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The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.
Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can’t really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.
I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.
Neither of these has base building, both are more of a “this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely” type game.
The fuck clowns are buying up our culture. It’s hard to not participate in it. I don’t play these kinds of games, but I’ve nothing on people who do. We should beat up the fuck clowns until they serve society again.
And just to be clear, I am advocating violence in the form of stringent regulations binding corporations towards socially beneficial paths. I advocate for violent anti-trust measures to the point even the execs don’t know who is still working for them and who has been broken off to another company to compete freely. And I want worker protections that cause mind-bending fear in wage thieves.
No mods, on my first clean install, all the Automaton voice lines were missing, so the robots were mute. I did a reinstall, that fixed it, so I only had the rest of the “normal” bugs.
Here is a long list of them, feel free to pick your favourite.
My favourite bug someone just found is that if you build stuff in any of the indoor settlements, like Vault 88, it breaks pathing in subtle ways everywhere. If you put down something, it marks the coordinates in that indoor cell for NPCs to walk around, so that they don’t try to walk over beds and such. The problem is that it actually marks those same coordinates in all cells everywhere, so the bed shaped “no-go zone” is there in every single interior in seemingly random places. That means, the more you build in these places, the less NPCs can walk in indoor cells, and they might get randomly stuck.
BTW the immersion breaking thing for me is that I’ve always hated that unlike previous Fallout games, or like all games ever, when you holster a weapon, it just disappears into thin air instead of being holstered in some way. There is a simple mod that fixes that, but it got broken by the next gen update, which also broke F4SE. So now I wait and play sg else.
The point I’m making is that let’s say Gaben did not have the headstart or the loyal player base. What is Steam or Valve? Its customer base or market share? Those are for sale, they can be bought with “free” services, exclusive deals with publishers, or other fuckery. Its team and employees? How would you pay them without revenue if someone else is price dumping the market?
Yes, Gaben could keep the logo with the bald guy with the valve on his head, but that’s pretty much it. Everything else he has to fight for, invest in, keep alive. And the opponent, Wall Street, has literally unlimited money.
What I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as “just don’t sell out”. And I’m speaking from experience, not as the sellout guy, but as the employee where the company was sold out from over me a few times already.
This is such a weird thing to be upset over, and a weird side to take so passionately that you do.
I don’t even play Helldivers, nor do I plan to after this, it’s just on the one side there’s random upset people, on the other side there is the corp that got infamous for distributing straight up malware in a weird effort to enforce DRM. Why would people go back to being happy with a company that tried to fuck them over, and then walked its position back to the status quo with no commitments of not trying this again later.
The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:
- Actually own a deciding majority of the thing
- Have a good enough product to resist your business partners (eg. game developers) being paid with investor money to switch over to you, sapping value from your product.
The point is that if Steam wasn’t so much over the competition, Epic could have taken market share over with the exclusive deal shenanigans, or publishers could have started up their own marketplaces. The biggest reason for that is that Steam was early to the party and could get to a good product before others tried to enter the market.
If Steam didn’t have that, people would have switched over to Epic and publisher stores, and we’d be bitching over Steam not having any good games on it because of backroom deals.
Epic is trying to IPO and has all kinds of investors. It tried to undermine Valve by buying out its partners by just spraying money at them for exclusives - you know, “disrupt” the industry. Steam prevails because they are real good at what they do, and they had a head start, but it takes a Gaben to not sell out, a good team and a lot of luck to manage that. Steam is playing against a tilted field is what I’m saying, and is one of the few players who successfully are managing it. They are the exception.
The smart is now a 4 meters SUV
Is it? I haven’t heard about it, I’ve seen some weird concept picture, but the Fortwo as currently being manufactured is still the same 2.6m long car as it was in 2014 as per Wikipedia.
The Volkswagen up (small 4 person car) is out of production and they’re selling nothing under 4 meters Skoda, after retiring the citigo, has the Fabia that’s relatively small (almost 4 meters) and the rest are huge
They are the same company. The Skoda Citigo and the Seat Mii are both just rebadged Volkswagen Up cars.
The fiat panda (another small 4 person car) is in the process of being redesigned and the mockups look like a huge range rover SUV
Those mockups are actually the redesign of the Panda Cross, which was an SUV-ish thing they introduced in 2014. Fiat still makes the subcompact 500, having recently made an electric version.
Some EU automakers are doing weird stuff, but if you look at the electric car market for example, at lest where I live, locally produced electric kei trucks actually outsold Tesla at some point.
I haven’t really got into HD2, too online for my tastes, but I can see its appeal. I think there is a broader phenomenon of a divorce between where big studios are heading and where “traditional” players want to be.
They’ll see a live service game doing well and think that people want more live service games, not fun games.
Couldn’t have said it better.
You playing for free illustrates my point perfectly. You are there to provide entertainment for whales who actually pay for the game. The deal is that you get some entertainment of your own so that you stay around. But the game is not made for you, and that becomes apparent every time the owner puts the screws on to extract some more money.
Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.
There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.
On the one hand, it kinda devolved into a generic open-world time-waster, where I and II were mostly story-based action-adventure games. Car handling, as someone else said also made the game what it is for a large part, driving a Model T felt like it was from that era. The low acceleration especially made car chases high impact, which I haven’t seen done in any other games. The story was actually about the Mafia, as in Italian-American organized crime, and I felt it got diluted by the change of atmosphere in III.
I don’t think III is a bad game, it’s just not a Mafia game. They could have sold it under a different name, and made a proper Mafia III.
is that companies can increase profits and productivity
Not even necessarily increasing productivity, just slashing it less than they slash worker pay, so that they have more of the pie for themselves. Like with customer service chatbots that are worse than agents, but are less worse than the amount of money they “save”.
I hate the euphemism of “joining”. It’s not a happy union of two groups of like-minded people deciding to pool their resources to better do what they do.
It’s one set of suits paying another set of suits a boatload of money to fuck off, then firing half the people who created the value that made it worth to talk about in the first place.
Acquisitions are not a happy sunshine and rainbows thing, it’s one corporation devouring another to gorge itself ever bigger.
Why AAA? Come on Sega, you can get it to AAAA, have people pay for time like back in the arcade days! Game starts, you get “Insert coin” and a microtransaction!
Dream big!