They don’t have continuous revenue streams like a live service
Yet. The game seems extremely easy to monetize, up to them how evil they go. To be successful longterm (if thats something they even want) they will need to add more content first but they could cash in in so many ways. Dlc, selling servers, cosmetics or more nefarious stuff lkke boosters to speed up mechanics, pals that take huge grinds without payments. It would be very easy to do.
People have been looking for Pokémon replacement for years, anything even slightly innovating on the concept is going to do very well. It doesn’t have any microtransactions (yet?), it’s actively improving, has fully animated real time battles, a difficulty/complexity level appropiate for adults, decent coop and a pretty good sense of antiestablishment humour that I think works really well with the type of millennial that is sick of what Pokémon offers.
It is definitely rough, but I haven’t hit a show stopping bug in 13hrs (plenty of stuff like pals clipping through stuff of pathing fucking up though). If it’s kept regularly updated I could see myself putting a lot of hours into it. It’s definitely still an early access title but it’s eating Pokémons stale lunch.
The speedrun for this game ends with the end of act 2, if you haven’t gotten that far your good, but even then your probably not going to get much, it obviously skips most of the game.
I can tell dozens of stories of buggy hilarious moments in oblivion stories that are memorable and unique. All I remember from vanilla skyrim are the official plots everyone went through. It was just as buggy just charmless.
I think the goal is to eat market share away from Steam, once users are too invested in the platform to switch (and/or steam is no longer relevant) then they start hiking the prices. It has the added effect of reducing the switch to linux momentum that the steamdeck started, but perhaps that is still too small to get MS’s attention
What a wonderful multinational corporation, spending all this money out of the goodness of their heart! It’s moves like this that let me know I can trust Microsoft™
So far I kinda like it. I got major decision paralysis late game in DD1 because I was afraid of screwing up my whole campaign whenever I took a break. I like that the consequences of failure seem more localized in DD2. I can see why that would annoy people who really like the original.
I see darkest dungeon 2 is on sale. I remember being excited to play it on release before seeing it was an exclusive, so I might pick it up on sale now.
I’m having a lot of fun,. The performance stuff is a non-issue for me, I haven’t spent much time looking at my fps but it hoveslrs at 45 or so (6800xt+3800xt, at 5120x1440, all setting on high except i disabled volumetic fog, tilt shift and motion blur), the sim speed seems fine. I only played vanilla cs1 and this seems to have added a lot, but not sure how that compares to the dlcs. I like how much more complex the demand for different zones are and the car systems seem greatly improved. Natural disasters was something I definitely missed in cs1 so it’s nice to see that. The graphics are a huge step up.overall just about every system seems to have been improved in some way. There seem to be legit incentive to make a dirty city, I felt making a polution free city was a littke too easy in cs1, now there are much more significant tradeoffs. A general theme seems to be that the city changes and grows over time, whereas in cs1 I often felt I could setup some districts for life right away. It feels like the city grows much more realistically and organically now.
On the negative side of things, a lot of the Twitter posts don’t seem to make sense, someone will complain about crime and then I’ll zoom in and they are super happy in a 0 crime area, I’m also pretty sure my commercial districts are bugged to always report not enough customers despite showing signs of success otherwise, and a lot of my busses seem to run all their buses at once rather than being spaced out. Every now and again a hearse/ambulance/firetruck gets stuck and won’t ever get to its destination despite a clear path. Its really finicky to attach pipes/power to something that consumes it. The radio is repetitive and often plays conflicting stories one after another. These are minor gripes but certainly annoying.
I have about 10hrs and I reckon I’ll put at least a 100 more. If the game never got another patch it would be fine and enjoyable, knowing it will have long term support makes me quite excited for it.