As for RTS, keep an eye out for Tempest Rising, a Command and Conquer spiritual successor, that's even headed to consoles. With Microsoft successfully bringing Age of Empires to console, I don't think there's any need to promote PC as the place where RTSes live.
Personally, I think if RTSes are to ever be mainstream again, they're going to have to reinvent themselves, but in the meantime, RTSes doing what they've always done will make peace with the size of the market that exists for them these days.
Layoffs have already hit this and other industries, including Microsoft, regardless of buyouts, and since this deal is fresh, it will likely happen again in the near future. But there's no need for them to squeeze value out of what they bought. They can revive dormant IPs just by making sure they run on modern platforms and putting them on Game Pass. That alone is a tremendous amount of value that Activision couldn't get regardless of how much they squeezed.
And a lot of people who leave or are let go in these situations go on to form new studios. If you think about it too, it doesn't make much sense that the jobs would disappear. The industry will support a certain number of games being produced, and someone's got to make them still.
A worse outcome to me still seems to me to be a world where Sony is uncontested in its console space.
Trusts would be a very extreme case of consolidation, and if Microsoft were to qualify (they're close), it's certainly not because of its presence in video games.
I don't think I'm being charitable at all when I say these old games are dormant IPs. Star Wars Episode 3 was only a handful of years old when Disney bought Lucasfilm, and they were still making all sorts of merch and other products. Actually dormant IPs would be things like Metal Arms and Tenchu. They're not powerhouse franchises, but they're fodder for porting to modern platforms and bolstering Game Pass. Activision is reluctant to revive any of this stuff because it's money that could be spent on Call of Duty.
As to your last paragraph, it was inevitable, but we've been slowly trending toward getting that diversity back in the industry. It may not hit your town specifically, but the Devolvers, Paradoxes, TinyBuilds, Embracers, and Anna Purnas of the world are finding success catering to the customers the mammoth AAA companies abandoned.
After Baldur's Gate 3, contrasted against what EA's Bioware has output lately, I'll bet Microsoft is happy to let their RPG studios continue doing what made them a success in the first place.
Nether Realm Studios, Naughty Dog, Angel Studios (Rockstar San Diego), and Relic, without thinking about it too long, but there are also all kinds of reasons why a studio's quality would struggle to hold up over long periods of time regardless of being purchased, and even then it can be very subjective.
Didn't Troika and Black Isle essentially lead to the creation of Obsidian and InXile? You're basically listing the same studios multiple times. Plus there has been a lot of communication between Bioware and CD Projekt, leading to talent moving between those studios, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true for Larian.
The big players don't bother innovating anymore, which is why they don't see any other option except to sell to someone bigger than them. Meanwhile, publishers that used to be small are getting much larger by offering the breadth of games that the biggest publishers haven't for 20 years. To think that things can only get worse is to ignore what's happening right in front of us.
Bioware and CD Projekt worked together on the first Witcher, because that game ran on Bioware's engine. The new director for Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk's sequel came from Bioware, and he said in an interview that that past relationship is why they reached out to him for the position, insinuating it's not the first time it's happened and that the two companies had continued to be in contact over the years. Given CD Projekt's last two games' similarities to Bethesda's formula, it wouldn't surprise me if there was overlap with the developers of those studios as well; and the same extends to Larian and the inspirations they've clearly taken from old Bioware.
as far as I know Troika just disappeared along with it’s developers
It's possible that all but about 5 developers from Troika left the industry after the company folded, but I'd call that the least likely scenario. In my own career (only briefly in games), people who liked working with me have reached out to hire me from previous working relationships between companies, and you tend to see a lot of the same people from job to job as a result.
Alright, no offense, but I think you need to expand your horizons, lol.
The last 5 games (all of which were post-acquisition) Nether Realm put out have all been multi-million sellers in a genre that struggles to do that, and their past 2 games are only second fiddle to Smash for number of copies sold. They're the only ones who figured out how to do single player content in a fighting game that interests people enough to buy those games for that content, and while Capcom and Bandai Namco both tried, I think you'll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks they did it better.
Red Dead Redemption 1 and 2 were both post-acquisition, and regardless of my feelings of RDR2 (which is still that it is not a bad game by any means), both games are critical and commercial smash hits.
Relic has had very successful Warhammer 40k and Company of Heroes releases over the past 20 years.
Naughty Dog has made far more games post-acquisition than pre-acquisition, and some of their best-selling, highest-rated games have been on the more recent end of things. Perhaps you've heard of Uncharted and The Last of Us?
It's an incentive for devs to put their back catalogues to EGS, after they just laid off 800 employees because they spend too much money. Is it just me, or does everyone besides Epic know what the problem is with EGS?
