mindbleach

@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works

Profil ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.

mindbleach,

Perfect Dark with mouse support and modern resolution is still a hoot. And there’s no abysmal framerate holding everything back.

mindbleach,

Genuinely a good idea. No idea if it’ll work out.

A similar move I’d like to see, instead of some shrunken emulator gizmo, is a straight re-release of the GBC or GBA. They’re low-bullshit entertainment, with the distinction of being standalone portable devices. And like the 2600 (and to a lesser extent 7800) people still make new games for them. Hell, I made one last month.

mindbleach,

Which is one of those lies where, even if it was true, that’s deeply horrifying and reveals things that should not be tolerated.

mindbleach,

Yeah it’s almost like deleting a game to replace it with huge changes is bad, actually.

mindbleach,

Dewey disagrees.

mindbleach,

Thin on bottom, with hard candy up top?

CD Projekt apologise for Cyberpunk 2077 Ukrainian script's potentially "offensive" references to Russians (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski

CD Projekt have formally commented on the presence of references to the Russia-Ukraine war in Cyberpunk 2077's recently added Ukrainian localisation, apologising for dialogue lines "that can be considered offensive by Russian gamers", while reiterating their support for Ukraine....

mindbleach,

Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.

And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.

mindbleach,

Lower your budgets, ship more often, stop treating products like services.

mindbleach,

I mean… if it looks and plays like a touchscreen- and battery-limited version of the $60 PS5 / Xbox Whatever game… fine?

Of course if he also expects one cent of optional or recurring fees on top of that, he can get fucked.

mindbleach,

And “budgets keep going up!”

Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.

The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.

If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.

Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.

If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.

mindbleach,

That’s not damning. That’s how franchises work. Sequels come with an audience built-in, so they can pull a bigger budget on expected sales and spend less of it on marketing.

How recently was this not true?

Seriously. Ten-ish years ago, the big releases were Halo, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Xcom, Zelda. If not all ten years old at that point - spiritual successors to much older games. Twenty years ago, the big releases were Tony Hawk, Mario Kart, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Sonic… Elder Scrolls, GTA, Zelda. Thirty years ago, when home video games were just barely fifteen years old, half the big names were either direct sequels or media adaptations, and most would become long-running franchises. Shockingly, one title was already a decade-old franchise: Super Bomberman.

Now consider the games he’s talking about, today. Halo’s not on that list anymore. It’s there. But it’s not big. Deus Ex is dead again. The specific aforementioned Tony Hawk game killed Tony Hawk games. Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden came and went. GTA and the Elder Scrolls haven’t released a game since, technically speaking.

Meanwhile the last two Zelda games are a more radical departure than anything since that awkward NES sidescroller. FromSoft keeps doing FromSoft stuff, but that’s more of a genre than a franchise. Baldur’s Gate III is a sequel twenty-three years later, in a genre that was niche then and niche-er since. There’s big-budget remakes of stuff from the PS1 / PS2 era, but they’re practically brand-new games. Tony Hawk, ironically, less so.

Some of the big-ass games ten years from now will be surprise hits and slow-burn successes from the last few years. Some games will get a quality-bump sequel that takes off, and then if we’re being brutally honest, a publisher like Microsoft will squeeze the life out of the studio by forcing them to crank out more of that until they hate everything. And people in 2033 will complain on probably-not-Lemmy that Sea Of Stars V is such a tired rehash after the highs of IV, and why does nothing new ever come along?

mindbleach,

And maybe don’t look into what went on at “the Blizzard you knew and loved.”

mindbleach,

Metroidvania Month on itch.io ended a couple weeks back.

New Minimum Age Classifications for Gambling, Loot Box Content in Australia - IGN (www.ign.com) angielski

From September 2024, any games featuring simulated gambling (such as social casino games) will be rated R18+. R18+ is a legally restricted category in Australia, and games rated R18+ cannot be sold to people under 18....

mindbleach,

Fuck them kids. This business model is abusive no matter who it’s targeting.

mindbleach,

Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.

Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.

PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.

mindbleach,

No platform earns an entire third of developers’ revenue.

mindbleach,

The cut, genius. The cut you said is “well earned.” That is what’s horseshit, here.

And on consoles.

And on phones.

mindbleach,

“It makes money so it can’t be wrong.”

“It’s commonplace so it must be fine.”

