ampersandrew

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Honestly, you could do far worse than this. There’s some stuff in here that looks awesome.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Trickle-down economics is far older than Trump’s presidency.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

You’re thinking about it wrong. How much content it has is not the problem. The problem is we’ve seen gameplay and it looks nothing like its predecessor.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Consumers have always owned their media.

That’s not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that’s disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS “best of” tapes and whatnot, but you’d never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we’re at a spot where you can buy a “digital copy” of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your “copy” of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you’ll get through in a month. That’s just simple economics. It’s usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she’s a member of the other party and likely doesn’t care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it’s better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It’s funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there’s no competition I can go to instead.

I don’t see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they’re not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo’s online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I don’t think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that they’d have been better off without Game Pass.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

You can still own your games without a physical copy if you buy them DRM-free.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’ve barely heard about it, and here in the US, I would not call it highly anticipated, but perhaps the story is different in China.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Epic isn’t making money on exclusives. Square Enix isn’t making money on exclusives. Sony probably isn’t even making money on third party exclusives. Thankfully, market forces have ensured that it was never going to be exclusive.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The loss leader strategy hasn’t worked, is what I meant. They said in an article in the past few days, quite explicitly, that that strategy isn’t even working for whatever ill-advised loss leader strategy they’re up to in order to acquire users.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what’s in front of you.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

EverQuest required a subscription fee every month and created a gold rush. The shutdowns come when you don’t find the gold that they did.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If not GoldenEye, then I believe Perfect Dark would let you plug in two controllers for a dual analog control scheme.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Minecraft is far more responsible for the survival crafting genre that followed in its wake.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Be careful; you’re stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to “the Berlin Interpretation”, where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it’s not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you’re typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or “sidegrades” that are neither better nor worse.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

What’s the timeline on that mod versus the Battle Royale mod for DayZ? Because as far as I could tell, the DayZ mod is the true progenitor, but DayZ was itself inspired by Minecraft.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It is, and I don’t think it’s even the first game to require a subscription fee. It was just so successful at it that everyone wanted that monthly recurring revenue. When it doesn’t work, they’d often rather see the game cease to exist.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

And unfortunately, not one of them did it better.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Mortal Kombat did not come first. It was quite openly inspired by Street Fighter II.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They might be closest, but they’re still pretty far off. One of the core pillars of Arkham combat is that it would punish you for button mashing by dropping your combo, meaning you not only gain fewer points at the end of combat but also lose access to your instant finishers, which are all too valuable for taking out the toughest opponents. Spider-Man is happy to let you mindlessly mash, and it’s far worse off for it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I did like the magnetic nature of Arkham, and since Mordor lacked it, they let you hold your combo streak for longer, which also made it too easy.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I felt it was more about the “free flow” in the free flow combat system in Arkham. You want it to all chain together, and Arkham made sure you only hit the buttons you needed to exactly as many times as you needed to. Mordor let you keep your combo going even though it had been like 10 seconds since the last time you did anything, which wasn’t exactly flowing at that point. That combo system was a great fit for Batman, and it would fit in nicely with Jason Bourne or John Wick as well, and I’m not sure Lord of the Rings was the best fit for it, but it doesn’t seem like many are trying to do that combat style anymore.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I’m not even the biggest Hollow Knight fan, but as long as Fantasy Critic exists, I cannot forget about Silksong.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Because it’s got bigger problems, like being free to play, always online, and not long for this world at the rate it’s going.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Also, this is not the first time that I’ve posted a YouTube link and the thumbnail didn’t display, so I’m not sure what’s happening there.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

But perhaps a good community rule would be to make threads that are conducive to discussion rather than single answers that can be found with a quick web search.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Those games are so littered with trash mobs that I definitely didn’t have the stamina for 100%.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Try some unpopular games.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

That game won’t release until at least 5 years after this one.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

For what you’re hoping for, they likely haven’t. That game is basically just pre-production at this point while all hands are on deck for Dragon Age.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Nah, France and Spain. We only need 7 countries to pass their thresholds, and after that, only raw numbers matter. We need the big population centers, and France and Spain are way behind Germany.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If you’re there, perhaps you can signal boost?

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The community updates for these sorts of things never seem to be interested in controller support and split-screen, so when those things are well supported, that’s when I get excited.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I think he also did Doom 3, but I don’t think he was involved in Doom 2. Doom 1 was mostly just playing fast and loose with copyright law. The iconic E1M1 theme song is just a MIDI version of some song from Slayer.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

I just tried GZDoom from Flathub to try to see if these things were there, because they weren’t last I checked (which was admittedly a long time ago). The game couldn’t find my WADs after a few tries of trying to get it to work, even after using Flatseal. Flathub reviews indicate that those who managed to get it running were having trouble getting the game to recognize their controller. The Steam version just works. Having community source ports is great, but there’s value in the company updating their official version.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

If this deal went through in time to save Tango, as the press release states, this just must have been how long it took for the paperwork to go through.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

They did to me too, but maybe it’s one of those things where you can’t talk about the deal for X, Y, and Z reasons, especially since it might not go through.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

even those that are often do have a way to continue to run after the service ends

I’m going to guess you use a different definition than the rest of do if you came to this conclusion. Even still, we’ve got an enormous graveyard of games rendered nonfunctional once the servers were taken offline, and we can objectively measure those and see no way it’s going to slow down. Sony’s about to push out Concord this month. The two RTS games pushing themselves most as successors to StarCraft are both online-only. All three of these games will be completely unplayable and lost to time in just a few short years.

