Each game in that series is a full length game. Episodic implies that each entry in the series will be shorter, cheaper, and with more frequent releases.
TL;DW: Mark lays out 3 reasons why a game dev might choose to make a game challenging, discusses why it is difficult to balance difficulty, and then talks about how Silksong balances difficulty by always giving players another path to explore when they hit a boss that seems impossible.
what makes it spyware? i get wanting to boycott everything Microsoft because of…well, everything they do to make the world worse. But spyware is a new one.
(also don’t date guys that seem to play certain games performatively like they saw this post and went out to match it) (a friend dated a guy that brought a modded gameboy to social functions and played it sometimes but he never really talked about gaming and i’m pretty sure the gameboy was more about the aesthetic for him than actually playing games)
I think you got the most level-headed take here. It really is about capitalism and the fact that gaming is now a mature market, which means it is now sufficiently saturated in the stink of capitalism and megacorps, just like other media industries. In a world where we weren’t all being squeezed from every direction, games would probably cost less and Silksong’s price wouldn’t seem like an outlier.
yeah it’s unfortunate that they have become the dominant force in the gaming industry. Sony always does cool stuff when they are in second place, and then they do this fuckshit when they are in first. It will be interesting to see how they fare as we get closer to the next generation of consoles, one wonders if the current trends in the market will cause them to lose a lot of market share just because they’ve become stagnant.