You won’t hear arguments from me on that, but it’s still a problem that happens along a spectrum as you scale graphics up, too.

BG3 has plenty of other strengths over its predecessors. It’s just not its main villain. Gortash and Thorm were both great, but our attention was divided amongst several antagonists rather than how much of the spotlight Irenicus got.

I’ve never heard of anyone taking a game job because it pays extraordinarily well compared to another job they might be able to get with the same skill set. Definitely not recently. I’ve turned down a programming job in games because my non-game job paid way better, and that job I turned down didn’t even exist a year and change later, because the industry is so volatile and competitive.

Astroturfing works where everyone is anonymous, but I don’t know how you expect it to work when every reviewer has a byline and an incentive to reveal corruption.

Oh no, not even because they’re feeling guilty. If anything, those same YouTubers who get their audience angry for a living would have a monetary incentive to present proof if it existed. Actual astroturfers advertise their services on LinkedIn, and in order for this conspiracy to work, you’d have to pay off people who don’t astroturf for a living.

Actual astroturfing often has a paper trail. “Citizens Concerned About the Whatever” publicly listed as funded by companies who directly stand to benefit from Whatever’s opposition. If it was so easy to buy good review scores, why did Microsoft not purchase them for Redfall? Why did Sony not purchase them for that 2D God of War game? Why did AnnaPurna buy them for this game but not the dozens of other games they publish? Why is the Steam user rating for Mixtape also very high if it could only achieve such ratings via bribery? Is the only explanation for Mixtape’s reviews that they were paid off? Or, perhaps, could it be a bunch of people who don’t have to prove that they’ve even played the game leaving 0/10 reviews on Metacritic en masse because they were riled up by Asmongold or some other influencer who traffics in getting their audience mad about “woke”?

The line that stuck with me most was where he picked a random-ass woman, briefly told her life story, and then said, “and now she’s dead”, and killed her in an instant. All-time great villain.

The delivery of Irenicus was so good that every time Irenicus wasn’t on screen, I was asking, “Where’s Irenicus?”

Of course, but I only added my two cents as to it having nothing to do with wanting the game to fail or not getting its chance.

I played Lawbreakers back then, and it was neither too much like Overwatch nor representative of the arena shooters that came before it; there wasn’t a plethora of characters to choose from like the former, and there wasn’t an even playing field with power weapons to fight for control over like the latter. The thing that baffled me about the game was its objectives design. There’s a capture the flag mode where the flag is a battery, but due to the way you have to charge it first, it renders the entire match pointless except for where the battery is when it reaches 100% charge. There’s a point capture/domination game mode where the capture points stop and start for minutes at a time, and I don’t understand the point of that either.

I think the follow up question to your adoration of these two games is: how many Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, or recent Ghost Recon games have you played?

Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.

Reviewers get early copies so that there’s a review score available in time for people to buy it.

But that’s what I mean by how quickly you can accumulate wealth at a quarter million per year. Of course something could go wrong early in your career, but the average case is far better than that. Could I stop working and live comfortably? For a while. We’d have a lot of runway, far better than a 6-month emergency fund. Given a bit more time and saving into index funds, that can become indefinite, and that’s on our far-lower salaries than Schreier lists.

The combined income of my wife and I comes in under one of the figures he gave, and with a 2 BR apartment in NYC, we are very, very comfortable, even after splurging the past few years on a far nicer location for an extra $1k/month in rent. The rest of what you describe is what I would call lifestyle inflation, and I’m not living the life of a pauper because I don’t own a car; if anything, that’s extraordinarily wasteful around here, and it’s something that less than half of this city even bothers to do.

What he doesn’t explain that would actually be helpful is why teams are so big.

Can you not see the difference in money on the screen between Halo 1 and Destiny 2? One person can make Halo’s relatively simple models, complete with nutcracker-esque mouth syncing, much faster than you can make the likes of Destiny’s quest givers with far more complexity to them. So if you want to make more of those kinds of NPCs, you need more people making them. The same goes for any other discipline involved in making a game.

Like what are all the departments that work on AAA titles, what do they do, how many people on staff relative to other departments, what does a 3D modeler make vs. a gameplay programmer?