To the question about “why not boycott companies selling games this way?” he explains boycotts don’t work. But when Bud Light ran a pro LGBT ad, so many bigots switched beer that Bud Light had to apologize and fire their executives. It fell from #1 beer to #3 and the parent company is now switching their flagship beer from Bud Light to Michelob. Boycotts work.

I agree with you. A lot of people don’t realize the power they have in the marketplace. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is very obfuscated. Why would they tell you clearly that the game is going to stop functioning at some point in the future if they don’t have to? It would be terrible for business. They’ll put it in their EULAs, the things you only see after you’ve already purchased the game, and declining it means you can’t use the thing you bought. It might be in some small italics text on the store page that’s difficult to find. But if you’re looking at Diablo IV next to Titan Quest II, you as the consumer have very little indication that one of those games will live forever while the other lives on borrowed time.

Plus, yes, games are art that are worth preserving.

Helldivers said everyone would need a PSN account to play the game on PC and it got so much backlash that the company changed course in a few days.

It’s worth noting that, because this game can’t exist offline, this is a change they could impose on you after you’ve already bought it.

The response is “Shut down your game and never make another online-only game ever again”. He spends a lot of time talking about how games are works of art that need to be preserved for the sake of humanity and the good of consumers, and then he tells devs to shutdown their game and never make another one.

There was a gaming VPN program called Tunngle that I would use when Hamachi would fail me. It was surely collecting untold quantities of my personal data without my knowledge. When the GDPR passed, Tunngle decided to just close up shop rather than finding another way forward. That was a casualty of consumer protections, but it doesn’t mean that consumers aren’t worth protecting. He acknowledges the very real scenario that this is a non-starter for a lot of current games’ business models, and they’ll sooner shut down than comply, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making sure that people get what they expect to receive when they pay for a game: actual ownership.

This isn’t preservation of games anymore than…

I’m not touching that metaphor for all sorts of reasons that could derail this discussion, but yes, requiring that a game remains playable after the servers are shut down is preservation. Requiring them to put a label on it, like a surgeon general’s warning on a pack of cigarettes, describing exactly what it is they’re selling to me; that would be consumer protection. I’ll still happily take the preservation as one step further than that.

I honestly think that the better way of handling this is an awareness campaign (like is currently happening, keep the conversation going!) and boycott against the worst offenders, not a petition to create a new law.

Awareness is a huge problem, because, much like I stated earlier, games aren’t even required to inform me that I wouldn’t want to buy them, and it takes me a lot of work to find that out.

If a free market solution (which I like and prefer, by the way) was going to solve this, it would have done it by now.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Man, what a bummer.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

It’s a nontrivial thing to make a good product for your customers, but it should still be done. If only GOG had the market muscle to require this without shooting themselves in the foot, like when Apple pretty much universally made digital music purchases DRM-free.

EDIT: Wait, what does this mean?

as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections

What infrastructure? You need some port forwarding know-how, but other than that, you type in an address and go.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

The unanimous game of the year did it just last year. No one uses seat belts or air bags until you have to either. LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc. are essential for when services like GOG’s or Steam’s are no longer functional or available. Without them, some part of the game will effectively always have DRM.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu)

It’s convenient for players, who don’t need to know anything about networking to play, which is why we all use it despite its downsides. But it always has downsides. Steam networking goes down for regular weekly maintenance and kills your multiplayer session in a lot of cases. If you and a couple of friends are on a train or in a rural area with terrible internet, you can still play with LAN.

But these online connections are in fact DRM. If you need to connect to your store’s servers to play multiplayer, I imagine that reduces piracy compared to being able to copy paste the executable a few times and send it to a few friends that can all play together. Still, I want the guarantee that what I’m buying is built to last, which means no DRM, which means requiring that connection to my store’s servers is not it.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

Steam itself can be DRM but isn’t always. I would use GOG Galaxy if I could, but they don’t let me. What bums me out is that it’s required for multiplayer functionality in some cases, and I can no longer just assume that the entire library of GOG fits my values the way that it used to. A lot of this information I’m looking for is often not clearly communicated on store pages and requires lots of extra research.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

There are just a ton of ways to skin that cat. You can do things like object replication, where the server is authoritative and sends updates states to every player, but even then, you might want to have something like aiming in a 3D game done locally so that it feels responsive and then update it with the server’s understanding of what’s possible just in case things get out of whack. In the fighting game space, there’s rollback, where each player has a complete up to date simulation of what the game is doing, and they only send inputs back and forth; then if something is out of date, it resimulates the last couple of frames, invisibly, until it’s done catching up, all within the span of 1 frame. However, this approach tends to be less graceful when it comes to people coming and going, because you need to synchronize the game state before you start sharing information back and forth. The network infrastructure for something like Dark Souls, where you’re dynamically pulling in players, messages, and recordings of players’ ghosts, will be different still. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but the most common ones do tend to be available in one-size-fits-most.

ampersandrew, miesiąc temu

pcgamingwiki.com/…/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games…

It’s not exactly an advertised feature when a game is DRM free on Steam, so this list may not be comprehensive or accurate for every game. DRM is optional on Steam. You can copy these game directories out of Steam and run them on a totally separate computer with Steam not even installed, and they’ll still work.

And I’d have just made my username &rew if they let me, but this is the one I use when that one is taken or they have limitations on special characters. With the special character, it has the benefit of fitting in old-school four character clan tags as well as Smash Melee names (and I don’t like going by Drew).