conciselyverbose
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None of those games are that recent.
Discounts over time are a perfectly standard part of their pricing strategy. It’s not even mildly unhealthy. Resellers don’t count at all, because that’s always their strategy.
The unusual part of suicide squad and skull and bones is that they’re brand new games. The discounts are not huge because there’s a problem with the market. They’re huge because they’re dogshit excuses for products and nobody is stupid enough to buy them.
That’s a loot box with extra steps. You get loot box physical trash and loot box digital trash. TCGs are the original microtransactions.
Now, the extra steps are a small barrier that makes it slightly less bad, because you have to physically go to a store or at least order and wait to get them. But it’s not that much less bad.
No they didn’t.
“You have to rebuy your games, that you can’t play anywhere else” isn’t just “not the best way”. It’s straight up horseshit with no possible way to be valid. It’s also the biggest reason it tanked.
The only thing about stadia that was in any way redeemable was the fact that they didn’t mess around and gave full refunds for any game purchase.
The other dumb part is that when their manufacturing capability does significantly improve, AMD will happily sell similar chips to other people. And Valve won’t care in the slightest. Because all they want is people on PC so they buy games, many of which are through steam.
Linux being relevant is a bigger benefit to them than any revenue from the deck, and they’ve already demonstrated that it’s capable of pretty much any game that doesn’t actively exclude it.
I mostly don’t play multiplayer, but some games just aren’t the same single player.
Madden, for example, the AI just is too complex for them to handle it at a high enough level for the balanced but competitive strategy game football can be. All Madden is hard, but it’s hard by cheating. Playing against humans is how you get the chess match. I’m sure there are various other genres focused on strategy that are similar. AI can beat advanced humans in clean games like chess or go, but probably not on a PS5 and not with messier strategy games.
If they were to do that, and have cross platform purchases/saves (provided I could make it work reasonably on Linux), I would be way more likely to think about buying games from them.
The PS5 is a nice piece of hardware. You can do a lot of stuff better on PC, but the loading tech is still legit. But I’m not buying multi platform games on PS5 over Steam for a bunch of reasons (steam deck being the biggest, steam input being another, just generally the fact that my PC gives me a lot more future options and modding potential).
Even if they did the UWP locked file shit, being able to bring games from PS5 to Steam Deck to desktop would make them pretty competitive. And I’d start using them regardless for the library I already have.
No, users were banned because AMD took it upon themselves to intercept and change code execution.
It was a completely fucking bonkers decision that anyone remotely aware of game development in any context should have known was literally guaranteed to get anyone who used it banned. It was not, and fundamentally cannot be, acceptable in a competitive game.
The only possible valid way to do it is by working with developers to make the required changes.
There’s a lot of super invasive stuff companies are doing that I don’t support, but hijacking execution to inject code is something they won’t and shouldn’t permit. (If they’re detecting it by touching the kernel they should be in prison, but with any legitimate methods they have at their disposal, if they can detect anyone hijacking their execution, it should always be a ban. There is no legitimate source or way to do that in a competitive game.)
AMD working with the companies directly to patch in what they need is the only way it can work. Just shipping that code was insane.
You don’t have to have played BG1 or 2 to be aware of the new game exclusively because it’s the third.
Again, literally all of the hype was about Baldur’s Gate. Larian was barely mentioned, way down the line, when people eventually got around to “who’s making it anyways?”. It wasn’t even close to the primary driver.
It also came with massive built in world building and mechanics that are better than DOS2. They effectively didn’t even have to design the gameplay. They just had to do the story telling.
An order of magnitude doesn’t mean anything when the market is much more than an order of magnitude larger.
If you don’t know for an absolute fact that the primary reason that BG3 pushed Larian past niche into a blockbuster success is the IP, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not even sort of ambiguous. The IP was all of the hype. The quality is just why the hype turned into GoTY.
An order of magnitude with the difference of volume of game sales over time isn’t the giant improvement you’re portraying it as.
It wouldn’t have worked without a quality team, but Baldur’s Gate is every bit as much of a behemoth IP as something like DOOM. There’s a reason they worked so hard to get it. It’s sure as hell made them a hell of a lot more than the 90 million cut they gave Hasbro.
Some percentage of revenue for using other people’s IP is pretty normal.
And I think it’s hard to argue Baldur’s Gate and using DnD isn’t a meaningful part of its success. Divinity Original Sin 2 is a really good game with a lot of the same DNA (it’s why I personally bought BG3), and it stayed pretty niche. The IP is a big part of it exploding.
3 months is recent.
A game having a significant sale 6 months or a year later is perfectly normal behavior. It tells you absolutely nothing about the industry. It’s worked that way for decades. It’s not the tiniest bit unusual.