Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect.
I think consumers have spoken, at least in part. What money can be made doing this job is more easily made on YouTube.
I get my gaming news from YouTube podcasts, mostly; at least those two do employ people actually doing some of that same type of work. It doesn’t really matter how good Schreier is at his job when I’m not going pay for a Bloomberg subscription and someone else can more cheaply copy the same content and tell me what it said. The video format gives me more of a dialogue with the person who did the work. Plus ads are much more easily defeated on a web page than on YouTube, though they are still partially defeated.
That came after the purchase, yes. They’re also far less likely to have DRM-free versions of games these days. It destroyed a lot of my reason for shopping there.
I take issue with the requirement being “when it’s no longer supported” for similar reasons. I can foresee an argument where a company advocates for some scenario where they’re going out of business and can’t do it, and some 75-year-old judge who hasn’t played a video game since Tetris lets it slide. Still, this is the shot we have, and we need to take it.
I feel like if he were a user, he’d have been caught by now, and losing a brother (iirc) to addiction is a solid enough reason to expect sobriety of him.
Yeah, these parts were great but do not require an open world. Contrary to the developer’s comments, having agency or autonomy in a game is not at odds with being linear. More often than not, making a game open world just leads to those problems you pointed out.
I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they’re paying per month that they didn’t used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I’m simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it’s cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they’re performing lately.
As already leaked, the game is a 6v6 third-person hero-based shooter. Heroes include magicians, robots, creatures, humans, and more. There are currently 19 different heroes, each with different abilities and playstyles that you’d come to expect from a MOBA including ranged, healers, tanks, assassins, etc....
I agree, it does, and it does. In many cases it’s necessary for the survival of the company once you’ve committed to release dates and marketing expenses. Larian ought to have enough cushion for their next project that requiring it makes even less sense.
Release windows can make or break a game, and they were counter programming Starfield, which they expected to be a bigger deal. I would interpret “a bit of crunch” to be a few weeks rather than the several month death march you hear about in game development all the time.
Very few games do. So few that the ones that hold a high player base or even grow are anomalies. This one is making strange moves like being a fighting game that, at least at launch, can’t be played offline and costs $240 to stock with every character for local tournaments.
As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games....
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn’t butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn’t stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn’t make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
I’ve been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren’t so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that’s the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it’s made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I’ll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
The divine beasts are not identical, though they are shorter than traditionally Zelda dungeons. The overworld has a ton to find; you just didn’t find it.
Breath of the Wild’s equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren’t even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn’t find what was hidden in the negative space.
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
If a little extra jiggle was crucial to the vision, then I’d say they need a better vision, but that’s just me. The commentary I heard around this case in particular is that ratings boards around the world impose a ton of different criteria, and getting around all of them is no easy feat, so that could be to blame.
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell (aftermath.site)
Welp, this didn’t take long....
IGN Entertainment acquires Eurogamer, GI, VG247, Rock Paper Shotgun and more (www.gamesindustry.biz)
The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games [Accursed Farms] (www.youtube.com)
Actionable steps provided, especially if you ever bought The Crew! www.stopkillinggames.com
Trump Pressures Republicans to Pass a Law to Keep Him Out of Jail Forever (www.rollingstone.com)
Furiosa director George Miller’s comments on Mad Max game and Hideo Kojima prompt response from Mad Max’s original devs (automaton-media.com)
Baldur's Gate 4 Isn't Next For Larian; Something Bigger Is Coming | Spot On | Gamespot (www.youtube.com)
This is a really good interview. tl;dw is…...
11 years after launch, 49M people still use their PS4s, matching the PS5 (arstechnica.com)
Who is subscribing to Game Pass, PS Plus and Nintendo Switch Online, and why? (www.gamesindustry.biz)
New Details on Valve's New Game 'Deadlock' - Insider Gaming (insider-gaming.com)
As already leaked, the game is a 6v6 third-person hero-based shooter. Heroes include magicians, robots, creatures, humans, and more. There are currently 19 different heroes, each with different abilities and playstyles that you’d come to expect from a MOBA including ranged, healers, tanks, assassins, etc....
Larian Studios' CEO says, "we did have to do a bit of crunch" making Baldur's Gate 3 (www.eurogamer.net)
Halo Reach remains a masterpiece of dread - and the greatest prequel story of all time (www.eurogamer.net)
MultiVersus relaunches to more than 114,000 concurrent players on Steam (www.videogameschronicle.com)
What are some eras of gaming that you've stopped feeling nostalgic for?
As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games....
Controversy and Censorship
Now this one might be a little heated, but an example of this happening is the game Stellar Blade, whilst it is still a good game, there was also a sex appeal to it which they cut out the jiggle physics and sultryness out of the game before release....
PS5 barely missed its sales target in latest earnings report, and Sony expects to sell even less by next year (www.destructoid.com)