Yeah normally I would feel the same way about this FOMO style of marketing but normally in that case it’s the company selling it deciding to like remove it from sale to create the FOMO need. In the case it’s another company basically forcing this decision on them so I don’t think it’s bad to let people buy it for cheaper while they still can.
I mean I also doubt the director was behind all the bad decisions that led to this. Cause this game started development back when Overwatch 1 came out. It wasn’t an old formula then, it just took too long to come out. That could be the directors fault but from what I’ve heard it was more decisions from corporate to chase new fads like live service and more that ended up delaying it so long and causing it to become dated.
You can still get that by just playing very small indie games. There’s tons of small games out there being made by just a handful or even one person that have these kinds of little fun things scattered throughout them. They are harder to find by their nature but that culture is still very much alive in the indie space.
Pretty sure it’s cause they did it without the original people (or person, not sure how many) who did the code. And so what ends up happening is the new people come in, don’t understand why things were made the way they were, and try to rework stuff to be better. Whether it actually is needed or not is a different question but either way reworking large parts of your code is bound to lead to bugs and problems.
I think at this point it’s just an argument of semantics. Yes it’s hyperbole to say they dont make games because they have technically released games. But there is still very much a problem there when the last majorly successful games you released are over 10 years old (I don’t count CS GO 2 as a separate game, it was just an update to an already existing game). Since then all they’ve done is make smaller games like Artifact and Underlords which were just their attempts to cash in on more live service genres and one large project that was VR only. So of course it makes sense why people are gonna say they make no games anymore even if it’s hyperbole. You can try to um actually it and say they have technically released games but that doesn’t mean the problem people are complaining about isn’t there.
Yes technically they are making games but if a large part of your core audience doesn’t want to or can’t play the games you’re making then to them you aren’t really making games. Cause from my perspective I hadn’t even heard about a bunch of these games that valve is making cause they weren’t interesting to me so the marketing for them never reached me. Like the only new things I had heard about valve doing was the new cs go which was less a new game and more just a big update for an existing game and half life alyx which I can’t play without vr. So sure you could say technically valve is making new games but from my perspective they aren’t cause they are all either games I’ve never heard of and after looking into them I’m not interested in them as they’re just more live service micro transaction machines, games I can’t play, or updates/rereleases of existing games.
While I agree with this for bigger game companies the problem is people apply the attitude of deserving infinite content to smaller games as well even if they don’t participate in all the things you talked about. For example with Manor Lord the only thing from what was listed that might apply is it being unfinished since it’s in early access. And while that does come with an expectation of more content the speed people expect it at is wrong especially since this game is basically being made by one person.
I mean it just released into early access so I mean yeah it makes sense that there isn’t a full game there yet. Personally I like this approach to early access more then the approach a lot of other games take where the full game is there but it’s super buggy and has lots of bad design throughout it. This feels more like a slowly building out and polishing from the start of the game to the end which I think is gonna make a great game once it’s done. And even now while the experience isn’t super long it’s really good and well polished.
If it’s on steam it isn’t even really review bombing. Cause for steam reviews you have to own the game. So this is people who own the game giving a warning to potentially new people who might get the game about what’s going on and a recommendation to not buy it. Usually review bombing is people who have never even played the game or consumed the media reviewing it bad to bomb it for whatever reason. So this definitely isn’t that and they’re just trying to shift the definition of review bombing to any kind of mass negative reviews for whatever reason.
Yes but at the same time Unreal doesn’t really compete with Unity at all when it comes to 2D games. Unreal is primarily meant for 3D games and maybe you could make a 2D one work in it but Unity has a lot more resources for 2D games. That’s why games like this switched to Godot instead of Unreal cause Unreal wasn’t really an option. I could be wrong but when Ive made some projects in Unreal it didn’t really seem to have any options for 2D games like Unity has.
I mean even in the past when WoW didn’t have much competition this never really happened before. It would always go down over the expansion then spike up again with a new expansion. While this is definitely in part due to the fact that WoW has multiple versions now and new ones of those have been coming out helping this is definitely still a good sign that what they’ve been doing recently has been working to keep players around.
This is the classic problem with all paradox games that I don’t really have a solution for. Like as players we want them to support the game for a long time and keep updating it, but unless that’s through dlcs then they can’t really do that without getting paid somehow. The other alternatives are just not doing any updates and releasing a full new game every couple years which would probably have less features added compared to doing dlcs. Or having a subscription that you pay to get new updates which while I’m personally fine with I know a lot of people aren’t. So that just leaves the current strategy of constantly doing dlcs and every once in a while releasing a new game and bringing over as many dlc features as they can to the new one while not making the development time unreasonable.
The only one I’ve bought is the one in Marvel Rivals but that’s cause it was only $5 for a game I’ve already put like 50-60 hours in. Plus with the way it’s setup if I want to get another one in the future if it’s the same price it’ll only be like $2 with the included currency you get from buying it. I generally agree I would rather just not have battle passes at all but I think Concord showed that paid games in this kind of genre don’t really work anymore. Sure Concord had other problems but I’m sure it would have been better off if it was free to play with micro transactions as a lot more people would have given it a shot if there was no barrier to entry.