Using it for upscaling and frame interpolation was reasonable - that felt like a good use of AI to emulate higher performance for a lower cost. But using it as a filter over the entire vision of the game? Utterly insane and strongly smells of NVIDIA targetting other companies for more investment/sales, not gamers.

Given how big the LGBTQ+ community is in the games industry, they really need to host this in Vancouver or Toronto until things settle down in the USA.

It always surprised me they never invested properly into building a decent Steam competitor that gamers actually want to use. Instead they’ve persisted with the free games dangling carrot. It’s a shame, we could have used some competition there.

What do you say Lemmy, should we all put in $20 and make an acquisition offer? The people in this thread should cover it.

I really hope they come up with some kind of certification system for games targeting Steam consoles, in the same way Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo do. All the boring stuff like making sure controllers connect and disconnect gracefully, the console can be slept/woken at any point in gameplay without bugs, consistent language/UX etc. That stuff goes a long way to making things “just work” on a platform. IMHO it’s the one edge console still has over PC gaming. Even if it was an optional certification, it would give players some decent guidance as to what will work well.

No, that’s why it bought a phone.

It’s also the fact that AAA budgets demands a huge return on investment, so you end up with gross monetization schemes designed to keep players paying as long as possible. Imagine if Stardew Valley had a Farming Pass subscription each year.

I backed the Kickstarter, and oh wow did I get my money’s worth! I genuinely wasn’t expecting them to finish, and that’s fine - I was there for the support and the ride, however it turned out.

It’s been so long since I originally backed the project that I’m not really that interested in playing it any more, but I’m happy for them that they got it over the line… well, most of it.

Like many Kickstarters they promised a lot without realising just how difficult or expensive it would be. There’s still a lot of deliverables ahead for them, but they’ve been pretty open about running out of money and operating on pure good will at this point, and I can’t say I blame them with over a decade of their lives poured into it.

I hope it does well for them!

But is the overall market growing? What I’d love to know is if less people are playing non-MTX games now than before, or if we’re just getting more people staying to play games and they happen to be drawn to MTX games, ie. a broader target market, in the same way we saw mobile gaming explode with people who never played games before.

It’s really not limited to the game industry. A project of any kind with 10 people vs 100/1000 people is going to be a very different experience. It’s just human nature - there’s more planning and communication required, and more personality types involved.

Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of switching, if Google still get to harvest all your data?

I have no mouth but I must scream

I worked for a large AAA during the pandemic, and it was ridiculous how many people they hired in a short space of time. We quadrupled our studio size over 12 months. So when layoffs started happening, of course our studio scaled back. Public corporations cannot be trusted to act ethically.

Game Pass’ revenue grew by 5.7% in the year to June, which is below the internal target of 11%. Following the service’s declining growth rate, it was dropped as a metric contributing to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s pay in 2023.

Rules for thee, not for me.

For couch gaming, the discontinued Steam Link hardware is still king IMHO. I tried switching to the Android app on my smart TV and have had nothing but trouble with connection quality (even over a gigabit wired connection) and maintaining 4 controllers connected to the TV at once. It seems extremely sensitive to host hardware and software issues, which often change underneath you with TV updates. The Android hardware and software it runs on is just too variable to ensure a consistent reliable experience, and Bluetooth controller support is often hit or miss.

The Steam Link hardware was amazing as it did exactly what it needed to do, and most importantly was tested more thoroughly than the thousands of Android devices that all have their own quirks and specs. I hope they bring it back.

It’s the responsibility of the game developer to ensure their game performs well, regardless of engine choice. If they release a UE5 game that suffers from poor performance, that just means they needed to spend more time profiling and optimising their game. UE5 provides a mountain of tooling for this, and developers are free to make engine-side changes as it’s all open source.

Of course Epic should be doing what they can to ensure their engine is performant out of the box, but they also need to keep pushing technology forward, which means things may run slower on older hardware. They don’t define a game’s minspec hardware, the developer does.

The “complicated” Fediverse signup process is actually the perfect filter. If someone isn’t willing to learn such a trivial process to gain access to an open decentralized discussion platform, then they really only have themselves to blame when they keep ending up in enshittified algorithmically-manipulated echo chambers.

Piracy is a service problem.

Late-stage capitalism (specifically public companies) are rather incompatible with singleplayer or “one-off” games that don’t have a long revenue tail of a live season or multiple DLCs/expansions. That really sucks for the whole games industry, players and developers alike.

I’ve already installed Arch on a spare laptop to assess the difficulty of switching over. So far I’m very impressed!

arch-install made the setup pretty easy, and KDE Plasma feels very natural for someone migrating from Windows. Flatpaks make installing/updating apps a breeze, and there’s way more apps available than I expected, including commercial ones like Spotify.

Most of the “muscle memory” habits translate across too, for example pressing Meta and typing “notepad” shows KWrite in the start menu. That was a nice surprise.

I can already tell it’s going to be viable for 90% of my needs, and the fact that there’s good free software to do everything from video editing to office tasks is really amazing. Linux desktop has come a LONG way.

Tech bros reinventing things poorly… a tale as old as time.

And yet Fallout: London - a community-made singleplayer experience - just hit 1 million players. It feels like there’s a huge mismatch between what many players want and what public game companies are chasing… they’re all going after online MTX and completely discounting singleplayer because it makes less money overall.

This reminds me of the time the Zoom CEO announced he wanted employees back in the office because remote work wasn’t as effective. It’s easy to assume the people running these companies are competent…

It’s just such an odd thing to remake. The old version still held up fine and can be played on PS4 or PS5, plus plenty of people would have gotten it for free with PS Plus. They must have really been banking on the PC platform selling well for all that effort.

The one thing that could cause serious porting pain would be the need to support high/variable frame rates. That could require a whole bunch of code to be refactored.

If they only released RDR on PS3, this explanation might make sense as the engine would be heavily optimised for PS3. But they also released on Xbox 360, which is the closest console platform to Windows in terms of architecture. It wouldn’t have been that expensive to port.

It’s just so insane to me that the community is having to make singleplayer Fallout games now because Bethesda aren’t interested.

I’d rather drink a verification can every 30 minutes.

Pretty massive screw up from the marketing team involved. To try and sell a hero shooter for $40 upfront from an unknown dev studio in a crowded market of free-to-play hero shooters is pretty risky. Even Overwatch 2 saw the writing on the wall and went F2P.

I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?

No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).

For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.

Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.

The reality is those other platforms won’t make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they’ve made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.

It’s the same reason a lot of indies don’t target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn’t make sense for small teams. Anyone who says “But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It’s literally two clicks!” has no idea what they’re talking about and hasn’t actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.

Witcher 4: Uma, The Jester Years

But in many ways, it would probably be easier for them to remake in first person, considering they’ve got the engine and a wealth of Fallout 3D assets ready to go.

I feel like they’re going to get into legal trouble with that name and logo.

A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.

And imagine being the guy who’s got to clean out the train car afterwards of all the tiny pieces. Nightmare fuel.

Where this game shines is in storytelling and art. I thoroughly enjoyed it and rate it very highly, but I also really enjoy the walking simulator genre. It’s the perfect game to chill out and play on the big screen over an evening or two, very watchable for spectators too.

Would love to see the same tests with an adblocker installed.

The US has absolutely atrocious employment laws, so yes they can: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment