megopie

megopie, 18 dni temu

I don’t think it is so much that executives cannot learn, it’s more that their priorities are consistent predictable margins, not the overall health of the industry.

It’s a prisoner’s dilemma, most of the benefit of succeeding with something original is for the industry as a whole; proving certain concepts and ideas are viable, revitalizing public interest in the medium, ect. But the risks are mainly carried by a single publisher or studio, if it flops, they loose money.

So the general trend is to avoid risk and maximize predictable profit, this shrinks the over all profitability of the industry by fatiguing public interest and willingness to pay, but maximizes safety for individual publishers and studios.

Having a low budget segment that can afford to take risk on new ideas is key to preventing industry decline, but the industry has moved away from that towards the highest possible revenue generating films. The publishers and studios that used to do that have all ether folded or moved up to bigger budget higher return options, and they’ve pulled up the ladder behind them by making it so difficult to get indie projects in to theaters.

The same thing could happen in the video game industry. Luckily the indie game market exists, and they’re still able to get their products distributed on large platforms like consoles if they prove a big enough hit on the PC market. It is getting harder though, and more and more, small budget, small team games are getting relegated to PC where there is just a smaller market. Ideally, consoles should make it easier to get small indie games onto their platform, or more people should start playing on PCs.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.

It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

I suppose in my mind AAA refers more to certain group of publishers and parent companies. A certain way of structuring companies and doing business. As supposed to a metric of the budget needed for a game.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

This is a shame, I haven’t played a sims game in a while and I remember them quite fondly. The latest EA sims stuff has just been utter micro transaction slop, or at least last I checked. I hate to see a smaller studio that’s not working through one of bastard publishers get hit like this.

I’m a lot more patient with paradox than I am with other publishers. Their focus still seems on producing interesting games rather than chasing “maximized revenue”. There are realities to being a publisher though. if a studio is failing to produce something and your financials are limited, there’s only so much risk you can take on extending deadlines, and writing something off for a quick boost to financials is a alluring sirens call.

I have my issues with how paradox studios design is affected by their DLC model, but I don’t think there’s a better way to bring in ongoing revenue to fund further development.

It’s a mess, all of it, but it is a results of the context and system they exist with in, not necessarily the will of those making the calls at paradox. Paradox tends to do a better job of existing with in the system without making pure slop than other big publishers, so they have my patience for that.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.

TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.

I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Yah I suppose that’s true, broad cast was a thing, suppose that’s the equivalent for free to play or something.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Signalis mentioned?

megopie, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Of the 17 games I’ve played over the past 9~ months since installing mint Linux and steam proton, only 2 base games have had issues and 2 games I’ve had trouble modding. I think it’s a discussion worth having so let me go through the few issues I’ve had in regards to games on Mint Linux (Ubuntu based). 2 problems were resolved without issue, 1 was a qualified success, and one I gave up on trying to mod.

To be clear this is all on an intel Intel 7700HQ CPU and nvidia GTX1060 GPU. It’s not the newest or top of the line anymore but it’s still plenty capable.

Foxhole: there was a week about a 2 months ago where I had to launch it through lutris because proton was having an issue with loading in to the map. As far as I could gather, the devs had updated shaders or some libraries to fix a glitch with small trains hovering at max map height, and this caused issue with proton being unable to load shaders. Using lutris (which I think uses wine?) fixed the issue and the devs fixed the issue with proton about a week later.

Helldivers 2: extremely bad frame rates and straight up locking up the computer part way through the intro or tutorial. I think it was an issue with the graphics card memory just getting filled up and not clearing. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix it, but it involved caping the FPS at 60 FPS. It works now but only with low settings and I still get a bad frame rates when the map gets crowded.

Then there was modding games that had some issue. Both of them were older games that relied on patchers.

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Worked great as the base game. The patcher for the unofficial fan patch was a .exe though, so I added it to steam and ran it with proton, it couldn’t find the game files and I had to manually direct it to the files in proton’s mock windows file structure, but after that it patched and worked fine from there.

Fallout: New Vegas: The base game ran flawlessly (well as flawlessly as base game New Vegas can run), same procedure as above, opened patcher and mod manger by adding to steam and opening with proton, directed them to the weirdly placed files, but this time they didn’t recognize the game files and refused to patch. I fiddled with it for a bit, but gave up because I didn’t care that much.

Again I want to emphasize that these are 4 out of 17 games, only one of which had persistent issues, and one that I gave up on trying to mod. None straight up wouldn’t run and none were unplayable after a bit of tinkering. This is about the same rate of tinkering I was doing back in windows to get things running the way I wanted with games.

There is a lot of work left to do here, but playing games on Linux is absolutely doable even if you’re not particularly tech savvy. if you don’t have the patience to trouble shoot, you will be fine 9 times out of 10. I’m more tech savvy than the average bear, but I don’t work in tech nor do I have a formal education.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Are you using steam and proton, or Lutris and wine? I’d suggest trying the other if one isn’t working. That’s helped me in the past

megopie, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Proton is steam’s compatibility tool, these “medals” basically indicate how well a game works through it. Platnium and gold mean work without troubleshooting. Silver means a little tinkering with settings. Bronze means it can work with effort, and borked means it just doesn’t work.

So, 84% working with 0 effort, and 11% working with light tinkering.

