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Tell that to all the smaller studios that have already been decimated and forced to close because of their publishing/funding deals falling through over the last couple of years.
You don’t hear much about it because they’re smaller and/or working on things that hadn’t released yet, vs the occasional big media splashes from companies like MS doing more layoffs, but indies and AA are being gutted too.
It’s comforting to believe that only the biggest companies are struggling, but the industry as a whole is currently in active collapse from the inside out.
Founded in 1985, Rare is one of the UK’s most historic game developers, best known for Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie.
Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and it has since gone on to create titles such as Kameo, Viva Piñata, Kinect Sports, and Sea of Thieves under the Xbox banner.
Says it all, really. Rare has been mismanaged into the ground for the past 20+ years.
Agreed. Permanent hardware bans have been a thing since the PS3/360 era.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing that they can unilaterally disable hardware you purchased (although I certainly understand the reasoning wrt cheaters and pirates) but the author here is acting like the idea is some completely new scheme from the diabolical industry villains du jour.
It’s disingenuous at best.
No, I mean the completely unfounded claim that discord’s typing indicators are somehow a tool for analysing users’ writing styles and selling that on to data brokers.
It’s so bizarrely specific that it comes across as an unhinged conspiracy theory, especially when it’s delivered as part of a link salad.
From the article:
Danilov posited that the mistake was either the work of a “careless translator taking shortcuts”, or it was “done by someone on the dev/publisher side who couldn’t be arsed sending last-minute missing lines for translation and decided to throw them in a random LLM without oversight”.
Handong Ryu, who handled the Korean translation for the game, replied: "I was responsible for translating the vast majority of the Korean version of The Alters. Unfortunately, the same issue exists in the Korean version as well, which makes it more likely that the second scenario you mentioned is closer to the truth.
Sounds like this text was either added late in development or simply overlooked until after the last set of translation work had been completed, so the devs decided to let an LLM do it rather than getting billed for another batch of localisation.
Very dumb, especially as this puts them in direct violation of the Steam AI disclosure policy, but given the context I guess they figured no one would notice.
I’m sure there are lots of examples for me, but I guess one that comes to mind is 007: The World Is Not Enough for PS1.
Reading/hearing about it as an adult, not only is it seen as a poor follow up to Goldeneye, but also the PS1 version is the worse of the two releases, with the general consensus being that the N64 version is better.
Back in the day, though, I didn’t know any better and I loved it. I expect most people have games like that.
Yes, same as in the original release.
I’d say the only caveat is that I would not recommend multiplayer for a first-time playthrough. It completely undercuts the tension and horror aspects and turns the game into a comedy. Still fun, but absolutely not the intended experience, so it’s better saved for a second run through (IMO).
Nothing out of the ordinary for Nintendo, unfortunately. Even the blockbuster Wii Sports was an aberration that they had to be convinced about.
[Reggie] Fils-Aimé pushed for [Wii Sports to be bundled free with the Wii], and initially company President Satoru Iwata turned the proposal down: “Nintendo does not give away precious content for free.”
It’s almost like there’s a limit to how many times you can return to the same creative well until you hit diminishing returns and run out of steam.
Having a successful series is one thing, but AAA studios don’t seem to know when it’s time to stop - they drive franchises into the ground because they’re too scared to try something new.
Besides Tunic, there are still several good to great games in the first dozen (and no doubt a bunch more if you’re willing to dig into the smaller indies):
- Cook, Serve, Delicious - Overwhelmingly Positive (95% of 3,631) all time
- Hoa - Very Positive (89% of 2,098) all time
- Tangle Tower - Overwhelmingly Positive (95% of 4,760) all time
- Octodad: Dadliest Catch - Very Positive (93% of 8,480) all time
- Whispering Willows - Very Positive (81% of 1,166) all time
- Hidden Folks - Overwhelmingly Positive (97% of 7,333) all time
- Eldritch - Very Positive (88% of 1,673) all time
- They Bleed Pixels - Very Positive (84% of 2,014) all time
Not sure about the minority now, but you will be in a few years if not already. Prebuilt PCs haven’t included optical drives as standard for years now, and good luck buying a new laptop that has one.
Optical media isn’t dead but it’s on life support and will become functionally obsolete in the next decade, same as what happened to magnetic media.
The definition of indie is always contentious, but there are definitely studios out there who are independent (as in not owned by a larger company) but work with a publisher for funding, marketing, and other support.
Even beyond that bit of semantics, many indies rely on funding from investors of one sort or another, be that angel investors, startup funds, or even just small business loans.
Many of those investors have lost their appetite for games, making it extremely difficult to pay the bills unless you’ve already got a sizeable cash reserve to cover costs.