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Well yeah - game development, a creative endeavour, benefits from continuity within the team working on it. Once you lose a certain percentage of that team, or even just a handful of key figures, the original vision and the lessons learned during its realisation are lost forever.
You’d think this was obvious, but apparently not to the c-suites, who see everyone as replaceable cogs.
That original version still exists - it’s called Save the World and iirc they recently revamped it and made it free for everyone (it used to be a standalone purchase).
Last time I played it I didn’t find it all that engaging, so it’s hardly surprising they stuck with BR as the lead mode once it took off. I guess my point is this: they didn’t ‘throw out’ StW, it just got eclipsed by a far more popular mode. Can’t really blame them for backing a winner.
And that’s not even close to a full list, either. There’s also Flight Simulator, Sea of Thieves, Pentiment, and Hi-Fi Rush. Probably others I’m forgetting too.
There’s plenty to hate on MS for, and I’m not saying they haven’t squandered a lot of the talent they paid for, but to say they’ve released nothing great for over a decade is just ignorant.
Sorry, didn’t mean to cause any stress - clearly I was wrong here. Reading through I saw a lot of sentence structures typical of LLM writing, but like you say this is partly because they were trained on writers’ work.
I’m a writer myself, so I’ve seen first hand how LLMs are rotting our profession from the inside. That’s not an excuse for making false accusations, but I hope you can understand my exasperated tone when I found what seemed like slop on my feed.
You’re acting like harassment of the sort in the article is some kind of unavoidable natural phenomenon, and the only possible course of action is for the victims to suck it up and take it.
Steam is a platform owned, operated, and fully controlled by Valve. They have the ability and the money to take steps to improve the situation, but instead they seem perfectly happy to let it continue, including not even bothering to enforce the few rules they do have. It’s gross.
There’s a big difference between allowing people to comment and allowing people to be openly racist, sexist, and homophobic. Steam reviews, forums, and curator pages are absolutely full of the latter because of Valve’s hands-off ‘not my problem’ attitude, and it often goes hand in hand with doxxing and harassment campaigns.
We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.
I kind of get where you’re coming from but your dismissive framing means it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.
The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.
The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.
That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.
I’d rather games only include a manual because they wanted to, rather than because they had no choice.
Here’s an article detailing the methodology.
Do you say the same for Epic Games Store exclusives?
Yes, actually. If they funded a game, like with Alan Wake 2, then whether or not they make it an EGS exclusive is their prerogative.
there is no pro-consumer reason that the GOG fixes could not have been given to everyone that already owned the game on Steam as a free update
I disagree. GOG invested time and resources into patching the game. Tacking the word ‘pro-consumer’ in there means nothing. They’re a business. They shouldn’t be expected to give away their work for free to customers of a competing platform.
I don’t care if 2% or whatever goes to GOG for their fixes
That much is clear. You seem to want something for nothing. Pirate the GOG version if you’re so desperate to play without paying for the work that went into fixing it, but don’t frame it as some kind of pro-consumer protest.
It’s as much as anyone outside of GOG can know, based on interviews like this one.
The exact contents of the deals is not public information and no doubt differs for each game, but the overall process has been reported on.
Oh, well that’s the easier part to understand.
Before they even start on any technical work, the GOG legal team contacts the owners of the game they want to sell (e.g. SEGA, in the case of Alpha Protocol) and they negotiate a deal to update and distribute the game.
Things get complicated when a game has joint owners, or when it’s not clear who owns a game, but otherwise it’s as simple as that.
If you’re interested in a specific example, here’s an interview with their technical producer on how they updated and rereleased Alpha Protocol in 2024.
Lots of insights!
Console certifications only check that a game is functional and meets platform requirements (like achievements, peripheral support, accessibility).
They’re there to ensure a game works and won’t brick any systems or steal bank details etc. They don’t typically check that a game is ‘good’, since it’s so subjective.
IIRC they’re adding this to American Truck Simulator. ETS2 is getting coaches, but not sure about cars (at least as an official option - I’m sure there are already community mods for it).