The problem is that the first is easy, the later is hard, nigh impossible.
Software development is notoriously hard to predict. Specially features against time and cost of development. But video games are even harder to predict. It’s impossible to know how many copies a game will sell, you might as well hire a tarot reader. Specially if the game doesn’t exist yet.
This is not a justification of the AAA practices. Quite the contrary, things are this way because mid and high management refuse to do their job or plainly suck at it. I guess that the adage still rings true: I want smaller games, with worse graphics, made by well paid developers who work less hours. But this games have never sold billions of dollars or sparked billion dollar game as a service IPs. So executives think it can’t be done and keep expending more in a desperate chase of the golden eggs goose.
Consoles shouldn’t tie their success to a single game. Nintendo, the creators of such model, ditched it almost immediately. After the Famicom. Volume of games + convenience is what move consoles, not a single game. Exclusives have diminishing returns and at the beginning of console sales cycle they’re more likely to hurt the game.
You just know that there used to be an “…at this time” at the end of that sentence and some good PR folk edited it out because managers are out of touch douches.
My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won’t be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.
Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.
When you own something and someone comes to offer you money to buy it, you have this thing called “No” you can say, and then they don’t buy it. It’s a pretty neat hack. I learned it from Gaben.
Yes, when you own the thing you can say no to selling it. Why is this point so hard to understand? Even if you don’t have a monopoly or even if your product sucks you get to say no.
I agree, but that doesn’t apply to multiplayer with server side verification and matchmaking. It’s notoriously difficult, near impossible to pirate exclusively multiplayer games.
The sequel was given way more manpower, experience, and money right from the start.
Which was then squandered by bad management by scrapping almost two years of work to startover with entirely different staff. Let’s not kid ourselves, from a managerial POV, KSP2 is a perfect template of all the “what to do to ensure a video game fails at launch”.
They were non-game developers doing a videogame. But they were pretty good programmers for what they put out. It’s still the best and most popular space exploration sim game ever made. The thing does the thing they said it was going to do, it will probably melt your computer during edge cases, but everywhere else it’s a solid game. They even managed to confine the kraken to very extreme circumstances. If it is a hack job but it works, then it isn’t a hack job.
I wonder how will they manage that logistically. They are firing every single developer from IG. Who exactly in Private Division is going to be doing the updating? I suspect they will just brush a little of the code that is ready, then completely abandon the product in a year or so.
I predicted KSP2 was going to be eventually abandoned and IG closed around the time of the launch, when the first industry layoffs were starting to happen. The mildest thing I was called for suggesting this was pessimist and it only got worse from that term. I suppose I was half right…so far.
The problem is the corporate greed. But anyways, Juno exists. It has the same spirit of accurate spaceship design and flight simulation, even if the tone is distinctly different.
Minecraft is already on the way out of the Zeitgeist of cultural relevance. The minecraft audience is mostly nostalgic grown ups now. Bedrock is kept alive by parents trying to have quality time with their kids on a safer or easier to maintain server space. The truly passionate and obsessed users, doing crazy and innovative stuff to their servers are still on Java edition. Kill Java and you kill Minecraft for all practical intents and purposes.
Streamers almost exclusively use Java. There are certain popular games and mods that are only possible and/or easier to setup on JE. Achievement Hunter was one of the rare channels that used the console version at first and even them changed to the JE eventually. But they are not relevant anymore, weren’t for some time before their closure. Hyper massive servers, custom maps, automated gamerules with scripts, most of those things that make Minecraft creative and interesting to watch exist only on the JE.
It’s funny you bring that up. Because it’s par for the course. Bedrock is the prettier Minecraft, but JE is the gameplay Minecraft. Flashy shaders and shitty LOD have their splash for a few days. But ultimately they are not what Minecraft is about. Same thing happened with ray tracing. People think they want to play with those things because they’re shiny, but then they realize their old hardware can’t run it without lag, so they go back to their obby maps and squid game servers that look like shit but run at 60fps and are actually fun.
I didn’t say it is out of relevance. I said it is on its way out of cultural relevance. As in, it’s slowly dwindling over time. Nothing extremely popular disappears over night. It will take decades. And it’s not that I don’t like it, I bought Minecraft on alpha 1 and something. 14 years ago. Have played every single update until recently, and played almost everything it has to offer.
However much I love it, I can also recognize that it is no longer like the heyday of popularity around 2015, when the default YouTube page was plastered with Minecraft let’s plays, and the only non-Minecraft streamers on the newly minted Twitch brand were WoW players and speed runners. Kids are no longer making Minecraft fanfic comics, and there’s fewer Minecraft themed birthdays. Again, the average Minecraft player has a higher chance of having kids by now than being a kid themselves.
