Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don't blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,
But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.
When people say it's shallow, I wonder if they didn't even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn't even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.
Because of that I'm also really looking forward for their new game.
Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.
Most digital gaming stores are, except GOG and ItchIO. Even consoles are trying to push things that way. XBox has Game Pass and Playstation released a version of their console with no disc reader. Subscriptions may seem more fleeting that digital purchases but in actuality we've seen how companies can take down purchased media and entire digital storefronts.
I have purchased more Steam games than it would be sensible but as companies lose any qualm to take purchases away from customers, if anyone wants any any guarantee of ownership they really need to buy DRM-free and back them up independently.
To be fair nobody plays *JUST one single game for 3 years. Economically speaking it is more affordable to pay the subscription than to buy it. That said there are no guarantees they won't raise prices. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually decide to include ads and add limits eventually. There's not even an expectation of control by the users.
But we have seen enough of how streaming libraries change and split. Losing access to your favorite game is an almost inevitable eventuality.
You are confusing my argument. You listed me 10+ games. If you paid $2/mo for 3 years and got to own a game for it, that would be enough for a couple of them at most. I'm not saying old games are not worth playing. I'm saying that if you had to pick between buying all the games you like or paying for a subscription, most likely the subscription would be more affordable. Because ultimately you played more than a single game.
To be fair nobody plays just one single game for 3 years (they play multiple)
rather than
To be fair nobody plays one game for 3 years (they are too old)
The former complements the following argument regarding how costly buying vs subscribing would be. The latter doesn't work with the following paragraph that lists the unreliability of subscription libraries as a downside.
This sort of argument is just a way to cope with the erosion of customer rights and the overreach of corporations over digital media as if that's some inevitable entropy of the universe type of thing. We still have books that are thousands of years old, but even though we have better technological means to store and reproduce media than ever, arbitrary legal hurdles are leading people to treat cultural loss as an inevitability.
You got your answer in your own response. Emulators are a thing. Virtual Machines are a thing. Proton is a thing. We figured out how to recover games going as far back as the Atari. Unless actively and fiercely obstructed people will figure out how to keep these things available out of sheer passion and goodwill.
A DRM-free installer/executable for a game, when properly backed up, will still be playable most likely indefinitely.
Unfortunately, as the mention of DRM itself indicates, obstructions are plentiful and ever increasing. This is why supporting DRM-free media and open platforms is valuable. Can you imagine what people could do if they were empowered instead of obstructed?
You really seem to want to argue with me but I don't think you understood what I was saying to begin with. I'm not saying subscriptions are better, I'm saying they are more economical but unreliable, and I am saying that you, who listed 10+ great games you played a lot, didn't get only a single one. It also doesn't mean there won't ever be any new game you like.
You know, 10 games × $60 > $2 × 12mo × 3y
Though Ubisoft is $18/mo and games are $70 now. Ubisoft Club is a bad deal but Game Pass is still ends up cheaper at $10/mo. But I digress,
That said there are no guarantees they won't raise prices.
Yup. You just want to argue and decided you'll be doing it at me for whatever reason. This is literally on my first comment that you replied to.
You convinced yourself I'm advocating for subscription as The Future, rather than just conceding one point on economic grounds. Meanwhile in this thread you could find me arguing that DRM-free backups is the only true guaranteed way to own digital media.
It can go however far you want. Even if you say you'll play these games for the rest of your life, at $2/mo buying it only becomes more economically worthwhile if you entirely quit getting games entirely. I emphasize, economically. Now, if we take Game Pass, depending on where you live buying might be more worthwhile if you get 2 or less full-priced games a year. In my country Game Pass is cheaper than 2 games
With the means that we have, that anywhere in the world a dozen people can figure out how to get very niche things adapted in one way or another into different systems, and countless people can keep media on thumb drives rather than needing entire climate controlled libraries, something has to be very, very, extremely obscure for it to be completely lost, and even then there are people for which the obscurity of something is the very thing that makes it appealing.
I don't think you are technically incorrect to some extent that some things will inevitably disappear, but I would still scratch it far more to imposed legal and technical restrictions than to the futility of fighting time.
Say, every single online or mobile game that closes and is completely lost? It's 100% on the erosion of customer rights, exclusively. We have today the technology to keep them running and people willing to do it. It's just that business and contracts defined that, no matter how much people have spend on them, they don't get access to essential server files necessary to keep it running. This is not "time coming for us all", it's selfish businesses enabled by a law with no regards for cultural preservation.
Meanwhile the MAME project year after year figures out how to run incredibly niche arcade titles from decades ago. Even with all the challenges and obstructions.
