The cheapest buy-in some years ago was like $35, and everything above that is like bigger ships and insurance on those ships if they get destroyed, IIRC.
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.
You don't think Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, and CoD DMZ are already the top three of the extraction shooter fad? It doesn't necessarily need to be replaced if the players already found their games in the fad and no new entries can successfully launch. Dota, LoL, and Smite are still around and thriving, but no one's making MOBAs anymore.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
But there are so many features built in to Steam that if even one or two of them are important to you, there's less of a reason to ever default to someone else doing the same thing but less so. Like with GOG, they don't match Steam feature for feature, but DRM-free and easy preservation of previous versions of games are good selling points that matter to people.
The game industry did get that much larger, but that's on the backs of only a few (non-Capcom) games that sell to the type of person who only buys a couple of games per year at most. Hardly any company is selling as many copies as Call of Duty sells year after year.
Two streaming services is less competitive than the 5 or 6 major ones we have right now, you can choose them a la carte in a way you never could with cable, and even if you felt compelled to have all of them at the ad free tier, you're paying less than cable and getting no commercials. Video game prices have lagged behind inflation, not even kept up with them, and the game you want will probably have a substantial sale 3 months after release anyway. It just seems like an incredibly thin premise to justify piracy.
That person just said in another comment that they have the money. Before you even get to piracy, there's also the option of purchasing and playing the games that you feel are priced fairly, because that incentivizes more of that to be made at those prices, and those games typically need your money more anyway. As for adjusting prices for different territories, I'm no expert on it, but I understand it might be related to people in stronger economies buying games from cheaper regions with something as simple as a VPN to get a game for a fraction of the price, which at any kind of scale means that that game needs to sell substantially more copies to break even.
You were morally outraged enough to decide that this justifies piracy, but this is Capcom we're talking about, not EA. From what I can see, they're not making their money off of gambling mechanics like Ultimate Team. They're talking about raising prices on products that are generally seen as quality and charging what they believe those products to be worth, even saying that this will allow them to raise staff salaries to retain talent. I don't condone piracy, but I was asking you what line you believed they crossed when price increases are just inevitable for anything that costs money, and I personally don't really see any scummy business practices attached to this. Beyond that, I'd also argue that you have a greater effect on the market when you just don't pirate or play those games that offend you at all and instead direct your time and money to a game that could use it more. That means they make more of the latter and the former is less successful for doing something you didn't like. Word of mouth of the games you played and the lack of word of mouth for the ones you didn't has an effect on the market as well.
You're free to do as you please, but if the game wasn't worth it enough to pay for, pirating it still does them more of a solid than if you had bought and played something else. Let's say the game is Starfield. Sure, they didn't get your $90 if you pirated it, but if you're contributing to discussions about it, it keeps people thinking about it, and especially if you have positive things to say about it, you end up encouraging other people to buy it, which means that their business strategy of selling the game at $90 CAD (or any other strategy you decided justified piracy) is still that much more effective, and they'll do it again, because the game sold at that price. But maybe Broken Roads comes out for cheaper and you get your RPG fix there instead. They could use your dollar more, and each sale counts way more toward a future where that team gets to make another game after this one. If your word of mouth instead convinces someone to pick up Broken Roads (which you also hypothetically paid for), you're contributing toward encouraging more games to come out at that price point. Both games are going to take up your finite time, so both your time and your money influence what survives in the market.
They're all trying to have enough to watch to keep you subscribed all the time, which means they have an incentive to keep making more good shows. But there's no world where 5 streaming services will have something I'll want to watch every month, so it's pretty easy to just cancel until you've got a handful of shows to go through on that service. Then you subscribe for a month or two and come back later. That's way, way better than a local television monopoly like cable typically had, with channels you couldn't opt out of for a cheaper bill, that still forced commercials on you regardless of your exorbitant bill.
I loved that first Wargroove, and I held off on playing it for so long because I thought the changes they made to commanders wouldn't be to my liking. It turns out I actually prefer this to Advance Wars, as it solves a lot of problems with pacing and balance that Advance Wars had. It also had absolutely none of the bullshit that Advance Wars and (at least the old) Fire Emblem games had in their later missions where they'd just spawn new units out of nowhere and wipe out your forces with no ability for you to know it was coming without reloading the save. So imagine my surprise when I went back to read reviews, and they criticized Wargroove 1 for both of those things. I can only sit here scratching my head, wondering if the game I played was very different after patches than what people played at launch, because those were egregious issues in Advance Wars 20 years earlier as well.
