I don’t think a lot of people are going to double dip this time. This game will sell consoles, but it’s not going to make up for the deficit the console market has compared to how many PS3s and Xbox 360s were out there in 2013.
I’m not sure what support you’re talking about, and I’ve never delved into mods for GTA V, but the rest are just sensible business decisions, at least up until now; we’ll see how the different modern dynamic between consoles and PC plays out this time, but I think it’s the last time they’ll do it. As with all these exclusivity deals that are quickly dying out, that PC version will come, and that’s when I’ll play it.
I don’t know why you’re being nasty to me. I genuinely wasn’t sure why someone would have an issue with Rockstar. If they don’t want to make story DLC for GTA V, it’s much the same as Valve not making a Portal 3. I can just move on and play something else. Focusing on a console release first and foremost, especially for a project as ambitious as this, made a lot more sense in the past, and maybe was still common wisdom when the project got rolling. It will stop due to natural market forces. Speaking of natural market forces, it’s exactly why RDR2 Online would be abandoned: there weren’t enough people to care about it compared to its costs. Modding isn’t really my world, so I wouldn’t exactly be privy to those shenanigans, but that sucks.
I’m with them; my 1080p TV still gets the job done and looks great to me. Maybe I’d be more invested in cinema if cinema cared more about what I want. I can’t even walk into brick and mortar and buy a movie anymore, and it’s not like there’s a GOG for movies.
Personally, I don’t think that’s worth getting mad over, especially not in this saturated market right now where there’s always something great to play. Valve worked on Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead many times since their last iterations, but you have to give creatives time to throw out what’s not working. And plenty of game developers I like work on plenty of stuff I’m not interested in. I just wait for them to come back around to the stuff I am interested in. In the case of live service stuff, it sucks, but Rockstar’s hardly unique there.
Gotcha. No worries. I’m more disappointed that basically everyone in the industry stopped making crime stories except for Yakuza, but we’ve got two coming this year, at least, in MindsEye and Mafia: The Old Country.
Given the swathes of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
Not just my favorite indie game, Skullgirls is my favorite game. That game is 13 years old, and there are still killer strategies that no one has even found yet, due to how flexible defense and team synergies are.
Vagante is probably my favorite roguelike, trailed closely by Streets of Rogue. As a bonus, both are playable in online and local co-op.
Sadly, the team behind Cannon Brawl never got to make another game together after making one of the best RTS games I’ve ever played, but to be fair, it wasn’t exactly super similar to the likes of C&C and StarCraft. Tooth and Tail is another great indie RTS game that I felt could be a future for the genre, but it didn’t really take off either.
There are also a handful of indie games that I’ve played that very few have. The Masterplan is just shy of being the perfect heist game, including a bunch of mechanics built around holding people at gunpoint. Magnetic By Nature is a clever magnetic platformer that deserved more attention. And most recently, I finally gave up hope that Cloak and Dasher, a fast paced platformer like Super Meat Boy or N++, will ever get another update and leave early access, but what’s there, while kind of thin, is pretty great.
EDIT: I mistakenly listed Mind Over Magnet, Game Maker’s Toolkit’s game, instead of Magnetic By Nature. They’re very different games. Magnetic By Nature is the one that I liked that so few people played that it may as well have been a secret.
I would say it’s a game that requires you to play tactically rather than rushing through it. Especially early game, the traps are very reminiscent of Spelunky, and it’s clear where a lot of their inspiration came from, but Vagante gives you even more mechanics to deal with traps, like magic rings that let you go through walls and floors, for instance, but you won’t necessarily find them every run. Noita has caught my attention here and there, but I just never made time to try it.
I’m not really a streaming kind of guy. Early on in the game, you’re mostly looking out for floor switches and spikes. You can hold the walk modifier to make sure you always climb down a ledge, which helps to make sure you don’t accidentally land in a spike pit, and you can throw just about anything on floor switches to trigger them before you get there so that they’re no longer a threat. You could check out a YouTube let’s play and see how they deal with them, or you could just accept that the game is pretty cheap, so worst case, you’re not out much money if you don’t like it.
