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.

If you like AC’s museum mode, you might be into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2. The first game is a bit janky at times, and some of the characters are fictional, but there will be a pop-up video-esque prompt to let you know what the real history is, what they changed, and why.

Also, I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet myself, but I’ve seen people learn a lot about space missions second-hand via Kerbal Space Program.

There’s about as much game in Witcher 3 as in all three Mass Effects combined, so it’s still a very good deal.

the creator is notorious for making games that take forever and succumbing to development hell before the studio steps in and finishes it for him

Including this one, it happened like twice. Prior to that, Irrational put out 5 games in 6 years, which was maybe a little faster than the industry cadence at the time.

What they’re doing is ambitious, but they could spend twenty more years trying to make it perfect (which it will never be) even though it was “good enough” a long time ago.

My friends list has a ton of people in it who put the game down at about the same spot, including me.

Most of what we’ve called indie has had publishers, which is how we’ve heard of those games in the first place.

I expect it’s the same way game companies have gotten by with “licensing” games to us for so long and remotely disabling them with no recourse. And that’s only just now being fought legally. It’ll be another 15 years before we can expect the average politician to be a gamer the way that the average person watches TV and movies or listens to music.

When time is money, you’ll likely be “lazy” with some of your development decisions, too.

Got a source on them paying publishers for that?

It’s the opposite. It’s that those people are so into those games that what you see as small changes are big ones to them.

I think the difference in money between them is exactly it, but in how many developers it took to make and how many it still takes to continue to add to it. There is no chance that Warframe had the capex or opex of Destiny at any point in either game’s life.

And as much as people’s minds can be blown by the size of executive bonuses, I have yet to see reporting that ties it as a major contributing factor to why games became too expensive to make or maintain. That cost is mostly in just how many people those games employ to make them multiplied across how many years they’re working on it.

I suspect chicken and egg is reversed in a lot of comments like this. Did popularity fall because they increased monetization? Or did they increase monetization because popularity fell and live services are expensive beasts? Gotta say, I expect it’s the latter, especially since we know Bungie wasn’t doing so hot when Sony bought them.

They just hired this guy, and he made those statements before that, so it’s not avoiding looking inward. Besides there very much is a customer they’re losing to these other things, and they’re the largest market segment in gaming. It’s just not your demographic.

Pragmata isn’t the game competing with crypto, gambling, porn, and TikTok. That would be the likes of EA’s Not-FIFA, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Destiny, NBA 2K; the kind of game that sells to people who don’t play many different video games.

Time Crisis is something different entirely. Making a new TimeSplitters is something I’m pretty sure this industry is allergic to making. The last time they tried, they got some of the original devs on board, and they basically reinvented Fortnite instead of making TimeSplitters.

There are two really good examples of how to represent that from the past two Splinter Cell games. I’m not convinced it got any harder from this explanation.

That one was cancelled. My guess is it’s Lord of the Rings built on the bones of Kingdom Come, which funny enough might result in a better Elder Scrolls.

It’s been a slow but steady transition. PC used to not even be worth big publishers’ time to make a half-assed port, and now over 20 years later, in most cases, it’s 50%+ of their customers and revenue.

25 years ago, they weren’t going to get any closer than the original Xbox did. PC gaming was extraordinarily different from what we know today, and much as you might not want to hear it, a lot of the reasons it got better were also because of Microsoft. The truth is we can only have something like a Steam Machine today because of incremental improvements that have been done over long periods of time. Valve basically started work on Proton right after the first batch of Steam Machines came out and bombed, and it took until 2022 for their next batch of hardware to materialize that made use of it. Closed platforms can fuck off and die these days, but they solved real problems for decades.

It used to be way better than what you got for free, because they put up the infrastructure to make it better for what you paid. But not long after Sony started charging for online, the way the wind was blowing in the industry meant you were, more often than not, playing on the publisher’s servers and not Sony’s. So what are you even paying for anymore? Friends lists, I guess?

I’m an advocate for Stop Killing Games, but I don’t think it applies here. It’s not asking to stop delisting; that seemingly has to do with car licenses expiring. It’s phenomenally stupid to license real cars with expiration dates in a damn Lego game, but here we are. Like clockwork, those games will be delisted. SKG is about preventing them from disabling things you’ve already bought. It appears this game not only has an offline mode but also has offline multiplayer. It’s likely not network multiplayer that will work offline, but none of SKG’s demands have ever been that specific, likely because every game is so different that trying to apply that terminology in a blanket way is a recipe for failure. I’m afraid that framing it this way is going to be ammunition for the game lobby to fight SKG.

Along similar lines, I’m a fighting game player. With a few notable exceptions like Multiversus and 2XKO, this entire genre works in local multiplayer when the servers are eventually retired, and that’s why I feel okay buying these games and not the likes of live services like Battlefield 6 or whatnot. Local multiplayer is what you’ll choose when it’s an option, but it often isn’t, and these games still come with the caveat that they’re built with good online net code that will be rendered inoperable at some point in the future since there’s no option for direct IP connections.

I may or may not end up playing Pathfinder 2e until a video game comes out with it; I know there’s one on the horizon, but I don’t know if it’ll be any good. Fabula Ultima is even less likely, if I’m being honest, because this is the first time I’ve heard of it, and I’ve only got so much time in my life for TTRPGs.