I get the sense that people still won't take kindly to exclusives that they publish, which we'll see when Alan Wake 2 comes out. For me, they still don't answer the question of why I should shop with them instead of Steam if the same game is on both stores. There are answers to that question, but they think the problem is that we need to get all of our games on the same launcher.
You may want to know that Ubisoft’s Rocksmith® 2014 Edition will be de-listed from Steam and other online stores after October 23rd, 2023 which is one week from this post date. This is a game that makes learning to play the guitar like Guitar Hero/Rockband, which can score you or let you slowly practice a part with scrolling...
I mean...they're removing it from sale because they have a more egregious business model to sell you instead that no one wants. And that last qualifier you added about alternative channels being illegal is the problem, because we have no measures to preserve things like this.
I thought I'd have put the game down by now, but I'm still playing Baldur's Gate 3. I'm now deep into Act 2 on my second playthrough with the Ghost Recon team. Currently everyone (Astarion, Lae'zel, one hireling, and myself) are level 5 fighter battle masters/level 3 rogue assassins. Since just hitting level 5 fighter, everyone now has access to an Extra Attack, and you can combine that with Sneak Attack, Action Surge, Trip Attack, and Precise Attack to wipe out entire encounters in one or two turns. So far, the only difficulties with this team came at the end of Act 1 (since I was low level in two classes instead of high level in one of them) and at a particular Act 2 quest where you have to defend a portal against dozens of enemies (I just didn't have enough crowd control for that many enemies, so I broke out Gale for that fight). Other than that, I'm basically only swapping out my hireling for character-related quests, like the one I'm doing right now for Shadowheart. At level 12, I should be level 6 fighter/level 6 rogue with everyone in the squad, and we'll storm through Baldur's Gate.
Other than that, I started playing some fighting games again, and I'm not as rusty as I thought. The usual suspects of Skullgirls, Guilty Gear Strive, and Street Fighter 6. I'd probably be playing more Mortal Kombat 1 if not for performance issues and the inability to decline matches against wi-fi players; it's a shame, because the game is otherwise pretty great.
I haven't made much progress in the System Shock remake, but I am really enjoying it. I discovered the Resident Evil remake pretty late, and it's a shame how few of those games there were for so many years, by which I mean that style of RE game, not games with the words "Resident Evil" in the title. Still, we seem to have plenty of them these days, which is great to see. System Shock was 94, and Resident Evil was 96. I'd be surprised to learn that RE was inspired by System Shock, but perhaps both of them took similar inspiration from Alone in the Dark. Hopefully that remake early next year is good too.
When in doubt, check the tooltips to see what a thing means and what it does. Even the tooltips have tooltips sometimes. I do really wish they broke down the to-hit percentages underneath the cursor in combat, because that would go a long way toward helping the player understand the underlying math.
I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho...
They can also be some of the best, most engaging, and longest-lasting forms of entertainment
Emphasis mine. Longest-lasting is the one thing live service games are guaranteed not to be, which he gets to later.
The thing that really truly makes a live service game a live service are the updates.
Games got updates before live services, and games today that aren't live services get updates.
Then the author acknowledges the existence of expansions and patches before live service games but doesn't see this as being at odds with his definition. Expansions certainly didn't take "several years" to release back then, like he said, and they still don't take that long now (they still exist, which he also acknowledges). While the updates that came along with World of WarCraft were large and significant, it also wasn't out of the ordinary for PC games to add content like maps and modes for free, no subscription required, because just like today, new content drops bring players back to check it out.
Magic: The Gathering and Dice Throne get regular updates. These are tabletop games. Are they live services? Of course not. They're selling you a product, not providing you a service. The regular work the developers do on those games are just R&D that any producer goes through to make a product. The "service" of live service games are that they're providing the server for you to play on alongside those updates, but the server code is just a part of the product that they withheld from you in order to make you dependent on them and eventually have to spend money. Live services are not services; they're just bad products, because they didn't give you everything you paid for.
The author then discusses all of the manipulation that comes along with live service design, and I too find that gross, but from my perspective, that's just part of the bad product that they built. Chicken and egg. Customers were perfectly capable of the technical requirements of running a vanilla WoW server, and it was only Blizzard's legal department that stopped them.
I think the industry as a whole should be finding a better way to preserve these games and also to provide some legal avenue for paying customers...to continue playing them even when the publisher has thrown in the towel.
Exactly. This is the problem. These companies won't do this unless somehow forced though, because that dependency on their servers means you have to play the game with the lengthy grind that they dictate so that you stay subscribed longer (even though the house rules on the community server speed up the grind to be more fun), stay online longer through manipulation, and keep getting opportunities to spend money in their cash shop. Even games that aren't monetized like a live service do this nonsense, probably out of some attempt to prevent piracy, but it just ends up just making the game worse along with it. I no longer buy or play games that are dependent on an external server; even this definition has some blurred lines with games like Hitman.
