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This is why you use distinct art in a game and not something that looks close to something a mega corp owns. Like art style ip infringement is one of the easiest legal roads a corp can take to take you down. Since art style is subjective, it doesn’t need to be an exact copy to make the claim legally valid. As long as the claimant can claim that customers have confused the infringing art with that of the ip holder. Look I’m not defending MS’ actions. If we lived in a fair and just world this wouldn’t have happened. But we don’t, we live in the world these fucks have created. So either you fight them and “die” trying when these fucks take your game down or you could have used another art style and this wouldn’t have happened in the first place and you’d use the incoming revenue on something else instead of wasting it on a legal battle. I know this sounds defeatist but it’s just not a hill that’s worth dying on especially if you are a small indie dev. It’s not even an art style that is cool looking anyway who wants to be associated with the shit Notch made.
This game feels like it was an executive decision from the PlayStation C-suite and not by the studio independently. And ironically the head of PlayStation Studios is the former CEO of Guerrilla Games. This guy is probably behind Sony’s desperate attempts to own a successful live service multiplayer game
Sony is desperately trying to own a live service game that will generate positive cash flow month after month for the next decade without investing hundreds of millions of dollars. Sony has some of the best selling single player games this gen but each game costs them a hundred million dollar or more to build and promote and more than half a decade to make. since their audience expects the most realistic looking games. Which is a huge risk to them when multiple games flops and when a game is successful it will generate most of the revenue in the first year only. That’s why they force every studio they own to build a live service game but the ironic thing is they lost more money doing that than they have generated from those projects.
Also it’s the same reason why Remedy Entertainment released a multiplayer game out of the blue. Since the development of Alan Wake 2 could have bankrupted them if the game failed. And also ironically this game probably cost them more then it will ever generate in income.
If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.
Devs are also paying for the Steam recommendation algorithm. It’s not just a store that puts games on a shelf and just forgets about it. The store actively promotes games to the right audience. The algorithm is how small indie games from a team without an advertising budget can blow up into millions of dollars in revenue. No other digital games store has a recommendation algorithm that is as good (for the buyer and the seller) as Steam.
Yeah gameplay wise the game basically leaned a lot on novelty. But they are wrong to say that it lacks world building and lore because it’s scant on narrative. That’s like saying “the Quiet Place lacks world building because there is barely any narrative”. The game is excellent in using game mechanics to tell a story. Instead of relying on the storytelling mechanics of film.
It also offers nothing compelling for the hardcore Nintendo fan unless they just like to collect Nintendo stuff. No new Zelda, Mario, Luigi, Animal Crossing or Smash. I think Nintendo completely misunderstood the market. Mario Kart 8 is the best selling game on the Switch 1. So Nintendo probably thought they should focus on MK for the Switch 2 launch. But MK8 was not the main reason people got the Switch. Like for example they got the Switch for Animal Crossing and then bought Mario Kart as a side game. Mario Kart is universally like by Nintendo fans it’s just not a game that is on top of people’s wishlist. Nintendo fans don’t want to buy a new Nintendo console just for Mario Kart or Donkey Kong.
Price isn’t the main reason why sales are dropping. I doubt that every Nintendo fan with the means to buy one already has one. Most are just waiting for a game they actually want to play.
I think the Wii stole the momentum. PS3 and 360 were just crazy expensive compared to the Wii and the prev gen of consoles. And unlike PS2 those two consoles lacked a lot of games for kids. So for parents it was an easy decision to just get a Wii. Not to mention if you already had a PS2 you had a large library of games at your disposal and the machine was modable, it’s why it still sold very well in the end of the console’s lifetime especially in middle income regions, like it sold super well in South America. So many PS2 owners weren’t going to convert to PS3, just way too expensive and can’t play pirated games.
It will definitely boost PS5 sales. Sony loves to boast about PlayStation 2 being the best selling console in history but they conveniently leave out the reason. It’s because there are modchips and even software jailbreaks for the console. It’s why it sold super well during the end of its lifetime in low and middle income regions.
Matchmaking is nothing more than a user database query. That database sits on GOG’s servers and the only thing GOG does is put users into a lobby and then send that data back to the clients so the game can show it to the user. And then when the game starts GOG connects the clients to the host. So developers don’t have to setup their own lobby and relay server. That host can be another client, then the developers don’t have to pay for anything, or a dedicated server which the devs have to provide and pay for themselves. And in case a game only does multiplayer with dedicated servers then clients do not have the server binaries unless the devs provide it.
GOG Galaxy only handles lobbies, matchmaking and relaying connections to the host. So even if they provide a way to self host it, if the game uses dedicated servers to host sessions it still wouldn’t work if the game devs don’t provide the server runtime binaries. Only games that can host a session on the client would work without the server runtime.
Don’t even need to do that. With a visual spot check there is still a chance some things fall trough the cracks. Even a bright pink asset. Better to tag assets as a placeholder in the metadata and then let an automated validation process find the placeholders in the levels. And you can even configure it to run the validation process during a build so it will halt the build when it finds placeholders.
Same with the Dragon’s Lair port
https://youtu.be/4XiUvMowedA
https://invidious.f5.si/embed/4XiUvMowedA
It’s not like they are just going to do a visual spot check on each level to clear out the AI assets. They will probably tag it in the meta data as a placeholder. So some automated validation process can find every ai asset in a level. Not to mention game objects are wrapped in an object template. And then the template is used to place the object into the scenes. So they only have to replace the placeholder with the final object once in the template and then it will replace it everywhere the template is used.
What is there to be solved? It’s not a physical store with scant storage space. It has been solved by the store algorithm. Games that do well in the first week will rise to the front page and will get recommended to other customers, while crap will basically become invisible. Does it really matter that these crap games exist when you’ll rarely see them and the storage space they take up is insignificant to Valve’s bottom line. Like when was the last time you ever saw shovelware on the front page? If you see shovelware then the algorithm thinks you like that stuff. You can solve that by giving shovel ware in your library low reviews and by curating the queue.
Sure this will hurt some devs who made a hidden gem, but these devs would have failed in the physical retail space as well. Studios have the responsibility to do the leg work of promoting their own game. That’s not Steam’s job. The Steam algorithm will basically give each game some visibility during its first few days of release and if a game can’t generate sales momentum the algorithm will drop it and basically becomes invisible unless you search for it. Games that do well in that period get pushed to the recommendations. And no the threshold isn’t millions in sales it’s basically a couple of thousand copies in the first days.
Raising the fee would hurt devs on a budget, like devs outside high income countries and students.
Apple is dipping their toes in the gaming water. Like couple of weeks ago they had a livestream, outside the WWDC schedule, about porting pc games to MacOs. They have even made plugins for Unity and put them on GitHub. So at least they take gaming a bit more seriously than they did under Steve Jobs.
I remember reading a story from an old Sega or Capcom dev and he basically said that the boss would lock the door of their office when they had to meet a deadline. Not only toxic but the boss doing straight up illegal shit.