Kobolds with a keyboard.
- 0 Posts
- 255 Comments
I’m glad the creature collector + sandbox game mashup is becoming a genre; I hope we continue to see it evolve in new ways, though, and not just stagnate in the ‘survival crafting’ archetype. An open-world sandbox game with creature collecting elements doesn’t need those survival crafting parts to be compelling, in my opinion.
To get a fair comparison, you’d need to poll people who are the same age that you were at the time you’re comparing to. I bet you’ll find that they’re just as into gaming as you were at that age. What’s happening is that you’re getting older, and you aren’t enchanted by the same things that you once were. Basically, this is a ‘Back in my day…’ rant about the ‘good old days’.
Nor do I in certain games have time to check in on my stuff regularly.
This is a huge part of it. When I was younger with no responsibilities and could tailor my schedule around a game, I enjoyed this stuff. Now? I don’t want to have to think about whatever game when I’m not actively playing it, and if I don’t play for a few days, I want to be able to return and find things as I left them. That philosophy is antithetical to many modern PvP games’ design philosophies, where they want you to be constantly thinking about it and emotionally invested in it.
The actual quote that the tagline paraphrases:
“And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible,” says Faliszek. “And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe’s better at that than you. I don’t know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things.”
Other good quote:
Faliszek says it infuriates him to see “lazy dev” complaints when companies like Epic “just cut them off at the knees, man.” He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: “And how many people still work there after all those years?”
And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. “They care so much about what they’re making that they’re still there and they’re all rewarded handsomely,” says Faliszek. "To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I’ll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.
"But Valve understood that. That’s how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I’m excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.
I wouldn’t even care if they hadn’t used the Marathon IP for it. What the fuck was the point of bringing that back for this? It’s not like it has name recognition against anyone but like age 35+ folks who happened to play the originals in 1995, or the remakes on XBox Live Arcade, and those people are definitely not the market for a live-service extraction shooter, so what was the point here, other than to irritate people who would have enjoyed a proper reboot of the original trilogy?
I know this may come as a shock to some people, but you do not have to buy the latest and greatest parts, and if you stick to parts that’re 1-2 years old, the prices are quite reasonable. Unless you’re doing some really top-end shit on your PC, DDR4 RAM will work just fine for you, and if you are doing something that’s too intensive to work on older parts, then discussion about “decent” gaming PCs doesn’t really apply to you.
I mean, excluding temporary price jumps that affect the entire industry like the current RAM and storage shortage… I assumed that was obviously implied.
Here’s the thing: you don’t need the newest, greatest graphics card. I’ve managed just fine for my entire life by never spending more than $800 or so on new PCs. (When I upgrade, I typically just replace everything and have a second PC, rather than replacing half of it and having spare parts). Do I have the best and latest? No, absolutely not, but I also said a “decent” gaming PC, not “the best PC money can buy”. Certainly comparable to - or better than - current gen consoles.
Consoles honestly don’t even feel necessary at all anymore. It used to be that you got better performance compared to a similarly priced PC, but that’s not really the case anymore; console prices just keep going up, and the price of a decent gaming PC hasn’t really changed much in the last 15 years. Even things like the Switch are largely invalidated by hand-held PC gaming solutions. Maybe it’s just time the consoles die off.
If this results in the AAA games industry dying and having a full reset in a couple years when this all blows over, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think indie games are going anywhere, so it’s not like we won’t have anything new to play, and AAA studios have just become so generally awful that there wouldn’t be any great loss there.
The issue here is that I, as a gamer, want to know if developers espouse opinions that I strongly disagree with, because I don’t want to give them my money. So if a developer was (for example) in the Epstein Files, I would want to know that before buying their game. Reviews are an effective way to communicate that information, and I’d be rather upset to see them go.
You can’t reasonably allow reviews outlining some developer behavior and disallow others - that’s straight up censorship. As much as I disagree with the 'I will downvote games by someone who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death" stance, I think it’s their right to take that stance. I’m not really sure how you reconcile those two things without just banning them both.
