“There is literally no reason to buy this handheld,” Fryer opined of the ROG Xbox Ally. "
You want access to games or services that are either better or only available on Windows without having to deal with the desktop Windows interface. That is literally the reason to buy it. Game Pass and popular live services can woo plenty of people over.
Gotta say, from the few times I’ve come across her channel, she seems like a shit-stirrer, and right wing rage baiters seem to love quoting her.
But what is the long-term plan?
To transition to a world where “Xbox” is the brand slapped across Microsoft’s Windows gaming endeavors and they mostly serve as a Game Pass purveyor and the largest third party publisher by market cap.
Where are the new hits?
This one is really surprising as a question, because if you could will hits into existence, everyone would do it, but for a publisher of their size, they’re doing more in recent years to create new franchises than most, even if they then lay off the team behind Hi-Fi Rush. South of Midnight came out this year; Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Grounded all came out of Obsidian as well as the much smaller Pentiment; and Clockwork Revolution got a sizable demo on display just this summer.
It’s too expensive to make those kinds of exclusives anymore, which means they take longer to make, which means there are fewer of them. Sony can’t make enough PlayStation exclusives to justify me buying a PlayStation anymore, so I don’t buy one, so they put them on PC too, so there’s even less reason for me to have a PlayStation. Console exclusives are on their way out of fashion.
Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.
The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.
Will [FBC: Firebreak] have the staying power for the long-run?
Maybe not! But that’s (probably) okay! It’s not a live service. (It doesn’t have LAN either, which is a personal gripe of mine, but they don’t seem to intend for you to play this one for very long.) Most games don’t last very long in the public consciousness, no matter how good they are. I just played some Hypercharged: Unboxed with a friend of mine, because there haven’t been much of any deathmatch shooters in years, and it was just what the doctor ordered. It’s been so long since the FPS genre was about this that Perfect Dark (the person on Lemmy) might not even remember an era where shooters were often very similar to Perfect Dark (the video game), and that sucks.
Speaking of things that suck, I hope your health situation improves. Best of luck. We’ll be here when you get back.
Hello, in the recent years I find myself willing to spend much less time and energy on games, but I do still enjoy them. Oftentimes I end up quitting a new game I tried out relatively early on, because I’m encountering some block, grind, non-optional boring side quest, empty open world, uninteresting clutter or details that I...
I would describe Red Dead Redemption II as having significant fluff, not just in how much time it wastes getting from A to B a lot of times but also in that whole island chapter, Act 4, I think.
It’s the in between missions riding that I was referring to. The previous game was much more lenient about giving you opportunities to fast travel. Also, when I played the game, mods weren’t an option, and OP might be looking for Xbox games.
“Stop Killing Games” is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods - with no stated expiration date - but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher...
It seems to be due to rage bait YouTubers running with the beef/drama between Ross and Pirate Software, because of course it is. That’s the only thing that gets anything on social media to spread, it seems. In this case though, I’ll take it.
Lots, on channels run by generally awful people that I wouldn’t want to link to. The kind of people who just want to get people angry about video games. The kind of people who direct hate mobs at Sweet Baby Inc (without even understanding what it is that company does) and complain about games being “woke”.
They are awful people, but they’ve made videos in support of the initiative and likely drove their followers there. If you search for Stop Killing Games on YouTube and look at the recent videos, there’s a who’s who of “oh no, not him”.
Regarding the desire for Final Fantasy to return to traditional turn-based combat, Square Enix said “they are aware of Expedition 33 and consider command-based RPGs to be Square Enix’s origin and foundation”. For Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, Square Enix insisted “They value the command-based RPG genre and plan to continue delivering games in this style in the future”. For fans disappointed by FF16, this is fantastic news as it means Square Enix intend to return the series to the command-based formula it made popular.
No it doesn’t. Assuming the translation is accurate, they said they still like turn-based games and will continue making turn-based games. Octopath Traveler and Bravely Default would fit here, especially in reference to their desire to make more “mid tier” games when asked about Clair Obscur. “For Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest” does not appear in the translated text as context to making more turn-based games, though I don’t think Dragon Quest has been real-time to date? Hey, maybe I’m wildly off base here, but it appears to me like the author of this article added what they wanted the tweet to say rather than what it actually says.
To be fair to the investor, who was probably asking the questions more as a fanboy…do they usually sell better? There are more variables here, like platform exclusivity, to blame for poor sales in Square Enix’s recent efforts, but when games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Persona, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are outselling Square Enix’s real-time games, I don’t think we can say turn-based sells worse in such a blanket way.
It’s not turn based, but even though it’s on PC, the launch momentum can often be extremely important to a game’s long tail of sales. A delayed release on PC can sometimes poison the well.
Congrats on the cabin! Is that more of a home or a getaway?
Also, I’m one of those guys who grew up on Lego Island. I can’t say I’d want to revisit it for anything other than a history lesson, but it was in fact important to a lot of us.
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
It was the reporting from Jason Schreier, not the official reason. The official reason is something like “difficult economic conditions” and “we were about to topple over”. The behind-closed-doors reasons were that Nadella made a sweeping change across all of Microsoft that was antithetical to what Xbox had been working on for years, and that Xbox had a much larger spotlight on them after making an acquisition as large as Activision.
The EU Citizens petition to stop killing games is not looking good. It’s shy of halfway where it needs to be, on a very high threshold, and it’s over in a month and change....
