Generally speaking, algorithms on these sites don’t serve me a ton of videos with no views from creators with no followers, en masse. With AC shadows, I was suddenly inundated with these videos, on multiple sites, without ever having looked anything up about it, exclusively by streamers that nobody is watching.

This is true, but one thing I noticed with AC Shadows is that there were a LOT of no-name streamers posting reels with fake hype over the game. It was a little egregious and came off as more than a little desperate.

A good observation. Hence why one of those games can afford to launch during a crowded window despite its lack of quality, and the other, despite their confidence in their work, and the high quality of their work, could not. You’re starting to get it now.

That’s just not how these things work. Launch windows have a documented history of being uniquely impactful to the long term success of games, movies, even products. It would take some serious evidence to the contrary for you to claim otherwise.

Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.

That’s not really here nor there. It also isn’t really true.

A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.

It won’t though. This feel-good theory that if a game is “good” then it’ll just make the same amount of money it always would have otherwise is not supported by any real world evidence. And even the most hypothetically high quality, ethical, game making company is still a company in the end, and companies need to money to pay living wages and keep people employed making new games. And if the games they are putting out are high quality, they probably have competent leadership. And competent leadership isn’t going to gamble the future of their company and livelihoods of their employees on an unproven feel-good fantasy espoused only by people on Reddit and Lemmy who’ve never run a business before.

It’s the exact same thing actually. Their claim was:

Good games will sell regardless of what’s out

But that’s just not true, and game studios of all sizes know that. The risk aversion of these companies exist because of the reality of the situation.

It also has nothing to do with a studios confidence in their game. The quality of a game is light years away from being the sole objective indicator of a games sales. The Outer Wilds is objectively one of the greatest games ever made and has no real peers in what it does. And yet it didn’t make nearly the sales numbers as the latest asset flipped Call of Duty game.

They aren’t crowding into those windows because competition helps their sales, it’s because they expect the biggest shopping period of the year will result in more sales than they lose. And there’s a reason only the biggest titles release in these windows.

Capcom made the decision years ago to release in February/March because they know a November window will drown them.

I don’t know about that one. Games are expensive these days and if your game releases anywhere near the rumored $100 GTA 6, a LOT of people are going to have to choose one or the other, and it’s very unlikely that in most cases they don’t choose GTA6, literally the most anticipated video game of the last decade. Sure you can always buy the smaller game later, but a huge part of the sales of video games is the opening week, when all the hype around it has had time to come to a head, and you’re influenced by the fact that lots of other people are playing it.

Yeah good games will always sell SOME copies. But if you thinking that a game even releasing in the same month as GTA6 won’t have a permanent impact on that games sales, you’re smoking the reefer.

It’s one of those things where it looks good when in like the case of a video game, the GAME’s implementation of it is good AND your Console/PCs implementation is good AND your TV/Monitor’s implementation is good. But like unless you’ve got semi-deep pockets, at least one of those probably isn’t good, and so the whole thing is a wash.

SWAT 4 - $4.99

Four player co op PvE tactical shooter.

Have all players install this mod which completely revamps the game to add a ton of more modern features

Sounds like hotseat. A remnant of the good old days.

I could not preorder this game any harder if I tried.

You’re not going to be shunned or ridiculed for using an AI helper when coding. It’s not appropriate for use in a game jam generally, but that’s not the same as being shunned or ridiculed.

Like if you go into a big weightlifting gym, there will be people there on various chemical substances that augment your bodies natural abilities. These people aren’t going to be shunned or ridiculed from the weightlifting community just because they’re not 100% natural. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be allowed into most competitions and they understand that.

I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll even find some that allow the use of AI as long as you disclose what it is you use and how. But if the point of a given game jam is to demonstrate natural ability, why would they allow AI when that isn’t your natural ability?

In the game jam? no, because the point to write something yourself from scratch. You’d join the game jam once you no longer require the AI as a crutch. It’s ok to not be ready for a game jam.

Buddy, using AI as a coding crutch is not the issue for the same reason it’s not an issue if you rely on stack overflow for learning how other people do things. The issue is when generative AI is used to generate assets for a game.

Sony doesn’t really do that, not in the way that we’ve seen Microsoft do it at least. And most PlayStation exclusives are on PC now or are planned for PC.

Somebody fucked something up, exactly how specific do you want them to be?

All official game reviews are early access reviews. Whether you buy the game on day 1 or you pre order, you’re seeing the same reviews. There are also community reviews of the game, if game journalists are you issue, but more and more these days community reviews are putting out reviews early, including gameplay. It’s very rare to “go in blind” when preordering, when there is so much information prior to release. I certainly didn’t buy Cyberpunk at launch, and I didn’t need to wait two weeks to know that.

And also it doesn’t take 2 weeks for community sentiment to form lol that’s a ludicrous thing to say. You will have full access to community sentiment on day 1. And with a full week to refund, you get an extra 6 of those days to get one. Your argument would be more at home 10-15 years ago, but certainly not today.

There is in fact no practical reason not to pre order.

Yes objectively lol. There’s a reason why the player counts of BFV (and BF1) dwarf those of BF4 and BF2042 today.

Yeah people avoid pre ordering because they don’t want to signal to the publishers support for a game before they know it’ll be good. And that’s a perfectly valid reason not to pre order. But it’s also the only reason not to pre order, and it’s more political than practical.

BFV was a great game marred by awful executive meddling causing issues several times throughout its run but support was dropped for it because it was at the end of its life cycle (The same as the battlefield preceding it). But it was and is to this day actually one of the most popular games in the series, along with BF1. It (and BF1) dwarf the players of both BF4 and BF2042

BFV is objectively the best BF game mechanically and content-wise and it’s not close. Unfortunately the awful reputation it rightly earned throughout most of its lifespan will forever rob it of its throne.

