RTS did go mainstream and it indeed turned into games very different from old school SC et al.

Plants vs zombies and LoL are the descendants of the genre and are or at least were, HUGE. Tower defense and moba are the two evolutionary paths that RTS took.

Tower defense is super mainstream, but moba, while huge isn’t really mainstream in my opinion. But one things for sure, they don’t have much in common with SC except the lineage.

It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

It’s crazy to me the way that all of the also-ran handhelds seem bent on putting a desktop OS on these things. The steam deck didn’t succeed in spite of its lack of windows, it succeeded BECAUSE it ran a purpose built OS.

Like imagine looking at a market where the Switch exists and saying “My path to victory is Microsoft Windows, that is what the people are demanding!”

Even worse is that there almost certainly going to be some sort of handheld optimized windows release in the coming years from MS and they have zero incentive to license it to hardware OEMs. Best case for MSI et al is that they build a market for MS to steal from them in a year or two.

That is the traditional argument. I saying that game budgets have passed the point where it is responsible to use them for marketing tools and they have to be products in their own right.

Those insomniac leaks show that Sony is feeling the squeeze and is looking to find ways to make its first party offerings cheaper (strategic layoffs). When you need to sell 10s of millions of copies for the product to be successful, platform exclusivity is going to be a tough sell in the boardroom. Especially when the hardware wars has already been fought and Sony won it by a lot.

I think it will be a few years before the rest of the business catches on, but I actually think he is right about this. If you spend 100s of Millions on a game, you need to make money on it. It’s not some cheap thing you can use as a loss leader to sell some hardware. Winning the console war is no longer as smart of business as it was in past decades.

You have to look at the other platforms as retail partners instead of competitors. Game budgets are way too big to justify exclusivity in 2024.

Modern games cost WAY too much to make and the industry has come up with the worst possible way to solve that problem. If you want to make a single player game with modern graphics that sells for 70$ and has a few 30$ dlcs, it HAS to be a huge hit or your going out of business. There are very few studios left with the guts and confidence to make that sort of wild “all-in” bet.

The worst part is that games production costs are almost all labor cost so making games cheaper means making games with less people. There is no worker friendly future for games but free to play cash grab skinner boxes.

Making art with 100s of millions in budget requires a hell of a patron. There is no market way to get the Sistine Chapel.

You never know how other people value their money. Some people buy a $3500 AR headset. Some people buy a truck that costs more than they make in a year. Some people pay 30USD to make the portals a different color.

I have NEVER bough a cosmetic item in a game, I truly do not understand people who do. But, people love that shit so who am I to say it shouldn’t be available to them?

That is a valid take. You could also say that all the VC was transferred into payroll for ordinary folks without any return to the SV billionaire club.

Totally different industry, but my company took a huge swing a few years back that blew up in their faces. It’s been rough since then but I put a LOT of money in my pocket during that period and I’m certainly better off than if they had prudently managed on austerity budgets the whole time.

I haven’t chased down sources but I saw a claim that the industry added net 20k jobs in 2023. This might really be more realignment than bloodbath. Anyone who was debt financing payroll has to make changes asap, but the industry still generates tons of revenue and grows YoY.

I think that is a microcosm of the whole business right now. Very low interest rates meant that VC were taking bets like this all the time. Which allowed devs to finance expansion well beyond what their revenues would allow. The free money tap turned off and now everybody has to adjust back down. Low interest rates are an engine for growth. Raising rates is meant to crush investment and employment.

Macro economics is bullshit and not empirical at all but, the monetary policy levers do what they are supposed to do.

If these people robbed the most litigious company in the video game space, I bet it works itself out. Pretty sure Nintendo lawyers have got this under control without any help from XxTwitterSlueth420xX. If there is a case, there is a case.

Corporate fanboys prosecuting the case on social media is some of the saddest shit. Seeing this forum full of communists, anarchists and evangelical pirates get exercised to protect the sanctity of corporate intellectual property is fucking killing me.

The way that they were able to use their toolset to make space, actually super cool. Especially when you start to poke at it a little and see how the clock actually ticks. BUT, it doesn’t really serve fun. Like I bet there is a morrowind technical dev somewhere who shit their pants when they saw it but for the rest of us, it ends up feeling bland.

So there was some interesting innovation, but it did not serve gameplay. Strange award to give that game. The strongest thing they do is level design and all the bespoke levels are really good. That is a compliment I can give starfield without any reservation.

The long game. I like it.

Epic published the game, gonna be a long wait. It will come to steam when epic gives up the storefront dream, which is to say never.

How many games game out this year? Thousands. There is absolutely zero possibility that MS or anyone else is anywhere near holding monopoly status on the production of entertainment software. Even if they bought EVERYTHING new creators would enter the space the very next day.

Trust = one or more independent organizations making secret agreements to mutual benefit.

Mergers: not a trust.

Monopoly = a single organization that controls an overwhelming amount of the market.

Microsoft buying a publisher that put out 2 games in 2023: not a monopoly.

The competition! lol! Activision is going to put out 2 games this year. Whatever will we play now that these 2 games are owned by a platform holder?

You are correct though that there are a million cool ass games you can play right now and put your money in the pockets of people who make THINGS instead of people who make value for shareholders.