child for this. While I love their work, they had a horrid run with crowdfunding and I guess it should have been expected since they are always late and overspend on their budget when they were working with publishers.
Now with all the negatives said, I think crowdfunding in all its forms can lead to wonderful project that simply couldn't have existed due to a lack of interest by publishers. Hell I doubt we would had Baldur's Gate 3 without crowdfunding and this isn't talking exclusively about BG 3 since the Divinity Original sin games really got the ball rolling for Larian Studios. Crowdfunding can lead to the rebirth of genres once thought dead.
Yeah development hell is a rough spot. Sometimes it can turn out great projects (Doom 2016 is a decent example, when it was originally meant to be Doom 4 it was closer to a call of duty style game) but alot of the time it turns into a mess. You already mentioned Duke Nukem forever, you also have Spore, Too human, Final Fantasy 15, Dead island 2, etc.
I mean while I don't like EA, the route they took with 3 was pretty disappointing. Was just way too actiony for its own good and what I'm seeing for 4 is interesting but I'm not sure I would call it dead space since they wanted to add some survival elements and being a bit more open ended. Like the pitch they were going for seems to be in a weird way a roguelite style of approach in the vain of cryptark or void bastards at least from how they were describing it. Like what was being suggested seems too wide but once it actually hit development it would have downscale quite a bit then likely gotten more toxic monetization. Looks like they were trying to keep the gun customization of dead space 3, which honestly just broke that game since balancing was all over the place.
The dead space remake. Its just so wonderful since it basically captures everything I love about the first, horror games seem to be one of the few games that just get dramatically better as they get graphically more intense since it helps with the immersion. Now it is a bit questionable since I rather see new games but I won't lie and be excited to see a Dead space 2 remake since holy shit they added flesh stripping and it just fits in so perfectly. Just wish they make better subplots since they had to radically change the narrative and how the other characters interact with you since Issac is now a far more active character (which honestly should have always been the case) since it just makes sense the engineer character comes up with engineering solutions.
But didn't TOTK also have the issue that to some it felt like an "expansion pack" (Probably closer to a switch's version of Majora's Mask, where many assets are reused and remixed with a new gameplay element added). While it was a good game its probably not as revolutionary as BOTW. It also doesn't help it was the switch's first 70$ title.
I mean the big part of why I want the steam version is the mouse control (also waiting for adventurer mode, which is something I did actually play with original ascii DF with tilesets later down the road), yes yes I know its slower but when you are learning a new game sometimes its just easier to take it slow like that. Yes typically ascii games do have tilesets with them at least the ones I know of CDDA, DF, and ADOM, its just people want things to be "good" out of the box. They don't want to faff about for 2 or 3 hours to get the "optimal" experience.
Have you seen Aurora 4x? It is probably one of the deepest 4x space games on the market to this day. The problem is it looks like a spreadsheet and I'm sorry but when people are focused on gameplay only style games, one of the things that get dropped off by the wayside is the user experience and the UX. It is fucking efficient as fuck once you have it down but when you are trying to learn the system, its a bit of a cliff to overcome and if you don't have a ton of time to game that can be quite the burden on someone. Seriously for newcomers it can seem a bit counterintuitive that capslock/shift dramatically change what actions you can take (talking from personal experience was very thrown off by capslock actually have an effect on what you are doing since shift + key is pretty normal for rts/stuff).
I'm going to be put on a cross but I disagree. Its a balancing scale, one shouldn't ignore all other aspects because they favor one, its fine to prioritize one over the others but there shouldn't be a huge gap between them especially in the AAA field. Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example. It is one of the most mechanically deep games around and I think its wonderful at what it does but it is almost unplayable for most people until fairly recently because most people don't like Ascii. Hell even something like Aurora 4x is very mechanically deep but looks like a glorified spreadsheet, everyone has their breaking point and unfortunately for me Ascii is that out. I think many people throw away graphics since the AAA likes to glorify it too much but I think for a soulslike game, graphics need to be the 2nd most focused aspect because I consider animation quality a big part of graphic budget and I'm sorry a soulslike where there aren't good animations is a very bad soulslike. Predictability and reaction are a huge part of that subgenre.
Edit: Everyone has their own values on what they are looking for in a game and its specific subgenre, the recent debates about Cities skyline 2 shows this where people are some reason fine with a game like that being targeted for 30 fps. While sure its playable, I think we are in a modern era of gaming and 60 feels it should be the standard everyone shoots for.
Oh yes, because everyone knows. They say one thing it totally won't morph into something new afterwards. Also how do you imagine they will "restrict" the modding? By making the game more tamperproof and harder to mod. So while it may not be "prevented" they will basically make the only mods around texture swaps or some shit.
Except they have been increasing the prices this whole time... Most of the prior race packs which focused on 2 factions from Total Warhammer 2 were 10 dollars per pop. Hell the last 2 dlcs were so much bang for the buck since they basically made a pair of 19$ dlc obsolete (yes, with the new pack you only get 1 lord each but having 1 lord but a whole new faction for 10 bucks is good value and that doesn't even count that you also get a number of units from a different faction as well). So Total Warhammer 3 comes out and to say it was a fucking mess at launch is an understatement. Their first new dlc is a race pack at the price of 16 USD. So we see an increase of about 60% right there for many units that simply should have been in the game at launch since the chaos roster was very light compared to the other 2/3 factions in the game as well. So come around to when we get a new faction, prior to this factions cost around 19$ and the price increases to 25$ and personally the community was angry but I was 100% fine with this since yeah prices increase and factions have been this price since 2016. So its fucking insulting they do a new race pack and give us a bullshit letter saying I quote
To get right into it: our costs are up. Unfortunately, that means that prices have to rise. We know any increase is going to be tough, which is why our prices have remained fairly stable over the past few years. The downside is that any increase today is going to be more noticeable.
When this is a blatant lie, this new race pack that gives us less content than prior is now an increase of 150% from 10$ it used to be in total warhammer 2 but a ~60% increase from the last fucking price they had from a year prior. It also doesn't help when they haven't patched the fucking game when there is obviously broken shit. For instance they dropped a patch for the honorable frenchmen (Bretonnia) but some faction features were broken for nearly half a fucking year until after this whole. Hell Nakai the kroxigor (A big fuck off giant lizard alligator man who can do a death roll) lord for again half a year couldn't recruit his special units and kroxigors. This anger is coming from a place where obviously the money they earn is being misused on other projects that end up crashing and burning. Like a fucking new extraction shooter that was a money pit gets canned that was DOA (technically never got released but I know they were running beta test and I imagine it getting canned was based on how much engagement was around it, I remember seeing so many fucking ads that beta test). A reskin of Total war Troy (A newly released AAA priced game that had a peak of 5,424 user), which has failed by basically most margins. So its god damn insulting to hear a lead say basically if you don't buy this dlc expect this game won't be supported anymore even though it is literally CAs only cash cow right now. People want better support for this game, it is under horrid management. A ton of anger is strictly coming from how poor a game WH3 released as and the continued support it has seen. We need a proper custodian team who can actually patch this game more than once or twice in a span of half a fucking year.
Edit: I also want to hammer home how fucking bad TW Pharaoh did.
Peak users
TWW3: 166,519.
Shogun 2: 10k or 50k (can't get an accurate count since Steamcharts only goes back to 2012 but SG2 came out in 2011) was 10k (as long as we ignore when the game was given away for free then it was at 50k).
Rome 2: 118,240
Attila: 26,237
Rome Remastered: 18,407
Three kingdoms: 191,816