bogdugg

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

A couple years old, hopefully most of the websites on here are still alive:

drive.google.com/file/d/…/viewalinachin.github.io/onlineboardgames.html

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

Managed it in 5 somehow. Very cool.

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

It might be because they are part of the Order ‘carnivora’, so in that sense they are carnivores even though they are omnivorous.

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

the game we should have had at launch

DLSS, frame-gen and massive CPU/GPU performance boosts

I don’t think the performance is Starfield’s biggest problem.

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

Is it cheating to skip a paragraph in a book?

bogdugg, 7 miesięcy temu

Maybe you’ve read it before and you want to skip to the good parts. Maybe it’s non-fiction and you’re only interested in something specific. Maybe there are parts of the story that make you uncomfortable, but you’re enjoying it overall. Maybe a page is missing. Maybe it’s an abridged version and it’s not up to you, that’s just what was available.

And to the original point, what of translations? Maybe the original author is dead, and somebody translated their book. Are you ‘circumventing’ the author’s original intent to ‘gain an advantage’? I mean, yes. Does that mean you’re ‘cheating’?

What about audio books? Was the book intended to be read on a page? Are you cheating by having the book read to you?

Calling these things ‘cheating’ is silly and unnecessarily loaded, and they assume that the goal of a work is completion. That the only reason you would start a thing is to finish it. I don’t believe that’s the case for any art. One might say that the challenge in a game is the point, but that’s only sometimes true, and challenge is relative. If something comes naturally easier to you, is it ‘cheating’ to use mods to make the game more difficult, because you’re gaining the advantage of improving your experience, against the original intent of the game? I don’t think so, so I don’t see why it is any different the other way around.

To think about it another way: if you subtract that paragraph from that book, does it cease to be a book? No, it’s just a different book, and that can still have value to people. You’re not ‘cheating’, you are making a new experience for yourself.

I could go on and on so I’m gonna stop myself here.

bogdugg, 8 miesięcy temu

I have two podcasts in my rotation currently:

• Remap Radio; previously Waypoint Radio, sometimes their politics feel overly dogmatic, perhaps as a reflection of the audience and culture they have cultivated, but the vibes are good and they have insightful things to say. I’d say they are currently in a transition period so they’re still finding their rhythm.
• 8-4 Play; Started by a localization company based in Tokyo, you’ll get a unique perspective of life in Japan, Japanese games, and industry connections that you can’t really get anywhere else, at least not in English.

Used to listen to the Bombcast, but none of the splinters from what it was appeal to me much. New Bombcast, Nextlander, solo Gerstmann, are all flawed in different ways imo.

bogdugg, 8 miesięcy temu

Why all the hate towards this guy?

As time went on, he developed a reputation for big promises and hype and underdelivering - viewed by some as straight up lying. He arguably killed the Fable brand. He presented a tech demo for the launch of the Kinect that was thought to be a real game, that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Following Fable 3’s poor reception, he makes his own company and hypes up “Curiosity”, essentially a bad clicker game with a promised prize to the person who gets the final click. The tech was bad, and the “prize” was supposedly a share of the revenue from their following project Godus. That project was not good (which was only expected to be at all due to his penchant for inflating expectations), and the cherry on top was that the person who won the prize for the aforementioned Curiosity game never received a dime.

After that, people stopped caring.

bogdugg, 8 miesięcy temu

I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.

Here’s a contrasting example:

In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.

In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you’re constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what’s the value of stealing a cool rock? It’s also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don’t matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you’re far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don’t even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don’t really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.

So to summarize: I don’t know who I’m stealing from, I don’t know why I would care to steal anything, it’s not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it’s not worth using my lockpicks, I’ll never be caught, and their door is always open. There’s zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it’s critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It’s just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Now I’ll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I’ve changed. It’s possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what’s that cool cave on this planet? I’ll go check it out! Oh uhh, it’s nothing? There’s… a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?

bogdugg, 8 miesięcy temu (edited 8 miesięcy temu)

Oh you’re definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There’s all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don’t talk to each other very well, in my opinion.

Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn’t make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*

*I know it doesn’t work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

I think it’s better to reframe the question as “Are there downsides to Valve’s PC market dominance?” or “How is Steam’s 30% cut different from Xbox or Playstation?”

For the latter: it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Sony sell their hardware at a loss, and make up the difference through software, so there are obvious developer benefits to the 70-30 split. For Steam, the equivalent value-add for developers is only the platform itself, and I would wager for many of those developers the biggest reason for selling on Steam is not the feature set - though obviously useful - but because that’s where the users are.

So, users get a feature-rich distribution platform, and developers (and by extension users) pay a tax to access those users. So the question is, how fair is that tax, and what effect does that tax have on the games that get made? Your view on that is going to depend on what you want from Steam, but more relevant I think is how much Steam costs to operate. How much of that 30% cut feeds back into Steam? My guess is not much; though I could be wrong.