The post is kind of incomprehensible if you’re not already familiar with proton and the troubleshooting website proton DB.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Yah, I had to manually install the driver in mint for the nvidia card, and had to change a setting in the bios to get the system to even see the card. But it works fine other than that. I’m considering going with an AMD card next time I get a computer, largely because I hear they work a lot better with Linux.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

i mean, basically everything works so long as it doesn’t use certain anti cheat systems. But knowing what they play would have been more useful for the sake of discussion.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Good to know for the future.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

yah, it’s a bummer, but most people who play games on PC aren’t playing such tittles. The current online player count for league is about 2.5 million as supposed to the total steam active player count of 25 million. A lot of people play league, but, like, it’s hardly a problem that everyone has.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

I mean, base game FNV ran fine for me. Which is kind of funny because my friend who was playing it for the first time was having a bunch of issues with it constantly crashing while playing on windows 10 and I had to walk them through getting fan patches and the like running.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu (edited 2 miesiące temu)

Essentially. It is often held up as a good “gaming” distribution because it has AMD and Nvidia graphics card drivers built in, I suspect there is more to it than that but I’ve never used it personally.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

Not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have personal experience with Bazzite but, essentially, it is gaming oriented distribution built on fedora.

It has a lot of stuff built in to help it run games well, including the right graphics drivers. Fedora is one of the major Linux distributions along side Arch, Debian (which Ubuntu is derived from), and others.

There are a few other distributions that do much of the same regarding graphic card drivers, but built on one of the other major distributions. For instance PoP_OS! (Based on Ubuntu and thus Debian).

So bazzite is good for running games, that’s what it is built to do, but other distros do that as well, it depends what flavor of Linux you want it to be built on.

megopie, 2 miesiące temu

I think Microsoft has been trying to build towards cloud computing of everything on user devices.

Games pass seems to have been them building towards a Google stadia type system. Getting a large user base of monthly subscribers used to Spotify like game experience, and then slowly running more and more off of the user device.

The contraction of studios, internal fighting, and this price hike makes me think they’re is some internal opposition to go all in on this, even as they go full speed ahead on the windows side of things.

megopie, 3 miesiące temu

Any controller that has asymmetrical joysticks. I get they’re all copying Xbox, Xbox was wrong.

If you’re using one to look around and one to move, having them require your hands be in two different positions is dumb.

megopie, 3 miesiące temu

I think it’s very fun, but a bit light in content at the moment, understandable as it is in early access.

The ground work and mechanics are clearly there already. It needs fleshing out, a lot really. But the visions is amazing, it feels like what I thought AOE2 was when I was 12

megopie, 6 miesięcy temu

Signalis is a 2.5d top down 3rd person single player survival horror title available for switch, it is probably one of the best modern examples of the genera taking clear inspiration from older titles like silent hill and resident evil 2. It’s very story based and currently on sale for the switch, I would highly recommend it.

It is a new game, but it very much has an old school vibe and is clearly leaning strongly on what made older titles great.

megopie, 7 miesięcy temu (edited 7 miesięcy temu)

I played Signalis and really enjoyed it, I actually found it a bit inspiring, if a truly tragic game. The core gameplay was fun and engaging, the puzzles never felt grating or frustrating and completing them or figuring them out was quite rewarding. Although never obvious and requiring some thinking, they never felt like total moon logic like so many puzzle or adventure games. The combat was a good mix of resource management and brought just enough tension without interfering with puzzles.

The story and aesthetic was probably the highlight though, it wears its cultural influences on its sleeves, classic cosmic horror, evangelion, ghost in the shell, 2001 a space odyssey. It brings some new elements to the mix as well, notably an East German aesthetic and the existential personal dread of living in a totalitarian surveillance state. At once dread inducing and tragic, but also beautiful. I’m very curious to see more from the duo who made it, and am curious if they’ll do more in the setting or move on to something else.

megopie, 9 miesięcy temu

It is really interesting to see so many paradox titles ranking so highly given how niche a lot of their games were even 10 years ago.

megopie, 10 miesięcy temu

More specifically “private equity” investors who are gradually looting the US economy.

megopie, rok temu

You’re hardly responsible for the actions and decisions of several large companies. Your choice to buy a fancy card or run a powerful rig are not even a drop in the bucket compared to the actions of companies that shoe horn in the tech even when it isn’t wanted just so they can sell more.

megopie, rok temu

KSP with the realism overhaul mod and realistic progression 1.

I just never get over the beauty of seeing a dual centaur upper stage gently drift away from an atlas booster before lighting up those stunning twin blue flames, careening deep in to the abyss of space.

megopie, rok temu

The financialization and corporatization of the game industry and it’s consequences has been a disaster for the average player and game dev.

megopie, rok temu

A real time RTS with proper command and control and fog of war. So like, you don’t have perfect information on where your units are, let alone enemy units, where you have to contact the units on the ground and request that kind of information, and also manage to communications system you’re using to maintain contact.

Radio commander does something a lot like this but I’d like something a bit more in depth and comprehensive.

megopie, rok temu

The people behind foxhole (think rune scape/planetside/but early 20th century) are making something to that effect called anvil empires.

megopie, rok temu

Radio Commander has instantaneous communication with the units, it being over radio, and you’re only really interacting with your own units, sometimes you’ll operate near allied units in a mission and have to make sure your units properly identify contacts before engaging.

But the core mechanics are that you’re sending out requests for information to units and orders to move and engage, but you cannot see where they are on the map, you can put markers down on the map, but like that’s just you best guess of their postion based on what coordinates they gave you. The coms basically always work perfectly, although there are options that will make it so units can get lost or make mistakes in their reports back to you.