Platforms are an obstacle to customers, from the developer’s point of view. This has been obvious since the PS2-PS3 transition - and it’s why Sony is freaking out about PSN accounts. They don’t give a shit about your data. They desperately want to go back to when every game was made for one system and maybe got a conversion or two. The closest they can get is roping people into their ecosystem to justify the continued existence of their deliberately0incompatible AMD laptop opposite Microsoft’s deliberately-incompatible AMD laptop.
Same deal with Epic refusing to make Fortnite work on Steam Deck. It’s not a technical issue. They’re just having a slapfight with Valve. They want their store to stand up against (let’s face it) the de-facto monopoly source for major PC games, and the market says no.
Where this ends is the death of consoles.
There is no reason to release a game three or four separate times, with a private screening process for two or three of them, even if each release is goddamn near identical. All that’s really different is which middleman slices off an entire third of the publisher’s revenue. There are no technical reasons three of these platforms couldn’t just run the same executable with the same data. There’s differences - but not important differences. And even the ARM version could be served if games were published in .NET or SPIR-V or whatever. Slow startup time? Yeah, once, but games already take their sweet time installing. Even shaders need to compile and cache. That nonsense would be a lot more sensible if it let you buy whichever hardware was best from whoever the hell was selling it.
So really, where this ends is the death of platforms.
The ones who were there 47 years ago remember it clearly: Han shot first. But in nearly every version of 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope that you can find today, Harrison Ford’s charming smuggler was a little slow to the trigger in his face-off against Greedo — one of the many changes that director George Lucas made to the...
George, you don’t even own your movie anymore. The mouse bought it for four billion dollars.
Art belongs to its audience. Nobody has a right to censor it after-the-fact - least of all the artist. If you wanted it to be yours alone, you had the choice, and you instead decided to publish. Any control after that is a gift from us to you, and it’s a gift for the explicit purpose of getting us more art.
Oh right, this is .ml, where we’re playing make-believe that the lifetime figurehead who won an election against nobody is toootally a legitimate example of popular democracy. Because it would be impossible to criticize The West™ unless the immediate alternative was completely flawless.
Inventing a domestic video-game company obviously isn’t totalitarian, but it’s some Kim Jong Un shit. It’s an autocrat copying a theme park, with blackjack, and hookers. (Oh god. Tell me I’m not gonna see people pretend the Kims are anything but a hereditary monarchy.)
It started in “free” mobile trash and is now in $70 single-player games. This shit costs almost nothing to add. The backlash doesn’t outweigh the extra money squeezed out. This is the dominant strategy. It is half the industry’s revenue. What else needs to happen, to tell you everything else is in trouble?
‘Just don’t buy it!’ I’m not, and yet: it keeps getting worse. It’s half the industry by revenue. And growing.
‘You just don’t like it!’ It monetizes human misery… inside entertainment. It makes gaming objectively worse.
‘Don’t legislate content!’ This is about the bus-i-ness mod-el. Sell whatever sex and violence you want. Just sell it.
‘There’s no exploitation here!’ Games make you value arbitrary worthless goals. That’s what makes them games.
One genius argued ‘other studios make several games over the decade these wallet-siphons have been dragged out, so they’d have to cost hundreds of dollars on release!’ Or. And this is just wild speculation about the cutting edge of computer science. Or they could make several games? Over time? And sell them for normal prices, less than a decade apart?
These people act like the just-sell-games model is unproven and hypothetical, in the same breath they insist it’s unaffected by this alternative of tricking people into tolerating endless fees. They’re not arguing. They’re just shuffling cards.
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
And then the post-bro-culture company fired Matt Bragg, a blameless font of positivity and beloved addition to any video. This was a long time coming.
Even if they hadn’t betrayed Ray over streaming, the whole Let’s Play format was going to trend down as Youtube stomped around blindly across people’s livelihoods. The company maybe could’ve been ahead of the curve on managing streamers? But ehhh. Their live content was never as good as their edited content.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’
Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.
On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.
Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.
Again, not a Netflix problem. This is becoming the entire industry. More big names are using it than avoiding it. There is almost no cost to adding this greedy bullshit.
‘Ignore the systemic problem and there is no systemic problem’ is never sound advice.