But anyway, let’s imagine you took away half the 30% cut. Where does that money go? Well, one of two places: either your pocket, or the developers (or publishers) pocket (depending on how the change affects pricing). The benefits to your pocket are obvious, but what if developers just charge the same price? Well, as far as I’m aware, a lot of games are just not profitable - I read somewhere that for every 10 games, 7 fail, 2 break even, and 1 is a huge success - so my personal view is that this is an industry where developers need all the help they can get. If that extra 15% helps them stay afloat long enough to put out the next thing without selling their soul to Microsoft or Sony or whoever is buying up companies these days, and Steam isn’t severely negatively impacted, I’d call that a win.

But of course, that won’t happen, because Steam has no reason to change. That’s where the users are, and they are fine with the status quo.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

I don’t dispute they provide value, but why 30%? Why not 35? Or 25? or 80? or 3? or 29? I don’t know.

I’m curious, how much of that 30% do you think feeds back into making Steam better and keeping it running?

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

“are the devs happy with it? Is that the standard for digital stores as well?”. And the answer to both is Yes

I fully disagree. On the first point, do developers accept it? Sure. That does not at all mean they are happy about it. Money is tight for games, and I guarantee you every developer would much prefer to take a bigger piece of the pie.

To your second point, it is the standard but it is not universal. Epic Games Store takes 12%. Itch.io defaults to 10%. Google Play Store takes 15% on the first $1 million in revenue.

But that alone doesn’t impact me, the consumer.

I don’t believe this is entirely true. The more cash flow developers have, the more stable they are as companies, and the more able they are to put out good games. You are indirectly impacted because a larger tax on developers means fewer, or lower quality, games that get released.

Steams share has zero impact on my wallet.

Disagree, unless you exclusively play AAA.

Edit: Actually I’ve changed my mind on this. I mostly agree the percentage cut doesn’t affect the optimal price point.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

The consoles justify the amount they take more because they are selling hardware at a loss to bring in users, so as a developer, you are seeing direct, tangible, and ongoing benefits to giving the manufacturers a cut. Every console cycle, there is renewed investment in the ecosystem to keep users interested.

For digital platforms, the continued investment in the platform itself is both less tangible, and I would wager less overall (though we can’t know this for Steam because we don’t have access to numbers like that). The longer Steam continues as a platform, the more true this is, unless you believe that Steam will continue to improve at the same rate. I don’t see my interaction with Steam being much different 5 years from now as it is today, so it is less obvious to me that such at steep rate is justified.

Like, imagine they “perfected” Steam. They made all the features users could ever want, and there becomes no reason to make any more changes. Should they keep charging the same rate? Or, maybe a better way to frame it, would be that rather than investing some of that 30% rate into improving the platform, they invest in developers themselves to make better products, because it’s the only place left to make the platform better than it was before. This would be equivalent to just lowering the rate across the board, in my opinion.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

Is there a source for the $10 fee for digital releases? I’d love to read more about it, had trouble finding it.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

This is an interesting perspective, and gave me something to think about!

I don’t think the Steam Deck is quite there in terms of adoption to justify an across the board tax. The order of operations is kind of reversed, where Steam is reinvesting money made from previous sales towards R&D and Hardware ambitions, rather than using the Steam Deck to bring in users. But if you’re developer that benefits from the Steam Deck’s existence, or saw a sales bump from Steam Deck sales, or some other benefit like that, I agree it’s a pretty good trade-off in that case.

Nintendo is a bit different because they sort of focus on their own thing and everyone else is secondary. Something like 80% of software sales for Nintendo platforms are first party, so it’s mostly a Nintendo machine. Frankly, I think they should take less of a cut. Indies do really well on Nintendo though. They have a kind of pseudo-monopoly of a younger casual gamer demographic, and they maintain that user base by putting out great software. It is an interesting counterpoint though.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

I understand the reflexive hate for tech executives, but you can do a lot worse than Phil Spencer.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

Didn’t they already announce Marathon? Strange that this article doesn’t mention it at all.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

It’s weird, because they absolutely need to switch things up… but also they have a winning formula and so long as the games sell they will never adapt.

For me, the biggest fault isn’t the tech itself (at least not directly), but the game design. Every time they strap another system to that Frankenstein’s monster of an engine, those systems need to be justified in gameplay, which is harder to do the more there are. As everything grows in scale and scope, each component, whether locations or mechanics, feels less individually compelling. Then they hide mechanics behind the tech tree, which solves one issue by focusing the player experience, but now the quests feel even more bland because they need to appeal to every possible build.

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu

people who sold millions of shares

Is there a source for people selling millions of shares?

bogdugg, 9 miesięcy temu (edited 9 miesięcy temu)

2000 shares is not millions… that’s less than $100K at the current share price. For scale, the CEO was paid over $8 million in stock in 2022, of which he sold about 50000 shares over the course of the year, which would translate to roughly $2 million worth, which I assume means he’s holding many more shares.

I just don’t see it. Seems far more likely that he just regularly sells shares as income.

I do agree the other two are more scummy than the CEO.

bogdugg, 10 miesięcy temu

a slot machine simulator is still gambling even if it doesn’t really pay out

Uhh, no? That’s not what gambling is?