The publisher is restructuring around five ‘creative houses’ by implementing cost-cutting, project cancellations, and a return-to-office mandate.

“We’ll become gamer-centric by fucking our employees even more”

Just like with watershed TV/movie/music, it seems quaint and overhyped as their innovations become the norm.

There is even a trope that describes that

If you launch the game outside steam the time isn’t accounted for. I know this because I love playing Timespinner with a randomizer. Inside steam I have 40h of played time. If the timer counted my randomizer sessions I’d have at least 4x that

well, TIL. I thought it was more recent than that. Their quality has been steadily decreasing for quite some time, and I always blamed that acquisition.

They used to be good but have greatly enshittified since being acquired by Condé Nast. I’ve been an Ars reader for almost 15 years, until last year. I don’t even bother going there anymore.

since they’ve been acquired by Condé Nast, Ars has been almost thoroughly enshittified, this list (and almost everything else they publish nowadays) was created to appease their corporate overlords.

I feel you, I’m in the same boat

it would be cool if there was something like the Game Boy Magnifier for those modern systems

How often do people leave reviews?

Speaking only for myself, I only leave a review if I loved or I hated a game. A “meh” game doesn’t get a review. I’d hazard that many people do something similar.

I kinda agree with you. I don’t use retro achievements because I’m an obsessed completionist. That means that I’d keep playing one game well beyond the point it stopped being fun just to tick all those boxes.

Corporations are amoral things. Money is money, it has no frontiers.

Poe’s law, maybe

Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.

This is the main reason I cannot replay Valkyrie Profile

It’s an fantastic game, as other have already told you. But I’d like to add that there’s a randomizer for it and this basically adds almost infinite replay value (at least for me!)

It’s a little old and more Metroid- than -vania: A Robot Named Fight

EDIT: since no one else mentioned it, Timespinner is kinda good too, despite being a somewhat short game

I’ve got it working but, unfortunately, when wireless the controller has unacceptable input lag. Might be something interfering with the bluetooth signal, I don’t know.

Poem for your sprog

I’ve seen someone who took that username here in Lemmy, but that could be anyone, no guarantee that it was the same guy/gal on reddit

The regular PS4 controller works fine. Works well in steam, lutris, retroarch and the few native games I own, never had any (unsolvable) problems with it.

I still have a few save state hacking guides floating there :)

Five years olds shouldn’t be allowed to play GTA.

150 million Switch 2 sales

Nope, that’s Switch 1 sales, over its entire lifetime.

the patent system is based on a “first to file the paperwork” basis

then blame the patent office, because it shouldn’t be so

the PS2 didn’t use Pentium processors at all

Requires an active Amazon Prime or Prime Video membership.

thanks, but no

and quite frankly the symmetrical stick placement is uncomfortable and outdated by nearly 20 years

sorry but I have to disagree, it’s so much more comfortable than the mismatched sticks other controllers have

fuck Sony BTW, they patented said symmetrical stick placement and the world is worse off because of this

cool joystick

But several people also noted that the games industry goes through cycles of mass layoffs, because simply having a stable business isn’t enough for investors. Revenues must grow by a chunky margin: if they don’t, costs must be cut. Embracer’s mishandling of their business might be grotesque, but it’s business as usual nonetheless. “We make a shitload of money, but it doesn’t go back into the games,” one person commented. “It goes into a lot of now very wealthy peoples’ pockets, and the people who actually make the games kind of scrape by, most of the time.”

late stage capitalism

intereresting read, thank you

enlighten us plebs with your wisdom and tell us which conclusion should be drawn then

Archived version

I develop software for a living and still this looks like deep, black magic to me

Kernel level anti-cheats are a must nowadays to lift the barrier to entry which excludes quite a bunch of cheaters.

$40 ain’t much of a barrier to entry

I’m curious about that too

EDIT: nevermind, another post below has the answer: it’s a programmable wheel

that cake is flipping the bird to us

stay a while and listen

A p2p-share-hosted daily-routine blogging system without any central authority. The unique selling point of Goldkarpfen is its calm way of publishing: nodes will only sync once a day. This is a more human approach to communication and will reduce stress and improve the quality of content.

???

We live in a world where hundreds of millions of people are literally starving, dude.

Honestly, blacksmithing isn’t that hard

it’s well beyond the reach of most people, specially considering the price of the tooling alone

So don’t play those games

…and I don’t, I prefer supporting indie devs

DLCs aren’t the only “evil”, there’s also the case for microtransactions and other stupid monetization bullshit schemes

But even rolling from there, a 300% hike in base prices would mean games cost $200, and that’s just not true.

if you consider that nowadays (almost) all games ship incomplete and demand DLCs… yeah, it’s true