That all comes out in the average cost per employee, which is the same ballpark math the publishers are using to estimate, and he says that in this video.

Yeah, it’s a reboot. I just played through the original recently, and I can see the vision for how they’re expanding on a lot of the promises of that first game. There’s a really good chance they do justice by it.

There are for sure tiers of how rich you can be. But when you’re beyond the point of financial stress and can at any time stop working for the rest of your life and not worry about making ends meet, I think most of us would call that rich. If you’re pulling in a quarter million per year, even in an expensive city, the slightest bit of sense with your money allows you to accumulate wealth so quickly that I think you qualify.

It’s not that long of a video, and he gets to the answer fairly quickly, then outlines examples using back of the napkin math. (average cost per developer per month) * (months of development) = cost of game. And then it’s the difference between real world numbers for those in 2015 and today. Average salaries have gone up, especially in major cities in the US, as have staff sizes to make AAA games, as has time needed to develop substantially larger games than we typically made in 2015, and that number balloons very quickly.

I’m not sure why so many people are down voting this. The only part I took issue with was what kind of salary Schreier said would make one rich versus middle class in an expensive city. I live in an expensive city, I don’t make anywhere near as much as some of the high salaries he cites, and those who do around me are certainly rich.

Yeah, that’s pretty common. That type of demo was what Perfect Dark was, and it was obvious. You learn to spot one from the other, and I have a hard time explaining why Fable’s comes off as real, but at least part of it is its proximity to release and how much of what they showed was left to your imagination.

Unlike something like Perfect Dark, this game seems far closer to being done, and what they showed of it was really impressive. Plus, if you thought shutting down Tango Gameworks was stupid, nothing would sink Xbox…sorry, XBOX…faster than shutting down this studio, since they’re the goose that lays the golden eggs known as Forza Horizon.

Yeah, but they’ve had a really high hit rate, and this could interfere with that.

Play Double Exposure first, as this is a direct continuation of that.

Yup. The Max stories have been the best ones. The character writing remains strong in this one after Double Exposure, but the game loses track of some of its own time travel rules, and the actions that determine your ending could have been telegraphed better.

XBox’s new CEO is on a goodwill-gathering streak right now. Brought down the price of game pass and seems to want to bring people back to the brand proper

Oh, you sweet summer child.

You do you. The Ally is a better value today. Good spot; pass it on until they sell out, because it currently looks like Best Buy is pricing it as a thing that’s in their inventory and not selling. I would recommend that you don’t trust that Xbox is going to right the wrongs of Game Pass price increases just because the removal of Call of Duty brought it down to still-higher-levels-than-it-was-in-the-very-recent-past. And definitely don’t trust lip service to things the new boss is “thinking about” and “treating seriously”. In a world where the next Xbox is definitely for sure just a PC that allows you to buy games from any store you like, and the Ally is that too, they’re not subsidizing hardware. Neither is Valve, hence the price hike.

They will jack up their prices if they sell through their stock and decide that that demand will stick around long enough to justify another batch of them at higher prices. As it stands today, it is doing your fellow Lemming a solid to point out the current price discrepancy in favor of the Ally. When both of those devices are priced for stable market conditions, my recommendation leans heavily toward Steam Deck, but we are not currently in stable market conditions.

Playing on the go is all I do with mine. Beats the hell out of a laptop.

Set your expectations accordingly. ROG Ally is only cheaper until they have to build more with today’s component prices (if they choose to). And it’s not like Microsoft executives don’t have yachts or sell kids gambling boxes.

I mean…how big is that backlog and how much are you playing on the go? There’s been no better device for handheld gaming, IMO, though I can see why it isn’t tempting at that price.

They are, but they’re not beloved for it. The companies still selling to consumers now have less competition for fewer available parts, which is why prices are higher.

Depends on when precisely you’re in the market for a handheld, because if Valve is raising their prices, everyone will be eventually.

Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.

We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.

But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.

I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.

It’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.

As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.

AI might be a problem for this market with or without the US, but tariffs and a war with Iran that drives up oil prices (and therefore plastic and electronics manufacturing) sure is our fault.

Sure, but if the price is going up here, it’s the latest symptom of prices going up everywhere for this hobby.

Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.