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.

One of Star Wars’ most acclaimed video games is original side stuff (KOTOR). Especially in a game where your choices can shape the outcome, it’s generally good practice to steer clear of anything that intersects with the main story, which is what I assumed would happen here.

There are a couple of actors from that show I could pick out of a lineup having seen only a few episodes, but I wasn’t even under the impression that this game would use many of the characters from the main story at all.

At the end of the day, if I think the final product looks generic, it will affect my opinion of it. But I’m not going to assume it looks generic just based on something I read about how they’re developing it.

Someone who makes YouTube or TikTok videos, or streams on Twitch, usually. Of those, she does at least YouTube, but her resume much longer than that.

Or for just being an always-online game. I can hate it for that too.

And Counter-Strike, and Marvel Rivals, and PUBG, and Crimson Desert, and Baldur’s Gate 3, and Elden Ring, and (somehow) Delta Force. I don’t think you can say it’s only indie games doing so.

Not quite. There aren’t thousands of releases per year that would qualify as AAA. In fact, since they take so much longer to make, there are very few of them in a given year anymore.

This thread is about AAA game budgets, not indie budgets. Even Stardew Valley took 4 years of living off of his partner’s generosity while he earned no income. It paid off, but that’s the exception to the rule.

I’m not a tax expert, but I think the taxes are applied after gross. Taxes on money coming in, not going out. So that ~$120k is what the company spends, but it’s not what the employee sees.

Halve the employees and double the salary, and you’ll be closer. Few people on a team will gross $120k, but benefits are part of that cost too.

As far as I know from this evidence you brought, he has never made shit up, because the Switch Pro was happening, and then minds were changed before it was announced. The Switch 2 can both be one of the fastest-selling consoles ever and have less demand than they initially budgeted for. Something Nintendo has been doing with the Switch 2 that’s unprecedented with a home console launch, is that they’re trying really hard to meet launch demand rather than being more conservative with their production lines. It’s not surprising to me then that the Switch 2 only lags behind the Game Boy Advance, because from what I know of the history of that one is that the GBA’s design was settled shortly after the launch of the Game Boy Color, and they only postponed its launch because the GBC was still going strong.

All the investment in game development right now is going to where labor is cheapest, which I’ll bet does not include the UK. You’ve probably noticed more rising stars in recent years out of South Korea, China, Japan, and some EU territories. The reason a state might want to fund the arts is because that’s how its own culture spreads on the world stage.

I think I’m going to be picking up Screamer when it has its proper launch on Thursday. I’ve waited so long for a racing game like this to come out again. The only one I’ve had in the past 20 years was Trail Out. The Steam forums for this one are full of people asking who’s going to pay $60 for this when they can buy Forza Horizon, and the answer is me; I have no interest in Forza Horizon, but this is a racing game that speaks to people who don’t care at all about real world racing. Let me check people off the road. Make it over the top. Don’t bother with an open world. Screamer seems to be checking all of the boxes of what’s important for me in a racing game.

Yeah, the 3.5-based systems seem to all have a lot of the same quirks, but I’m having a good time.

Gotcha, that’s disappointing. I assumed it was just buy it and keep it, not free to play.

Where does it say there’s going to be a subscription fee?

lol, well, I think a business would look at those small potatoes and say that it isn’t worth burning your reputation on. Now Star Wars on the other hand…

Owlcat has worked on Pathfinder and Warhammer 40k lately, and fans of those properties seem to be fond of Owlcat’s work on those CRPGs. I’m playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker now, and it’s quality stuff, but I don’t have any existing familiarity with Pathfinder. I expect they’re doing an Expanse game because A) they believe they can make “the next Mass Effect” now that they’ve got smaller projects under their belt, and B) they’re probably fans of The Expanse.

Rue Valley is a game they published, not developed.

This studio doesn’t have a reputation of milking an IP for a cash grab. And if you were going to do that, The Expanse isn’t big enough for that to be a very lucrative idea.

Well, hopefully this inspires more devs to “steer into the skid”, so to speak. Stop fighting what your customers are showing you they want.

Well, this is fascinating. I don’t think anyone’s done anything like this before with an MMO, have they? The thing is, in MMO form, the incentive is to keep you grinding so you keep paying a subscription. Without that incentive, I’d want to have a knob I can turn to adjust the grind, like I can in V Rising server settings. It’s cool that this retains some amount of multiplayer, too.

EDIT: Seemingly still via a subscription, so that makes this far less interesting.

There weren’t all that many more off-the-shelf engines back then, and as that eroded, it all quite visibly gave way to Unreal. Making your own engine during the 7th gen (over 13 years ago now) was very clearly a way to avoid paying Epic for Unreal, because there already wasn’t much competition at that time.

Unreal was the defacto engine for large scale games long before Fortnite.

Just because the Switch Pro didn’t come to pass doesn’t mean they weren’t working on one or planning one. He wasn’t the only one reporting that.

I’m rooting for the demise of what Nintendo currently is, but this isn’t so much of a story. They had lofty projections for sales and manufacturing to make sure that they could meet demand, they’ve met that demand, and it’s high. This is revising one quarter’s production down from 6M to 4M. It’s still doing well for them.

It can be overused, but that one’s useful for avoiding a thousand different “are you sure?” prompts.

Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally “load-bearing walls”, and I’ve been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of “how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?” Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn’t a very vertical climbing game. Assassin’s Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman’s ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it’s not out of place there. I can’t speak to Sekiro or Jedi.

That’s the Vita.

I had to slow mo the video to see what was happening here (which is a good thing; only nerds like me are trying to figure out how this new stuff actually works). Counter Blitz is activated during the slow mo effect of counter hits, and it sort of acts like a nerfed Red Wild Assault. I’m curious about how this affects characters who rely on White or Blue Wild Assault.

To make video games for people, be authentic. Children and people early in their careers usually don’t have a lot of money, so it should come as no surprise that they’re primarily playing games that cost nothing or under $10. We can talk ourselves out of a lot of logical decisions by insisting on grouping people into these arbitrary generational buckets.

Couch competitive multiplayer? Because it’s not a fighting game, and I’d say it has more in common with Speedrunners than it does Smash Bros. And Samurai Gunn is a good one of those.