It’s a complicated issue. In an extremely financialised economy like in western societies, a non insignificant portion of labour was detoured from productive useful work into entertainment and services. This labour is becoming more and more replaceable by NNs which threatens the jobs of bloggers, influencers, artists and the like. Personally, I think the negative sentiment is a mix of these people having privileged access to spread their message and the incompetence of governments legislating so that all these economic sectors don’t eschew workers resulting in massive unemployment and a further degradation of standards of living for a big slice of society.
Taking all that into consideration, I can’t help but feel a slight schadenfreude due to these sectors of society having hijacked the blue collar class struggle and shifting the left towards movements that are predominantly defending bourgeois causes and leaving the working class behind. I happily see more and more artists talking of unionisation and labour movements. Perhaps we can go back to mainstreaming relevant left wing talking points like minimum wages, labour unions, workers rights, et al. Group issues, rather than bourgeois issues that focus mostly on individuals.
Which ones were ever present in humble bundles or other key bundles, what is the age of the purchase vs the age of the game, etc. I agree, a deeper understanding of the data would be great.
Never once claimed to be smart, for someone claiming to be so smart, reading comprehension is not your forte. If minimum A -> B is a pretty easy concept to grasp.
Regarding the purported success of Avowed I just have to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop, so, I’m good. See ya at the next layoff party.
Let’s put the marketing cope for the absolute flop aside (marketing can get anyone to install a game on gamepass for “free”, we’ve seen with HiFi Rush and Veilguard that mimdgame is complete trash at predicting anything).
I like games, what I don’t like is being advertised a deep RPG from one of the old greats, paying 70€ and refunding because I was not served an RPG but a middle of the road first person fantasy shooter with a static world and a bunch of numbers on weapons, that are even more insignificant that the RPG elements of destiny. Logically that creates antibodies towards what was supposed to be a great game and, conversely, ended up as a mindless shooter that would not be out of place among steam greenlight projects.
Avowed is not a good game, it’s a C, painfully mediocre and unimaginative. Coming from Obsidian, with 6y of development and after the ad campaign they did, together with asking for 70€ upront!? Fuck that noise, that is unacceptable. Of course, Microsoft has a great marketing team, so they created a culture war around the game, if you like it, you’re woke, if you don’t, you’re a chud. This poisons the well and destroys the discussion about how one of the dearest RPG developers in the West is now writing characters that sound like they were written by chat GPT. There’s a reason the best RPGs of the past few years come from independent European devs and the best Action games come from Japan… So, keep your dearest mediocre game and your culture wars, Obsidian lost yet another fan and because of people burying their head in the sand, they won’t know about the very large amount they lost… Well, they kinda do, looking at Grounded (not a masterpiece but a mediocre game like Avowed that conversely did not promise the wprld), priced at max 39€, and already for a long time on gamepass, 30k peak, current 3,5k. Avowed, the deep RPG, 19k peak, 2,8k current. Avowed flopped hard. Keep your feelings about the game however you want, it’s quite obvious for anyone with two neurons avowed flopped and is yet another symptom of the “mobile game” trajectory a lot of US American devs are taking due to the subscription model becoming ubiquitous. Strap in for the slop avalanche à lá Netflix.
Clearly Avellone did something right, other than the great pentiment (which started as a rogue project), they have yet to release anything of note since he left.
Resounding success, barely anyone touched it outside game pass.
The publicly available data for those 6M comes from mimdgame, which is as reliable as divination.
There is a large contingent of people who don’t like romance mechanics in their RPGs, often for the reasons she states in the article
Give me an example of an Obsidian RPG romance option where the character becomes a yes person? My argument is that reason is bullshit, either that or we hear it from the director that they believe Obsidian doesn’t have the talent to write such characters. You know what, that actually makes sense, the talent is not there, clearly.
They should change their motto to: Obsidian, making mobile games for simpletons
Translation: Numbers look like shait otherwise we’d brag about them.
It’s always a bit of a letdown when you see a character who has a clear personality, and goals and interests, and suddenly, in the service of this romance that the player has embarked on with them, they now become the player’s yes-person
Looks at Dragon age Origins and Morrigan… How do these people, with 0 knowledge of the actual medium they work in, get to leadership positions? Was it a tokenism thing? To see how the brilliant Avelone got pushed out years ago, and clearly incompetent people are now promoted is truly baffling .
I gave you plenty of evidence, you just decided to ignore it because for some ungodly reason you attached your personal value to it.
70€ for a PC it better be better than just meh and deliver what was promised by the adverts. I work to have those 70€, if a company lies and overcharges, sure as shit it’s a 1. They advertised a completely different game than what was delivered. And this is after 6y.
You’re basically the equivalent to a Taylor Swift fan arguing with people who don’t equate her music to Bach or Brahms…
Literally the first dialogue with Garryck. It’s like it was Va’d by different people depending on your answers.
“That’s the imperial envoy you’re talking to, show some respect” - lol perfect deadpan delivery, emotional delivery is for losers.
And that’s before mentioning all the other missing perks of past obsidian games, like the interactivity of the world. It’s like a single player shooter stuck in an MMO world.