MudMan
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Is that where it is now? I haven’t looked at the documentation in an age. I think most stay lower because ultimately cloud storage is a cross-platform concern and different first parties have different requirements. Plus you want to keep it under control anyway. At any rate it’s not a huge concern and other services like PSN or Nintendo Online already charge for it, so… not a dealbreaker as long as the base implementation stays free.
It’s on par with Steam, I think. You get like 200 megs per product. I know because my Witcher 3 install is above that and it’s annoying. That wouldn’t be a dealbreaker as a subscription benefit, I don’t think.
With the rest I do agree.
I can tell they’re struggling and have been for a while. It isn’t easy to compete with Steam, and the thing that would have done it (having DRM’d new games in the service) was voted down in a similar survey some time ago.
I would not be against some Patreon-like crowdsourced solution for behind the scenes stuff and prioritization rights. GOG, or something like it MUST exist. Steam is bad enough with their current dominant position, it can’t be the sole remaining option in this market.
I would much prefer to be able to give them more money in exchange for more games, though. I am constantly frustrated by how often some indie game is only available on Steam, and I’ve started buying things full price on GOG but waiting for sales on Steam as a matter of policy.
Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.
“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).
Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.
Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.
They’re not even introducing regualtions. These are non-binding guidelines, as far as I can tell. Basically a declaration of how the relevant EU protection services will interpret existing EU regulations. They explicitly don’t force courts or individual member states to do anything. You could follow these rules and get sued in your country… or you could ignore them and win in court.
They do address that:
When in-game digital content or services are offered in exchange for in-game virtual currency that can be bought (directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency), their price should also be indicated in real-world money. The price should be indicated based on what the consumer would have to pay in full, directly or indirectly via another in-game virtual currency, the required amount of in- game virtual currency, without applying quantity discounts or other promotional offers Although consumers may acquire in-game virtual currency in different ways and quantities, for example through gameplay or due to promotional offers, this does not change the price of the in-game digital content or services itself. The price must constitute an objective reference for what the real-world monetary cost is, regardless of how the consumer acquires the means to purchase it.
I would argue this is a remarkable loophole, though. It effectively means they are ordering devs to display a higher price in real money than in virtual currency. Effectively a prompt that goes “this is normally ten bucks, but if you buy it this way you can get it for seven in virtual currency” would be following this recommendation to the letter.
Turns out regulating things this granularly is actually kinda hard. Go figure.
Yeeeah, no, they did nothing of the sort.
This seems to be a set of non-binding guidelines for HOW to provide virtual currencies in games as per consumer protection agencies within the EU. Specifically that when something can be bought with purchasable currency it needs to show the money price next to the in-game-currency price and that currency packs should not be deliberately mismatched to in-game item prices to leave frustrating leftovers to encourage more purchases.
This article is just incorrect. Please seek better sources, like the direct link to the text someone more competent than this reporter provided.
Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.
I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.
I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.
I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.
I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.
I’m a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You’d think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we’re at it. People seem… reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.
I mean, the article is right there:
Despite this, Kjun says he believes in the value of InZOI’s visual direction. “The realistic graphics also have clear advantages,” he explains, “they enhance immersion in both building and character customization, and the detailed world design has even led to some interesting moments during development. There were times when we looked at screenshots and had to double-check whether they were from the game or real-life photos.
So I’m torn on this until I can test it.
Right now you can absolutely share digital games. You do need to have your account logged in on both machines and only the one where your “main” account sits can play the games offline.
This seems both easier and harder? There are now arbitrary time limits and per-game activations, which seems like a massive mess. Before the only limit was that a game couldn’t be played in two places at once and that secondary consoles needed to stay online.
But conversely, the “main account” thing was annoying for a portable, so if you shared with someone that carried their console around outside the house it kinda required giving THEM the main account with all the games and keeping the secondary for yourself. This is a very parent-like situation to be in. So… that’s better?
The worry here is that this sure seems like setting the groundwork to give up on physical media altogether without messing with the way people use Nintendo portables, and that is a bad thing overall. Given Nintendo’s dumb, litigious approach towards these things they’re getting no benefit of the doubt from me in this area.
That is at least plausible, even though they don’t mention a specific source so it’s impossible to know if it’s accurate and whether or not it includes marketing or just development.
