There are challenge runners who’ve beaten the entire game with only salami for weapons. Oil puddles are just a small part of it. There was a part in act 3 where I was denied entry to a place by failing a speech check. I could have possibly brute forced my way in and murdered everyone, but instead I found a back door that was three stories up on a balcony, cast flight on my rogue, and had him stealth in to achieve the objective. That’s emergent design. Solutions to problems that weren’t explicitly programmed in but work because the rules are loose and can be applied intuitively. There’s a part in the game where you have to cross a bridge blocked off by some high level enemies, and there are a ton of ways to get across the bridge that I know of, several of which the developers didn’t intend for, and probably dozens more that I’ve never even seen before, because the game just lets you run loose with its systems.

That’s depth.

I have. I don’t know which options you’re referring to. Materia selection? I guess, but there are fewer permutations of those than there are spells/feats/stats in D&D 5e, and that’s before we even get to all the stuff that makes BG3 stand out, like its emergent design. FF7 is a great game, but it is not emergent, and emergent design will nearly always be deeper than the finite stuff.

You’re going to have to elaborate on those first two sentences, because that’s a wild thing to say.

With its nuanced characters, wonderfully layered world, and incredible depth of interactions, it was natural to feel the game had set a new bar for the whole genre—but it was pointed out that declaring it the new standard was unreasonable and unsustainable given how few other developers could possibly rise to meet it.

You could make a game a third of the size of BG3, and it would still be excellent value for BG3’s asking price. And no, you shouldn’t attempt to make a competitor with BG3 on your first try. Nor should you try to make a competitor to Elden Ring on your first try; FromSoft had been making those games for the better part of 15 years, building and iterating on what came before. I do think more RPG developers should strive to follow the systems-driven approach that Larian has and be cognizant of what it is that we all like about BG3, but it can be sustainable if you don’t try to hit a home run on the first pitch.

Game Pass is already plateauing in subscriptions. I’m sure that while it’s far fewer subscribers than they thought they’d have, they’ll be happy to keep making money this way for some time, but it’s not going to turn in to the primary way people play games.

Steam isn’t always DRM, and even with its DRM, the vast majority of those games have continued to work without repurchasing them for over 20 years now. The premise at the top was basically that people are willing to give up the ability to resell their games when competition on PC has led to deep sale discounts, and I’d agree with that as well. On consoles now, you’re rapidly headed toward a future where you can’t resell your games and there’s no competition to drive prices down.

I’m struggling with your English a bit, but basically yes.

“But the publishers don’t want you to resell games. They want to have you buy games from their first party sales channel over and over again until the end of time.”

This is a problem that doesn’t really exist on PC due to forward compatibility and competing marketplaces. That forward compatibility has now been easily observed for decades by people who’ve been slowly losing the advantages that consoles used to offer.

I do have an optical drive in my PC, for Blu Rays and music CDs. The thing I was calling out was, “they want to have you buy it over and over again until the end of time,” which isn’t really a thing on PC. Sure, there are remasters and such, but the copy you bought 20 years ago largely still works on your new PC.

Perhaps one of many reasons that the console market is shrinking and PC is growing.

It pisses me off that there’s no GOG for movies and TV. I don’t want to have Blu Rays, but it’s the only way to actually own that stuff.

The reality is that Nintendo removed your ability to buy those old games for $10, because they’d rather rent you those games forever on their subscription service. If they were on Steam for $10, I’d have bought those old ROMs.

The patents on the Game Boy hardware expired years ago, so that’s what gives Analogue the right to do what they do. As for these Switch emulators, I have no idea, but I’ll guess it’s just Nintendo trying to scare people without their own legal departments into complying.

Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.

There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.

Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.

$50 for the base game, $70 for digital deluxe with two bonus skins from Doom and some unknown number of additional songs, as well as 3 days advance access.

I cannot meet you on this. Seriously, put Meryl from MGS4 next to Monster Hunter Wilds Lady; it’s night and day. And Monster Hunter is operating at a scale that MGS4 cannot. MGS4, of course, also has performance problems trying to push what it did on that hardware.

I do think it’s reasonable to assume that STALKER 2 sold, in all likelihood, far more copies than Avowed. But for anything other than multiplayer games that rely on retention and monopolizing all of your time, I’d say Steam charts are a bad way to try to get an apples to apples comparison. Number of reviews has been the metric that I always hear devs using as a point of comparison. It still won’t be a very accurate picture of how many copies it sold until you get far enough out that enough of the game’s players have had time to finish the game, since that’s when they’re most likely to leave a review, but while I doubt Avowed’s <7k reviews will catch up to STALKER 2’s 82k by June, it doesn’t mean Avowed is unsuccessful just because STALKER 2 was more successful.

Look, it may not run well, but you need to go back and take another look at PS3 games. If I wanted to say a new game looks like a PS3 game, I’d pick Earth Defense Force, not Monster Hunter (unless you mean Monster Hunter Rise).

It’s not a good unit of measurement to determine if the game was successful. Longer games will have higher concurrent players, pound for pound, just because those people are kept online longer. Its success would be determined by copies sold, not concurrent users. Elden Ring did not only sell half as many copies as Black Myth: Wukong, but it had half the concurrent players on Steam.