It lowers the threshold of how many copies need to sell before a given game breaks even on its budget. It also lowers the number of copies it will sell, because some percentage of people who would have bought a game at the lower price no longer find it to be worth what they’re charging for it.
Central banks can adjust the inputs to the formula that result in inflation or deflation, but not the result. It can be a difficult target to hit, as you can see if you followed the news in the past 3-4 years.
It was a nontrivial cost that factored into the price, and the switch to digital is a large part of why game prices were so inflation resistant for so long.
The OG Xbox got cut down to at least $150 from $300. My memory tells me that every console of that era was eventually cut to $100, but I found $150 with a very quick search. The PS3 slim was cut down to at least $300 from an entry price of $500. I don’t know how you call that small.
Half-Life: Alyx showed that Valve still knows how to make a great campaign shooter, and it’s not like we’re spoiled for choice in that genre right now. At this point, a solid Half-Life sequel that doesn’t push the envelope would still be amazing.
You’d lose a lot of the effect in mouse and keyboard anyway. Each combat encounter has to be tuned very differently from non-VR. But the point is that they still have a very good understanding of how to make this kind of game.
Well, given the implosion in the industry due to live service games, that’s not really a solution either. The actual solution is seemingly to just make smaller games, but they’re not really interested in that, so they’ll go out of business the first time they have a game that doesn’t hit.
The developer that made Sleeping Dogs shut down, and Square Enix had so many misses that they sold off their western studios. You should keep an eye on MindsEye and Mafia: The Old Country though. I’ve been dying for a good crime story that isn’t Yakuza.
The trailblazing video game website Giant Bomb has faced significant staff departures, as owner Fandom claims the brand will undergo “strategic reset and realignment”.
It might end up just being a name for game guides, which sucks, but that core nucleus will still be doing Blight Club in some capacity, and Jeff will still do his news show. I think the same thing will live on by another name, just like the old school lives on in Next Lander and Gerstmann’s solo thing.
Nah, you can unsubscribe after a month. If the price of the games you want is more expensive than a month of Prime, you come out ahead, and it can frequently work out in your favor.
They’ve been owned by Fandom for a little while now, and they even made some good changes lately, but then someone a few rungs up the corporate ladder was replaced with someone who decided to make a pretty huge change to the company that basically compromises the entire point of Giant Bomb, if not also Gamespot.
See my other comment below, but the gist of it is that they were told to pause streaming for a while as everyone tries to figure out a path forward. They put out one Bombcast that rebelled against the new Fandom “values”, and you can find a link to it if you look through Bluesky or the Giant Bomb reddit. They’re still paused, and it’s been about a week now. It might be the end of Giant Bomb, in which case, Grubb, Mike, and Dan have sworn to keep doing Blight Club, and the others are probably preparing their parachutes too. It also might not be the end of Giant Bomb; nothing’s been decided yet, and everyone currently still has their jobs.
If Episode 888 is the last Bombcast, it will leave the world with the integrity that created it in the first place. Give it a listen, when you get around to it.
It’s looking like GB is now dead. At the very least, I’m confident I’ll continue to get Blight Club and Jeff’s news show, even though they won’t be at a site called Giant Bomb. Hopefully everyone else found a place where they can land on their feet. Their personal brands are stronger than Fandom’s.
I have no ill will toward Gerstmann, but there came a point where he became very unentertaining, so when I heard he was gone, it was a good signal for me to give them another try, and Grubb fit into that old Gerstmann interviewer role very well while also being a more positive guy and someone who might break some news. They had a really good group, and Blight Club was an all-timer Giant Bomb show.
Trying to raise the “standard” price to $80 will have very nice ripple effects of more pricing diversity, where each game will really consider what it’s actually worth, which we haven’t had for a long time. Even now we’re getting first-party Microsoft titles releasing at $20, $30, and $50.
They’ll only get Game Pass on PlayStation with Sony’s blessing, which is unlikely. And the next Xbox will just be a PC. I don’t think any of the consoles are in the market of selling units at a loss anymore. Those days are done. So with tariffs and inflation, this is the only way it could go.
