Gonna slam people with a bit of reality here: I think it could’ve had staying power if people could afford it. And that’s not a statement on hardware companies making it too expensive - it’s a statement on people choosing to fight equality and encourage wealth hoarding.

If your market is the tiny group of wealthy consumers that can afford it, who will buy singleplayer games only, it’s not going to go far. You need. People. Able. To buy it.

A streamers I like played through Avowed, and didn’t feel it had nearly as many problems as the internet claimed.

It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.

One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.

I think the exclusive model could still work, but it requires a VERY compelling group buy-in. Remember back when there was a very wide set of games for which you had to have a PlayStation to play them. Even Nintendo still succeeds at this, albeit with a current dip due to a low number of Switch 2 exclusives. No matter how much anyone here would fuss about it being anti-consumer, eventually there’d be enough compelling reasons, and some people may just bite the bullet even if they’re regularly PC gamers. From there, that’s where the real money is; getting people to keep burning money on live-service games on that given platform, since people are locked in.

No way can one or two occasional console exclusives manage that wall of compulsion on their own.

People can run their own justifications for piracy, but god this has always been a shitty one.

It’s like not considering veganism because “The cow’s already dead. It’s been chopped up in that steak on the counter. Me refusing to eat it won’t change anything.”

Feels like many times I’ve heard in my life:

“We’d like to change this law.”
“You can’t change this law. See, it’s written here: It’s the law.”
“I’m…not contesting what it is. I’m saying I want to change it. We set it in place, we can make changes to it.”
“…But that’d be…against the law…”

I guess I’m lucky this never happened to me. I tend to do a lot of research on a console before I get it, and wait until mid-generation when it’s matured with some good games. The closest thing might be the Oculus Rift, since I never did find an addictive VR game I loved. If I hadn’t bought it, I might’ve never tried out Half-Life: Alyx, and would’ve been forever curious. But…it definitely wasn’t a killer app.

If it helps, I can recommend indie games that fit the mold.

I made a Steam curator group called “Objection! AA-Likes” to help

I get a nervous inhalation each time an acquaintance asks me for advice in buying a gaming laptop.

Their computing world started with laptops, and they want to extend the idea. It’s so hard to express to them it’s generally not a good one.

I’m definitely upset that influencers are more likely to talk about bombs and high profile failures than games they have moderately positive interest in. There’s a weird incentive to celebrate failure that makes game development less appealing.

I just go to YouTube, Lemmy, BSky, maybe a few others. I don’t go directly to any major gaming news sites, since they’ve had declining track records for decades.

And of course, Steam. Criticize the monoculture if you like, but when Sony and MS have killed their community features in favor of EpsteinNet, it’s not surprising people will go to platforms designed to discuss games.

Is this some Hollywood accounting, where they set the game up to fail? I’ve literally never heard of it until this post.

Anyone remember Devolver Digital? Basically, they had a bad year. That’s going to happen with publishers sometimes. The public investment in them didn’t like that.

It’s something that doesn’t jive well with public investors, who judge the company value minute to minute, when game development can take half a decade. So far as I’m concerned, public investment in companies like Nintendo should be seen as fairy money on top, prone to vanishing.

I’ve been seeing clips of it online, and it seems genuinely hard to replicate the kind of confident, bizarro humor applied with so many of its scenes. Especially helps with how many of the “concepts” players can insert to get muddled around in conversation so many ways.

I’m reminded that we often only see “shounen anime” as the main art style of Japan, but they’re very refined at a wide variety of strange, human and less-human appearances.

I mean…I’m not gonna hate them for researching possibilities (there are none). Most of my hate goes to execs that see one (puppeteered) tech demo and resolve to instantly fire all dev teams.

If a company is at least taking a slow, “let’s see what this can do” approach, my bet is they’ll come back in a year saying “…yup, it’s a dumpster fire”.

Back around the PS4, I posited theories that we’d hit the “graphical plateau”, and while it was technically possible to make a stronger console, the returns were not great. I was wrong, and we got the PS5, but I don’t think I was wrong by much. It’s nicer to have 60fps and 1080p more reliably, but there’s really nothing urgent going past that - and if I understand right, there’s still a pretty large install base of PS4 users. It even runs some of the latest - did anyone notice games like LEGO Batman: LotDK and Jedi: Survivor somehow run on there?

I think there’s still plenty of ways to pull people’s interests, but it’s not going to be by the same big E3 reveal of some graphical leap. Not like we have E3 anymore anyway.

(I will admit this is a very anti-consumer move, but honestly, the most logical long-term strategy I could see them going for is returning to making large console-exclusive games)

I mean, they do that already. You can visibly see how popular PS+ Cloud is. I don’t have exact numbers, but I can see that they don’t do much to advertise it anymore, and that the whole industry saw Stadia and Luna fail.

