Live service has broken people’s brains.

Well, I definitely wasn’t going to buy a PlayStation 5 when it was $500, but now that they’ve stopped putting out versions of their games on PC that run better than PlayStation versions, and now that the console costs $650, I’m definitely enticed to buy one!

There is a space for rentals to exist, but if you know exactly what you want already, the price of that indie game you’re looking for already isn’t very expensive, especially during a sale. We’ve probably got a bunch of these games in our libraries already just from bundles.

Gaming centers that buy the same hardware in bulk, is what I understand. So naturally, they’re going to buy them with Windows pre-installed.

They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.

They want Epic because of Fortnite; that’s why they invested in Epic in the first place, and it’s what the article cites as business reasons for the acquisition. If Unreal is doing what they need to already, it could still see cost cutting that affects video games, as they don’t see as much need to enhance it with features that actually support new games.

The article says Sweeney still retains full voting control, which would mean he’s got at least 51%. As I understand it, he can sell any time he wants, and Tencent gets a portion of the sale.

I debated posting this one myself, but the article does highlight that Disney isn’t even sure if they want to do it, and Tim Sweeney is the gatekeeper of this ever happening. The worst thing that can come from this is that Disney gets bored with owning a video game company a few years down the line and then dissolves the institution responsible for the Unreal engine.

Yeah, I miss it. Given the total obliteration of LAN and the incentive to subscribe to PS+ or XBL, I’m pretty sure LAN is actually forbidden on modern consoles, since the PS4 and Xbox One.

I don’t know about Save the World, but the other modes of Fortnite are barred by anti-cheat on Linux, no matter how you launch it.

Whenever Steam makes a controversial decision, Epic always takes the opposite stance, like on NFTs. Unfortunately, not once has Epic done this on something that I felt would be better for me as the consumer. Here’s some low-hanging fruit: being able to tell what kind of multiplayer a game has, or how much of a game I get to own with my purchase, is awful on every store, including GOG. Steam has a tag to indicate that a game has LAN multiplayer, but plenty of games have it and don’t list it. There is no tag to say, “you can host private servers for this game, whether on LAN or internet”. If a store took a stance to answer these kinds of questions for me, that store would fare better in my eyes. But of course Epic won’t be the ones to do it; their big cash cow is a live service game that must be run through them.

They did have the wisdom to use Fortnite’s proceeds to make something like a Steam competitor that both takes a lot of startup capital and also has the potential to wildly exceed Fortnite’s future review, but they did not have the wisdom to make a store that customers would actually want to use for any reason except giveaways.

From what I’ve learned on Economics Explained, I don’t think it’s something that necessarily leads to better outcomes than global trade, beyond just redundancy. Competitive manufacturing relies on low costs, which relies on low wages, which favors countries where there aren’t thriving sectors of the economy that pay better than manufacturing. And even once that country is favored, it brings in more money, which leads to higher salaries, raising the quality of living, and eventually making the factory jobs non-viable in that country either. If I didn’t get anything in the above incorrect, I believe that’s called the middle income trap.

Almost certainly not, but it’s probably not far down the list.

They did.

Roblox gets mods and UGC because people wanted to be there to begin with. Mostly children, but still people. I don’t know how to make an apples to apples comparison about how prevalent modding was back then, because there are just way more games out today in general; but there were still tons of mods. Elder Scrolls and the mod community have always been intertwined, and once again, people like what’s there in the first place. Even with the reputation of Elder Scrolls being a game you install mods on, it’s only something like 10% of players that ever install them. I have never modded Elder Scrolls.

The third-most populated game on Steam right now is Dota 2. Dota 1 is a mod. Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod. PUBG came from the designer of a Battle Royale mod for Arma.

Were you playing games through the late 90s and early 00s, by any chance? Because we’ve been here before. At least three of the most-played games on Steam right now came from mods.

FPS is a genre usually designed around something that’s easy for a computer to do but difficult for a human to do (aiming). It’s kind of inevitable. I tend to like the ones with small player counts that I can play with a few friends and fill out the rest of the match with bots, and there aren’t many of those these days. By now, I’ve gravitated toward fighting games, where cheating is often difficult for a computer to do by comparison, because any attack a player makes tends to also leave them vulnerable. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but in order for someone to win by cheating in a fighting game, you’re hardly touching the controller anymore, because the computer has to do all of the playing for you.

Google couldn’t make cloud gaming work when the entire world was stuck inside with a sudden desire to play more video games. They were given an underhand toss for the best possible scenario to get cloud gaming off the ground, and it didn’t take. The math doesn’t work out.

We’re also losing the ability to shrink our transistors at this point, so the things that made old tech cheaper before don’t really apply anymore.

Speaking to BL4 in particular, it certainly doesn’t make me feel good to have to parse a chart to see which DLC I have to buy to get the thing that I want, but with Paradox games, I definitely don’t want all $300 of DLC, especially at the start and they’re all in a readable linear list. I think I bought 3 expansions for Cities: Skylines, and the others didn’t speak to me, so especially on a sale, it’s not a high buy-in. The “whole package” would include tons of stuff I had no interest in using.

Why was it not an option to buy just the DLC you wanted?

With the exception of Pre-Sequel (which came out after 2 but takes place between 1 and 2), I liked each new game more than the last, so I’m glad they kept making sequels. And unlike Destiny, adding new content doesn’t mean erasing what came before it, so you can still go back and enjoy one that you may have liked better for one reason or another.