A lot of games priced at $70 right now are having a rough go of it, so charging more on top of that isn’t going to help, but there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50. If your game isn’t as hot of a commodity as Mario Kart, you’re probably going to try to lure people in with a lower price.
The breadth of the Game Pass catalog is far larger, and Microsoft isn’t exiting the console market, as much as they don’t care about exclusivity. So personally, I doubt it, but I don’t have a crystal ball.
Yeah, there’s always someone bringing this up, but you can’t just run Steam on it, and that’s what’s about to change. Xbox games still go through cert and need explicit ports above and beyond the PC SKU.
Yeah, it just launches a web browser in the client, but behind the scenes, it’s using a referral code in partnership with GOG to make sure they get a cut. So you can support DRM-free and Linux gaming support at the same time.
We all? I mean, I have, but we represent single digit percentages of the market, which is why they keep shoving more bullshit into Windows that no one wants, because hardly anyone leaves Windows. The most that this affects Linux gamers is if you like their controllers or individual games that they publish, but that would be the same as on Windows as well.
It’s looking like the Xbox will stick around as a cheap entry point into Game Pass and the games that Microsoft publishes themselves. Yes, I know, it’s not as cheap as it used to be, but still fairly capable for a game machine at that price. The Steam mini PC is likely on its way. A couple of months back, there were leaks of the new Steam controller that leaked on their way to be mass produced after finalizing the design, so they’d probably accompany the living room machine. In the meantime, I have a mini PC running Bazzite that’s been awesome, but with tariffs in the US, you won’t be able to get the same performance per dollar that I got.
The Metal Gear Solid games are some of my favorites, and I’ve played all of them. If you’re referring to the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games, those were made with similar team sizes and “levels of effort” as most games that would be called “indie” are today, for very similar economic reasons. Blue Prince was made over the course of 8 years largely by one person, and I guarantee you he wasn’t trying to find a way to make bank by doing little effort; a famous development talk pointed out that people getting into game development to make big bucks with little effort would have been better off opening a Subway franchise instead. Balatro was also made largely by one person, and it was a nominee for Game of the Year last year. Split Fiction was made with a team size and project scope reminiscent of MGS2 or 3, and it too will be a Game of the Year contender.
You haven’t even played the games I mentioned. How on earth would you know? Also, take a look at the credits of Crash Bandicoot, and learn something about how games are made. 84 people, including the publisher and marketing. Naughty Dog itself was only 9 people. Here’s Indika, a cinematic puzzle/story game, not a far cry from 2018’s God of War without the combat, an indie game from last year; the development studio dwarfs Naughty Dog from the 90s. UFO 50 is an indie game from last year that has 50 full, new, original games contained in it, designed to portray a fictional game development studio’s catalog from the 80s. It was made by 6 people over the course of 7 years. And I’m clueless, huh?
Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2 (www.youtube.com) angielski
What is your favorite indie game? angielski
Given the swathes of posts about bad behavior from big companies, I figure we could counterbalance that with some positivity about stuff the smaller guys made that often costs us less too.
deleted_by_moderator
Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts (arstechnica.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/29113065
Half Life 3 (wccftech.com) angielski
Could it be true? We’ve all been waiting so long I’m very skeptical anytime I see articles like this but this actually looks good?
Chrono Trigger Remake Seemingly Confirmed By Yuji Horii (insider-gaming.com) angielski
Grand Theft Auto 6 release date has been announced, but the game has been delayed to 2026 | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
May 26, 2026
Future of Giant Bomb website in doubt following prominent staff departures (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
The trailblazing video game website Giant Bomb has faced significant staff departures, as owner Fandom claims the brand will undergo “strategic reset and realignment”.
All of this month's 'free' games with Prime Gaming angielski
This month’s titles have been revealed (as Amazon always does!)...
Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs (kotaku.com) angielski
Microsoft is raising prices on Xbox consoles, controllers, and games worldwide (www.theverge.com) angielski
Xbox first party titles expected to hit $80 USD this holiday; Game Pass pricing currently unchanged.
ARC Raiders Is the Most ‘It’s Fine’ Game We’ve Played in a While - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski