Neither did many of the miners. There was pretty famously a near-universal shortage of GPUs for several years because crypto miners were buying so many cards - online, direct from the manufacturer, even big box stores; they drained them all. Most of those would be indistinguishable from a normal purchase (a lot of miners only bought one or two cards; there were just a lot of crypto bros looking to get rich).

The ball ultimately encompasses everything, including the answer.

They’re complaining that the revenue was filed under gaming, but crypto miners bought gaming GPUs. How would Nvidia have possibly been able to separate those purchases from regular gamers?

Genuinely one of the hardest farming game in existence. Even if you keep out the wildlife that are after both your farms and farmers, a giant squad of bandits is probably on its way to “request” your crops.

I would be so pissed because three titles came to mind before I even finished your first sentence.

(Why do so many farming games start with an S?)

I believe it split off from TipOfMyTongue during the old Reddit days.

And you can probably guess what the porn spinoff was called.

For an example, see the leaked Heart of the Swarm ending animatic (StarCraft spoilers, obviously). It’s a super janky rough cut to try out the scene’s flow before pouring their full resources into it. They had most of the art assets already in place since it’s a sequel, but for the parts they didn’t they used concept art and even music ripped from the Transformers movie.

With the high quality of free engines and the resulting explosion of indie games, nearly every genre has a constant stream of titles coming out. At this point I find my enjoyment of a game comes down to how many quality of life tweaks it implements more than any other factor.

So many otherwise great games stumble here. Take the survival crafting genre: basic things like crafting from storage or stacking to nearby chests make a game so much more pleasant to play, but it feels like half of all games neglect to implement them even when players request them from day 1 of Early Access.

I’m pretty sure that’s a joke. The article is referring to the legal team as a bunch of Lionel Hutzes.

• Really fast Instagram filter (when run on a second dedicated 5090).

Franchise rot is real. You’d think they’d learn when their most talked about games are always the early entries in a series, after the devs have hit their stride but before execs have ruined things with dumb ideas and fad chasing.

I haven’t played an Assassins Creed since Black Flag. I remember watching a preview of (I think) Valhalla showcasing the stealth. They snuck up on a boss and “assassinated” him, which… started the normal boss battle with the boss missing a bit of health. What’s even the point, then?

deserved bonus

Contractually mandated bonus, but I wouldn’t call “more than all Unknown Worlds games have made combined” a deserved bonus.

The CEO was an idiot for offering a quarter billion dollars extra for a simple milestone bonus on a game that almost certainly couldn’t earn more than a fraction of that, and that’s on top of everything else they paid for the studio. Them using ChatGPT as an advisor explains so much about their terrible legal and financial decisions.

Even if implementing it turns out to be trivial, testing art assets for quality and consistency will be a nightmare. Especially if the underlying generative AI isn’t deterministic.

I’ve stopped buying new games I’ll probably never even launch, and started splurging on the DLC for the old games I actually play.

because you initially thought going with AI generated crap is fine, just so you can save some money and pad your managerial/C-suite pockets.

It’s worse than that. A lot of places are pivoting to AI despite knowing it’s terrible and self-defeating, simply because adding AI to a product is the only way to get investors interested right now.

The core developers of Godot already sell console export templates on the side since they can’t include the proprietary SDK integrations in an open-source project. Steam hardware support would at least be free and (presumably) open to all, provided it doesn’t require a Steam Partner account to use.

I just started my first playthrough of Horizon and a few hours in I’m finding it pretty easy on Hard. Does it get harder later, or should I just crank up the difficulty now?

Having played the series back on original hardware, I can confirm it was a nightmare. Save states make old games so much better.

Obligatory “rights to the Harvest Moon name are owned by the publisher, who now slap it onto their own farming games; the actual direct successor to the original games is the Story of Seasons series”.

At first glance I thought that tattoo was a scar option and was getting excited to play as “person who ran face-first into an axe”.

Someone posted a great article about that game a while back. Was that what got you to try it?

How long does it take before everything clicks and you can play smoothly instead of constantly stopping to look things up? The core concept of a realistic investment simulator looks fun, but needing to know and follow all of the real life laws and regulatory minutia from decades ago sounds like a nightmare for a new player.