It's okay to make a multiplayer game that people may only play a handful of times before putting down, or a single player game that you play through once that has a deathmatch mode attached to it. Some of the most successful multiplayer games of all time, including ones that are still popular today, started as great single player games with multiplayer attached to it. If it really gets its hooks in people but needs some touching up, put out some patches and expansions for it. It doesn't need to keep getting new content forever, and thinking that a game can or should do that is what leads to all of this nonsense. Give us the servers. Give us LAN. Give us direct IP connections. Give us same-screen multiplayer. Sever the dependency on a server that I can't control, or I'm not buying.
It's also a compelling argument for me to not buy the game, though, because it puts an expiration date on the game. Baldur's Gate 3 sure had no problem moving copies even though it's got LAN, direct IP connections, split-screen, and it's available DRM-free. By contrast, I could have been into Mythforce, but multiplayer is tied to a server in that game, so no thanks. Cherry-picked examples? Sure. But it still doesn't make the server-tying any more compelling for the consumer.
I agree on all of the above. But they still don't provide anything resembling a service. They just call these things live services to disguise bad products.
The money to fund those updates has to come from somewhere, and the incentive systems behind those games leads to, inevitably, the game being wiped from the face of the earth. Plus you lose access to the earlier versions of the game, which may have been better; if not for you, then for someone else.
I'd still argue that it's worse than giving the customers the ability to roll out that history. When your incentive is subscription fees, then you're trying to keep people playing longer, which means making the game grindier. At that point, it's trivial to add hours and hours of content, because it takes so long to make the numbers go up. World of WarCraft may have lasted 20 years, but I can't legally play City of Heroes anymore.
They kind of can't buy any competitors at this point. They got through this acquisition by the skin of their teeth and have to cool it, and after all that, I doubt this leads to a future where they've got a larger market share than PlayStation. There's also just far too much competition in the gaming space for them to approach a monopoly. Epic couldn't will their store into superiority over Steam, especially when they're not doing anything to solve problems for their customers, and Microsoft still has to make good products to get you to buy them too.
That's far more cynical than I can meet you at, and it's probably why the merger isn't "opposed by everyone". Microsoft is already dancing right up to the line of antitrust, though I suspect that if they're broken up, the video game division remains in one piece, not several.
It's still an improper invocation of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish regardless; only Call of Duty came along with this sale, so by your own logic, they still can't have a monopoly; there are several other franchises, owned by several other corporate entities that Microsoft doesn't own, that would fit on that list of yours; and IMO, Resistance was never good anyway, so if they want to make their own Call of Duty, they're starting from scratch, and they've got a decade to figure it out.
If you bring up Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, especially since we're talking about Microsoft, that is not what it means, and your definition has issues, because if you're buying a big company for a lot of money, the last thing you want to do is extinguish it.
But if Microsoft did something so nefarious to Windows gaming, enough people could switch to Linux to punish them for it, since the last 5 years were spent making nearly every game work on Linux regardless. Microsoft tried to use their position to get you to buy every game through their store, and the market rejected it. That 90% they have currently is now afforded the privilege to be fickle with Windows usage, when before they didn't have the option.
In the 80s and 90s, third party exclusives were a necessity because you were making games for sets of hardware that were capable of dramatically different things.
I tried Fedora briefly before switching back to Ubuntu. It seemed like it was still forcing updates in a Microsoft-esque way that Ubuntu does not. On Ubuntu, most updates can be applied without a restart, but Fedora seemed to bundle a bunch of updates together without really telling me what was in them, and I believe it had an install step during shutdown or startup? Which is another thing I hated about Windows. Some of this could be false, as I have an atrocious memory, and some of it could have been user error, but the first foot that it put forward reminded me too much of Windows. On Ubuntu, I just disable snaps.
Apple's got bigger problems when it comes to gaming than just whether or not Call of Duty comes out for Mac that year, and those problems are of Apple's own creation.
They were capable of dramatically different things. Perhaps they also had those contracts, but Genesis couldn't do mode 7, and the sounds that came out of the SNES were dramatically different. There were cases where a game would come out on each system under the same name but developed by two different companies with two completely different designs, because their capabilities were so different.
But I use the same software center in Kubuntu without those restrictions. If it's easy to toggle that off, I could have Fedora in my back pocket as an alternative for some day where Ubuntu gets too egregious with their Snaps, but so far, it's easier to just stick to Kubuntu.
