Calling what Google did trying is a bad joke. Stadia failed because and exclusively because it was a fucking horseshit premise with no redeeming qualities.
Mad Max was decent, but it chose setting over gameplay with how insanely empty it is, and while car combat is fun, driving without the combat really isn't and there's a huge amount of it to make the big empty desert feel like a big empty desert.
The combat is basically AC/Arkham/Shadow of Mordor, but holy shit do the animations make it satisfying. There's this gritty desperate quality to it I haven't seen anywhere else.
But they haven't crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don't force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don't force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it's things customers value.
They're a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn't force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That's what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there's no other storefront that wouldn't be a worse value if it was free isn't Steam doing something wrong.
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
Quality control is another word for "high barrier to entry", and especially with their market position, being rejected by Steam for some arbitrary reason would effectively kill your project.
Not only should they not restrict the ability to sell your games there without a concrete reason; they shouldn't be permitted to do so. A company with that much influence shouldn't be allowed to be a gatekeeper of what constitutes a "good" game.
Their review system and strong return policy are more than enough.
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
I wonder if Nintendo would consider removing the engine version requirement if enough developers make it clear it's a dealbreaker and cancel ports or stop maintenance.
Still, there are a few things getting in the way of the plaintiffs being successful here. For starters, games and in-game content are often cancelled - an unfortunate reality of the industry. Furthermore, even if refunds weren't granted, Aspyr did offer affected fans a copy of KOTOR 2 on Steam - where the mod can be played for free - or another Star Wars game altogether.
How is this relevant in any way?
I don't think they're legally entitled to a refund for buying a game with content that didn't exist, but neither of those are even sort of substitutes for the content or a refund.
Because they knew it didn't exist when they bought it.
You would win your example lawsuit, too, unless you had a contract explicitly promising future services. Talking about future plans when they're clearly future plans isn't legally false advertising or any kind of legal obligation.
In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase shared their feelings on the term JRPG, both having different perspectives on it....
JRPGs are a very distinct genre, and either you like it or you don't. The idea that it shouldn't get its own descriptor when it's clearly different from a crpg or other approaches to RPGs is nonsense.
But not every rpg from Japan is a JRPG. Not all JRPGs are from Japan.
If you don't want to be put into the JRPG box, make something that isn't a JRPG. They're in a box for a reason, and it's because they're markedly different from other RPG formats.
"Selling shares before the announcement" was a pretty egregious misrepresentation. He has scheduled pre-registered sales on a regular basis because he gets paid partly in stock.
It was always going to be relatively soon after a sale of stock.
This has nothing in common with insider trading and doesn't resemble it in any way. The shares he sold weren't a relevant proportion of his ownership. He didn't sell then deliberately tank them. He sold then announced something he thought would improve the value of his big stake in the company. The decision almost definitely cost him a lot of money by substantially lowering the trajectory of his company's ability to maintain market share.
Exactly. It was plopping his dick on the table, then realizing "oh shit, no one actually is impressed by this".
Insider trading would be more "I know we're about to get sued for this egregious fuckup and have no defense, so I'm going to sell before the news leaks". Strategy knowledge can be part of insider trading, but it would tend to be more buying shares because you have advanced knowledge that a highly lucrative contract has been signed before the announcement. It would be harder to have selling because of a strategy decision be insider trading unless you were opposed to it internally, because decisions you make are intended to make the shareholders (you) money.
Dragon's Dogma was the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn't want to feel alone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you'd create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of...
lol at choosing to present it in a way that implied there was no way to avoid the retroactive license change (which you explicitly said you wanted to apply retroactively, charging fees based on activity prior to your license change), then blaming the community for interpreting it how you told us it works.
Literally no one but legal should have the authority to remove a contract from the website, and allowing any other human being to do so is gross negligence at absolute best.
It should have sent a cascade of giant red flags the second it was touched.
I don't think any of their stuff doesn't work now. Even stuff like Halo with anticheat has been allowed to work via proton already.
This doesn't provide any promise that you can use gamepass or windows store games on Linux, and it doesn't provide any promise that they don't use anticheat in a restrictive way on Linux machines. They can trivially provide a bypass in the cloud environment that doesn't get shipped to end users.
Hopefully they don't do that, but this doesn't really mean a lot to individuals buying their games.
It would have been perfectly fine if they did it this way to start. Tie the new licensing costs to a future engine version, give lead time before you start collecting data, and have the number be manageable.
But trust in such an absolutely critical vendor that your entire business relies on, and they told you they're perfectly fine trying to retroactively change contracts. The uncertainty of legal costs to protect your rights is a huge concern.
I think they were specifically referring to the "2.0" because it entirely overhauls the systems. They suggest restarting so your progression feels natural and you can decide how to allocate skills as you learn them.
I didn't see anything saying the actual expansion benefitted from starting over. I was under the impression that it's a mid/late game area/missions.
RT + DLSS is less cheating than most other graphics effects, especially any other approach to lighting. The entire graphics pipeline for anything 3D has always been fake shortcut stacked on top of fake shortcut.
It has nothing to do with DMCA. It's not copyright infringement.
It's violating an NDA on an unreleased product, and even if they can't actually get damages, the day they do it they never get a review code from anyone ever again.