What Steam could do is have a separate review category (from ‘normal’ ones and ‘off-topic’ ones) to categorize character profiles of the developers, and let people opt in or opt out of having those included in the aggregate score. Alternately, they could categorize reviews by the reason (e.g. “Performance / crashes”, “Unfun”, “Too hard”, “Too Woke”, “Developer is a horrible person”), and let people choose which categories they care about.
I’ve played online games before where the entire point was to write a bot to play the game for you; I don’t know what the genre is called, but there’ve been a few of them over the years. The game is essentially just an API and the efficiency and complexity of your self-written bot determines your success or failure. It’s fun.
This is functionally that, except… you… don’t write the bot yourself. So… what the fuck is the point? Like, seriously. I’m not judging you - if this interests you, I would be legitimately interested to hear what the appeal is.
This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.
People who enjoy a game are more likely to have more playtime, therefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. This is exactly what you’d expect to see on any game, barring situations like the developers making changes that ruin a game that previously was good.
So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.
Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. If a game - especially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. I don’t have enough hours in the day to play games I don’t enjoy hoping that they’ll get good eventually. Why should anyone feel the need to do that, whether they’re giving the game the benefit of the doubt or not? It’s the MMO argument. “The game gets really good around the 100 hour mark!” I don’t care. I’m not sticking around for it. There are plenty of other games to play that are fun within the first 2 hours. If a developer expects people to slog through an unenjoyable 2+ hours to get to “the good parts”, they probably deserve the negative reviews.
I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?
If the 17000 employee statistic is accurate, $780M won’t even last 6 months. That’s just shy of $46k per employee, and according to Glassdoor, the average salary is considerably more than that.
It starts very slow, so be forewarned, but if you’re looking for a long-haul incremental game, I’ll recommend Evolve. I’d estimate roughly 2 years to “finish” it. Legitimately a very good incremental game.
It makes sense to me if you’re talking about information that wasn’t public already. For example if you obtain someone’s private communications and make them public to smear them. This is just stating information that’s publicly available to a large audience. How do news organizations not just constantly get sued for defamation any time they print or state anything negative?
Edit: I assume, anyway. The article doesn’t say anything about this streamer obtaining privileged documents that they used to get this information or anything, so I’m making the assumption that they used publicly available sources.
It’s important to note that defamation laws in Korea are very different from those in the United States and many other countries. Of particular note is the fact that defamation can still be claimed even if facts are used in the related statements, and the fact that the aggrieved party need only show that the statements hurt its reputation and that allegations were made publicly (i.e., widely available to many people).
What the fuck, that’s draconian. “You publicly stated factual information and it hurt my business!”
I’d bet some significant amount of the hype was from people thinking “Oh, sick! The Marathon franchise is getting a revival!” without realizing that the new game had essentially no relation to the Marathon franchise they remembered. I don’t know who they think is sitting around thinking, “You know what I want? Another live service extraction shooter.”
From my perspective, this is another reason it’s a bad idea to have an American company (even a somewhat user-focused one like Valve) be a steward of modern digital services. Local culture puts too much emphasis on the theatrical elements of morality.
Yeah, I hear you. It should be based in a sane country like Australia or the United Kingdom or China or Japan.
Point is, making this an ‘America bad’ problem is just ignoring that it could be so much worse if it was based elsewhere.
This was from 2021, so prior to the Steam Deck… that was really their break-out moment, I think, with regards to hardware. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were neat but didn’t really capture their respective markets, and the Index was widely considered one of the best VR headsets on the market but that’s a relatively small market, and it priced out all but the enthusiast tier consumers. The Steam Deck on the other hand had mass appeal and basically ushered in a golden age of handheld PC gaming… not to mention the immense hype around their recent hardware announcements. Could be that their hardware team is making more now.
It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.
This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.
This sounds like the Train Simulator of driving games, which I’m sure there’s a market for. I think it could have more mass appeal without compromising the vision if you included a set of in-game goals like visiting various landmarks, obeying (or disobeying) road rules, or whatever else.