I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
The way I interpreted that part was that they were trying to smooth over the frustrating part of finding a server, because at large scale, you end up in a spot where it’s difficult to actually secure a slot on one. That might be their reasoning, but it’s still an excuse to omit a key feature.
That limitation, and the inability to sidestep DICE by renting a server that never shuts down, made it difficult for communities to take shape in Portal.
The ideas are bound together. Same with anti cheat. Same with preservation. Removing private servers caused all of these problems at the same time. The author of the article speaks for the group who want the community that I admitted never mattered to me, that Portal doesn’t provide, but other knock-on effects of the death of the server browser do matter to me.
it’s not hard to relate to their frustration either, as they are basically seeing the unintentional “flaws” they failed to iron out celebrated as “signature” characteristics of the games they created
They are signature, and that’s why they’re an aesthetic choice. I’ve heard people refer to the N64 as a “blur factory”, because it was low res with even worse textures, if it had any at all. Likewise, the PS1 looked like everything was under water. If your stealth game has a secret agent and a PS1 aesthetic, we know you’re trying to take a shot at MGS1. If your horror game has a PS1 aesthetic, we know it’s your spin on Resident Evil or Silent Hill. That signature look conveys to its target audience what kind of game they’re making, and it conveys it very quickly. As a bonus, it can often be cheaper than trying to make a modern art style with fewer “flaws”.
I imagine there would still be tons of cheaters even if it caused them physical pain every time they cheated, lol. What a great, brilliant, stupid idea for a video that masterfully weaved in his sponsor.
The games today are not mostly shit. There’s so much great stuff that comes out every year that it’s difficult to keep up with it all. It’s just not usually the stuff that gets the most marketing. As a bonus, the best games of the year rarely ask for that $70 price point. What are you looking for?
That’s interesting, because it’s no more boring than it was 20 years ago. It is, however, like most sports, tied up in bullshit exclusivity contracts. From my perspective, all of sports has a problem with gambling advertising and with making it annoying to just watch the sport in the first place. If a certain game isn’t exclusive to Apple TV or Amazon, then you still have to deal with your local team’s games getting blacked out for 90 minutes after it aired live if you bought the league’s streaming package for $150 per year.
Maybe baseball isn’t boring, and their business model is teaching people like me to stop watching. I watch fighting games instead now.
One of those ways that people have choices is with multiple competing soccer leagues, is there not? That may explain in and of itself why it does better. Of course, that’s a chicken and egg thing with how much the market can sustain, but there’s no one to keep MLB or the NFL in check. The NFL, I understand, does have a similar generational problem, but that could also be attributed to CTE findings.
New games are not exclusively pushing high end graphics. In fact, they’re dwarfed by those that are not. My favorite game from last year was The Rise of the Golden Idol. It’s mostly still images and takes up less than 3 GB. Balatro was a game of the year nominee from last year, and it’s only a handful of MBs. Blue Prince is hardly a looker, but it will likely be on a lot of game of the year lists this year. There’s so much out there.
From what I understand all professional sports are having difficulties gaining traction with the Gen Z demographic
And they’re all doing the same nonsense with making it annoying to watch. I’m not asserting that I’m definitely right or anything. I haven’t done anything resembling actual analysis of the trend. Intuitively though, given my own experiences with the prospect of following a sport I enjoy or not, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just the leagues offering poor value to a demographic that hasn’t been locked in to the sport yet.
Yeah, I was never bored, but it is a deterrent to keep up with the sport when each game goes 3 hours and there are over 150 of them in a season. Cutting off all that extra time is only a good thing.
I’m having a great time with Borderlands 3 right now. They did so much to improve the feel of those games with that one. Standards are incredibly high if that’s trash.
for me mine are 1. Elden Ring, 2. RDR2 3. BOTW, all because they genuinely blew my mind when playing them for the first time and changed how I saw and played video games.
Skullgirls - Simply the best fighting game ever made. There’s so much depth in a comparatively small roster that I could basically never get bored or see every viable strategy in it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 - Tried and true RPG mechanics combined with the best version yet of Larian’s engine that encourages free form problem solving. And on top of that, they managed best in class presentation in NPC dialogue and had some of the best writing in the genre. This will be a tough act to follow, especially since I don’t think their last two Original Sin RPG systems were anywhere near as good as D&D 5e.
Elden Ring - It’s been a great couple of years for two of my favorite games of all time to come out within a year and a half of each other, but this is another one of those games where there’s just so much to see and so many ways to solve the problem in front of you. Pattern recognition for where to find your next reward is up to you; your next goal is up to you; how you conquer the bad guy in front of you is up to you.
All three of these games just respect your intelligence and are composed of systems deep enough to give you countless ways to solve their challenges.
I’d definitely have a higher opinion of FTL if it didn’t feel like the entire game ended up just being about the final boss. Knights of the Old Republic is also one that I felt that, if you knew the twist ahead of time, lost a lot of its impact.