But however you want to cut it, nine figures is absolutely triple A territory. I was a well grown man when we were scandalized at games starting to break 50 mill during the PS3 era.
That said, I don’t believe the numbers in the billions being quoted for some games are accurate, either. At the very least people are being quoted the entire studio overhead, not just the cost of the game, and in some cases almost certainly just reporting incorrect numbers.
They went from a hundred to four hundred devs across a five year dev cycle. Unless Baldur’s Gate was developed by minimum wage workers it was NOT done for 25 mill. Depending on what the average salary on the seocndary locations is, it’s more likely anywhere between 3-5x of that at least, not counting marketing budget and other costs. I guess you’re correct about it not being four studios. Larian actually has studios in seven locations. And it is NOT developed unilaterally by Larian under the Open Game License, it’s a WotC-backed game on a licensing deal years in the making.
Larian isn’t small and BG3 is a HUGE goddamn project of gargantuan scope. It’s as AAA as they come. It’s amazing, I love it, but it’s a AAA game or the term has no meaning.
I’m also pretty sure the Concord and CoD figures are inflated. Concord was stuck in development hell for a long time, but some of the numbers out there are way too high. For one thing people are claiming it was in development much longer than it was (the studio didn’t even exist at the time some of the reports claim it started development). That thing took about as long to make as BG3, best I can tell. It’s also, incidentally, originally an independent game. The studio only got purchased by Sony after they ran into issues. It wasn’t a first party game for most of the time it was in development.
People are stuck in the 2010s when they think about how the games industry is put together, where the money is going and what “AAA” means. It’s leading to this weird mismatch where they think the only things coming out are five franchises from traditional publishers that are driving a fraction of the revenue and playtime across the industry. You want to know what the majority of the games industry is in 2025? Fortnite, Roblox, GTA Online and Call of Duty. Minecraft on a good day. It is insanely top heavy right now and players are sticking to forever games and not moving to anything else for a decade.
It is getting increasingly exhausting to see the online narrative rant and rave and dogpile over whatever punching bag they’ve decided arbitrarily is the big bad moneybags of the week based on who knows what while the real userbase consolidates around a handful of games they won’t even acknowledge existing. The general feeling around the industry is of depressed desperation and with the userbase as stuck in random hatefests as it’s always been (because man, has gaming’s fanbase always been toxic as hell) I don’t know what reverses things.
This idea that anybody with a few million of funding can just turn around and make Baldur’s Gate is not going to destroy all of gaming, but it sure as hell won’t help. There are many good lessons to take from BG3 (and a few bad ones), but the reality is the investment is gone, is not coming back in the same way anytime soon and it’s going to be Balatros all the way down until something changes. IF something changes. Gaming as we remember it may have a comeback, but there’s no guarantee. It could also just become the next comics industry or music industry, and depending on how it goes, my patience with this line of argument will likely shift as well.
I guess we’re doing this again.
BG3 is the triplest of triple-A. It’s a four studio game with a budget in the hundreds of millions, a major IP license and half a decade of development. If we’re going to use the term we’re going to have to agree on what it means.
Also, everybody is bleeding money right now. It’s not a creative issue. The financial situation has changed. If anything, the AAA guys are still raking it in. Fortnite and Call of Duty are making tons of money. It’s the middle of the pack that is suffering most.
Nobody is “throwing money” at them, though.
That’s exactly the state of the industry I’m referring to. Indies are effectively brute forcing creativity with a firehose of smaller games, either self-funded or supported by a few indie publishers, but nobody is funding efforts along those lines with higher budgets. Unless your name is Kojima, I suppose.
Aren’t most of those examples from like… the mid 2000s? We’re like two CEOs and a remarkable amount of arthritis away from like 90% of that.
I like the loot boxes piece because everybody throws it at EA, but when you point out that Valve re-released CounterStrike two years ago and they very explicitly kept the loot boxes in all you get is crickets. Not that I think loot boxes are a deal breaker, myself, but hey, you’d expect some consistency.
I do not believe they’ve been in trouble for violating labour laws, either, but I’m not their lawyer. I know they got a pretty bad reputation like in the 90s or early 00s about a specific studio, but my understanding is they’re actually pretty good about that these days. If you’ve heard otherwise I’m happy to be given new evidence.