Bluey, the Australian cartoon sensation (seriously, it's great and you should give it a watch even if you're not actually five years old), is being turned into a video game that's coming to Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 17th November this year....
I mean, what price point are we talking? I'd spend $20 to let my niece mess with it a couple times, but if it approaches a full priced game it's not happening.
Imagine thinking that what is very probably the most hand-crafted content ever in a 3D game, with one of the broadest variety of choices for anything close to that scale, is a game lacking content.
It's not an opinion. If you ignore straight procedural generation with no human input like no man's sky, Starfield is very probably the biggest 3D game ever made. The fact that it's an absolutely massive game isn't debatable in any way.
Nobody who's played it is making the ridiculous claim that they ran out of content. It's fundamentally not possible for "relying on mods for content" to be in good faith.
BG3 is a top down CRPG. Having 3D assets and being a 3D game with full 3D movement aren't the same thing.
And whether it's more content is debatable. There's more pure story and production, with a lot of branching, but the overall amount of space (not counting Starfield's use of negative space because of the setting) is significantly smaller. And even in terms of total number of quest lines, Starfield has a lot. Which you can get more time out of is all about personal preference. There will be people with 1000 hours in both, easy.
UE5 is "the same engine" iterated on in the same way Bethesda's is, there are plenty of games using UE that don't run well, and it would take plenty of custom work to build to Bethesda's scale using it.
Literally everything about game development is a trade off. It's not possible to make a game at 5% of Starfield's scale as polished as a rockstar game. The difference in scale is too massive.
The scope of Bethesda games is a huge part of the point. Nobody else makes anything similar to what they offer.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....
There was a bad experience version you could use without a subscription to games you purchased outright, and they included "free" games with your subscription, but to get a reasonable experience you had to pay for both.
You got it for $200 because you're paying with your privacy. It's an absolute dumpster fire of a deal that's not remotely worth it. They could pay you $100/hour to play it and requiring an account with them, in and of itself, makes it the worst possible theoretical version of VR.
Facebook is absolutely the reason VR is fucking terrible. Their involvement, in and of itself, completely destroyed the community, many of whom abandoned the space entirely when they took away viable options to replace with privacy invading crimes against humanity. Turning enthusiasts from advocates into activists against their product is the reason there's no money left.
US FTC Revives Microsoft-Activision Deal Challenge (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Game prices are too low, says Capcom exec (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Capcom's president and chief operating officer has said he thinks game prices should go up....
Cult of the Lamb publisher Devolver Digital rejected several Game Pass style offers (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Mad Max vs Days Gone, which do you like more? angielski
Both feature a cinematic style story, a focus on their vehicle and upgrading that vehicle, both are apocalypse games, and both were kinda forgotten
"Going digital will be cheaper for consumers because we can cut out the middle men", they said. (media.kbin.social) angielski
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com) angielski
BallisticNG - Moving forward after the Unity debacle (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Star Wars Fans Launch Class Action Lawsuit Over Cancelled KOTOR 2 DLC (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's leads have some conflicting opinions on the term JRPG (www.vg247.com) angielski
In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase shared their feelings on the term JRPG, both having different perspectives on it....
Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle (www.wired.com) angielski
Dragon's Dogma 2 brings back all the joy of Capcom's 2012 cult hit with few real changes (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Dragon's Dogma was the action-RPG for people who wanted to play alone, but didn't want to feel alone. By far its most charming feature was the Pawn system, whereby you'd create an AI-controlled sidekick and hire two others, shared online by other players, to accompany you on your journey through a fantasy wilderness of...
Unity: disappointed at how removal ToS has been framed. We removed it way before the pricing change was announced not because we didn't want people to see it. (twitter.com) angielski
"Ubisoft may also request that Microsoft perform technical modifications,including to ensure that the Activision Games support emulators like Proton" (twitter.com) angielski
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/08cb7b68-0897-43f6-8dc0-fc21b6fbac0e.webp
Unity: An open letter to our community (blog.unity.com) angielski
Unity updates its runtime fees (blog.unity.com) angielski
Archive link: https://archive.ph/Ys676...
Embracer says its ‘crazy’ outlay on platform fees exceeds its spend on game development (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
deleted_by_author
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review: perhaps the best expansion pack ever made (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
I've tested Nvidia's latest ray tracing magic in Cyberpunk 2077 and it's a no-brainer: at worst it's just better-looking, at best it's that and a whole lot more performance (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Nvidia Says Native Resolution Gaming is Out, DLSS is Here to Stay (www.tomshardware.com)
IGN posts written review of Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty, but withholds video review. CDPR is, once again, not letting reviewers use their own gameplay footage before release. (www.ign.com) angielski
Bluey's getting a four-player video game adaptation in November (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Bluey, the Australian cartoon sensation (seriously, it's great and you should give it a watch even if you're not actually five years old), is being turned into a video game that's coming to Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC on 17th November this year....
Bethesda: Thank you to more than 10 million Starfield explorers for creating the biggest launch in Bethesda history (twitter.com) angielski
Stadia's death spiral, according to the Google employee in charge of mopping up after its murder (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....
$70 Mortal Kombat 1 Switch version called "robbery" as graphical comparisons flood the internet (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Mortal Kombat 1's graphics on Nintendo's hybrid console have been widely panned, with many wondering how the developer …
Meta is shutting down three Oculus games without explanation (www.theverge.com) angielski