I get how that can be a hard sell at $30. I did buy the deluxe edition of the game, so I’ve got this in my account, but I haven’t played the DLC yet because my co-op partner doesn’t have it. You can make an argument that the new character class bundled with it makes it worth it, if you’re in the market to replay the game again with a new play style, but that’s only going to appeal to so many people. I did have a great time with the game, and I will be checking out the DLC sooner or later. I would recommend it on a sale, if nothing else, especially since a few years down the line, whatever your new PC is will be able to brute force its way paced the unfortunately high system requirements. The game still excels in combat design, character class design, and encounter design. They made a really good looter shooter, and unlike most of its contemporaries, they actually let you own it without always-online bullshit.

She’s written for IGN as games media before going on to write for video games themselves. She had a stint working at Sony Santa Monica writing for Cory Barlog’s still-unannounced new game, and she’s now working on a handful of upcoming indie games. She’s done at least one indie film project and she’s done a handful of VO roles in games. Most recently, you probably heard her as Malevola in Dispatch.

The first game system I ever had was a Game Gear when I was 6, but I think every game I ever got for it was a gift. We got a Sega Genesis the following year, when I was 7 (1996). Little did I know at the time it was actually obsolete at that point, but that’s why my parents got it for me when they did; it was dirt cheap. So were the games. I kid you not when I say I could walk into a FuncoLand with $10 and walk out with 20 used Genesis games, most of which were $0.25 each. So as a result, I have no idea what the first game I bought was, because my brother and I bought a plethora of games all at the same time. In that haul though, probably, was Vectorman, Jurassic Park, Clayfighter, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (we already got Sonic 1 and 2 with the console, as well as a couple of Mortal Kombat games that our parents made us return when they realized how violent they were, because I guess the title left it ambiguous).

That’s why I said it was the up-front cost that’s cheaper. This is how it’s been for a long, long time now.

Analysts have been calling that this price increase would come to consoles too, and it’s already come for the Xbox. What firm do you work for that your data is telling you otherwise?

Because the equivalent graphics card is about $450, and you still need to buy a CPU, storage, RAM, PSU, and case. And it’s only the up-front cost that’s cheaper.

Memory. Xbox raised their prices already.

The “bulk” of that Steam Deck compared to Switch 2 is what I’d call ergonomics. I was actually shocked that Nintendo didn’t reevaluate their joycon design more, because the Switch sucks to hold for long periods of time, and alternate joycons are one of the most prominent third party peripherals.

Even without getting into piracy territory, yes. You need a subscription for online play on console, and there’s a lot of competition among PC stores to keep prices low during sales, including bundles of games. So for perhaps most use cases these days that involve some amount of online play and playing a certain number of games per year, PC ends up cheaper.

And I don’t have data for this, because I’m not an analyst, and Piscatella shares what he shares, so all I’ve got are anecdotal observations.

• Some Nintendo properties have extremely strong moats, as Warren Buffet might call them. Pokemon, Mario, and Zelda especially. Even if a new property like Splatoon does well, it doesn’t mean it’s a system seller the way old exclusives used to be. The lower bound for this moat is clearly what the Wii U did in sales.
• Switch 1 was very popular with children, as the machine is cheaper and more durable than handheld PC equivalents. It was very easy to end up with multiple Switch 1s per household. The industry outside of mobile and Nintendo has done, from what I can tell, a horrendous job of catering to children compared to how it used to.

Speaking for myself, even if I wasn’t pissed off at how Nintendo operates as a company and decided not to be a customer of theirs anymore, they’re still running into the same problems that caused me to lose interest in PlayStation. They can’t put out enough exclusives to justify a $500 machine to play them, since I’m going to be playing everything else, at better settings, for the same or lower price, on PC.

Mat Piscatella of Circana makes a good argument that they haven’t proven that. A lot of Xbox titles became all-time PS5 best-sellers immediately after getting ported. People who wanted to play those games could have bought an Xbox at any point to play them before the multiplatform strategy was announced, but they didn’t. He would argue that people have already settled into their platform of choice and just wait for the games they want to come there. Something like a third of all console players (at least Xbox/PS) are only playing multiplatform live service games on those consoles, not any of the marquis exclusives.

And to be honest, that makes sense. In the grand scheme of things, there aren’t even that many exclusives anymore, compared to the deluge that there might have been in the 5th/6th gens.

There are fewer and fewer reasons as time goes on, but the big one is that it’s usually a lower up-front cost (in a lot of cases, still is) and just works without any fuss. We might find the fuss on PC to be pretty minimal, but on console, it approaches 0. PCs have gotten easier to work with, people have become more literate in how to use them, and the long-term savings on PC with a significantly sized library have become more apparent, but there will always still be a market for something like a console, even if that means they abandon some of their defining traits in order to survive the future.

Xbox had already begun raising prices for the same reason Sony’s doing so now.

Skyrim was made two console generations ago, so I’m afraid you can’t use it as any sort of metric for how games are made today. Starfield’s team was about 100 people larger.

I don’t follow you. The Witcher games take place after the books for exactly the same reason, and they’re highly acclaimed.

I would imagine one could gin up a political conflict in that setting either before or after the main story, but I’ve only barely dipped my toe in. Either way, I’d be surprised if they were just retreading the main story.