It is literally an initiative. Jack Thompson was disbarred, and any kind of assertion between video games and real world violence is long since dismissed. Meanwhile games are willfully designed to leave you with a worse product and little to no indication what you’re actually getting for your money, and that isn’t some theory. Leaving a game in a reasonably functional state without intervention from the game’s publisher is pretty specific, and it just happens to cover some use cases that affect a game company’s bottom line, but that should be the cost of doing business. Developers and publishers can be just as guilty on this when they’ve got the same incentives.
God of War always struck me as the wrong game for that gimmick. Sure, there are no camera cuts, but you need to pull up your menu constantly to check the map, change gear, etc. It ends up feeling like there are hundreds of cuts.
It depends on the game. I wouldn’t remove the open world from Elden Ring at all, since sightlines are so important to you figuring out how to get somewhere. Horizon: Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands are two games that I love, but both would have been better if you just selected missions from a menu. In Metal Gear Solid V, they basically give you the option to play the game that way, which is nice, since there are open world systems, but you don’t really interact with them constantly. If you can get away with the Uncharted thing though, where you’re seamlessly moving from one thing to the next, it can be great for pacing and presentation. Especially since Bandai-Namco had the patent on loading screen mini games, a lot of developers ended up inventing “load bearing walls”, where tight spaces that you have to crawl through will mask a load screen between two scenes.
The unanimous game of the year last year is a turn-based RPG, and I can promise you Metaphor: ReFantazio this year will do well critically and commercially, just like Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth did earlier this year. There are plenty of turn-based RPGs to go around. If you meant turn-based tactics or strategy, same thing; plenty of those to go around as well.
RTS sort of peaked with StarCraft II, at least in terms of popularity, but you find some here and there. Battle Aces and Stormgate are both from ex-Blizzard devs chasing that high, and both are live service, so those two will soon be dead, but there are others out there that are less popular that come out from time to time.
That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.
20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.
GTA V is second only to Minecraft in copies sold across all of video games, and it still appears in the top 10 for copies sold on most months, 11 years after its initial release. It’s also available on other stores and consoles, so Steam is not a complete picture.
Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
#4: No early access games, except for games that were in early access and hit v1.0 this year. Even if it’s a great game this year, odds are it’ll be a better game when it’s done, so I made this thread to call out games that are done.