No kidding there’s always going to be some games that don’t commit this abuse - but anything with marketing and payroll will be tempted, and damn near all of them will go for it, because the downsides are fucking slim. The market brought us here. The market will not magically get us out of here.
Yeah sure, it’s my fault for describing a problem, that’s what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people’s wallets.
Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?
‘Why are you ignoring the problem?’ cannot be answered with ‘why are you ignoring not the problem?’ The existence of things outside a growing issue don’t make the issue go away.
This is half the industry, by revenue. ‘But it’s only half!’ is aggressively missing the point.
I’d be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it’s not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.
Some of the alleged “retreat” from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They’re not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They’re not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.
Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever’s already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’
Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.
Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.
This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.
No kidding nobody should throw money at that.
But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.
Metal Gear on MSX2 was a genre that didn’t exist yet, and which sounded boring when he proposed it. The real Metal Gear 2 built on that in ways that would still be noteworthy features in Metal Gear Solid. Snatcher and Policenauts were little more than visual novels, but they were well-executed. That’s largely thanks to Kojima insisting on artist-driven tools for scripting the exact timing of graphics, text, and music.
Metal Gear Solid fucked with the player by constantly breaking the fourth wall. MGS2 cranked that ten times higher, along with prescient comments on memetics and populist narratives. MGS3 was just polished as hell. MGS4 opens with fake commercials starring the voice actors and only gets weirder from there.
MGS5-- calling back to artist-driven tools, I recommend the article about the game’s rendering engine. They developed a little rectangle you can drop into a screenshot, and then however you adjust the screenshot in Photoshop, copy-pasting that little rectangle back into the game will perfectly match whatever you did. Kojima productions have a certain “just solve the problem” vibe behind a lot of their technical direction. MGS 1-3 had too much focus on the minimap radar, so MGS4 has a holographic ring around your feet. Why? How? Who gives a shit, it’s a video game.
P.T. was a horror game demo set entirely in one hallway. And it was terrifying. And weird. And full of promise. So when Kojima handed that gift to Konami, reviving one of their beloved franchises, with several big names on-board thanks to his weird industry connections… and then Konami booted his ass out the door… people noticed.
Death Stranding is the ultimate illustration of why he became well-known and why he remains well-known. It’s a ridiculous product. It forces comically long sequences that are not technically gameplay. Its writing is completely bonkers and longwinded. But every aspect is deliberate. It is that way, on purpose. A premise that sounds boring becomes interesting because it’s well-executed. Balance and stamina aren’t floating UI elements; they’re represented in your character’s movement, so you keep your eyes on your dude.
Basically, Kojima is the sort of lead who can insist on a ten-minute opening cutscene, thirty seconds of actual gameplay, and then another eight minutes of cutscene, and still have people’s attention.
Classic video game franchise. Realistically it’s not going to adapt any particular game. They’ll sample as they please from any previous works and build up their own version of the story.
It’s not often that any video game company gets to turn 50
In no sense is this company 50 years old. Atari was cleaved in half by Warner 40 years ago. One half was purchased and used for branding, right before the new parent company also went out of business… five separate times. The other half did quite well in arcades until those stopped existing. The absolute latest you could say “Atari” lasted was 2003, when Midway Games West ceased operations.
Even the modern company calling itself Atari, formerly Infogrames, has been in and out of bankruptcy, and no longer owns most of the IPs either brand was known for. This company is that shambling wreck.
This brand is such an L factory that their bold new direction is re-releasing the machine that came in third place behind the NES, basically unmodified, and pretending it’s downright archaic 1970s hardware that was brought low by the technical demands of Pac-Man.
And it’s honestly a good idea.
I’m excited to see how it goes. More companies should do it. But acting like this is a victory lap for a titan of industry is a punchline in itself.
Jitter when the camera slides left and right means he should keep it in one spot and offset the screen. I.e., don’t move the camera - move the graphics. Have some X/Y value that gets added to all block positions, that frame. Then any visible gaps between tiles would at least stay put.
The artistic solution to those gaps is to make hidden faces the same color as the top face. Anywhere a cube touches a cube, the sides that meet should not be shaded.