Oh, I can boost this list:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2389830/__ASURA_THE_STRIKER/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2784620/ROGUE_FLIGHT/

Granted some of what we see takes after Space Harrier a bit more. Rogue Flight has some very good VA, at least.

Gaem looks fun! But only one isue. It loks to woke. Also can you add some LGBLT rerpesention? To these bloxk puzzles?

Does this actually relate to indie development? Theres definitely shitty monetization in Asian gacha games, but I don’t think of any of them as indie.

I have actually played crummy games by budding Japanese devs and some of them are true underdog stories with fun gameplay concepts (and often poor translation)

The character design makes me think of Final Fantasy. 1-5, you’re dealing with chibi sprites and some silly situations where they’re jumping up and down, but also horrible circumstances that define the fate of the world. Even as far as 10, they improve their graphics but aim for a colorful, fantasy-driven atmosphere.

Then you get to 15, 16, and they’re pivoting to the dark and gritty, showing medieval warriors with realistic faces fighting through blood and grime to victory. And if there’s funny clips of 16, I’ve never seen them.

It speaks toward Japan really backlashing to the way the “JRPG” moniker is seen, and attempting to show they can make something “adult” and “realistic”. But it ends up doing the opposite.

Notably, take a look at Mouse, PI’s release. It’s a fully cartoony, silly aesthetic, but take two steps into the world and you’re fighting police corruption, Nazis, and coming back to a bar owned by a dour owner who can tell you dozens of stories about the way modern life hits the most vulnerable. It’s a true adult’s package, wrapped in a childish layer, rather than the opposite. Which, yeah, feels like the effort to make Starfox look “real”.

Also as someone else said, the widened fur around Fox’s neckline does somehow make him look obese.

I was at first interested in playing a shooter with hot women in it. Don’t mind admitting that. But the way so many gacha games develop this parasocial, intimate bond with the self-insert player character (and of course, the players that vote for that behavior) becomes freaking creepy.

I want to be talking with New Character XYZ casually about how flimsy her dating life is, how she’s shallow for trying to get guys to pay her checks, and how she plans to take out frustration against monster-of-the-day baddies. I don’t want to meet and find out she’s so crazy for me she murdered every office worker that frowned in my direction that day, and that the VA lists her sessions for the game on her calendar as “that porno company”

I hate that in Sky 1 and 2, Agate and Tita develop a nice, positive, younger sister and older sibling dynamic; and then in future games, the fan-standins in the world push this needlessly, uh…”mature” relationship.

She just wanted a sibling because she was an only child, dudes. Some people just cannot feel out dad/daughter or brother/sister relationships without the standard anime incest crowd.

At least the first instance of that unfortunate trend in the game had some reasonable basis for it (same age, no relation, meeting just before puberty)

Defense is tricky in fighting games. Often, if there are too many good defensive options, it punishes players for being aggressive, and can lead to high level matches where each side spends the whole time trying to goad the other into a counter attack.

For instance, I don’t play it, but I recall Invincible has some technique to break away from a combo, but you sacrifice some of your own health for it.

A lot of early negative reviews were from the difficulty. On top of ammo starvation, there’s also some modern action game mechanics: You can dodge and parry enemy attacks (in a tank control manner), and also have a very difficult mechanism to execute “critical hits”, spending just one bullet to kill an enemy in one hit.

The end result I got was, you can’t just always go for crits. But if you never do, you run out of ammo fast. Melee combat is an option too for weak enemies. So, for every fight, there’s a bit of decisionmaking on how to conserve resources.

This guy had a great analysis video, complete with interviews with victims, of toxicity towards female entry into male spaces. He goes historically into how video games were first age-neutral, then Nintendo made them “toys”, and toys were for boys, slowly leading to the space having a toxic exclusivity problem.

One of the best bits (which I unfortunately don’t have a timestamp for right now) is when he talks about his own experience as a kid, and how he inadvertently tried to exclude a family member when she started playing the game better than him.

For reference, Nacon published Robocop: Rogue City. Will do my best to keep an eye out for this publisher and blacklist them from now on

I reaaally want to hope that gamers will be smart enough to take their anger to the right place: The legislature that pushed these bills. But knowing most of them, the anger is all going to go to Sony.

This would be referred to as Divide and Conquer fallacy. Trying to make SFM/Roblox users feel attacked, when the comment only directly criticizes use of generative AI in artwork.

Defend your own position. Don’t try to group others into it if they’re not interested.

I’ve made SFM films…and his sentiment seems fine to me.

So the rumor that I heard (unfounded YouTube video, sadly) is that Sony had an issue with people running refund scams. People with usually-offline PS5s would buy a game, install it on their PlayStation, then pull the network cable, and request a refund on a secondary device. They get their money back, and then can play the game infinitely afterwards.

