I believe Gearbox has always done this royalty situation union-less. But that doesn’t spread out sales to other games that need customers. There are still going to be plenty of games that just don’t move a lot of copies because other games suck the oxygen out of the room.
Hey, that’s fair. If you already have the old version of the game, this one’s going to have limited appeal for you, most likely. As is the case with most remasters.
There should be exactly the toggle that the article asks for given this criticism. I don’t know how likely it is, because it seems like whatever engine they fed this game into just handles lighting very differently. Deus Ex is a great game, but I’m personally of the opinion that it’s quite ugly, and just about anything you do to the graphics are an improvement. The mod that the article compares it to doesn’t look better, just slightly different. In either case, the reason that both look better than the original, and why we pulled out the year 2003, is that the technology in cutting edge graphics didn’t really change until mid-to-late 2004, and the advancements in between were basically just more polygons and better textures, which is all you can reasonably expect in a remaster. More than that is a lot more work and gets you into remake territory.
The fan mods aren’t exactly accessible to PlayStation players. What would you want to see in a Deus Ex remaster that a mod couldn’t do? Mods are capable of a great deal, but there’s a lot of value to having things preconfigured to modern standards out of the box.
The PS2 version is surely severely compromised compared to the PC version. Even the sequel designed with the Xbox in mind had to cut back on a lot of things to make it fit on a more powerful console.
I never played this game back in the day, but in a world where it has voice acting and a PC port, this is the one I’ll likely try. I have no idea when that might be, since it’s already a struggle to keep up with game releases, but someday, for sure.
Reporting from outside sources has covered what Steam’s vetting process is. They check to see if the game runs, if it has the features that the publishers/developers claim it has on the side bar, and they check for malware. Often times this is outsourced, but the buck does stop with Valve. The thing with any security measure though is that anything can be circumvented, and preventing the same vector of attack in the future is an arms race. And another way to read what you said about how many instances of malware there are is that it affects 0.02% of games released this year so far, and they’re not the games that customers are most likely to buy in the first place like your Borderlands or Battlefields.
Fascinating story. The narrative at the time was that casual games were just too lucrative to bother with SiN sequels after Emergence, but of course, the truth has a lot more nuance.
Marketing cycles are short now. This will be the show aligned with Tokyo Games Show to show off games releasing in the last part of the year and maybe teasing a few high-profile games for next year.