Xbox users booting up their console today were greeted with a large splash screen prompting them to buy it now that the new campaign is out, and some of them aren’t too happy about it.
Aggressive marketing is killing the love for gaming. There’s nothing that can be done to off set the whales and that’s so disheartening. Games have become a part of the day to day stress with needing daily log ins for rewards or to buy an overpriced subscription to play with friends. The fact single play games dwindle down more and more everyday is why I moved to PS just so I can enjoy them with games like Spiderman
There’s a couple AAA games lately I’ve enjoyed, but yes I agree with you. Marketers are killing their own market for short term gains. The last several multiplayer games I’ve had are just as terrible as you describe.
I’ve put more hours into a 30 dollar factory game than all the AAA games over the last several years combined. Shows how just some TLC can make a great game, but marketing will only hurt it.
I just hope and pray that when Gabe Newell decides to retire, he hands the reins for Valve off to someone like-minded.
A huge part of the reason PC gamers have it so good is because GabeN refuses to sell Valve (and by extension, Steam) and also wants to deliver the best product possible. He’s content with merely making lots of money, instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of Steam at the storefronts expense.
Being in your 30s really means getting to grow up though the golden era of gaming. Real life gets in the way now so I just have the games I liked, maybe buy one or 3 (non AAA) titles a year, and that’s good for me. I’m still young enough to be confident I’m not being an old fart when I say, there really is barely anything worth your time or money in the industry anymore. There are of course exceptions, but man, its rough.
I hope it all fails and has to start again before ‘valve, and EA company’ becomes a possible timeline
This is 100% true. Also I miss cheatcodes, they were added fun, it wasn’t about cheating and beating the game, but just having nonsensical fun while playing.
I kinda hope Valve gets put into some kind of employee-owned foundation when Gabe leaves. Doesn’t need to be a non-profit, but it would be great if it could be set up in such a way that it can never be sold, only dissolved, and that if dissolved all IP and assets become open source/public domain.
You do know that you can disable that popup in the settings, right? You can also decide on which page the client opens. So if you set it up right you won’t see an ad inside the client unless you consciously open the store page. And I would think that ads on a storefront are somewhat the point of the storefront.
Yes, you can be bothered by how much of a cut steam takes, or how they no longer curate what gets on their store, but compared to what’s happening on consoles it’s in another league. If you don’t want to use steam, go ahead and try GOG Galaxy, it’s a bit rough around the edges and doesn’t have every game, but those it has don’t have DRM.
Somewhat of a fair point. I was more so referring to back in the day where it was not a given that a game would release on steam. I clearly remember the old videos from Totalbiscuit where that was a point worth mentioning. Asset flips and the like just couldn’t be released on steam, as everything had to go through at least mid sized publishers (not an ideal solution by any means). This meant that you couldn’t get many indie titles and some bigger publishers didn’t want to use steam either, but those games that were available on the platform, while not guaranteed to be good, were at least not broken or complete trash. This changed with the introduction of steam greenlight and the later removal of almost any barrier to entry to release something on steam and that bothers me a bit.
I’ve paid for an Xbox gold subscription since it’s been available, but when it expires early 2024, I’m done.
The video game industry pushed me away from wanting to play video games. Microtransactions, console ads, “seasons”, standard/gold/platinum editions, “online-only” single player, freemium garbage, pay-to-win, the paid Xbox Game Pass which removes games from the library on a regular basis… everything about modern gaming is just so off-putting.
The enshitification of the gaming industry is just another good thing that’s gone to shit because of greedy assholes.
I’ll be perfectly fine with my <$50 retro gaming system, where there isn’t a single hint of what the modern gaming industry has become.
the paid Xbox Game Pass which removes games from the library on a regular basis
This isn’t a fault. It’s a subscription service. It’s not an ever-expanding library of games you keep forever and it was never supposed to be. Many games are only there for a period of time.
Of course, it’s designed like that, but unlike a movie, some games take dozens of hours to finish. Some games hundreds of hours to explore them in full.
If I’m only paying to play demos, fine, they can market it that way. But this give and take model fails to work for someone who’s life doesn’t revolve around gaming.
I have enjoyed Games with Gold, which is no longer offered, but even those “free” games hinged on a subscription. It was a better model than the game pass, since those games remained in your library for as long as you have a subscription.
I don’t think it’s that big of a deal if it’s an event or 1p release but I can see why people wouldn’t like it tbh,
For the love of all things holy, can you people, for once in your lives, oppose something on principle? This weak-ass justification, this “it ain’t that bad” shit is exactly why we end up with something far worse in a few years. They count on this.
Do you know what Microsoft learned from the Xbox One launch? They didn’t learn not to be anti-consumer, they just learned that they need to do so slowly and gradually. The mistake they made was going too hard too fast, and creating kickback. They learned to implement little things, the things that “aren’t that bad”. And then another one a few months later. And another one after that.