But you get it with no compromises on MacOS, so why would they discount the price there? This is buy once, play "anywhere" (anywhere that's good for Apple). You don't pay less for a game you only play on a Steam Deck either.
I think the Switch and the Steam Deck have shown that portable games are worth every bit as much as non-portable, but in both of these cases, they output easily to the larger experience at home. I think Apple is providing that too. $60 still makes sense to me, since you're always buying the MacOS version which includes a mobile copy, which you said was acceptable.
It's not a Mac OS copy and an iOS copy any more than I have a Steam Deck copy of a game and a desktop copy of a game. From what I can tell, it's the same thing. Obviously this is beneficial for Apple keeping you in their ecosystem, but this serves the same function. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why you'd have an iPhone if you don't have a Mac, but I know plenty of people do.
Wait, so you do have a Macbook. Maybe it's not M1, but if you enjoy that part of the ecosystem, you'll probably upgrade to one at some point. At which point, that gives you a "Mac copy" of the game too.
Heh, honestly, this is the problem with Apple's value proposition when it comes to gaming. You'll see elsewhere in this thread that I don't think Apple has shown they know how to really make a solid gaming offering, and this is a large part of why.
It didn't even occur to me that this was a result of the patch, but I did notice it start happening recently. When the patch rolled out, I was in a spot in the game where all of my things were taken from me anyway, so I guess I didn't notice it initially when it first started.
It's been a damn good summer for fighting games too, and arguably the best year for all of video games. I've still got probably 10 hours to go in Baldur's Gate 3, haven't touched Starfield or Phantom Liberty yet, and I'm also looking forward to Broken Roads. There's not enough time to get to all this good stuff, and there's still Wargroove 2 coming in a week and a half.
As for the long term, it plans to evaluate a new partner for matchmaking and to adjust Payday 3's reliance on online services. That could mean that Starbreeze will remove the game's always online requirement, but the statement does not explicitly say that will be the case.
When it doesn't explicitly say that will be the case, I doubt that it will be. But hopefully we're reaching the turning point where games will stop with the always-online nonsense.
I had a hard time making it through this video. This guy's shtick is grating. At 1.5x speed, there's still tons of pregnant pauses for where he thinks I should be laughing, I guess. However, this is a point I agree with:
[In a segment about asking "the right kinds of questions":] "What, rather than scope, do we really want more of?"
Baldur's Gate 3 would be just as fulfilling of an RPG at half the length. I'm in Act 3, about 70 hours in, and I skipped a lot of stuff along the way knowing how much game I had ahead of me. Further still, there's a lot of stuff I didn't do along that same way because my character build didn't open those avenues or because I just didn't know it was there. It's a very dense and deep game, and that's what's important to me rather than the length. It's important to me that they continue to do what they've done well in Divinity: Original Sin with all of those tiny interactibles and the way all of the systems work together to allow you to come up with your own solutions. The raised standard, to me, is that they managed to iterate on that with Mass Effect level production value in the conversation system where you don't just get a story that's written well or voiced well but also performed well. On top of that, the game brings back old standards that this industry mostly forgot in that it has LAN and direct IP connections as well as being available DRM-free so that the game or its multiplayer features don't have an expiration date attached to them. I didn't necessarily need this game to be 100 hours long in order to get the enjoyment I'm getting out of it.
And the thing that the author of this video seemed to miss is that several of the quote reply tweets to that thread were from AAA developers, which is where the IGN video came from (which wasn't even the first video to bring this up). The same thing happened when AAA devs behind the likes of Assassin's Creed were publicly criticizing aspects of Elden Ring as though people weren't fed up with the kind of experience that Assassin's Creed provides, and it led to that famous UI barf mock-up of Elden Ring. Elden Ring, like Baldur's Gate 3, only happened because its team iterated on something smaller, and it too avoids lousy monetization schemes.
