I don’t think the Xbox or PlayStation brand will end anytime soon, but trying to keep doing things the way they’ve been done makes about as much sense as a cable company fighting against the rise of streaming television. PC is the largest single platform and is still growing, and even despite the complete obliteration of Sony’s closest competitor, PlayStation 5 hasn’t grown compared to 4; their growth has only come from selling at higher prices to the same number of users and from microtransactions from games that they don’t make themselves which are available on many platforms. Which doesn’t mean that they don’t still have their customers like yourself, but if I already decided to play my games on PC, how on earth are they going to convince me to start buying third party games on PlayStation, where their money is actually made? At the very least, they can offer me the ability to buy their big blockbusters (which often cost more to make than they’re seeing back in returns these days) on PC to recoup some of what they spent.

I don’t think keeping the single player games exclusive makes much sense either. Sony’s bread is buttered by taking the same 30% Valve makes on each game sale. If they’re only converting you for single player games, you’re buying…what…5 games on the platform, lifetime? And they’re all Sony published? Realistically, on PC, you’re probably already playing everything else on PC with no subscription fee that they would want to get a cut from. I think Sony has reached everyone they’re going to reach, and you’re just leaving money on the table by not bringing those games to PC, even if they come late.

A friend and I just started playing it co-op, and what’s really going to affect our enjoyment of the lore is that only one person can be involved in an NPC conversation.

They’ve been practically waiting for a way to kill the PC industry and take the profits from it.

I have nothing but anecdotes to base this on, but charging for PS+ in an era where Steam offers a similar service for free has seemingly been one of the biggest drivers of converting people into PC gamers. Back when Xbox first charged for Live, it at least offered a far better experience than what you’d find elsewhere, but only a few years later, that was no longer the case.

I can afford it, and I’ll bet I’m far from alone, but I’d essentially be buying a dedicated computer that can only play a handful of games, and it would play them worse than my PC could if they’d only make the game available there. There’s no shortage of stuff to play, so it ends up just being a bad value even when you’ve got the money.

From my time hands on with it, it will be. Maybe a mechanic or two needs an adjustment post launch, but the core is excellent.

I emulated the game a few years ago, because the alternative was dealing with the lousy DRM on the Steam version, and it’s weird (in a good way) to now play this game and see the battle transition animation run at higher frame rates. You can also use the analog stick. 3x speed is nice, but I can already do that on emulators. I know my brother got very into the modding tools for the Steam version of the game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those tools work on the GOG version already or in the near future.

I can highly recommend this game, and my IsThereAnyDeal extension says it’s currently $3.58 at GameBillet, though I’d say it’s worth every penny of the $20 they’re asking.

Plus PC is the largest platform, and it’s only leaving money on the table to not make a PC version.

PC might be implied in “console games”. It’s actually insane to not make a PC version these days if you’re targeting console.

For a number of these, they’re often games that had GameSpy servers or otherwise the online multiplayer portion of it was shut down, yet the game and multiplayer remain playable, and that’s what SKG is about.

My family share for GOG is an SFTP server, which I’m pretty sure you can also do just using FileZilla and forwarding one port. Or you hand them the files on a flash drive.

There are a number of old LAN games there too. It’s basically the only place I can feasibly shop for multiplayer shooters at the moment. The sad part is that I think the newest one is Crysis Wars, from 2008.

The difference is that even with the convenience of a launcher, I can decline an update that would undo DRM-free rather than manually copying every vetted DRM-free game on Steam to another directory every time there’s a patch. And that’s only to entertain this apocalyptic what-if that would never happen because it would trigger false advertising law suits that would instantly destroy the company.

Undoing DRM-free quickly enough that I couldn’t download my remaining installers would be speedrunning the failure of a company faster than Unity, but other than that, they can’t take away what I and others have already downloaded.

The reason why this doesn’t concern me at all is that the very nature of the business they run means that I explicitly don’t have to trust them.

Considering games with no DRM can have it added retroactively, that Steam pushes updates I may not want with no option to decline, and that that wiki can’t even load in its entirety without erroring out for me and comes down to user submitted data, GOG’s DRM free promise is more than just advertising.

I suppose so, but even if that bothered me, it would still mean I’m not owning the games I buy when I shop elsewhere.

I know it, but I’m not sure why one would affect the other. I still get DRM free games on GOG that I’m not going to find on itch.io or elsewhere.

