Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
I started a new run of Baldur’s Gate II to see if I can actually be good at it this time.
Of more recent releases, I’ve also been going through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and The Alters, both being very good resource management games in space.
It’s only the campaign, despite the fact that the competitive multiplayer was just as responsible for this game’s success back in the day. Split-screen is only supported on consoles and not on PC for some reason that I definitely cannot understand. And while it’s got online play, it surely won’t support LAN…in Halo…a game known for LAN parties.
I don’t know if they couldn’t figure it out or if they intended it this way, but I like the look. The 3D environments look like the bottom-most layer of an old-fashioned cartoon, where it’s painted and clearly not going to move.
Really looking forward to this one. I loved that last game and really appreciated how much they did with a little, leading to a much-appreciated brevity that helped its pacing. ACG had some reservations with the opening area, but we’ll see how I feel about it when I get around to it.
Dragon Age was last year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves are all great. Avowed kind of counts, and I’d recommend that one, too. I didn’t like Hades, but Hades fans sure are enjoying Hades II. And maybe I’ll get to Hollow Knight: Silksong before the end of the year, which people seem to largely be into.
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said. Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles? And does it matter how high the visuals score for Bye, Sweet Carole is if they’re leaving a subpar review for the puzzles? That’s what the content of the review is for.
How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review. Publishers can get slimy around it though and turn the knobs to be more nefarious after the review period, which people can call them out for, but much like how lies spread faster than the truth, updates spread slower than initial reviews. What I’d personally like to see make its way into reviews are how much ownership the game actually grants. So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.
But all of this has only been about reviews, and games media also breaks news. Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies. Sometimes we can actually get real confirmation that absolutely nothing is happening with Bloodborne and no one should get their hopes up for anything anytime soon. All of that is valuable, too.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
I gotta say, I don’t see it. I did start reading the NY Times toward the end of the election cycle, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without showing the awful things Israel’s doing; Bret Stephens has his own opinions, but they’re in the opinion column. Of what I’ve seen, I think they reported Biden’s administration accurately, and if that fucked him over, it’s not really their job to withhold that. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Also, they may not have hard quotas there but the writers are paid to make articles and content to fill the site (it is like how best buy did not do commission vs future shop but where both the same company and fired those that did not make sales regardless).
The incentives are very different when the writers own the company and are largely paid by monthly subscribers.
There is also a big “citation needed” part that should have set off a editor.
How would you have cited “declining quality of writing” as an inciting factor? How would you measure it? And why did it just become a problem in the past few years rather than any of the problems that are listed in the article?
I know you were talking about another part of the article, but you had a similarly uncited reason for the shrinking games media work force. I don’t care if you don’t like VGC, but I really don’t see a time when the writing was better, and I wanted to see what you were expecting.
Take the reviews for example, VGC’s coverage on Borderlands 4 Does not even address the games broken state but gives it 4/5 stars
That’s because it’s not broken; it performs poorly relative to its visuals. It’s an excellent game.
You’ve done little to convince me that “mistrust” of games media is any more than people getting upset that reviewers have different opinions than they do. I can tell you right now, for instance, that Jordan Middler loves Pokemon, so it’s no surprise to me when VGC gives good reviews to Pokemon games. I’ve got a friend who really gelled with Suicide Squad as well, so I know it’s possible for people to really enjoy that game. In this very thread, you can see people who are convinced that reviewers are paid off or playing difficult games on extra easy modes, neither of which are true, because they just can’t reconcile that anyone could possibly enjoy a game that they didn’t enjoy or weren’t interested in.
Its a non functioning product at launch, something that should be called out in a review.
It literally functions. I’ve played it at launch and will continue playing it. Watch Austin’s review on SkillUp, who had the benefit of releasing his review some time after launch but started during the embargo period, to see why a reviewer would not call it out.
The Suicide Squad was a bad game, someone liking it does not justify a dishonest or lazy review
The quality of a game, and the evaluation of it in a review, is entirely subjective.
Neither of which are true is a bold statement that needs more then a “trust me” level of response.
Try looking right under the comment where someone who has been a paid reviewer called it out as nonsense. Or ask literally anyone in the industry. It’s come up on podcasts like Friends Per Second and Giant Bomb over the years enough times. If this was all a big marketing stunt where reviews were bought and paid for, someone would have blown the whistle by now.
You seem to be pushing the idea that its the audience is wrong and desperately assuming that people don’t like the media state due to an inability to reconcile their own preferences with the articles (wild and odd).
And yet you’re doing it right now. I can see why you would distrust a review if you don’t understand what a review is.
As a sustainable video game entity, WB games would be better suited in just about anyone else’s hands. WB has tried to sell off its games division in the past, but they’ve spent the better part of two decades making sure that their game studios produced nothing except for tie-ins to their movie and comic book businesses. I was told straight to my face at a PAX years ago that the pitch process under WB starts with a game idea and ends with, “Cool, now make it Batman,” or “Cool, now make it Lord of the Rings.” Then when they tried to divest themselves of games, not only did they have no IP to sell outside of old Midway properties, they also thought the new buyer would love to keep paying licensing fees to WB for the properties attached to these gaming franchises. Bunch of geniuses over there.
There’s a paywall, but you can sort of read most of it before they tell you that you need a subscription. Also, reloading the page a handful of times seems to get by it?...
When they’re new and “incomplete”, it’s no different than how patches used to work for games before clients like Steam. I bought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and I can get updates through Heroic or Galaxy, or I can use the installers for each patch or DLC.
Surely someone out there is paranoid enough to be wiresharking constantly. Sony games get hit hard in GOG reviews for telemetry that I’d probably never think twice about.
To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.
Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.
We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.
My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.
It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.
I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.
ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS (www.tomshardware.com) angielski
Ex-PlayStation boss says the games industry is "littered" with Fortnite clones and "people trying to do Overwatch with different skins," but keep dreaming if you're just trying to get "big sacks of money" (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Rise of the Tomb Raider -SteamDeck angielski
What you guys playing this weekend?
Halo: Campaign Evolved | The Silent Cartographer Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Krafton is now an 'AI-first company,' will spend $70 million on a GPU cluster to 'serve as the foundation for accelerating the implementation of agentic AI' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
MOUSE: P.I. For Hire | Official Release Date Trailer [March 19, 2026] (www.youtube.com) angielski
The Outer Worlds 2 | Review Thread angielski
Game Information...
Microsoft Pushes Xbox Division to Hit Higher Profit Margins (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been...
Warner Bros. Discovery puts itself up for sale (also includes WB Games) (www.nbcnews.com) angielski
Warner Bros. Discovery, the owner of HBO, CNN and other streaming and studio businesses, said Tuesday it is putting itself up for sale
Even Xbox developer kits are getting a big price hike (www.theverge.com) angielski
There’s a paywall, but you can sort of read most of it before they tell you that you need a subscription. Also, reloading the page a handful of times seems to get by it?...
Xbox ditching hardware and exclusive games "makes sense," former Microsoft exec and Blizzard boss says, as "only a moron would continue" making consoles as games go third party (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
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ARC Raiders Just Became Steam's Most Popular Extraction Shooter and It's Not Even Close (insider-gaming.com) angielski
I love stardew valley. looking for an alternative that is made for controller experience. angielski
after long day at my job, i just wanna kick back and relax. maybe holding a controller instead of keyboard and mouse would be nice....
From Detroit to Deadlock: Quantic Dream are making a MOBA (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. (store.steampowered.com) angielski