Really, take a moment to really admire, that with all the struggles and limitations that we have, you as an individual human being, can with a handheld device, access and personally store thousands of Public Domain books from the Gutemberg Project, the entirety of Wikipedia, several full collections of every single game released for multiple consoles, including prototypes, hacks and homebrew. A single person can do that much. Ozymandias' statue may crumble to dust but his history lives on, in someone's pocket.
Maybe to you all that effort is pointless. Maybe it's be easier to just let it go. But there's a whole world of other people who might be interested in it. Maybe you just care about one single game. But a different person cares about a different single game. In a world of billions, how many different things might people care about?
If you talk to me about the inexorable advance of time, I'll still be on the side of the indomitable human spirit.
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story's rise. But back then there weren't so many indie fans.
Tunic has such an unique vision and it executes it expertly. On the surface it's a zelda-like but it's so much more than that, and it's best experienced blind. In fact, that's the whole idea. The developer wanted to replicate the experience of being a kid picking up a game in a different language that you had to figure out little by little.
Dark Souls and souls games in general. But the difficulty is just half of it. I have beaten hard games before. The problem is that everything is so bleak I can't even feel motivated to try. I'll do a thing only for some NPC to go "it doesn't matter, everything is pointless and you're so insignificant". Inevitably being spoiled I know that even the single optimistic NPC is not getting it great. Y'all can mope, I'm gonna put my effort where it's appreciated.
I'm curious what AI Shark is supposed to do. If it's just an LLM with hints that's not gonna "eclipse the original GameShark's triumphs tenfold". I'd still rather have a cheat tool than a glorified Clippy for walkthroughs.
Live Services, much like their older cousin MMO, are not something people can play multiple of. Each of them takes so much time/money investment that most people who do play them just pick one and stick with it. Making too many of them is a mistake.
Hello everyone, I remember the times of walkthrough guides being used for older games and was wondering if there is a central area for game walkthroughs for both newer games and older games through late 90s and early 2000s. There are official game guides which I may get, but fan guides would be cool as well....
I never get this type of response. Do you really keep paying attention at whoever ass it is rather than the whole game happening on the rest of the screen?
That's true, but blasphemous content created a lot more controversy than sheer violence. I remember when D&D books were getting burned because parents thought it was satanist.
Cult of the Lamb is explicitly demonic and yet it's still the possible addition of sex that is creating all this hubbub. Personally I think it's going to be about as explicit as The Sims at most, getting in a sleeping bag and them some shaking and effects.
As much as I'm very critical of both these studios, that's really downplaying Sonic Frontiers. It was puzzling that they decided to go for a realistic style while having floating platforms everywhere, but that was a competent game that a lot of people enjoyed. I wouldn't even call it glitchy, playing it lately I didn't see a single one. Maybe it had some glitches on release, but unfortunately this is commonplace these days.
They are just lying. I don't trust this response for a single moment. We have seen how the slope as far as game monetization practices goes is in fact slippery.
Sports games already use in-game ads. They will keep going for as long as players take it.
Crowdfunding-driven projects often have depressing fates, but probably not even a partial result would have existed if not for that.
Feels like if it was not for that Evo drama at the year they were selected as one of the competing games, maybe they would have sold well enough to finish.
I wonder if part of the reason they add these games by eyedropper is to use them as hype tools.
The Switch 2 might be announced any day now, what is going to happen to NSO? Will they actually port them because it's tied to a subscription rather than a standalone purchase? Or will they start over again?
I don't think this is a console war thing. I just think IGN is a sellout rag that rates games however game companies tell them to. Their ratings are consistently unexplainable by anyone with sense.
They try to say that the screen is bigger, but at that point they could just play on a TV, since they need to be with their PS5 at home.
Also mystifying that they say a tablet with a bigger screen would be inconvenient because you couldn't play it on the bus. You can't play this thing on the bus either.
Enjoying Baldur's Gate 3 but I think I missed out on all romances apparently. because I didn't start them on Act 1. That kinda sucks. Still, just got up to the Last Light Inn and the story is pretty interesting so far.
Is anyone believing they would not have layoffs anyway? They are likely just trying to pin their cost-cutting plans on game devs who protested against their ridiculous scheme. Comes to mind that the money their clients were already paying is the money that would have paid for those employees' wages.
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It's very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.
It's yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don't need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.
And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It's very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.
It's layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can't tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.
What he is doing sounds reasonable on the surface but it's a rhetorical trick.
This is about getting players in forever live services to keep paying forever even if the game is not adding anything more to make it worth it. There is a hint of merit of paying for a game that you enjoy a lot but don't forget how today games are endlessly padded out with grind and daily missions to keep players coming back out of habit, delaying access to what they really want to get, rather than because they are enjoying it. Nevermind that these tactics are also what gets people impatient and buying Shark Cards, for instance. It's why the freemium model became so commonly used. He wants to profit in the mean time too.