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
Neither time was that my response. I have asked developers via social media for LAN or listen servers or offline modes, and I’ve never been nasty about it. Being doxxed or getting hate campaigns is not okay. Customers asking for features for a video game that are important to them are not harassment, and listening to requests for those features is part of the job. If everyone at a company wanted their game to live forever, from the bottom all the way to the top, and it didn’t launch with an offline mode, then I don’t believe they wanted it to live forever; it simply didn’t make their list of priorities.
It’s an unreliable solution, because there’s no guarantee that even dedicated and talented individuals will be able to reverse engineer every online server, if that game has those individuals in its customer base in the first place. The solution seems to be either legislation, which this campaign is seeking, or for the market to outright reject online-only games, which it isn’t doing. I don’t even really have an alternative to online-only games in some genres, like FPS for instance, to send my dollars toward instead; sports games are in a similar position, since the sports organizations all signed exclusivity contracts.
It’s definitely not decided yet. A breakout hit could still come out of nowhere, which seems to be happening more and more often lately, including Clair Obscur. There’s also still the likes of Donkey Kong Bananza, Mina the Hollower, and Hollow Knight: Silksong coming later this year, and those are just the ones on my radar that seem likely to review that well.
The OpenCritic score is a very reliable predictor for winning the Game Awards, which is itself mostly an aggregate of review outlets. Donkey Kong is the next game from (probably) the Mario Odyssey team, and Odyssey has a 97 on OpenCritic, with Bananza looking to have a lot of the same design ethos. If I were a betting man, I’d be putting my money on Bananza winning GOTY. The previous Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight both hover around 90, so it’s possible but not the most likely thing in the world that Silksong or Mina exceed 90 by a wide margin, but they’ve got a better shot than most.
It’s interesting to note that the Game Awards started having a tangible effect on sales in the past handful of years. Games that used to come out in November now come out in October at the latest, because that’s the deadline for Game Awards nominations.
The settings targeted on PC typically far outstrip what consoles can do. I’m targeting modest settings that are still better than what a console can do in those blockbuster games, and it still runs better than on consoles. They just don’t scale as well as they should when you continue to crank the settings up.
It will be valuable information when we have more data points to compare it against later. The console’s high initial sales may very well have little to do with anything except how many Nintendo had available, for instance. It could do Wii U numbers (unlikely), or it could be a mega success, or anything in between. The third party sales might be reflective of the fact that the games are all older and available on other platforms, or it could be that customers are strapped for cash after a higher console purchase price, or any of a number of other reasons. I would just encourage people not to make a narrative out of this yet.
I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would put good money on this being closer to Excite Truck in the public consciousness a few years from now rather than one of the most successful games of all time. So no, it’s not bold to think that Drag X Drive isn’t going to supplant Rocket League.
It also seems as though plans for a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 3 are in the early stages already. Speaking to PC Gamer, Eugene Evans, the senior vice president of digital strategy and licensing for WotC and Hasbro, said the company has already started conversations about what the next Baldur’s Gate game will look like and how...
Enjoy your gaming. I picked up a couple of things already. And DMC1-4 are now in the Good Old Games program. Steam’s sale is supposed to start this Friday, if I’m not mistaken.
'Xbox Hardware Is Dead,' Says Founding Team Member, 'It Looks Like Xbox Has No Desire — Or Literally Can't — Ship Hardware Anymore' - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski
Steam Deck / Gaming News #22 angielski
As ever and always, I’m back with a week’s worth of gaming news I’ve spotted and thought I should share with you all!...
What are your favourite single-player games without much fluff, grinding or difficulty spikes? angielski
Hello, in the recent years I find myself willing to spend much less time and energy on games, but I do still enjoy them. Oftentimes I end up quitting a new game I tried out relatively early on, because I’m encountering some block, grind, non-optional boring side quest, empty open world, uninteresting clutter or details that I...
If you are a citizen in the EU or UK, don't forget to sign the Stop Killing Games petition! (www.stopkillinggames.com) angielski
“Stop Killing Games” is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods - with no stated expiration date - but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher...
Square Enix acknowledges Expedition 33 success as inspiration for next Final Fantasy as turn-based is still beloved by gamers (www.videogamer.com) angielski
Steam Deck / Gaming News #21 angielski
As ever and always, I’m back with a week’s worth of gaming news I’ve spotted and thought I should share with you all!...
Microsoft Plans Major Job Cuts at Xbox Gaming Division (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
bloomberg.com/…/microsoft-plans-major-job-cuts-at…
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The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] (www.youtube.com) angielski
The EU Citizens petition to stop killing games is not looking good. It’s shy of halfway where it needs to be, on a very high threshold, and it’s over in a month and change....
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach | Review Thread (92/100 OpenCritic) angielski
Game Information...
Monster Hunter Wilds game reviews hit "Overwhelmingly Negative" on Steam — can Capcom turn it around? (www.windowscentral.com) angielski
Devil May Cry 1-4 got release on GOG (www.gog.com) angielski
Limited Run has asked Nintendo to pull Gex Trilogy from the eShop as it doesn’t work on Switch 2 (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Embracer has reduced its workforce by over 1800 people in the past year (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
New report suggests third-party Switch 2 game sales are "below estimates" (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League's mojo (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Baldur’s Gate 4 may happen eventually, but not with Larian Studios (www.polygon.com) angielski
It also seems as though plans for a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 3 are in the early stages already. Speaking to PC Gamer, Eugene Evans, the senior vice president of digital strategy and licensing for WotC and Hasbro, said the company has already started conversations about what the next Baldur’s Gate game will look like and how...
GOG summer sale is live (www.gog.com) angielski
Enjoy your gaming. I picked up a couple of things already. And DMC1-4 are now in the Good Old Games program. Steam’s sale is supposed to start this Friday, if I’m not mistaken.