Y’all have no idea what criticism even looks like.

mindbleach,

Beyond discussion! What a mind-job.

Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.

Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?

mindbleach,

Neat.

A third off the top is still obscene.

The fact ‘everyone does it’ is worse.

mindbleach,

There is no point humoring abusive word salad.

Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.

The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.

The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.

mindbleach,

‘This thing should be slightly different.’

‘Then use something else entirely!’

Some of y’all really do not know how criticism works.

mindbleach,

Incorrect.

mindbleach,

Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’

That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.

Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.

What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.

mindbleach,

Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.

‘There’s other services.’

But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.

’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’

Lie better.

mindbleach,

You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.

Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that’s where the products are, and products are there because that’s where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.

The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that’s not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn’t rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn’t want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn’t get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always ‘accept this or pound sand.’

mindbleach,

Yeeeesh. They really did start working on this right after Skyrim.

Does Epic still have a patent on “detail textures” from Unreal? Like, the first one?

mindbleach,

Seriously, it’s a four-player game. Not some MMO clusterfuck. Not an arena shooter bragging about 128 codblops on a single map, like it’s Stand On Nuketown. You need matchmaking - you want anticheat - you’ll do some DRM bullshit. Other than that you should want to offload bandwidth and latency to your players. They’re all on the same team!

mindbleach,

In other words, they fucked with it while nobody was looking. Totally innocent!

mindbleach,

Dolphin now includes mGBA as a sort of controller. The wiki has a note about network settings but is otherwise full-steam-ahead.

mindbleach,

… wait, the Gamecubes are just used for GBA I/O? Sheesh.

mindbleach,

I remain flabbergasted there’s no simpler way to get ten buttons of input and 240p of output on a generic 32-bit ARM device with a zillion official and unofficial add-ons. Especially when you look at the unholy chain of adapters necessary for input.

Especially once you swap the console playing the game for an early-model Wii, which has been hacked to hell and back, and has Gamecube, Bluetooth, and technically USB inputs.

mindbleach,

It is nonetheless an absolute mountain of hardware to modernize a setup that could nearly fit in the pocket of period blue jeans.

Ayaneo Air 1S review (www.pcgamer.com) angielski

At 22.5 x 9 x 3 cm, the Ayaneo Air 1S is more like a Nintendo Switch than a Steam Deck. In fact, it's a touch smaller than the Switch. Or slightly bigger than a medium-large banana. The retro model I've got in for review weighs only ~405g on my scales, which is a little heavier than my Switch at around ~400g but far lighter than...

mindbleach,

I’m impressed that you can but I’m not sure you should.

mindbleach,

They so desperately want to be Fortnite.

Alucard from the manga series Hellsing

… oh, there is a scenario less appropriate than Superman in a fighting game.

mindbleach,

Every platform takes a third off the top.

A third.

I have no love for this company whatsoever. Most of the their revenue streams should frankly be illegal. But I’m not exactly thrilled about every glorified software repository taking a pound of flesh off all revenue, licit or otherwise.

mindbleach,

Only legislation will fix this.

mindbleach,

I like the concept. I don’t like Nvidia making up neat gimmicks as anti-competitive behavior.

mindbleach,

Sent to the COD mines.

mindbleach,

Shatter this corporation.

mindbleach,

Especially since Oblivion seems to work fine on modern Xboxen. Back on reddit, all the Morrowind first-timers were using OpenMW, and all the Oblivion first-timers were playing on console somehow.

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....

mindbleach,

Big air quotes on “choose.”

Microsoft May Exit Gaming Business If Game Pass Subscribers off Console Don't Increase Enough by 2027 (wccftech.com) angielski

Spencer said in no uncertain terms that Microsoft could exit the gaming business if this projection became reality. Microsoft needs the light green and blue segments (PC and cloud) to get much larger and much faster by fiscal year 2027, or it could opt out of the business altogether....

mindbleach,

“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.

That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.

Still making money hand over first.

mindbleach,

Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.

Every other F-Zero game is third-party.

Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.

But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.

mindbleach,

Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.

All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.

It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.

It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.

How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.

Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.

mindbleach,

It’s economical for distribution.

Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.

Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.

mindbleach,

Because appeasing the far right in Germany went so well for so many.

The methods in this case are a website saying “no thank you.”

If that’s beyond the pale, what the fuck is left?

mindbleach,

However, that leads us into a very slippery slope.

Wrong.

Next.

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