Because it's deeply dysfunctional how much of our society is driven by this shortsighted approach. A lot people are not surprised by it at this point, but just explaining and accepting that shareholder value is the only thing that matters to them doesn't really fix the issues. And there's a lot more issues caused by this than just how fun some games are.
We are beyond asking how it works or why, we should be asking what should be done about it.
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
I wouldn't count on millions of people suddenly all deciding to boycott now, if all the egregious practices of this industry weren't enough to get them to do it already.
Not really. Often companies degrade their products as a calculated choice, considering that they will save and increase their profits more than they will lose. If only a few people protest, which seems to be the case here, then they have no reason to change course.
But chosing to buy from companies that do better can at least carve out a niche.
Enshittification advances. Consoles already are the prime example of devices that act as if they are still owned by the company rather than the customer, but they somehow find even more ways to make it worse...
Seems like any customer rights now only exist in direct defiance of corporations and whatever unreasonable unilateral rules they set without consulting anyone else.
'You won’t find our games on a subscription service' says the founder of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, after Ubisoft forecasts a future of players 'not owning' games (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"Subscription models will always end up being cost/benefit analysis exercises intended to maximise profit."
What are some good games that have a bad reputation due to unreasonable expectations? angielski
For consistency sake, let’s say that any game that’s >or=7/10 at what it’s trying to do while having a popular perception of being a
Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games (kotaku.com)
What games do you think are unfairly snubbed when talking about the best games of all time? angielski
When talking about the best games of all time people generally mention Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario 64, Halo 3, The Last of Us, Nier Automata, etc. , but dismiss other great games....
What difficult games/game challenges did you give up on?
Be it a game that’s difficult in its entirety, or a particular challenge in a game that you just couldn’t complete....
Nintendo Switch 2 Release Date May Have Just Accidentally Been Revealed by...Gameshark - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
The Nintendo Switch 2 is supposed to launch in September 2024, according to a press release from Ai Shark (formerly Game Shark)....
10 Days Into 2024 And 2300+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced (kotaku.com)
Mostly from Unity: 1800 through the end of March.
Valve: Most games made with AI tools are now welcome on Steam (arstechnica.com) angielski
Well shit…
Suicide Squad Boss Downplays Live-Service Elements Of Obviously Live-Service Game (kotaku.com)
Be careful, recording Baldur's Gate 3's adult scenes on Xbox might net you a temporary ban (www.vg247.com) angielski
It seems that if you record any of the more titillating scenes from Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox, your account could get ban…
Someone needs to do a fantasy Hitman game. (kbin.social) angielski
Magical accidents. Potions. Demon summoning accidents....
Printable Walkthroughs
Hello everyone, I remember the times of walkthrough guides being used for older games and was wondering if there is a central area for game walkthroughs for both newer games and older games through late 90s and early 2000s. There are official game guides which I may get, but fan guides would be cool as well....
Male players: Why do you play female characters? (kbin.social) angielski
Got the idea of posting this when I watched this YouTube video that talks about reasons men love playing as girls....
Cult of the Lamb pledges to embrace its smutty community with a suitably sultry new update (www.vg247.com) angielski
After a community meme runs rampant, the official Cult of the Lamb Twitter account has tempted fans with a sex update. …
Sonic Superstars' Sales Were 'Slightly Weaker' Than Sega Had Anticipated (www.nintendolife.com) angielski
Firm hopes it will eventually match Frontiers' sales
Marvel Snap devs say the card game won't go anywhere, as publishers reportedly look to exit “mainstream games” (www.rockpapershotgun.com)
Ubisoft blames “technical error” for showing pop-up ads in Assassin’s Creed (www.theverge.com) angielski
Let’s hope we never see this type of ‘technical error’ again.
Them's Fightin' Herds to end active development without finishing story mode (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Embracer exec says laying off hundreds of people was an 'agonising process,' but that restructuring is 'how we win' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
"We know it's a necessary thing for us to hit our new and needed goals. So overall, good progress and we push on."
Are there too many video game remakes and remasters? (www.eurogamer.net)
Switch Online Is Expanding The N64 Library With Rare's Jet Force Gemini (www.nintendolife.com)
Borderlands company Gearbox buys the rights to beloved indie roguelike Risk of Rain, immediately makes a free-to-play mobile gacha game (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
The first non-Hopoo Risk of Rain game is exactly what many series fans had feared...
PlayStation Portal Review - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of November 12th
I definitely didn’t forget to do a new thread yesterday 👀...
Unity warns of likely layoffs following runtime fee decision (www.destructoid.com)
GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour (www.forbes.com) angielski
While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.
Starfield group fixing Bethesda's bugs say their job is tough as mods feel an afterthought (www.eurogamer.net)
“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
Xbox's new policy — say goodbye to unofficial accessories from November thanks to error '0x82d60002' (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Archive link: archive.ph/ajgMB...