The problem with a 500 hour game is pacing, finding natural calls to action and conclusions to those story arcs. And the next game that comes out in a week offers a fulfilling experience in a different way, and it's nice to see a breadth of different great experiences rather than just one really long one. I say that as someone who's put 1500 hours into my favorite game. I'm not necessarily wishing for Baldur's Gate 3 to be shorter, only that Baldur's Gate 3's scope could have been scaled back without affecting how much I enjoy it or how much value I got out of it. I would really like to see a batch of D&D 5e games on this engine the way there was a batch of Infinity Engine games back in the late 90s and early 00s, and even those games were much shorter than BG3. In general, I'd say games over a certain budget threshold sacrifice a lot of enjoyment in order to make their games bigger and/or longer, and games like BG3 and Elden Ring are the exception, so in most cases, I'd rather big games like Halo Infinite or Assassin's Creed scale down to the smaller experiences they used to be.
I don't think it is a completely different discussion. The length of the game affects length of development time, the available budget that they can spend on a game, etc. There are all sorts of effects on development, which circles back to me not feeling the new Halos or the new Assassin's Creeds are as good anymore. I hardly consider length of a game at all in how I feel about it or prefer it, as long as feels like it should be that long, which comes back to pacing again.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it’s unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.
Of the two options that Phil says Game Pass encourages (and I agree with his analysis), one is the opposite of scummy and something the market could use more of.
This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices.
Two decades ago, games were $50 which, due to switching to discs, was a price reduction over cartridges, so this point in time is a bit cherry picked. But even rolling from there, a 300% hike in base prices would mean games cost $200, and that's just not true.
They can still have similar production value and not be open world games that take 80 hours to finish. It just makes far more sense to me to bet small with tons of projects than to bet big with only a few, because then you'll find the PUBGs and the DOTAs that Phil is talking about eventually.
That wouldn't be the base price; the base price is $70 for the biggest games. I think people are also a bit liberal with labeling games as "incomplete", when really they mean, "this game will have DLC after the fact because it's the best way to make games that take years to make without laying people off". And just to take a brief look along some games in my library, Cyberpunk 2077 would cost a maximum of $100 with DLC, by the time Guilty Gear Strive is sunset (if it runs for 5 years) it will still be shy of $200 in a worst case, and I'm seeing far more games without DLC than with DLC.
Check back in on Devolver, Paradox, and TinyBuild in 10 years. They're scaling up to cover the market that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and Take Two abandoned.
So don't play those games. The only way that's "almost all games" is if you're looking at the mobile market. Once again, still not included in the base price.
I don't know where your information came from, but a lot of it is very wrong. I thought maybe you might be from some other country, but that would mean it's a country that uses dollars that are stronger than US dollars, which I don't think is a thing.
$50 was the standard set by PlayStation for its biggest games, which N64 couldn't match due to cartridge costs, but this standard carried over to the next generation and continued very, very briefly into the life of the Xbox 360. By 2006, all 360 and PS3 games were $60.
I bought many PC games on disc back in the day. Call of Duty 2 (not Modern Warfare 2; Call of Duty 2) was $50. You can see here via the wayback machine that a week after its release, Modern Warfare 1 is $50. Here's the PC version of Flight Simulator 2004 and the first Knights of the Old Republic for PC at $50 in December 2003. I remember there was a push to make those $50 games into $60, and the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 could sort of get away with it back when others couldn't. After buying Call of Duty 2 on disc for $50, I got the $60 version of (original) Prey, because the $60 version came on a DVD instead of several CDs, and installing games from 5 or 6 CDs was a pain that I was willing to pay $10 to not deal with back then (it also came with other collector's edition stuff).
Steam still does, and always has, taken a percent cut from game sales and not a flat fee. They priced it at 30%, because that was better than brick and mortar retail. These days it starts at 30% and follows a sort of regressive tax system once your game is super successful so that you're not as tempted to leave Steam for other platforms.
EA pulled their games off of Steam because 30% of a lot of sales is a lot of money, and they wagered they'd stand to do better if they made their own storefront, but after the first couple of years, they stopped trying to make a platform to compete with Steam and really only cared about keeping their own releases there for that 30% cut that they no longer had to pay to someone else.
I am planning to buy a laptop around ~900$ (equivalent) budget. But I am not sure to recognize good deals. I currently have my eyes locked on a gigabyte one with 3060/11400H....
Larian games are easy enough that you don’t have to min max at all
Including BG3? Because there have been a lot of challenging fights so far. And I only got a handful of hours into D:OS 1, but I remember hitting a pretty difficult fight there as well.