So, the fix is that a newly purchased PlayStation game must check in at least once after the 14-day refund period has ended. Once they’ve done that, it becomes a permanent license that can be played offline. In the YouTube video I saw, they claimed some people had reproduced this explanation.

Now, this sounds somewhat plausible to me. But if anyone were to reply “Bullshit, they’re backtracking” I wouldn’t fight you on it. We’ve certainly seen some controlling, domineering shit from game makers.

I will say that the specific case of military gamers is a key one. It’s very bad PR to give them a hard time, and they are usually offline wherever their base is. So, there’s often some investment in giving them some path to keep playing, which is what makes me more convinced in the rudimentary explanation.

I ended up installing some not-low-end gacha games, and felt pretty impressed at how well they could run and even have some moderate combat complexity for how shitty touch controls are.

Zenless Zone Zero, for instance, has a lot of the combat built into dodge timing/character swapping, and little work put into movement and camera controls.

Because hacker patches are untrustworthy, and may do far worse than lower your FPS, like install Bitcoin miners. I have also not seen reliable, well-documented, cross-game proof of the “lowers your FPS” claim. There have been cherry-picked claims that are often muddied with other patch work, as well as known poor implementations of Denuvo.

I want to support devs. I don’t want risks of malware. I don’t see any discernible issues when installing Denuvo games. I have never been given one salient, convincing argument about Denuvo being bad, just relentless downvotes.

I very much want to make an alternate /games community where whining about Denuvo is banned, not because I like such censorship, but because it seems to be the only way to chat with normal, nuanced people about new releases.

When it’s tied to rented games through PS+ membership, I think that makes sense. But this appears to apply for paid, owned digital items.

If SKG keeps momentum in the EU, and possibly even under current consumer laws, this might end up being illegal.

That’s pretty huge to me too. My main use would be with Moonlight, an open source version of Steam Link, and if it can’t connect to that Android TV to begin with, it’s worthless.

Strange that the Xbox and PlayStation controllers are now more open and reusable.

Mini Metro is a small, fun goal-based building game. You are given subway stations and must build lines between them, optimizing for different destination types, high passenger rate, etc.

I’ve played a lot of the games, but I bounced off RE1 since it’s a little bit stricter about resource management.

The remakes of 2, 3, 4, are all meant to be great entry points. If you like, 7 is also a good entry since it followed the poor reception of 6, and basically “soft-rebooted” with a completely different venue. For the most part, RE’s base story isn’t much more complicated than “Umbrella is an evil pharmaceutical corporation that makes monster viruses”, so there’s no strong need to follow an order.

I may be biased, but I think the story is faster and flows much better in Final Fantasy 7 original than remake. I think the long thread of hype for remake lead them to make way too much unnecessary “content” to bloat the size of the game, so they could justify 3 AAA games plus DLC around them. That can depend on whether you can put up with the older graphics.

If you’d like a JRPG from the same era that runs well on the Deck, another to consider is Trails in the Sky. Their remake is very true to the original, so there’s basically no urgent need to play one over the other.

Motivation from a character often pushes me to prioritize one game when I have many in my backlog. A key example of this is the Ace Attorney games, especially when compared to another mystery game like Return of the Obra Dinn.

In both games you’re solving a mystery, figuring out what happened. In Obra Dinn, you see the “happen” and fill out forms for which person was who, and how they died. But you’re not going to stop anything terrible from happening - that part’s done.

However, in Ace Attorney, every case has the same premise: Some poor fellow has been accused by an overeager justice system of murder. Worse, circumstantially it does seem likely they did it - and no one believes their story. As their defense, you prove them innocent AND drag out the evil miser who landed them in that situation, solving the mystery as you go.

In one of my favorite cases of the trilogy, the defendant was photographed in the act of stabbing the victim by a witness who was behind a fence. The accused was the only person at the scene, arrested on the spot, bears a cut on her hand from using the knife. When questioned, she willingly admits to killing him. Only reason you take the case is that she has no apparent motive, and her sister begs you to do it, feeling she couldn’t ever do such a thing. And yes: She’s innocent. Unraveling that mystery is one thing, but unraveling the motives to figure out how to help these people is another.

I put it in all caps because I’m referring to the 2016 reboot. It tries to be fast paced, but even though the Slayer is silent they’re pretty successful in giving him an angry, rebellious personality.

There’s something that activates my child toy brain having a vehicle large enough to deploy another vehicle. Even Sea of Thieves, being able to have one player steering at the helm, while another is placing treasure down below, while another is deploying the rowboat from the back, gives quite a sense of ownership. Needless to say, trains often fulfill the same desire.