Thanks for the link, though the store page does still say it requires an EA account. Is that just outdated? Dragon Age: The Veilguard also doesn’t have an EA app requirement, so this is a thing they’re doing with studios they own too.

It seems cool, and it’s got some ideas. I swung a hammer around, and it’s got a vertical swing, so it essentially just started digging. I did it a few times and then dropped into a dungeon that I didn’t know was there. The UI and onboarding are rough, as to be expected, and I wish I could see what they’re cooking further down the skill tree, but there are some good bones there.

I believe it’s still running in the background and makes it an extra pain in the ass to play without internet. I ran into that one with Jedi: Fallen Order when trying to play on the train (I only paid $4 for it and still felt ripped off). The store page still lists that it’s there. It’s why whenever I get around to the Dragon Age games, I can play the first one on GOG and the fourth one on Steam (no EA launcher), but unless something changes, the best option appears to be pirating 2 and 3.

I only bought Split Fiction because it didn’t come with the EA launcher. It seems to be a recent decision of theirs to not include it on some games on Steam, but they’re not doing it retroactively. It Takes Two I played on Game Pass for a dollar, because I’m not willing to put up with EA’s additional DRM.

Split Fiction and It Takes Two were pretty great.

It’s not either/or. Games can be made at all levels of production value and come from teams of many different sizes. Even games made by very small teams can have trouble breaking even at $20, because hardly any game is going to sell as many copies as Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Pricing a game over $20 is hardly greed. If every game was $20, it would be extremely hard for most of them to break even.

A simultaneous retirement/resignation says to me that the two of them were asked to do something very stupid or very unethical. And they’ve stomached a lot of unethical lately.

Jedi: Fallen Survivor?

I think it has to be insane levels of incompetence. They’re not patient enough to wait around for 3 years for Bluepoint to put out something that makes money, so they probably gave them some busy work, like support work for other studios, until they could go through the bureaucracy of closing the studio.

What happened is that pivoting from a bad idea like this takes a long time and a lot of money for a company this large, and they had no plan B, which is stupid, so they’d rather just reduce their operating expenses.

Word is this live service push was Jim Ryan’s initiative, and he left the company right before it all fell apart.

I think the reason Sekiro 1 happened was that they started making a Tenchu game and then changed their minds.

He’s only got vibes to go on in the EU, but the vibes were good from the people representing the movement there. There’s an NGO that already got the ball rolling in the US, and even though it’ll still be difficult, there may actually be legislation drafted in the US before the EU, which Ross finds hilarious. The UK’s initiative hasn’t been going well, but there’s one more long shot chance they have of some movement there.

I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

I want a modern Tenchu game too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It happens all the time, but you need startup capital. And a lot of what they did is remaking games (at high quality) that they don’t own the rights to.

What a needlessly stupid thing it was to put them on a live service project, and what a waste to close it down.

I’m reading between the lines a bit here, but back when I regularly attended PAX East, one of my favorite panels to attend was the video game data panel hosted by EEDAR (now a part of Circana). The games like NBA 2K, GTA, Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed that can regularly break $1B in revenue are the kinds of games that may sell to people like you or me on a gaming forum, but also that they can sell to the kind of person who only plays four or fewer games per year. Since then, I imagine live service games that keep you hooked on that one game in particular have only exacerbated that figure of four or fewer games per year. That’s a huge segment of the market. And I imagine that’s the customer that the market is losing on a Friday night to TikTok or OnlyFans.

There’s plenty of great new stuff too, often times even modern iterations of the retro stuff we loved, but it doesn’t get the same level of marketing, so it’s harder to find.

Dr. Mario 64 is my family’s most played N64 game by far. It didn’t hurt that it was a game that my dad actually found a taste for. One of the things that made it so easy for everyone to play is that you could adjust difficulty individually for everyone until it felt fair.

I doubt any of us were playing at the highest level of competitive play, but the reason garbage would be a factor for us is when you start taking risks to catch up to a player in the lead. Otherwise, I always appreciated that it was sort of a race to clear your own board. Garbage does slow people down, and not just in the animations but in how much time it takes to clear the garbage from what otherwise would have been an easy clear.

I said this before when you made your Puyo Puyo video, but if you’re left wanting by the state of the competitive puzzle gaming scene, even if you’ve never made a video game before, nothing could be a better target for a first project. The barrier to entry is just about zero these days. Take your pick of Godot, Game Maker, Unity, or Unreal, and iterate on one of these.