The ways those two businesses function are dramatically different. Microsoft has a near monopoly of the operating system that powers gaming PCs, and they couldn't turn their store into the Amazon of PC gaming, not for lack of trying, because Steam already offers customers what they want in a far better way and any attempt to close off their operating system is met with market resistance. There's also the fact that the games market is so broad and diverse that Game Pass and Microsoft's stores are nowhere close to being the one-stop shop that an Amazon or a Walmart have historically been, and it's why they're nowhere close to capturing "the bulk of potential customers". They've got about 25-30M subscribers last I checked, which is substantial, but it doesn't even come close to the 100M+ monthly active users on Steam, let alone the wider games market. (Steam is easy to cite, because they make more of their data public, but obviously there are substantial pieces of the market on PlayStation and elsewhere.)
What developers and publishers get from Game Pass and PS+ is a lump sum that devs/pubs project will make up for the potential of lost sales, and if it doesn't, that the word of mouth from offering the game with those services will make up for it in sales outside of those subscription services. If the offer is too low, they don't take the deal. So the subscription service is either a subsidy or marketing or both, but that's only if the figure they're offered is high enough. Saying that Devolver or TinyBuild benefited from that boon in ramping up subscription offerings is one thing; in fact, it may have ripple effects that help them out long-term, as people are more familiar with their brands through subscription services now than they would have been otherwise. But if they're truly "suffering" from those deals being less generous, that's just going back to the old investing adage of "When the tide goes out, you can always tell who was skinny dipping", or to put it another way, they weren't adequately gauging their risk alongside a good deal that was never going to last forever. Judging by the article, Devolver will likely be just fine and TinyBuild is more of a question mark. I honestly had no idea TinyBuild was publicly traded. Both are making sensible long-term bets, at least for the most part...in TinyBuild's case, I hope they didn't invest too much into the likes of RawMen. Both companies were contrasted against Team17, who kept more consistently conservative projections.
You could spend all of your free time for one month playing Starfield and have finished it for $17. You could functionally "rent" 17 games for $1 each to get a feel for each of them, one of them being Starfield, to decide which ones you want to stick with. You could beat two smaller games each month and spend the rest of your time playing Starfield, and four months later still come out ahead of the $70 Starfield would have cost you. There are lots of ways that math works out for you to come out ahead.
Baldur's Gate 3 came out less than a month ago, and I already know at least two people on my friends list who've beaten it, plus several others who put over 60 hours into it in the past two weeks, according to Steam. There are plenty of people who could get through Starfield in one month for $17.
You could. But that's also if it's the only game you play and you don't boot up Sea of Stars, Quake, Halo, Goldeneye, Yakuza, Unraveled, or what have you. I don't have a Game Pass subscription, but the math on it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people.
I think I agree with him. It's not just that it looks good and that it's cinematic; it's that it brings what they were doing well already to that cinematic standard that we got from the big studios for years. But those big studios were frequently sacrificing the depth of the RPG in the process. Mass Effect 1 had a full character sheet and a bunch of mechanics that never really came together. Mass Effect 2 had fairly simple skill trees. That series was good for lots of reasons, but in order to make each sequel in only 2 years, they threw away what didn't work rather than iterating on it to fix what didn't work. BG3 is iterating on Larian's previous successes and still letting us get that cinematic experience from Mass Effect. It's definitely what caught my attention when it was previously barely on my radar.
Every time Irenicus spoke, I just wanted him to keep talking.
I have no idea what level >12 magic looks like in 5e and why it gets so challenging, other than what little I know of Wish, which is in BG2, but magic was a menace in the under level 12 area of BG1 and 2 also. Just frequent spells that would AoE stun your entire party for the next 10 rounds, which may as well have been an instant kill.
I don’t know the last time I’ve ever finished a game like this just to go right back into it.
Elden Ring is this game for a lot of people, myself included. I'm early in BG3, but just like with Elden Ring, I'm already thinking about other things I'd like to try on subsequent playthroughs.
Yes. I just have a compulsion that most people don't where I feel like I need to see the earlier games in a series in order to get the proper perspective on the later ones. For instance, with returning characters, winks and nods, etc. It's orders of magnitude more approachable than BG1 and 2, which were harder to get into than Planescape: Torment, IMO. And at least right out of the gate, they don't expect you to have any foreknowledge of what came earlier. I'll bet they'll drop that lore as I get closer to the in-game location, Baldur's Gate, because you do not start there, and I understand that, like the first game, you don't see that city until toward the end.