They are all objectively practical, every single one. They are upsides without a downside. That being said, it’s ultimately your choice whether you choose practicality over the morals of the thing. If you want to choose not to preorder something just to send a message, I get it.

• You get content only available if you pre order
• You get early access to the game
• You get some amount of later expansion content for free
• you can preload the game so when it releases, you can just begin playing it.

There are lots of practical reasons TO preorder something, thought it’s not always all of those things. And you can both preorder something and “Wait for reviews” because the vast majority of the time, reviews release before a game releases.

For example, Civ 7 comes out on the 11th, if you pre order you get the benefit of getting to play it on the 6th, and the reviews for it all released today, the 3rd. That means I’ll know today if the game sucks and I can just… cancel my preorder if I wanted to. Then in a couple days I get to play the game early, so in case the reviews were all paid for I get to see for myself if I don’t like the game, and if I don’t like it, I can cancel my pre order.

In case I don’t cancel my pre order, I also save $10 on Civ packs I would otherwise be paying for. If I waited for release day to buy it, I’d lose out on the benefits of pre ordering, but gain nothing.

That kind of thing would likely be made known through reviews that come out a few days to a week before release in which case you could just cancel your preorder. And even if they didn’t, Steam’s refund policy doesn’t care if you preordered or not, you can get a refund either way.

If it’s a console game and the problem is bad enough that it’s crashing consoles, even with refund policies as restrictive as Sony’s, they will issue refunds in cases like that, as we’ve seen a lot of in the past couple years.

The only actual negative scenario that’s left is you play it and you just don’t like it, and you’re not on PC so you can’t get a refund. But not preordering a game doesn’t really solve that problem. If you buy a game on the PS store two weeks after release and it turns out you don’t like the game you’re no better off than if you pre ordered it and didn’t like it. Generally people don’t pre order games that they’re not sure they’re even going to like.

Reviews almost always come out several days to a week before release so by the release day I’ve seen them all. In addition to that, lots of the genres I like have well known players in the community who often get a chance to play early builds for marketing purposes so you’ll get an idea of whether the game’s at least worthwhile WELL before release. And if the game ends up being terrible, well Steam doesn’t care if you pre ordered or bought the game at launch, they’ll refund you just the same.

And when games I like come out I usually want to play them at release so if I waited for the game to release to buy it I’d have to sit there and download it first. You’d also lose out on any pre order bonuses which are often like free access to paid content which saves you a little money in the long run, or maybe you get to play the game early.

I guess the idea behind not preordering is you don’t want to get bamboozled into buying a bad game? But the thing is once you’ve been playing games for awhile and you know what you like, it’s actually REALLY hard to be tricked into buying a game you won’t like. It is very easy to tell when a game is going to release with issues or be something you don’t like. In 20 years of preordering games I think the only time I ever got duped by a game was No Mans Sky, but to be fair they put a lot of effort into lying about that one, to the point that I was able to get a refund on it outside of the refund window. So it still worked out.

Yeah I’ll pre order any game that I plan on buying. There’s no practical reason not to.

RDR2

Yeah he was passable in FMJ despite hamming it up a little too much, making “that” scene more funny that dramatic.

Yes for sure. D1 is older but it plays the exact same as D2. The story is a good one and you’ll really enjoy the context you get from the first game when you reach the second. They aren’t incredibly long games so you can finish it in a few evenings if you don’t take your time exploring and doing little side missions.

Two things to keep in mind, since you’ll be playing through D1 for the story, make sure you play through it non-lethally. The low chaos ending is canon so you’ll want to get it so that the plot in D2 makes sense. The other thing is to make sure you play the Knife of Dunwall and Witches of Brigmore Manor DLC (in that order) as they are functionally a prequel to the plot of the second game.

I just played through both and it’s definitely 2. The graphical difference between the two is actually absurd, and the QOL changes, level design, and two main characters pushes it into a separate league from the first. Only thing about 2 that isn’t better is the voice acting. The VA is HORRIBLE in D2 it’s actually kind of distracting. No thanks to Vincent D’onofrio who is an atrocious actor.

Certified classic

We also use Linux

In the last few years we used to do windows updates quarterly on our production servers as required by PCI DSS. In the last year though, we’ve had to do updates every single month due to critical CVEs needing to be patched. It’s becoming ludicrous actually, yet they’re cutting security folk.

I would be receptive of this if it was limited along geographical or cultural lines, but given that in Civ you don’t really play as nations from different time periods but rather their most modern equivalent (Like Germany instead of any of the previous countries that became Germany over time) I have the feeling you’ll be able to go from Japan in one age, right to American in the next age, my interest level in this game has dropped exponentially. Like, the driving mechanic behind the entire series is guide “A civilization” through time, not a series of entirely different, unrelated civilizations. That’s why the game is called Civilization and not CivilizationS

CIV does loosely fit into the grand strategy genre by way of scale and mechanics, but you’re right that it’s usually not included, mostly because of the nature of how symmetrical and “video gamey” each game start is.

The appeal is that Humankind did it and they’re trying to ape the mechanic from that game, even though nobody liked it in that one either.

Porco Rosso is slept on and it’s a crime. Must watch the dub with Michael Keaton in the lead role.

After seeing The Boy and the Heron in theaters… I think Miyazaki is done putting out bangers.

Yeah the difference between being public and private disappears when the “private” part just means a private equity firm.