Well, it may surprise you to find out that plenty of us don't find these games to be easy if BG3 is the easiest one. One friend of mine bumped it down to narrative, and the rest of us are finding plenty of challenge on balanced.
There are a million reasons for this kind of thing, cited for years now. These reviewers are exposed to more truly awful games than most of us, they're less likely to latch on to one or two gripes in a score, they're more likely to put the person in charge of the review who's most likely to understand the game's strengths (meaning they put the Dark Souls fan on the Dark Souls review and the Madden fan on the Madden review, for instance), and all sorts of other reasons. Were it me reviewing any game, I'd immediately dock tons of points just for the sheer act of requiring a server connection, because it can only ever make the product worse, but that hasn't stopped people from loving Fortnite, Diablo IV, or any other live service game. It's really just as simple as they came away from the game with a different opinion than you would have or expect. It's not a conspiracy or incentives influencing it; not from real review outlets anyway. Actual review outlets don't sweat it if they get cut off from codes, as it's happened plenty of times, and they review the games anyway.
Being the first one out only matters to a few publications. You're not competing with IGN and Gamespot just by being out first, so it doesn't matter to most of them. Review scores tend to fall a few points after the first day the embargo breaks, because those are all the outlets the publisher bet would review it worse. I play Fantasy Critic, and you can observe this happening with just about every major release. That doesn't mean the ones reviewing it with early review codes are any less honest about it.
This is the model Unreal uses, and it's not a bad idea. You accept those terms because that engine gets you up and running with all the latest modern software features far, far faster than if you coded an engine yourself, and as we all know, time is money. So if you don't like those terms, use another engine, but they're speeding up your ability to put out your product without spending that money up front. Unity's big issue was not only charging for something that the developers have no control over but also that they changed the terms after the fact. A revenue share also aligns both business interests. Both the engine maker and the developer have the desire for the game to be as successful as possible, so when the developer prospers, the engine maker prospers. That's another thing that was out of whack with the previous terms; the game being successful would be good for Unity but potentially bad for the developer.
Because this is a "software as a service" product that actually operates sort of like a service. Technology moves fast, and the company that makes the game engine is continually adding those latest benefits for you, especially Unity and Unreal. And again, the risk of building your game is now back-loaded. Unreal is totally free up front, and Unity is dirt cheap up front (sometimes free). The revenue share model means you only pay royalties once your game passes a certain threshold of success, so their incentives are aligned with yours. This is unlike most consumer products where you may never make any revenue off of what you create with them at all, and you're paying up front. The closest analogy would be if your car was free but they only took a percentage of your proceeds if you're a professional driver, and only after you made about $10k in a quarter.
Last Epoch could be new home for Diablo 4 players after content drought - Dexerto (www.dexerto.com)
$600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen? (exputer.com) angielski
Sega has cancelled Hyenas "and some unannounced games in development" (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Epic Games Is Cutting About 900 Jobs, or 16% of Staff (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Capcom President Says ‘Game Prices Are Too Low’ (kotaku.com) angielski
lol. lmao.
Wargroove 2 Review - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Still one of the best tributes to Advance Wars out there.
Resident Evil 4 Mobile Will Cost $60 (www.ign.com)
Yeah, no.
Baldur's Gate 3's latest patch has introduced a 'very frustrating, borderline unplayable' glitch that makes companions dump their inventories on you (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
The shared stash system is sharing too much.
This has been the best summer for RPGs and I want to live in it forever (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Payday 3 Developer Promises To Fix Matchmaking Issues (www.gamespot.com) angielski
Starbreeze clarified what caused the problems and how it plans to fix them.
GOG 15th anniversary sale is up (www.gog.com)
Why games are too big (youtu.be) angielski
Leaked Xbox Boss Email Perfectly Explains Why Game Publishers Are Eating Themselves Alive (kotaku.com) angielski
hello! looking to buy sub 1K laptop, general suggestions?
I am planning to buy a laptop around ~900$ (equivalent) budget. But I am not sure to recognize good deals. I currently have my eyes locked on a gigabyte one with 3060/11400H....
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 24th
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Payday 3 Review Thread
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Unity updates its runtime fees (blog.unity.com) angielski
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