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Descenders
Idk why. Well, I do know why: I grew up in an era where Flash games started to do physics-based gameplay, and something about that just made them endlessly replayable and easy to do while focusing on something else like a lecture or whatever.
So many games these days demand your full attention. And that’s great, when you have time for it. But if I just have 45 minutes to derp around while I catch up with friends on Discord, I can’t dive into an epic boss fight that I was prepping for a month ago.
ITT:
People throwing shade at the devs who could easily be maxing&relaxing in IT but chose to make art instead, rather than the perverse financial incentives baked into the industry which encourage them to overpromise to secure funding and then underdeliver to abide by publisher demands.
But maybe I’m in the unreasonable one.
I take it from your exasperation that you want a game to “just be good already”, from the very start. So I’ll exclude anything that takes too much thought or investment to start having a good time.
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Tunic
- Pacific Drive
- Gorogoa
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker
- Hand of Fate 2
- FTL
- Styx: Shards of Darkness
- House of the Dying Sun
- Hitman Go and Lara Craft Go
- VVVVVV
Yeah, that was my point.
Because so much of a (typical) mobile app’s behavior is delegated to first-party APIs, having a huge range of device models in the field doesn’t cause as much of a splintering problem as it would for software that defines more of its own behavior internally, like games tend to do.
Yearly refreshes make a lot more sense for phones, where the OS defines a lot more of the app lifecycle and common features, consumers might be interested in non-performance hardware upgrades like cameras, and things tend to be less spec-sensitive in the first place.
For a gaming device, giving devs an uneven foundation and users a confusing compatibility matrix would spell doom.
Edit: I should probably clarify that I wasn’t saying a yearly refresh for phones is good. Just that the context of Android+iOS is very different from the Steam Deck, and that context makes more frequent refreshes more attractive to consumers and less damaging to developers than it would be if applied to the Steam Deck also.
Edit 2: I also just realized this is not the same story as the one a day or two ago that drew a direct comparison to phones. So I guess I should’ve gone back and commented on that one instead. I just wanted to share cuz I’ve had a lot of meetings about device support and consumer upgrade habits, as a mobile dev and as a game dev, and I don’t think most people would guess quite how different those two worlds are.
Recently had to cancel Xfinity. Had to wait for a text chat so I could schedule a cancellation appointment. They didn’t call at the requested time. I called instead to make an appointment for them to call me back.
30 minutes of waiting and questions about what it would take to retain me as a customer or who could take over my account. I told them up front that Xfinity isn’t available at my new address but they had to ask all the questions anyway.
All of this nonsense meant I was 6 days into the billing cycle, so they had already charged me for a full month and held onto the remainder until the next month.
Ugh.
I fully expect that, just like the rest of the account management parts of Xfinity’s site, the page that serves the “cancel” button will be horribly slow to load, frequently broken, and borderline unusable, while the upselling pages remain lightning fast and reliable.
The Switch is ARM and uses several components from FreeBSD and Android. It would not be surprising to learn that they have the ability to compile system components like Virtual Console for an ARM Linux with stubs for Switch-specific stuff.
The SNES Classic is also ARM, and has much less going on than the full Switch OS (Horizon). That could be the core of what they use for the museum displays, considering there’s an ARM version of Windows too.
Either way, devs gonna dev. If you can’t get feedback at your workstation and always have to deploy to your target platform to test anything, you’re gonna move too slow to catch and fix bugs or build flexible enough systems to prevent them.
So much of dev testing is about trade-offs between rapid iteration and thorough fidelity. You need access to both.
From my own experience, I’ve done stuff like:
- built mobile apps that can also be deployed as desktop apps or web apps for the sake of dev testing
- built testing tools for car systems that fake out sensor input
- built HTTP wrappers for cloud-deployed services to allow them to be run locally
- faked out camera feeds for AR apps
It can get janky, cuz not everything works the same way, but most of what you work on is not platform-specific anyway and a good architecture will minimize the portion of code that only works on the target platform.
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
That’s fine for him, but let’s not take this as a guideline for the entire industry.
There are plenty of talented, creative, and committed developers who are trying to turn their dream game into their life’s work.
For most of them, the only way they can survive spending another 5 years working on the same title post-launch is by charging for the new stuff they make.
Makes sense as a requirement for online play.
I even understand region-locking all digital PC titles to regions where they already sell digital console titles. (Global consumer care, legal, and tech support is a complex beast.)
Requirement for single player is unnecessary though.
I can’t think of any good technical or business reason for it. Just shoehorning an extra potential marketing channel that doesn’t really need to exist if they just use the PC-based channels that are already available without extra friction.
I like the concept of an RTS.
Deciding how to invest my resources, where to expand, when to attack, defend, or retreat, scouting and countering my opponent’s plans…
…but when it comes to the physical act of doing this stuff, it feels so horribly awkward that it’s like I’m fighting the UI more than my opponent.
Clicking and dragging selection boxes as if my troops are always in a rectangle formation? Right-clicking to attack but accidentally moving instead… And ugh, the endless series of tedious build queues.
The actual mechanics feel more like data entry — the kind with real bad RSI — than military leadership.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.
I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.
I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.
FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.
Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.
You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.
Sorry, I meant digitally.
I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.
The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.
I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
I hope they bring SteamOS to ARM eventually.