In any case, I don’t need them to be spotless. Big corpos are gonna big corpo, they’re all the same. But much as I do agree that they’ve done shitty stuff (I disagree particularly strongly with their stances on piracy and IP and how they enact those as part of larger orgs) I also have no issues acknowledging when they do cool stuff, like their recent release of C&C code as open source, whatever it is they’re doing with Faris or that time they got banned from selling in Russia and other places for adding explicit trans support to The Sims. Again, corpos gonna corpo. Best you can do is pat them in the back to incentivize the less crappy stuff.
Right. People forget that The Orange Box was an EA game, too. I believe EA people even coded parts of the console ports directly or something, I’d have to look it up.
And yeah, that tracks. EA may exist only to provide a charisma black hole to cosmically balance out Steam’s ability to get players to go along with complete garbage sometimes.
He shared them a long while ago. I believe he said he was a libertarian at the time, and others have said the same thing about him. Who knows where he falls in the middle of the current postapocalypse, but he runs a major tech company and the few reports that leaked out from his bubble make it seem like he’s… you know, a techbro. A techbro with enough mental acuity to do long term planning, but a techbro after all. Could have told you from the fact that Steam is pretty much a gig economy app at the end of the day.
But also, I don’t need a politics purity test to buy shit. That can’t be how we operate society. There needs to be a better way than that handled at the public level, even if libertarians like Gabe don’t like it. That goes for Newell, Sweeny, Andrew Wilson and all the other tech CEOs. I don’t align with any of them, I just need a strong enough set of incentives for the government to keep them in check.
I’ll say this: there is absolutely no reason to “hate” a videogame company.
Like, Amazon and Meta, maybe? But certainly not for the videogame parts.
But also, voting with your wallet is late capitalist brain rot. You don’t vote with your wallet, you vote with your votes. Voting with your wallet just means people with a bigger wallet get a bigger say and people who need things from companies breaking the rules appear to be supporting them when they don’t. It’s extremely ironic to be given a dressing down about the ills of consumption while 100% buying into US-style anarchocapitalist “money is speech” bullshit.
If something is genuinely pernicious, get it banned through political action.
To be clear, he seems to be talking about the reboot. I don’t know if he feels the same way about 3 and 4 from the article.
I may argue that going from the reception of the end result he may not be wrong. Whether that would have been true of the team that was making the two games people actually like or why they went from that to Agents of Mayhem is not something I have an informed opinion about.
He’s definitely right that the industry isn’t throwing money at the wall to see what sticks anymore. That kinda sucks for innovation on high end games. You really need a big, established publisher to take a big gamble on a well planned project to even have a shot now. It makes a lot more sense to start small and build through iteration (or just make a million meme games and hope for a REPO or a Lethal Company).
We’ll see where that takes the industry, I guess.
More interesting than the random EA clickbait is his actual point:
“The problem with the whole capitalist idea is that you need to make more and more and more and more money,” he says. “That doesn’t make sense, because at the end of the day, you will make stupid decisions. But I just hope, in the best of worlds, that you take less of these stupid decisions and focus on what you truly, truly want. And those are the games.”
Man, you’re missing out. EA Originals published a bunch of stuff worth playing that people mostly ignored. If you like HazeLight stuff, Unraveled 2 was a cute 2D platformer take on coop puzzling. Zau is a decent metroidvania, although not the best of last year. Lost in Random was so underrated.
And the main internal studios make cool stuff, too. Squadrons is great if you like Tie Fighter, the Dead Space remake is up there with Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 2, the Jedi games are decent soulslikes… They aren’t particularly adventurous outside their sports and shooter franchises, but I feel in general they also don’t ship too much outright bad stuff, looking at it with some neutrality.
I mean, they made a poll. Every company was there. They chose EA as literally the worst. Multiple times.
Forget the specifics, I’m stating that the gaming community as a whole LOVES a dogpile. It loves having a nemesis they can dunk on based on one or two tropes they picked up along the way.
It’s not just EA, it cycles. Ubi is in the hotseat at the moment (for reasons I suspect most can’t even properly articulate, incidentally). Epic is up there, too, particularly around these parts, where the Valve worship runs strong. But it’s definitely a pattern, it’s definitely not particularly rational or mature, and it’s definitely disproportionate.
