Yes, I know, Fortnite bad, but this is a big deal. The way we got here is often embarrassing, but this is a major step toward tearing down walled garden ecosystems.
Yes, we want to tear it down. This is a company that was taking a revenue share of any purchase made on their device, whether or not they incurred a cost in facilitating it. It’s universally bad for consumers. It’s why game prices on consoles don’t have competition like they do on PC, and it’s responsible for consumers feeling lock-in to an ecosystem, feeling as though they can’t respond to a bad product by moving to the competitor.
I never saw it as a dick move. It always seemed to me like any other creative person putting their life experiences into their work. That didn’t make it good, but his best work in a comedy comic isn’t likely to come out while he’s grieving. It was sort of a shark jump moment for that site, but it always seemed way more distasteful to me to make it into a meme.
I believe that in the life experience that he’s drawing from, that he based his self-insert character on, he’s in every panel, yes. I certainly took it to mean that he too was grieving the child that he expected to be born into the world. I found it distasteful to make it into a meme because the subject matter it’s mocking is fucked up, plus bullying is kind of disconcerting in general.
You are free to make your own interpretations as far as how he portrays/portrayed women in his comics. It’s been almost 20 years since that comic went up, and standards in social mores and comedy have changed a ton in that time, but when I read those comics back then, only being familiar with Buckley through CAD comics and nothing else, he never struck me as a narcissist or a misogynist. His self-insert character was a Homer Simpson type (“which was the style at the time”), which is hardly the caricature of a narcissist in my opinion. I find it’s very easy to invent a narrative about who someone is from how they portray themselves publicly, and also…it’s been 17 years. Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today. I don’t know that he’s a bad person, I don’t know that he ever was a bad person, and I don’t think it’s admirable to hound someone with a joke about something that they put out into the world so long ago. Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on. I didn’t feel good when I saw that comic the first time, nor was I intended to, but I definitely don’t feel great whenever it’s brought back up either.
Which could just as easily be interpreted as steering into the skid, like a strategy someone might use when they’re relentlessly bullied. But you’re clearly more interested in Tim Buckley’s life than I am.
Context: Aside from Marathon missing the mark on its early playtests and getting mediocre reviews, Bungie was caught copy/pasting stolen art into a lot of the game’s art and textures. The company is internally under fire.
This one and FairGame$ are both screwed, and they’ll mark the end of an era for Sony and live service. What’s funny too is that Bungie was purchased in large part for being experts in making successful live service games, but it reminds me of something in investing where those who appear to be very smart after a string of successes are compared to being “expert coin flippers” who just got heads a number of times in a row. As we’ve gotten a peak or two behind the curtain after the purchase, it certainly looks like Bungie was only lucky.
I can name plenty of shooters that don’t let you take attachments off of guns. That might not be your best example of ignoring feedback, because the presence or omission of that feature can be for any number of very good reasons.
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.
There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.
It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.
GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.
Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.
Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox handheld, likely releasing by 2027, may feature a Switch-style docking system, allowing both handheld and TV play. Reports suggest two handheld projects: one by ASUS (possibly 2025) and a “true” successor by Microsoft (2027). The latter may use Qualcomm chips, support games from Microsoft Store,...
Allegedly, it’s an improved Windows experience so you get the compatibility without having to use a desktop operating system on a handheld game machine. So, you get Game Pass and kernel level anti cheat games with a UX similar to the Steam Deck (ish). And besides, “everything is an Xbox”. They don’t care how many of these things sell as long as you’re on Game Pass or buying their games.
Every time you buy a PC, you’re buying a platform that Microsoft couldn’t care less if it sells at all, and that’s all this will be. It will be supported by Microsoft as any other Windows PC, for better or worse.
I finished the game already, but the biggest quality of life update is being able to use Soul Pods to dispel illusions so you’re not more or less locked in with Yatzli while exploring in the later Acts. Set your expectations appropriately, and Avowed is a hell of a game, but it’s got more in common with Dark Souls or God of War than it does Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim.
Well, playing through the first KC:D now, I can tell you it was rough to go from Avowed’s combat to KC:D’s, but that’s okay, because KC:D has other strengths. When development gets restarted, it’s not because it was shaping up into a better game than what we ended up with.
Do you think there’s any stopping the industry’s shift to digital at this point? Because we just saw another quarter where we went even harder in that direction.
You can see the writing on the wall for FairGame$ and Marathon from a mile away, and this can’t possibly instill confidence in the people still working there.
Negative hundreds of millions of dollars. But the point still stands that they believed this was a rational way to make a boatload of money. With hindsight, we’re all geniuses, but yes, this was a stupid move.
Also noteworthy that not only are PS5 sales behind PS4, but the PlayStation’s competition has almost entirely disappeared, and that hasn’t resulted in more PlayStations sold.
I think more and more people have done the math on what your break-even is with a PC up front compared to noncompetitive digital console storefronts, needless forced obsolescence, and subscription fees.
And the games that really demand the high-end hardware tend to be pretty rare in the grand scheme of things, not to mention less likely to be as good as the low spec games. I always joke with my friends that I might buy a killer new PC in the next year or so, but my most-played game will still be a 2D game from 2012 that absolutely doesn’t need it.
Why are people going for Bazzite for desktops? I’ve got it on a mini PC, and it’s great for the living room and travel, but even then the updater still keeps trying to apply an update from April 28th over and over again. Is it a good choice for desktop too? I’m on Kubuntu now but will probably shop around for a new distro with my next PC.
While SNK devotes most of its efforts toward its King of Fighters series, the Fatal Fury series has remained dormant for 25 years. With the former series already featuring many of Fatal Fury‘s characters, it’s hard to imagine why players familiar with SNK’s niche titles would make the switch.