The artistic non-solution is to give each top face an outline so that all looks like a deliberate grid. Like the surface is tiled the way a kitchen is tiled.
An artistic abuse is that blocks could be oriented freely. Any 1x1 pillar of cubes can be stacked funny. Especially if the engine makes non-grid-aligned tiles cheap. Then you could do a ziggurat where every level spirals upward. Admittedly, that would make collision a pain. Even player movement seems to be gridded.
“They say the old caretaker of this place went absolutely crazy. Chopped up his entire staff. Of robots. All of them robots. They say at night you can still hear the screams. Of their replicas. All of them functionally indistinguishable from the originals. No memory of the incident. Nobody knows what they’re screaming about. Absolutely terrifying. Though obviously not paranormal in any meaningful way.”
Why the gradual death of the console exclusive makes business sense (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
George Lucas Explains Why You’ll Never See A 4K Restoration of A New Hope (www.inverse.com) angielski
The ones who were there 47 years ago remember it clearly: Han shot first. But in nearly every version of 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope that you can find today, Harrison Ford’s charming smuggler was a little slow to the trigger in his face-off against Greedo — one of the many changes that director George Lucas made to the...
'Marketing's dead, and I can back this s**t up': Larian's publishing director says players 'just want to be spoken to, and they don't want to be bamboozled' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Spectator rushes stage at CS2 tournament and gets tackled into trophy, smashing it to pieces (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
So, looks like Putin's ordered the Russian government to 'consider the issue of organising' domestic versions of the Steam Deck, SteamOS, and Steam itself (with a side order of Steam Machines) (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
You can't sue us for making games 'too entertaining,' say major game developers in response to addiction lawsuits (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Jagex co-founder and ex-employee (Andrew Gower) announces new MMORPG inspired by RuneScape (store.steampowered.com)
I mean, when I saw an ex-Jagex employee making a new MMO I thought it was going to be slightly inspired by RuneScape… But this game looks exactly like RuneScape, and the description of the gameplay also matches it perfectly - this is essentially RuneScape 3 but managed by someone else (and with a much newer engine)
Warner Bros. Discovery Shuts Down Rooster Teeth After 21 Years (www.hollywoodreporter.com) angielski
Deus Ex star says that Eidos asked him not to talk about Adam Jensen in public any more (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski
Ubisoft Wants You To Be Comfortable Not Owning Your Games (kotaku.com) angielski
This is what 11 years of usage to to a mouse. RIP my baby, hello baby's brother (I bought it somewhere 2014 after I fell in love with the first one) (lemmy.world)
Nvidia’s AI-powered NPCs are getting better, but still sound uncanny (www.polygon.com) angielski
Netflix might add in-app purchases and ads to its games no one plays (www.vg247.com)
Why Hideo Kojima is so popular? (gearsrealm.com) angielski
Hideo always has his 10 minutes on Game Awards, why? Why other game devs don't get that much recognition or screen time?
Legend of Zelda: Nintendo, Sony making live-action movie of classic video game (www.bbc.com) angielski
[MinnMax] CEO Wade Rosen On Atari’s Future, Acquiring Nightdive, Avoiding Layoffs (www.youtube.com) angielski
[GameMill Entertainment] Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 - Official Angry Beavers Spotlight (www.youtube.com) angielski
RuneScape ends Hero Pass following pay-to-win criticisms (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Atari 2600+ interview: New games and lessons learned from the VCS (www.shacknews.com) angielski
Cyberpunk's storytelling makes Starfield seem ancient (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Xbox Series X/S players feel forgotten by Rockstar after Red Dead Redemption 60fps PS5 port (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
iRacing acquires NASCAR's console video game license from Motorsport Games (www.sportsbusinessjournal.com) angielski
Wargroove 2 - Launch Trailer (www.youtube.com) angielski
Browser games you have burned a lot of time on? angielski
Personally I’ve played a hell of a lot of HexArena. Just a simple, low intensity game that runs well and is maintained :))...
How does the upcoming Playdate game "Diora" accomplish its beautiful, high-performance 3D visuals? (dioragame.com) angielski
via social.panic.com/
Cyberpunk 2077 Players Are Getting a Kick Out of Update 2.0's Haunted Police Car (www.ign.com) angielski