Compared to the business they used to with the Sims, free to play makes it much, much harder to break even. You're hoping to monetize more off of a smaller percentage of your players. 95% of people will never pay in a free to play game, and the Sims games would sell over 10 million units each, handily, plus expansions. But I know that plenty of people would pirate the expansions, so EA probably sees that as a threat that they need to lock behind an internet connection in a server-based game, and they'll likely destroy the series' profitability in the process.
I think this definition gets diluted by those who would call something like a Paradox game incomplete just because there are only so many features you can build for a systems-driven game like that in a few years of development time, and they naturally expand on it over time. But out of dozens of expansions, there are people who say all of them are absolutely necessary to get the "complete" experience when realistically they'd never engage with even half of the expansion features anyway.
They're pivoting to free to play, so that series may have waned as well. I'm sure it's still profitable, but you don't switch to free to play, especially for what is ostensibly a single player game that doesn't rely on player counts, if everything is going well.
They've got 10 games for 2023, and about half of them are either Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy (Kingdom Hearts, btw, is basically still Final Fantasy as it relates to IP). If you're making small bets to find the next big thing to replace your big franchises, you need to make a lot more of those small bets, like publishers used to do 20 years ago and like mid-sized publishers are doing now. Rumor has it they divested themselves of former Eidos studios to make themselves a more attractive purchase for Sony, which fell through but resulted in exclusivity deals like Zenimax did.
Dot com was a bubble because you could call your company anything with a "dot com" on the end and get funding for it without a business strategy. Indie games never got that treatment.
I agree with that person as long as we're continuing to use the qualifier "if anything". AAA studios have thoroughly undiversified themselves and are looking for buyers from the few other companies wealthy enough to afford them, hence Activision's and Zenimax's sales to Microsoft. EA, Square Enix, and Ubisoft were all looking for buyers, and it wouldn't surprise me if Take Two was as well. EA's got sports and Battlefield and little else. Square Enix has Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and little else. Ubisoft has Assassin's Creed and Far Cry and little else. On and on. They spent the last decade not making small bets on new IPs to replace these IPs once their time in the spotlight wanes. It's the very thing that Phil Spencer was talking about in that leaked e-mail about what he sees as a strength of Game Pass and a weakness of how AAAs chose to respond to the changing market.
What's with this focus on the word "complete"? Usually I just see it from people salty about the idea that a game ever gets DLC, but we're rarely seeing the kinds of things we saw in the late 00s and early 2010s where games would have a "missing chapter" or whatever, so if something about modern games is being described by how "complete" they are, it seems like a bad descriptor to me.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines still applies. Asking that question shows a misunderstanding of what a bubble is and also assumes that's what's happening right now is the only thing that will continue to happen into the future, rather than the ebbs and flows that come in any economic conditions. Current economic conditions are affecting a variety of industries right now, not just indie games, which the article acknowledges with regards to layoffs at big AAA studios. The market will only bear X amount of some thing, and spending is slowing, so X has to lower with it. That affects all video games right now, from Fortnite to Shadow Gambit.
I'm trying to make D&D happen since playing Baldur's Gate. Scheduling will be hard. I GMed one tabletop game of Cyberpunk 2020 about ten years ago, and I played in a short campaign of Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, so I'm not totally new to tabletop RPGs, but I'm new to D&D. I'm going to make it happen one way or another though. I'm too deep into D&D Beyond looking up spells and level up guides at this point.
Still deep in Baldur's Gate 3. I did relatively little content in Acts 1 and 2, and they still took me about 20 and 30 hours respectively. I wasn't sure if the game would run out of steam for me if I tried to do every quest that sounded interesting. Now that I'm in Act 3, I know I can end the game whenever I want, but I don't want to yet. I've spent 40 hours in Act 3 already and haven't even gone to the two major quests that I need to do yet to start wrapping things up. After I finish the quest line I'm on (hints for those who know, that will hopefully dodge spoilers: I'm about to go underwater to rescue some folks, and then I have to sabotage a thing after that), I may start wrapping things up, but we'll see.
That's not convoluted in the least bit, nor is it faster or easier to torrent. If you somehow found out about a show but not which service it was on, there's justwatch.com.
I suppose it was ambiguous from the way I phrased it, but just that $35, back in like 2014. The equivalent these days when it's not on sale appears to be $45. Probably the last time I checked in on it was 2019-ish, but I ought to get access if Squadron 42 ever happens. At this rate, assuming it does happen some day, some of the actors they performance captured will be dead by then; plenty of them were getting on in years back when they first announced the cast. It's definitely not the worst $35 I ever spent though.
I've played the $35 buy in, and it has a fun dogfight mode, a fun FPS mode, and a buggy open world sandbox mode. It's more of a space game than Sea of Thieves is a pirate game, and lots of people loved that one even though you can see all it has to offer in an hour and a half.