(source)

The modern music industry is entirely built upon the idea of middlemen seeking rent from other people’s work. They have a long history of trying to screw over musicians and customers for a little extra cash flow; them going after distributors as well tracks with all the other greedy and self-defeating shit they’ve pulled over the years.

They showcase the combat because action looks better in previews. Your base does get raided occasionally, but most of your time is spent balancing all the tasks a colony needs done and maintaining the fragile mental states of your limited number of colonists (it takes heavy inspiration from Dwarf Fortress in that regard).

You can also adjust the settings of the “storyteller” (the AI that makes events happen to shake up the gameplay) if you want a more peaceful community builder sort of experience.

Your likely best bet is whatever you’d call the genre RimWorld is in. RimWorld itself could probably scratch that itch if you up the number of colonies you can have in the settings and add a few mods that expand the world map-level gameplay.

Not necessarily. Developers choose what permissions their authorization token has when they register it with Discord. In this case the game asked for an auth token with all permissions, so the game connects to Discord with the same access levels as your actual login.

Gamefly

Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.

Ha! It’s a bit poorly named, but what the mod actually does is edit out most of the anime reaction sounds in the cutscenes. It’s surprisingly subtle - there are still plenty, but they’re placed where it makes sense instead of characters exclaiming with every slight movement they make.

The mod page has a comparison video with the base game that shows what I mean, but if the noises didn’t bother you then more power to you. Just be careful - I hear they can be contagious.

When you get around to playing FF7R you may want to check out these two mods. I couldn’t even make it through the intro without them.

Peak would be perfect for OP’s group. It’s cooperative, so having players of wildly different skill levels just means the better players can support the newer ones.

Abiotic Factor is an excellent game, but unfortunately it’d fail both of OP’s player requirements (too complex, and easily spoiled/speedrun by someone looking things up ahead of time).

It’s a shame they pulled the demo.

How would a prequel even work? The first Saints Row was a gritty street-level crime drama and only escalated to its signature ridiculousness after the Boss took over in 2. The original leader of the Saints, Julius, even has your character assassinated at the end of the first game (you get better) because he didn’t like how violent the gang was getting.

A game set before the Boss joined where Julius is still calling the shots sounds boring. Unless they mean a prequel to the reboot, but why make one for a game that was poorly received and instantly forgotten upon release?

That moment and what happened after defeating the Elite Four in Pokémon Gold both blew my mind as a child.

GTAV has made over ten billion dollars, one billion of that in its first three days. They would have earned more than double its entire lifetime development costs (estimated at ~200-250 million) if they’d charged a twentieth of what they did.

They’ve monetized GTAV so thoroughly via Online that they’ve given the game (including single player) away for free because they still made a profit off of it.

Charging $100 for a sequel they’ll definitely monetize even worse is the epitome of greed.

There’s also Flax, which feels a lot like how Unity used to before its enshittification. Or even better, in many cases.

The “support” was clearly a hallucinating AI agent, and Ubisoft has already clarified that the game is still supported and should get a patch in the future. This is yet another example of how replacing employees with LLMs doesn’t actually work.

It’s hard to go back to Avorion after they ruined subordinate auto-trading. You used to be able to tell your traders to make money and they’d figure out trade routes and grant you a decent passive income. Now they can only trade within a few sectors (each good’s price varies in a gradient spanning the galactic map, so trading with a neighboring sector is barely worth it due to prices being nearly identical), and you need to invest heavily in both the captain and trading hardware upgrades for their ship to make it even remotely worthwhile.

I know I shouldn’t expect an X4-level economic simulation, but they straight up ripped out an already working system and replaced it with something barely functional.

There’s a mod adding the ability to set up manual trade routes, at least.

Bethesda has a tendency to take features from popular mods for their previous games to improve future titles. Skyrim’s combat, for example, is heavily inspired by the Deadly Reflex mod for Oblivion. I wouldn’t be surprised if TES 6 cribs the Souls-like combat formula due to those mods’ popularity.

You’d be hard pressed to find solid, user-friendly documentation for UE2 as the engine wasn’t publicly available back then. There’s official docs, but they’re lacking compared to later editions.

If you really want to play around with old Unreal for some reason, the UDK (their first “free” release, based on Unreal Engine 3) might be your best bet if you can find a working download.