People on the internet: Oh my god, they were my childhood, I will miss them so much, they were like family and friends whom I loved and talked to me everyday and made me laugh.
People who actually worked on the place: Most toxic environment I’ve ever worked in, got bullied, harassed and physically assaulted by misogynist, racists, sexists hooligans everyday, management encouraged them and frequently joined on.
It’s actually very granular on the grind difficulty. There’s a story only mode that removes the survival elements and leaves only the material gathering for crafting. There’s also a creative mode where you don’t even have to gather materials and can just build whatever and go wherever and see all the story bits with almost no challenge at all. You choose how you want to go at it.
Pretty much, piracy are never lost sales. Either the person is extremely passionate and loving of the product so they’ll buy it anyway regardless if they pirated it or not; or they were just tasting the flavor of the week and never intended to buy it under any circumstance; or they are extremely poor/their economy and context doesn’t allow them to access the product legitimately, so they wouldn’t be capable of buying it even if they wanted; or the product is not legitimately available anymore, so pirating is the only way of accessing it.
However, the thing is that Yuzu doesn’t do that. Yuzu doesn’t include any form of tooling that breaks encryption, facilitates ROM dumping or offer downloads of Nintendo Copyrighted software. They aren’t facilitating it, the user has to provide all of that chain of the emulation on their own. Hopefully this would be obvious to a judge.
Yuzu doesn’t do any encryption breaking. The user is meant to use their Switch to dump their keys, which are legally owned by the user. Then it uses those legal keys to decrypt the ROMs by the exact normal method that the Switch itself uses. They were going based on precedent legal rulings about console emulation. Copying the decryption keys and making copies of the software for archival purposes have both been previously ruled to be perfectly legal for the enduser and don’t constitute piracy. This suit will challenge that notion.
Yuzu itself doesn’t provide tools to dump keys and Roms from the Switch. The user has to procure them, or the means to dump them, themselves. Thus Yuzu doesn’t facilitates DRM circumvention. The user has to solve that part on their own. They do provide guides for how to do it on their website. But Yuzu themselves don’t make or distribute the tooling, and Yuzu the software is incapable of doing it.
To dump the keys, third party tools rely on DRM circumventing sploits. You essentially have to hack your own device, certain versions of Switch and certain software updates are no longer susceptible. But it remains that Yuzu doesn’t do any of that. Those tools and sploits were developed by others.
It’s the sad part of science communication. The pop culture sees difficulties and failures as indictments of character. In science, failures are the fuel of progress. In this case, especially in scientific circles, this was a massive success and is being celebrated as such. The upside down part is laughed at as just the price of making the unimaginable, possible. But most publications who don’t belong to science journalism just don’t understand.
They can say and imply a lot of BS on a press release that wouldn’t fly on a court filling unless they have hard evidence. They can barely write a cease and desist order to the Pokémon mod creators. They can’t do anything beyond that.
Personally, apparently 71% of my gaming time was spent on FFXIV. Although in my defense, most games I’ve played this year were on GOG or old free stuff from Epic I finally got around to.
The game has a pretty unique mechanic. It makes you control two characters at the same time. It’s not a coop game, with optional solo. It’s strictly a single player game, where you use one controller to move two characters, the titular two sons, one on each control stick. Throughout the game you use movement and interactions with the environment to solve simple puzzles to remove obstacles in your way and travel to your destination. Usually, by having you do different things with each character simultaneously. After a while, it becomes second nature to control both brothers in a synchronous and flowing manner when you get used to the challenge of moving and paying attention to two different things at the same time.
spoilerNear the end of game though, one of the brothers dies. Now, you are left with two control sets, but only one character. Puzzles similar to ones that you already solved, now you have to figure out how to solve them, on your own. This on its own is gutwrenching as you developed a familiarity and affection to both characters and their dynamic, as they grow from mutually annoyed siblings, to a well coordinated team of brothers who care and protect each other. But through the game, you’re also taught that the younger brother can’t swim, he doesn’t know how to. So whenever you had to cross a body of water, the elder brother had to carry the younger brother on his back. He is deadly afraid of being in the water since their mother apparently drowned herself and he saw her die. At the climax of the game, alone in the middle of the ocean, you have to swim to shore. The emotional kicker is as you discover that using the dead brother’s stick on your controller, which you haven’t touched in at least half an hour since the other brother died because it doesn’t do anything anymore, calls however upon the memory of the older brother when you swim. You have to use both controller’s sticks to swim effectively and survive, and you can hear him cheering and supporting the younger brother to find his strength and swim on his own, back home, to carry on and save their father’s life. It’s such an empowering and emotional moment.