I finished Baldur's Gate 2 and moved on to Baldur's Gate 3.
Baldur's Gate 2 still has, or possibly invented, a lot of common RPG trappings that carry through to this day, but it's still very dated in some key ways that sucked the air out of the room, which was a shame, because the bones are solid. Sometimes there are just obscure knowledge checks against the rules of D&D or the monsters therein that make the game unsolvable unless you know the specific answer. Sometimes it's a monster that can only be defeated by +3 weapons or better; sometimes it's magic that can only be countered by specific counter spells. At the start of combat, enemy spells seemingly cast nearly instantly, but the defense spells to beat them take several combat rounds to cast, can be interrupted, or otherwise are ineffective unless you've already cast them before combat started, which means you're save scumming a lot as a necessity. Not only that, but the game throws so much combat at you. I ran out of patience for its combat, after playing through BG1 the month prior, sometime around chapter 4 or 5 out of 7 and just threw it on "Story" mode, which is basically god mode. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed the decision making. I just wish the designers had more restraint when it came to combat encounters and that they properly signaled these countermeasures, but perhaps they were trying to sell strategy guides.
Baldur's Gate 3 is difficult to put down compared to its predecessors; not just because 5e is easier to understand; not just because the game goes to great lengths to explain its entire rule set; not just because I can avoid repetitive strain on my wrist by using a controller. Though separated by 20 years of game design paradigms, they're remarkably similar games, as they should be, but this one just excels in every area it should. The presentation is phenomenal, all the way through the narrator that infuses some Planescape: Torment DNA into the game that wasn't so much of a thing in the past two BG games. The combat encounters have more restraint; I took on a goblin camp from the inside out and basically faced wave after wave of goblin patrols, and still it felt less taxing than the typical BG2 dungeon, with more systemic ways to interact with the environment and just find clever solutions to things. I just feel like a damn genius and a sense of exhilaration when I get through a combat encounter, as opposed to having a sigh of relief that it's over like I did in the last two games.
I highly recommend Mercenary Kings. It's like Mega Man combined with Contra combined with Monster Hunter. There's a really satisfying loop of fun missions where you get upgrade materials so that you can upgrade, strategize, and equip for more fun missions.
For roguelikes, I'd highly recommend Streets of Rogue and Vagante. The former is wackier and a more open sandbox; the latter is a better challenge and perhaps a bit more satisfying to beat, but both are phenomenal. Streets of Rogue is sort of a twin stick shooter with tons of classes that play very differently, often compared to Deus Ex; and Vagante is like Spelunky crossed with Dark Souls.
Other than that, those Quake remasters have split-screen for co-op and versus multiplayer. A friend and I just started Quake 1 recently.
As a bonus, all of the above are also online multiplayer.
The business these days is that keeping people online provides value to other players who are considering being online. A big online population means new players have reasons to jump in and play. How do they make sure there's a large population? They create psychological hooks to make sure you keep coming back, rather than making a multiplayer game that's satisfying, that you could play with friends whenever you wanted with small group sizes and your own servers. Because the business is to monetize that pool of players over and over again rather than to keep making new experiences via new games every couple of years.
It is a bad deal. I got into a game called Fantasy Strike. It's a fighting game that boils the genre down to basics and gets you right into the fun. I loved it. It didn't sell a ton of copies. So they updated it to be free-to-play; everything gameplay-related in the game was free (with an asterisk...more on that later) and they monetized it with a bunch of the live service trappings and nonsense that bothered you enough to make this post. Limited time purchases for cosmetics, subscriptions, etc. The thing that made me stop playing it was that they added a replay viewer where, much like in Street Fighter 5 and 6, you can just watch anyone else's replays, including your own, but that replay viewer was locked behind a subscription fee. You know, the feature that people use to get better at the game and see what they did wrong. Monthly subscription. It's a horrendous deal and made me put the game down. You don't get to charge me a recurring fee for something that lives on my own hard drive and gets calculated by my own computer. Likewise, these live service games are all things that could be run without their servers, with private servers or LAN, but they want you to keep seeing these opportunities to buy these ephemeral cosmetics where both they and the game itself are designed to self-destruct once the game stops making money.