It’s called boiling a frog. It works because of the average person’s passivism.
So please, I’m begging you, think forward. Develop some pattern recognition. Stop downplaying the minor things just to be contrarian and defend a billion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism.
Principles are a luxury most people can’t afford. If I have to compromise mine just to survive, I might as well also compromise them to survive comfortably.
All I’m hearing is that your exceptions to principles are fine and perfect and valid, and mine are not. The only mitigating factor seems to be your belief that we disagree on the subject of xbox advertisments, specifically.
You started this by calling principles a luxury. In defense of ADVERTISEMENTS.
The present condition of subsidies and moral status of entire industries is NOT the topic of discussion. It’s ADVERTISEMENTS. How are you seriously so dense as to conflate the two?
We’re talking about a company doing further enshittification in a system that’s already supposed to be paid for by subscriptions. Not about what commodities are perfectly moral to consume. Your entire interjection is a fucking what-about-ism that started via a selfish statement of dismissal.
There IS a place to talk about immoral consumption under capitalism, but it is NOT as a dismissive response to a corporation doing yet another shitty thing.
Microsoft makes shit practices standard. They duped their user base into paying for p2p online multiplayer. And that became standard. All the people who said they don’t mind paying for literally nothing made it happen for everyone else on each platform.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We have a HUGE Apathy epidemic right now, and it mostly affects younger people (Gen Z on down mostly but some younger millennials too). I think this is mostly because they were born too late to realize that things don’t actually have to be this way and could in fact be better if people just…tried. But they’ve been beaten down and had the phrase “that’s just how it is/always been” beaten into them so much that they just stopped caring.
As someone who worked at GameStop long ago, when these pre-order bonuses started becoming cancerous, no, no they can’t. The number of people who bitched about them, or how every FIFA game is just the same game with a different roster, yet still bought them and stood outside for midnight releases, was almost an overlapping circle.
Having integrity/principals requires abstaining, and that’s not how a lot of people think, unfortunately. They voted with their wallets and what they voted for was shit.
I legit went, “oh fuck no” at just the headline, and I don’t even have an Xbox.
I’m a PC gamer, and I don’t have words for how pissed off I am about the fact that every time I turn on my PC, the first thing I see before I can run log in in is a screenshot from Starfield and a message to “Play Starfield on Game Pass!” or to get Game Pass. Like. Eff off and let me log in. If I had to see that bs on a console to boot? I’d be screaming.
Unfortunately I also can’t play the games I spend the most time on, so it’s really only good for single player machines I don’t intend to be MP’ing on.
Basically my travel laptop is a Linux machine now, steam deck of course, but the desktop has to stay windows until anticheat for certain games is GNU/Linux compatible.
I’m on Win11 and don’t have that. Think you need to turn off “Spotlight Backgrounds” somewhere in settings. While it gives you new backgrounds, it uses it as advertising.
The minute i saw that was the minute i changed away from those types of backgrounds on the login screen. In the control panel you can just change it to anything you want
Depends. All it needs is some big distro to ad remote-loaded-image automatic backgrounds to the lock screen, and there you are. Whenever that image swaps to an ad, you’d have it on your lock screen, too.
Don’t misunderstand the ability for advanced users to disable or swap something (because this is trivially disabled on Windows, too) for an inability of companies or even groups of non-commercial volunteers to make shitty user-unfriendly decisions.
But what I think it happening is that you have your lockscreen background image set to “Windows Spotlight”? The web-based one? That’s usually the nature image in the background of MSN search, too? Because yeah, sometimes MS swaps that out for a full-screen image about a new game release, and that in turn would then also show this on the lock screen.
I would've legitimately sell my xbox on the very same day. It's probably an overreaction, but i'm not looking at ads on my paid xbox with a monthly subscription.
There are a number of registry edits you can make to basically turn Win11 back into Win10, at least from a UI and a “no ads on my login screen” perspective.
Bloatynosy app Google it grab it from GitHub, run it, select what you want from the recommendations. takes less than 5min in total and makes win 11 pretty great tbh
Remember the good old days when you got ads INSTEAD of directly paying rather than in addition to forking over already extortionate sums to profiteering megacorps? Pepperidge Farm does.
Absolutely. Hell, with how much of the heavy lifting they’re doing for corporations destroying most aspects of the world, it should probably be illegal to advertise at all except in strictly limited circumstances.
Not to mention the fact that huge billboards along streets and roads are by definition either ineffective or an impediment to traffic safety, depending on whether or not they manage to catch your attention while you’re operating a vehicle…
We should use sortition to get the money out of politics. Modern cryptography allows us to generate verifiably random numbers. You should be able to put your name into a lottery that gets drawn from using calculations from said random numbers and if your name gets drawn, you have some period of time to study up and prepare to serve a term in congress. No elections, just pure and truly representative legislature.
To be fair, the switch’s lock screen has small ads occasionally on the left side. They’re the news things. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen essentially ads but disguised as news there
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