The ending of that game still makes me tear up after all this years as it makes me think of my own family. Even writing this comment I’m getting emotional. And it does it all without a single line of dialogue, text or voice acting. All by animation and vocalizations along with game mechanics. It’s one of the most effective uses of gameplay I have ever seen in a video game and forever has made me think of this as one of my favorite games of all time.
Other video games, and things people call emotional are usually about story elements, plot lines, events on a character’s arc. Things that have books upon books of analysis and history. Not that they’re any less valuable or deserving of praise, but using gameplay this effectively to convey emotion is, however, kind of unique and rather harder to pull off effectively.
It’s now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it’s $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.
I play mostly smaller games, and am very patient with my gaming habits. Haven’t bought a AAA game in a very long while. Still follow these kind of news because they trend set the whole industry and encroach everywhere with bad practice as big publishers represent the majority of the industry releases and also the grossest revenue.
I once saw a comment on a SC update video from a guy who claimed to have backed up SC as a teenager, went to college, entered the industry, was part of a team from start to shipping a video game. twice, and still SC is in pre-alpha. He said that now as a veteran of the industry he realizes that SC is a scam. Like, 99% of the stuff they hyped as their envelope breaking new tech for video games, has already been done by dozens of games at a fraction of the cost.
If you don’t know what you want except a nebulous dream, you can’t tell that you’re dissatisfied with what you actually have, and don’t realize that what you’re doing isn’t actually getting you anything. This applies to both the devs and the fans.
In Spanish we say “música paga no suena”. Or “Paid music (service) won’t play”. As in, if you actually want the DJ, Mariachis, or band to stay the whole party, withhold payment until the end. If you pay upfront they will arrive late and leave early. They already have the money on the bag, and no legally binding responsibility to actually deliver any product. Even with this new round of crowdfunding, tomorrow they could just claim they already delivered what could be done with the money and disappear into a fiscal paradise. And not a single chump who backed up this decade long fraud would have any single recourse to fight back.
Dude, it was a random comment on a YT video about 8 months ago. I have zero chance of finding it again. It’s just an anecdote. So, as much as I hate to say it, just…trust me bro.
Listen, I would pay good money for an off the shelf console first computer that runs SteamOS, has as primary input a controller and an ARM architecture or any other small form factor x86, that fits under the TV. Freaking SteamMachines were a top notch idea, and Gabe should go for it again.
Now you’re all riled up and acting stupid. You are the oh so claimed expert who works at patents offices. No, you tell me what does your majestic and awesome field of expertise do to prevent corporate abuse and patent trolling? Tell me, evangelize to me, convince me that the patent system has safeguards to prevent theft of intellectual work, how does patent enforcing works? what do you do, that you work there, to make it a more ethical field? what are the practices and procedures in place to avoid a corporation from using patents to monopolize, bully industries and stifle creativity and innovation?
Former Square Enix exec on why Final Fantasy sales don’t meet expectations and chances of recouping insane AAA budgets (gameworldobserver.com) angielski
Images leak of Valve's next game, and it's an Overwatch-style hero shooter (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Though the way the leaker describes it makes it sound more like a 3rd person MOBA than a hero shooter....
Sony cancelled the PSN account linking requirement for Helldivers 2 (lemmy.world) angielski
"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know" (lemmy.world) angielski
Take-Two Interactive shuts down the Studios behind Kerbal Space Program and Rollerdrome (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Classic Microsoft (lemmy.world)
Rooster Teeth Shut Down By Warner Bros. Discovery (deadline.com) angielski
What are some good games with *zero* replayability? angielski
I want to try and play some more games. That feels more fulfilling if you play games that you can finish and be done with....
Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu (news.bloomberglaw.com) angielski
Nintendo’s full case filing...
Has also maintained an active playerbase for 1500+ years (startrek.website) angielski
Japan’s moon landing picture might be the space photo of the decade (mashable.com)
The Pokemon Company releases a statement regarding Palworld: Inquiries Regarding Other Companies’ Games (corporate.pokemon.co.jp) angielski
Here’s a archive link, archive.ph/oT1L6
I saved this meme ages ago and it's still relevant (lemmy.world) angielski
Steam year in review 2023 is up, if you want to get disappointed in how much you bought and how little of it you played. 😛 (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Personally, apparently 71% of my gaming time was spent on FFXIV. Although in my defense, most games I’ve played this year were on GOG or old free stuff from Epic I finally got around to.
What moment from a video game made you cry? angielski
For me, it was Princess Rosalina’s backstory in Super Mario Galaxy.
Star Citizen Just Had its Biggest Crowdfunding Day Ever With $3.5 Million in 24 Hours (techraptor.net) angielski
SteamOS will be coming to other handhelds before you can install it on your PC 'because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck' | PC Gamer (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
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GTA 6 has patented a new locomotion system to make "highly dynamic and realistic animations" (www.eurogamer.net) angielski