I’m sorry, but this is terrible analysis. You may as well say no one would play Street Fighter because those characters are in Marvel Vs. Capcom.
The single player offering is weak. The author and I agree that has an impact on sales. The graphics aren’t bad, but the presentation doesn’t really floor you like some other recent fighting games do. SNK has had a rough go of it with the netcode in their games, and people were burned by the non-functional matchmaking in KOFXV for over a year; beta 1 for CotW made it look like history would repeat itself. Ronaldo doesn’t help, but what would have helped is if, like Street Fighter and Tekken, it could have scored a 90 on review aggregators and been called a can’t-miss game, but to do that, they’d have to address the above.
It’s been 5 days since I shared the last of these - where I share a roundup of all the interesting things I have spotted in gaming news. There’s a lot of different topics this week, but as always it remains Steam Deck, Linux, GOG, emulation, Switch and gaming in general!...
I typically do use my Steam Deck as a Steam Deck and not a GOG Deck, but every time I’m on the go, forgot to explicitly put my Steam Deck in offline mode, and get hit with a license that needs to be reauthenticated, I wish I’d stuck to GOG instead…or that GOG offered the game I’m playing at all. Also, BioShock Infinite is fantastic, and whenever you hear about it now, it tends to be from people who really want you to know that they didn’t like it.
Lately I’ve been playing the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance still, and this one is via GOG. I got to a point where I can do some side quests, so the main story is taking a back seat for a little while. I am enjoying the story and characters, but I do wish they’d made different choices in things like the combat and some of the “realism”-related tedium.
I just beat the base game of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel last night, before moving on to its DLC in my attempt to play through this entire series ahead of Borderlands 4. There are some good levels and bosses, and I liked how my class that I selected works, but the writing is just atrocious. It definitely tried to be funny but rarely had anything that could even be classified as a punchline, as though they’d never actually heard a joke before but heard about jokes.
And then my wife and I are still playing through Blue Prince. We’re making good progress, but I do find myself agreeing with the criticism that the RNG is bringing down the experience. I think if you could draft from 5 rooms at a time instead of 3, it would do wonders for the experience.
It’s weird, because even though I support the idea of modding as you the customer doing what you want with the product you bought, I also usually refuse to do it for a first playthrough, because I want to evaluate the thing that the developer actually delivered when I have an opinion on it. So even if some mod out there removes the tedium, I want to see what the game is like, start to finish, with the tedium included.
I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.
Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.
Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.
Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and...
Very true. Though at the same time, you probably could have found that context you were looking for by typing a couple of those words into your favorite search engine or Wikipedia.
70% of games that require internet get destroyed (www.youtube.com)
After a lengthy legal battle and billion-dollar loss, 'Fortnite' is back on iOS (appleinsider.com)
Avowed Director Leaves Obsidian For Netflix Games (insider-gaming.com)
$80 for Borderlands 4 too costly? Randy Pitchford says, "If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen" (www.eurogamer.net)
Burned Loss
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/28829460
Games have to cost $80! Meanwhile focus £35 oh sure have the DLC for £1 you have the other game
No, the next-gen Xbox does not run on Arm — here's what you need to know (www.windowscentral.com)
New ‘Marathon’ Info: Bungie Morale, Launch Worries And Changing Plans (www.forbes.com)
Context: Aside from Marathon missing the mark on its early playtests and getting mediocre reviews, Bungie was caught copy/pasting stolen art into a lot of the game’s art and textures. The company is internally under fire.
I'm a console gamer so, Why the hate on the Epic Games Store?
I get that Steam is where everything and everyone is at. And that the user experience and functionality is best there BUT having another player to try an compete with Steam is a good thing, right?...
Microsoft's Xbox Handheld: Switch-Like Dock and Multi-Platform Support
Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox handheld, likely releasing by 2027, may feature a Switch-style docking system, allowing both handheld and TV play. Reports suggest two handheld projects: one by ASUS (possibly 2025) and a “true” successor by Microsoft (2027). The latter may use Qualcomm chips, support games from Microsoft Store,...
Obsidian’s Avowed 2025 Roadmap Includes New Abilities, Weapons, New Game Plus, And More (www.gameinformer.com)
Download Every AAA game from these sites
I compiled a list of sites to get every game ever released on any platform...
‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ DRM Is Locking Out Linux Users Who Bought the Game (www.404media.co)
PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Studio She Founded (www.bloomberg.com)
You can see the writing on the wall for FairGame$ and Marathon from a mile away, and this can’t possibly instill confidence in the people still working there.
Sony considers further price rises, as it braces for £500m tariffs impact (www.eurogamer.net)
Nearly 5 years in, PS5 sales remain neck-and-neck with PS4 | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Also noteworthy that not only are PS5 sales behind PS4, but the PlayStation’s competition has almost entirely disappeared, and that hasn’t resulted in more PlayStations sold.
Who Is ‘Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves’ For? Following Abysmal Sales, SNK's CEO Will Transition to an Advisory Role (www.vice.com)
Steam Deck / Gaming News #15
It’s been 5 days since I shared the last of these - where I share a roundup of all the interesting things I have spotted in gaming news. There’s a lot of different topics this week, but as always it remains Steam Deck, Linux, GOG, emulation, Switch and gaming in general!...
Tekken 8 replaces their entire balance team after disastrous Season 2 update (www.dexerto.com)
Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game (www.gamereactor.eu)
Giant Bomb, a web site about video games, has been purchased from Fandom
Just announced on twitch.tv/pax, live from PAX East. The reaction was so negative to what happened with Giant Bomb that Fandom sold to Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar. It sounds like this deal closed yesterday. Along with those two, Dan Ryckert and Jan Ochoa are now co-owners. Mike Minotti was informed of this deal this morning, and...