ampersandrew

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Scroll down a few posts. As far as we can tell, this is legit.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t think they particularly cared if you bought their headset, but they had the premium offering if you were interested. I think they wanted Alyx to be the Mario 64 of VR.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The Master Chief Collection launch was infamous.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.

Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.

As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.

Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s a single player game people are pretty jazzed about, too.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

They’d ask $1000 for it if they thought people will pay it. No one at Take Two or Rockstar has said this. Most likely is they’ll do that $100 “advance access” thing that a lot of AAA games like to do, where you get the game a few days early. The business hasn’t gotten in the way of the fun or fairness of the campaign mode for Rockstar’s previous efforts, and if it did this time, we’ll certainly hear about it immediately.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

This will probably be the last time it ever happens. They’re trying to get people to double dip, and plenty will, but the console install base isn’t what it was when GTA V came out at the end of a generation. Plus we all know full well that the PC version will happen, whereas in yesteryear, we weren’t sure.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Grand Theft Auto V came out 12 years ago and has been in the top ten best sellers almost every single month since then. It’s not manufactured; you’re just very out of the loop. It’s one of the biggest money makers in all of video games. They spent an estimated $2B on GTA6 and will almost certainly make it back within days, not years.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

If you like bigger games, and plenty do, them charging a higher price for it up front makes it more likely that they’re made sustainably. If a game costs $100M to make, the difference between breaking even on $70 versus $60 is hundreds of thousands of additional customers.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

“Just make good games” doesn’t really work in the age where we’ve got tens of thousands of game releases per year compared to the age of a few hundred games per year.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

The failure of a game doesn’t come hand in hand with it being bad. Lots of studios are struggling right now, because there’s just so much out there, and no one wants to compete with GTA.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

A game like GTA is likely to drive console sales, but not enough to make up that deficit.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I tried Dark Souls 3 co-op without this mod years back, since it has that password system, but the game fights back against playing that way. It basically made sure you got invaded constantly.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Factorio doesn’t give a fuck and will let you play with up to 254 other people on the same server. Most survival crafting games have LAN, as a matter of fact. Somehow this is the only genre that will hold developers accountable on a regular basis and make them hurt for not having LAN and player-controlled servers. Not all of them will, but most will offer LAN.

All of Larian’s recent RPG efforts have LAN and direct IP connections: Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3.

Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and the entire Borderlands series (outside of the GOTY edition of Borderlands 1) support LAN, surprisingly, if you want to get your loot game on.

Is Recharge RC the same as the upcoming Unreal engine racing game Recharge? If they don’t have the same lineage, they’ve at least got similar inspirations.

Warside is an upcoming turn-based strategy game inspired by (or ripping off wholesale?) Advance Wars, and it’s got LAN in its features list.

Streets of Rogue is an all-timer in the co-op roguelike department, and it too supports LAN.

A game that I download and install on a regular basis in the freeware realm is Armagetron. It’s the light cycles from Tron but in an open source LAN game. It doesn’t exactly have a ton of depth, but it’s good fun for about an hour every couple of years.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Oh, I’ll add on to this one that Rainbow Six 1 and 3 have been some of the best co-op games I’ve ever played, and both have LAN. The second game isn’t readily available for sale anymore. Even that first game involved editing a lot of level config files in order to circumvent bugs, but it was a great time.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Sure, but first person shooters always had LAN until they didn’t. Console games always had split screen until they didn’t. Those audiences largely let those features fall off in a way survival audiences didn’t.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t think there’s a total stock market index fund that only omits Meta.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I also heard your mom hates Dead Space 2.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It would be. The trick is that this initiative is coupled with a better UI for Windows on handhelds, like Valve made for SteamOS. If not this partnered one, then the official one will.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I do see them stopping soon. Those deals are benefiting basically no one anymore. Partners like Square Enix are doing way better by putting their games on PC without an exclusivity period. Sony’s not growing their console business over the previous generation, even when their competition has been destroyed. At some point it’s just money down the drain.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

There’s a beta test branch on Steam that was uploaded 5 months ago, and the game has been age rated in South Korea. Yes, that game is coming. For good reason, it’s also the belle of the ball when it comes to marketing deals, so as much as it’s a meme to say maybe it’s at the next Nintendo Direct, it might be at the next Nintendo Direct. For everyone’s sake, I hope it gets its release date soon so that we can stop talking about it.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

That’s a high bar to clear, but if you add it to the GOG Dreamlist, I’ll vote for it.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

In general, I’d agree that games are getting better, if for no other reason that there are so many made these days that eventually you’ll find something great.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

Thanks. I gave it a search before asking, and I didn’t see it, but with the link you posted elsewhere, I just voted on it.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I play and enjoy most genres at this point, but my favorite has to be Skullgirls. There are 18 characters and so many ways to combine them that you can still come up with new strategies in this game over a decade after its release.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu (edited 5 miesięcy temu)

I played BG1 and 2 for the first time shortly before the release of BG3, and I just wanted to hear Irenicus talk more.