Ok, let’s use the same growth curve.
By year three the Switch had sold 55 million units. The Deck is about 10% of that pace. So by “using the same growth curve” it’s the equivalent of every Switch user in 2020 playing 6 hours in the whole year, not 2.
As for the weird “further perspectives”: The Steam Deck has ALSO released a mid cycle update And yes, I do personally own both a launch and an OLED version of both the Switch and the Deck, if you’re curious.
I’m confused about the second one. Why pick year one for the Switch? The Deck is three years old.
To put this in perspective:
Valve has revealed that Steam Deck players accumulated 330 million hours of gameplay during 2024, representing a remarkable 64% increase compared to the previous year.
That’s the equivalent of every Switch owner playing two hours in the entire year. Nintendo doesn’t share their usage numbers in aggregate, but they do provide a “year in review” thing per user and most of the ones I see online are in the three digit range. Even assuming a bunch of people aren’t using these at all, we’re looking one to two orders of magnitude larger than the Steam Deck, which checks out with what we know about the total numbers sold for each device.
Which is to say, the Deck is probably as popular as, say, a Sega Game Gear or a Sega Saturn but nowhere near any of the modern consoles yet.
No, I am seeing what people say and how it relates to reality, then deriving conclusions from that.
For instance, my conclusions just got significantly reinforced by the fact that you’re framing my stance as “defending” the subject of built-in outrage because of what or who they are, as opposed to what they did.
That’s a meaningful part of that statement. Unintended, for sure… but meaningful.
What combination? The game was announced as F2P a while ago, it’s been running tests for a while and was always assumed to have MTX. The only thing that changed is they will make the MTX live during a test run and then refund them, which is not particularly rare.
If you must know, it normally has as much to do with seeing how popular your ideas for cosmetics are as it does with testing that your commerce system works properly.
But none of that is what’s sparking the fake outrage.
I did! And if this conversation was even remotely related to any of them I’d give it more consideration.
But people read “microtransactions in Alpha”, which was clickbaity on purpose, did not read the game was free to play, which was hidden at the bottom of the article on purpose, and got mad anyway.
So proxy for the disintegration of public discourse it is.
But it IS a crazy conspiracy… theory. “Skate testing its MTX during an alpha means that they will be a scam at launch and/or impact gameplay because Multiversus also had MTX and that had a bad relaunch” is a complete non-sequitur. This is cavemen sacrificing goats to make it rain levels of random event association.
So I have to conclude the emotional layer is what matters here. Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that’s why that headline exists and why this conversation happens. And why social media exists and is killing liberal democracy, but that’s probably beyond the scope of this thread.
You just made all that up. None of that is even tangentially related to the thing that actually happened.
I mean, now we’re arguing that this weird ploy to extract more money for cosmetics is probably going to harm gameplay (even though it’s unrelated to gameplay) because a different game from a different company also had MTX which were also not related to the bad gameplay changes they made.
I don’t know what to argue there. It’s entirely irrational.
To be clear, it’s not irrational that F2P games often push monetization in intrusive ways that are annoying. It’s not irrational that Multiversus had a very weird history and a poor relaunch. But the way you’re connecting those pieces along with a healthy dose of entirely disconnected preconceptions based on branding is completely off the rails.
This is why this is so frustrating to me. People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit. It’s pure mob mentality and I fully admit that it pisses me off in games as a proxy for how much of it informs modern society and politics in general. Which I guess I’m doing, too, a little bit. But still.
The implicit perception of value in this comment is making my head spin. We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren’t real, right?
Also, yes, they are doing the free to play version of preordering. It’s called Early Access and it’s supposed to happen later this year. See also Path of Exile 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3.
People are working overtime to get their knee-jerk reaction to be retroactively justified here. The thing is, I would get being mad at this being a F2P game in the first place. I would get being mad at it being funded through microtransactions. Those are meaningful changes from the previous trilogy that I don’t particularly care for.
It’s the being mad on the spot at a haf-misunderstood headline depicting something entirely unremarkable that rubs me the wrong way.
But they fussed about Call of Duty.
If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.
I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.