Game Pass is not captured publicly for Avowed or STALKER 2, and it’s possible that people were more aware of one’s presence on the store than the other, or that they were more confident that they knew what STALKER 2 was than that they knew what Avowed was, and so would be more interested in checking it out on Game Pass. With publicly available information, we can’t determine what Avowed needs to be successful. I can guesstimate that it sold about 368k copies (55 x 6700 reviews) at $70 a piece (it has a higher tiered $90 version that people bought too, but then you get into muddy waters with currency conversions from non-US territories, which is more complicated than I know how to estimate), which would mean it brought in over $25M, before Steam’s cut, in two weeks. I can also guesstimate that the game cost them less than $70M to make, which it doesn’t strictly need to make back in sales (though it very well may over its long tail), because this is a Microsoft-owned game that’s available on Game Pass, the way that Microsoft would very much prefer you to play their games.

That $70M that I just made up as a sort of educated guess could have easily had its development budget spread across The Outer Worlds 2 or even Grounded, reducing the overall cost of all of those games by sharing tech and developers in such a way that they’re getting more mileage out of each dollar spent. Plus, if they decide to make Pillars of Eternity III, they’ve now got a bunch of assets already built that could be reused yet again. Obsidian’s status as a multi project studio is sadly an oddball in the industry at this level of production value, which is a damn shame, but it’s more sustainable for all sorts of reasons, to the point that even if this project is a failure, it could be kept afloat by the other irons they have in the fire.

tl;dr All that to say that Steam charts are data that are good for some things but are bad at measuring this game’s success.

Hi-Fi Rush was $30 and Hellblade II was $50. I don’t know how they determine what each game ought to be worth, because Hi-Fi Rush was too low at $30, and Redfall was too high at $70.

It “reached” almost 5 million players. They do not break down how many of those are purchased copies versus Game Pass subscribers. Here’s a handy trick that I’ve heard from devs though: your range for how many people purchased the game is somewhere between 20x and 70x the number of reviews it has. Most end up around 55; for the biggest successes like Elden Ring, it ends up being closer to 20. So about 363k copies sold on Steam, probably; reviews tend to come after someone’s done playing a game, after all.

Which part of “concurrent players on Steam” makes it a metric that determines if the game was a success?

You don’t, but the “lazy devs” accusations are nonsense explanations for it being poorly optimized.

By doing these kinds of experiments, they hone in on what people want. They know it’s closer to FF7 remake than it is to FF16, and they know that the game must not have exclusivity to any platform no matter what.

Have you ever worked on a game before? I’m curious how you think laziness plays into this when the entire industry is collapsing and everyone would love to hold on to their jobs.

Nah, that doesn’t make it sad. It’s just that some of my best memories of racing games come from the likes of Burnout Revenge or F-Zero GX in local multiplayer. Single player is cool. Online is cool. I’m just looking for that local multiplayer fix.

One of the other games that fit that bill is Star Wars: Episode One - Racer, which you can find on GOG. At least on Linux, it requires some mods to fix it, which I made sure were documented on the PC Gaming Wiki, but you can play that one on LAN on PC through the GOG version. I don’t think split-screen on PC games was something they were thinking about back then, but LAN will do in the meantime.

Do you have any local multiplayer racing game recommendations? That’s basically my only use case for a racing game, but most of that market dried up. I’ve got my eyes on a few, but I’m curious what you’ve found, especially if it’s on GOG.

Open source does not mean that the intellectual property is free. There’s a lot of good that comes from this, and it’s not like those games are expensive.

Correct. Doom and Quake still cost money as well.

I don’t have to give a shit “about their next live service game”

I care quite a lot about game preservation. This isn’t defending EA; it’s praising this particular action. Again, this can’t be taken away from us, so it doesn’t matter what their next shitty behavior is. It doesn’t take away from this being good news.

Fall for what? They did one of the most pro-consumer moves they possibly could. It’s legally solid and irrevocable. It doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about their next live service game or be happy that they monetize soccer video games with gambling for children.

Are you okay? They open sourced some classic video games. They didn’t roofie your drink.

Not when they do this.

I’ve been buying obscure enough games that they didn’t have Lutris scripts available, and the Heroic interface works better with controllers besides.

Someone really should make the video game equivalent of Tool’s “Hooker With a Penis” someday.

Well, there was the time that Tekken 7 was 3, though.

The first remake is better than any other game in the series I’ve played so far, and I’ve played most of the mainline games at this point. It’s not the best because of its camera perspective, and I think it would be actively improved with an over the shoulder camera like the recent remakes.

Yeah, same, for all of the same reasons as you. But it would be nice if they cleaned up their store page so it was better at conveying features, like Steam. Or if I didn’t have to go to SteamDB to see what DirectX or Visual C++ runtime I need to install with winetricks.

Given the things I’d like to see GOG investing in, it sounds irresponsible to buy Times Square ad space, but that’s just a gut reaction that’s not based on any real numbers.

Diehard might be pushing it, but I liked PoE1 and loved 2, even playing through the second game twice so I could try it out in turn-based mode. I’m really enjoying it but for different reasons than I enjoy Pillars. Sometimes games are worth $70, and I’m personally finding this one to be.

Fair enough. The Outer Worlds definitely felt to me like it was as long as it needed to be and no longer, and that’s pretty rare these days, as so many games are ballooning in runtime.