Disco Elysium, on the other hand, just did not hit for me. The only things I hear about it are praise, but my friends list is filled with people who played it for a few hours, like I did, and stopped, so maybe the dissenters just aren’t so vocal.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I don’t think I came to it with many expectations other than that people praised it for the writing, but I found the characters to nearly universally be abrasive and the story delivered via info dumps.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

True, but I hated the player character too, and I’d have appreciated a more elegant introduction to the world.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I’m totally fine with playing a character who is always a shitty person, but when the world was littered with those characters, it was undesirable to spend any more time in it, especially considering my issues with the story’s delivery as well.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

I read novels too, and there are ways to deliver a story more organically.

ampersandrew, 5 miesięcy temu

It was still pretty inherently tied to Bhaal under Baldur’s Gate, so it made enough sense to have continuity.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

From the same interview, they said they scaled up from a team of about 65 for It Takes Two to a team of about 80 for Split Fiction, which they made in four years. Back of the napkin math means that Split Fiction was made for about $50M. I find game budgets to be really interesting to track lately, because so many have become so reckless with them that it’s great to see what can be made if you scope down.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

An assumption that each employee costs them about $150k/year in salary/office space/benefits. There are lots of ways it can be more complicated than that, including the fact that they’re in Sweden, but last I heard, $150k/year/developer was about what you’d expect to pay in the US, if a company was interested in replicating this kind of development in a place where labor costs are probably highest.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I don’t understand. So he had a team of over 100 people who worked on a Sony deal for like 3 years before it was shut down. Now he’s got a new studio and a new Sony deal? Has no one learned their lessons here?

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Who’s the abuser and who’s the abused? This deal didn’t work out for either of them last time.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I tried the demo, and I’ve got to say: I was hoping for more of an evolution to the stealth mechanics. This seems to be sticking very closely to what Monaco 1 was.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Valve says the data proves “Steam isn’t just a storefront—it provides social community, game discoverability, interactive events, and a deep set of game-enhancing features to attract and retain players who will be checking out new games in the future.”

I think it proves that Steam is the largest storefront on PC and that PC is growing and replacing other platforms.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

The Next Fests might count. They kind of fill the role that something like PAX does, encouraging you to try out demos.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Let’s not whitewash their history. A lot of concessions they only gave up due to legal challenges, and then there’s the whole child gambling thing.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Their refund policies only came about because different governments sued them. Check out either coffeezilla or People Make Games on CS:GO loot boxes, the latter of which has interviews with plenty of the victims of this system that Valve allows to continue because it’s so lucrative for them.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I was specifically refuting, “They’re the only ones safeguarding the industry,” and how they got to their refund policies matters when it comes to that statement. I was not here to throw a gauntlet down, insult Steam’s honor, and challenge anyone to a duel. I prefer to shop on GOG these days, when possible, but my Steam profile says I have 991 games in my account, and I bought most of those. Valve and Steam have done lasting, measurable good to this industry and medium, but that doesn’t mean they’re safeguarding it or that it’s all good news. As to the thing about ads, I don’t think that model would actually work with the PC gaming audience, and I think Valve prohibiting it is just so that their audience still finds quality products on Steam and spends more money. Valve’s best behaviors and worst behaviors are motivated by profit.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

Striving for profit is a quality tied to being a company, not being a publicly traded company. Everything they do is in pursuit of making more money. Often times, that means making the best store out there so that we shop with them instead of their competitors, which is how it’s supposed to work.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

I’d be with you if I still got to keep the game and the skins I bought in perpetuity, but that’s basically unheard of.

ampersandrew, 6 miesięcy temu

That’s just not true. They’re seeking profit by attempting to be the best place to spend your money. Epic would love for Valve to charge users monthly for Steam, but they don’t, because it would just drive people away from Steam. They stand to make more money by doing what they’re doing. This is not a public versus private thing. Arguably the negative that comes along with public companies is that there are more short term incentives at the expense of long term profit, but they’re both doing what they do for profit.