No, they arrived at the conclusion, for good reason, that the addressable console market isn’t growing using the old methods. So rather than hold on to exclusives with the myth that exclusives are going to drive adoption for Xbox, they’ll just port their games everywhere and make Game Pass available when possible, and Sony likely came to a similar conclusion. Even though they’re doing way better than Xbox, they also seemingly came to the conclusion that the ceiling is much higher without console exclusivity.
It takes more work and resources to do what they’re doing. They already do server side anti cheat. And realistically, this is more effective than not doing it, though it definitely still gets defeated anyway. I would say the things that it asks of the customer are not worth the trade even if they were 100% effective, but they are more effective.
It did take off for a time, and now it looks like it’s an early access game that hasn’t had an update in 19 months. And I can tell you that if they don’t let me host the server myself and play via LAN, they’re not solving any problems for me over Battlefield.
If we had private dedicated servers and the ability to play without anti-cheat, Linux support would be a non-issue. But because we don’t have that, anti-cheat is seen as a necessity, and we don’t have Linux support.
Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. - Jason Schreier
At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.
Did everyone in this comments section forget that Microsoft is in fact done with traditional consoles? “Everything is an Xbox”, and they’ll still release new hardware, but they are talking about Windows gaming, not a platform where they’ll have to do cert for a discrete spec. PlayStation games are coming to other platforms now, too. The old console model and console wars are over.
Microsoft didn’t have to declare consoles over. The market did. Yes, Steam is the big winner, but Sony isn’t gaining customers either; perhaps even losing them on consoles.
Their current pricing model is between $10 and $20 per month for somewhere north of 30M subscribers. The ability to get Game Pass for less than that was largely discontinued two years ago. You can conservatively estimate that to be $300M in revenue every month. Every two months, they can fund a Call of Duty game. Every month, they can more than fund one Starfield. That’s only Game Pass revenue without including game sales. I’ll also remind you that Microsoft publishes 6 of the top 10 PlayStation games last month; they’re still selling lots of games outside of Game Pass. “Excluding the [studios] they bought over the last 4-5 years” is a major omission. Their licensing deals for third parties on Game Pass have seen significantly less investment in the past few years; as their first party library increases, they’re less and less necessary. I’m also curious where you got that number for Starfield units sold, because my back of the napkin math puts it at more than 3M copies on Steam alone.
Me too. That’s a fact, but it doesn’t refute what I said. It’s a rosy picture that sounds like it refutes what I said, which is why Sony reports it that way, but it doesn’t. 124 million users includes PS4. What the article even mentions in the headline is that it’s behind PS4 at the same point in its life, even with the absence of a real competitor this time around in Xbox. Does it sound healthy to you that 5 years into a console generation, Sony can’t convince people to move to PS5 when all they play is Minecraft or Fortnite?
EDIT: Btw, Sony categorizes monthly actives as “an estimated total number of unique accounts that played games or used services on the PlayStation Network during the last month of the quarter and is based on company research, and may be updated in the future”, emphasis mine. My PS4 only streams video these days, and it sure sounds like it’s counted in that same metric.
I said perhaps, because our data is always lagging behind real time by a few months, and the difference between the two generations’ units sold is close enough that the gap could have been covered in the time it takes to report on it. We don’t know that it has, but it’s possible. Increased spending on exclusives, and fewer of them, has led to decreased margins on them, and the bulk of PlayStation’s revenue is coming from third parties that are available everywhere while PlayStation’s own games are going multiplatform as well, a thing that they never used to do. There’s no L for me to take here.
Im curious if its possible to enter a game competition or something as a casual player? I want to someday atleast try one but im not sure what game to get better at or what sites to use to enter some without making myself look like a fool? I also dont want to pay because thats sort of like gambling at the start....
Search “online tournament X” where X is the name of the game you want to play. Tampa Never Sleeps does tournaments for the likes of Street Fighter 6 and Guilty Gear Strive every week, for instance. They’re all free.
Ive wanted to be a gaming youtuber sense i was a kid but i realized im pretty boring and i dont have anything interesting to say, im also not sure if ill stick with it like most do, but i want to try anyways. Ive condierd playing without voice but that would be even more boring and im not a pro gamer to say....
Why would I watch your channel when I could watch someone else’s? A good answer to that question is how you grow an audience. I watch a lot of fighting game content on YouTube, and I can find value in Maximilian Dood for being good at explaining the legacies of old games or what makes new ones tick; I can find value in commentary and breakdown from those who win major tournaments and break down the subtleties that I might have missed. But there are hundreds of channels YouTube wants to show me of people playing those same games with no reason for me to actually click on them in the first place.