Nintendo had a problem to solve back then, which was shovelware, so they incentivized fewer, higher-quality releases. Compared to today's market and the means we have to sift through shovelware, it was basically the equivalent of martial law to get the market on track. But for many years, competing consoles were just capable of dramatically different things. That tended to even out in the 6th gen, but even then, many devs would only release on PS2 because it cost too much money to make a game multiplatform, so you'd just target the one with the largest install base. Take a look at the 5th gen for how dramatically different the capabilities were between the Saturn, N64, and PlayStation; two of them were on CDs, one was on cartridges; Saturn sucked at 3D and pushed FMVs; PlayStation had a weird "Z-buffer" problem where vertices were really swimmy and shapes would wobble; N64 lacked the storage space to have many textures at all; draw distance and raw processing power varied wildly; on and on.
The big publishers' moneymaking franchises have plateaued or declined without anything to replace them, and they're looking to sell their companies before those franchises stop making money. EA and Disney have a partnership via Star Wars that could work out toward making an acquisition or merger more affordable. Disney would probably have a hard time growing by acquiring more television or movie studios, but video games are in a different industry. Disney might see acquiring a giant like EA to be acquiring "experts" at how to actually run a video game business compared to Disney's failed past efforts.
Those are the reasons I can think of. EA was rumored to have hit up every enormous company like this to buy them out, including Apple and Amazon, so it doesn't surprise me that Disney was on that list.
Video games aren't in danger of becoming a monopoly, but that kind of measure seems more aimed at preventing foreigners from having too much influence.
FPS games are in dire straits if you like the kind of stuff we got 10-20 years ago, but so many other genres are thriving right now. Give it 5 years, and the indie scene will likely up the FPS market that AAA forgot; right now, they're chasing late 90s arena shooters rather than the slightly-slower, somewhat-grounded-in-some-sort-of-reality action blockbusters we got in the early 2000s through the 2010s.
And Halo Infinite's multiplayer was almost what I wanted out of a Halo game. Better than what Halo had between 3 and 5.
How many games came out in 2023? How many of those do Microsoft own? How much do you think that second number changes over the next 10 years? There are so, so, so many video game companies out there that Microsoft doesn't own.
I haven't checked in on Counter-Strike in a long time, but we can and should call out shitty business practices designed to exploit gambling addiction to make you play when you don't want to. I'm not equipped to assess whether CS is designed that way, but gaming in general is not predatory and addicting in this way.
You get no advantage from the battle passes in Street Fighter 6 either, but they're still designed in such a way to keep you chasing the rewards. It can be scummy without being pay to win. But again, I don't know what hooks CS2 has. Last I played CS:GO was when it was $15 and had no microtransactions.
No, I'm saying I've seen people who keep playing games with this kind of battle pass, loot box, or other reward system when they clearly stopped enjoying the game, the same way any addict keeps doing something they know is harmful to themselves. Systems like these (and again, I have no idea what kind CS2 implements, but it's a modern online live service game, so it's probably in the ballpark) just want you to be a body in the online queue so that other players have someone to play with, and they chase that goal through nefarious means.
But because they have no impact on the gameplay, the onus is entirely on the player whether they want it or not
So, Microsoft now owns Activision Blizzard. How will this affect the rest of the industry? (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Epic Launches Program to Pay Devs to Bring Old Games to Epic Games Store - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
It's an incentive for devs to put their back catalogues to EGS, after they just laid off 800 employees because they spend too much money. Is it just me, or does everyone besides Epic know what the problem is with EGS?
ROCKSMITH 2014 LEAVING STORES - Ubisoft (www.ubisoft.com) angielski
You may want to know that Ubisoft’s Rocksmith® 2014 Edition will be de-listed from Steam and other online stores after October 23rd, 2023 which is one week from this post date. This is a game that makes learning to play the guitar like Guitar Hero/Rockband, which can score you or let you slowly practice a part with scrolling...
Alan Wake 2 will have free and "significant" DLC (www.eurogamer.net)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of October 15th
Whatcha playing!...
2022’s best indie game hits 200,000 Steam reviews at 98% positive, and it’s on sale (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Live Service And The Decline Of Gaming (www.youtube.com) angielski
I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho...
Microsoft closes $69 billion Activision Blizzard deal after Britain's nod (www.reuters.com)
It's official, Microsoft now owns ABK (news.xbox.com)
Two (three?) games free on Epic Games - Blazing Sails & Q.U.B.E. ULTIMATE BUNDLE angielski
Blazing Sails...
Counter-Strike 2 ending support for macOS and older PCs (www.destructoid.com) angielski
Offering a 'legacy version' of CS:GO instead.
Disney's CEO Is Reportedly Being Urged to Consider Turning Company Into a 'Gaming Giant' [and buying EA] (me.ign.com) angielski
Sony Confirms PS5 Slim for This Holiday Season (www.ign.com)
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It (www.macrumors.com) angielski