I made what people seem to think are a couple of good video tutorials to teach Skullgirls quickly. It’s got a reputation of being exceptionally hard, but I disagree, and I thought I could explain them quickly. They worked, but the more general fighting game tutorials I made after that didn’t do so well. Maybe there isn’t as much demand for them as I thought, or maybe they just weren’t as good. Still, I was making something that I felt like people couldn’t easily get elsewhere.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out...
Are those instructions current? I don’t see it on the readme on the git project, and installing it from Kubuntu’s package manager didn’t create a gamemode group (it also doesn’t come with a manual page).
Would that same command also work through Heroic, or do they handle that kind of thing differently? Sorry, sometimes things are so abstracted from us that we don’t have to think about what it’s doing under the hood.
What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.
Another year, another Evo. While there were no stories quite like Hayao and “Evo Moment 38” this year, there were still plenty of great tournaments to be had. I’m quite partial to Guilty Gear Strive, and top 8, as usual, was full of inventive uses of the game’s systems and characters to come up with clever plays that...
Season passes and updates are what they’re doing now rather than splitting their player base with a new SKU. But of course, that new SKU comes with advantages like being able to freeze the game at a certain point in its life.
No one plays the old version now because we have no choice. Plenty of people would have preferred to go back to Tekken season 1 and Dragon Ball FighterZ season 2, but we didn’t get that option.
That it was! It’s a shame Justin doesn’t really compete anymore. That’s how well he does in a game he doesn’t really practice like he did back in the day. That man could pick up a fighting game at Evo that he’s never played before, and he’d still get out of pools.
Right now, I don’t have a PC. Long ago, when I did have one, the first AAA game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption 2. I have played other games, but I feel like RDR2 surpasses all of them and is legitimately one of the greatest games ever made. The amount of details dedicated to realism, the solid storyline, the amazing...
A one more heist story where it was clear it was never going to be just one more heist, and the band dissolved itself over a lack of real leadership. As opposed to the trope, where it’s one more heist that goes wrong. I take it back; I do have a critique of the story. Act 4, on the island, was a detour from anything that had anything to do with the main plot. Other than that though, I thought it was fantastic.
Battlefield 6 players are crying out for a 'real' server browser, and it's about time we demanded the basic FPS feature that Call of Duty killed (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly...
Final Fantasy X programmer doesn’t get why devs want to replicate low-poly PS1 era games. “We worked so hard to avoid warping, but now they say it’s charming” - AUTOMATON WEST (automaton-media.com) angielski
Who would win Kernel level anti-cheat or middle age man with a Raspberry Pi? (youtu.be) angielski
18+ Gen Z Is Cutting Back On Video Game Purchases (www.vice.com) angielski
'Consumers are not okay with okay': Take-Two boss says BioShock 4 is taking so long because the company's goal is 'to make the best entertainment, not necessarily the most entertainment' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
what are in you're top 3 favourite games of all time? angielski
for me mine are 1. Elden Ring, 2. RDR2 3. BOTW, all because they genuinely blew my mind when playing them for the first time and changed how I saw and played video games.
Sony Q1 2026 Earnings Call; "...in gaming business and moving away from a hardware-centric business to more to the community- based engagement business..." (seekingalpha.com) angielski
Battlefield 6 cheats day 1 of early access. Depite kernel level anti cheat, forced secure boot TPM 2.0 (youtu.be) angielski
Battlefield 6's beta has only been running for a day, but it's already suffering from a FPS curse with cheaters breaking out the wallhacks (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Xbox Drops Work on ‘Contraband’ Video Game After Four Years (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. - Jason Schreier
Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 30 Million Consoles This Generation (in.ign.com) angielski
For reference, Sony was recently boasting that PS5 sold over 80 million copies. This is terrible for Xbox.
How can i casual gamer enter a game online competition? angielski
Im curious if its possible to enter a game competition or something as a casual player? I want to someday atleast try one but im not sure what game to get better at or what sites to use to enter some without making myself look like a fool? I also dont want to pay because thats sort of like gambling at the start....
How do gameplay youtuber develop interesting commentary? angielski
Ive wanted to be a gaming youtuber sense i was a kid but i realized im pretty boring and i dont have anything interesting to say, im also not sure if ill stick with it like most do, but i want to try anyways. Ive condierd playing without voice but that would be even more boring and im not a pro gamer to say....
Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out...
Evo Las Vegas 2025 wrap-up angielski
Another year, another Evo. While there were no stories quite like Hayao and “Evo Moment 38” this year, there were still plenty of great tournaments to be had. I’m quite partial to Guilty Gear Strive, and top 8, as usual, was full of inventive uses of the game’s systems and characters to come up with clever plays that...
Red Dead Redemption 2 was amazing. angielski
Right now, I don’t have a PC. Long ago, when I did have one, the first AAA game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption 2. I have played other games, but I feel like RDR2 surpasses all of them and is legitimately one of the greatest games ever made. The amount of details dedicated to realism, the solid storyline, the amazing...