seems like they’re giving up on PC gaming entirely in the future imo

me too Mario, me too

It’s more likely that the devs are not being given the time or resources to do this kind of thing properly. Their bosses are too concerned with what will save money and generate shareholder value.

Arc Raiders launched as a feature complete game, mostly bug free, well optimized, with a sufficient amount of functioning servers, and with genuinely innovative game design.

It sold incredibly well at 40 dollars. I’ve bought it 4 times myself.

Expecting every game to meet those criteria is not “absurd”. It used to be par for the industry and it still should be.

AAA games from publicly traded corporations are just absurdly underwhelming. They want us to think these standards are absurd so they can keep their minimal effort bullshit gravy train running. It’s not going to work anymore. That’s the free market. Adapt or die.

Aka the market has rejected your overpriced bullshit. Adapt or die. Welcome to the free market.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a mega corporation and previously had the winning formula. You adapt to meet evolving market demand or you die.

These c suites got too comfy doing everything to only please their shareholders. They forgot that pleasing their consumers wasn’t optional. We are your money supply. If you lose us, it all comes crashing down.

Not only that but E33 showed people what ex-ubisoft devs could do when you actually let them be creative.

Let’s give Ubisoft to North Korea then

Allowing the working class to never have any kind of power is the highest priority of the ultra wealthy. That’s the only real threat to their own position and gravy train.

You sound like me when I was young and stupid. Have a good one my dude

Your expectations are too high and your cynicism is clouding your judgment.

They’re currently being sued by Nintendo and palworld did not make anywhere near the kind of money that would let them survive a lawsuit AND a game cancellation.

You’re making assumptions about their financials that are only ever true for enormous studios like epic games, which pocketpair is not. The gaming industry does not operate as simply as you think it does and companies don’t have the freedom to throw money away on something as simple as virtue signaling.

It doesn’t matter if a company used AI back in 2022 when it was new and less understood; it matters what companies choose now. If you’re going to throw blind skepticism at them for not making arbitrary financial risks just to appease you, then you’re not worth appeasing anyway because you’re too cynical to be a potential customer.

Yeah because they spent money making it. If you spend millions of dollars making a video game, you can’t just shut it down and refund every order of it without putting your studio in serious jeopardy financially. That’s not an option for them, so the best they can do is just not rely on AI anymore. Clearly they tried it and learned that it actually sucks ass.

Companies can change their mind about stuff like this.

Imagine if this was all proprietary and these conflicts were resolved with costly legal battles or the abandonment of entire projects and IP.

oh right that’s exactly what happens with corporate software every day.

This is why I don’t pre-order and don’t play games with no support for dedicated player hosted servers anymore. AAA publishers will never front the cost for a sufficient amount of servers to meet the demand. They’re perfectly fine with this outcome if they already have your money.

No. We all poor now.

That’s essentially what I’m saying. It will always end up this way. Whether we call it late stage or post capitalism or just capitalism is irrelevant. It’s a system that empowers sociopathy and sociopaths will always choose to enrich themselves at the expense of the country and it’s citizens.

It’s post-capitalism. Capitalism was only ever capable of bringing about merit based class mobility and prosperity temporarily before the sociopaths all trickled to the top over the decades and then shut that shit down. Neo-feudalism is the inevitable result, and that will eventually be dismantled by another working class revolution.

All economies have lifespans.

Candy crush is just another reskin of bejeweled; a game made by an indie developer in the year 2000.

Corpos can’t make good games because they’re sociopaths who don’t understand art, only products. Understanding art requires a functioning connection to humanity and emotions, which they lack.

Games aren’t only products; they’re art. Good art is not capable of universal appeal. The more demographics you try to appeal to for the sake of appeasing your shareholder overlords, the more dogshit your game will be.

Games made to support the interests of mentally ill rich people cannot be well made categorically. This is why AAA has sucked ever since wall street took over every studio.

And from ex-ubisoft devs no less; the undisputed king of mediocrity. It’s a testament to how utterly crushing the weight of shareholder influence and middle management bloat is on the people working there. Creativity cannot flourish within a publicly owned company that only seeks profit and nothing more.

What’s important right now is converting people away from windows. I expect Steam OS 3 to be much more beginner friendly than any other distro. If an average PC gamers first impression of linux is constant troubleshooting, they’re not going to try another kernel; they’re just going to go back to windows.

Even if valve stops support later, they will have still introduced many people to linux in a beginner friendly way and wrestled the gaming ecosystem out of microsoft’s grip that much more.

It’s normal for old versions of an OS to stop receiving support after a new version replaces it. That’s not unique to steam OS. if I install an old version of bazzite, or any deprecated Linux kernel, modern apps will not necessarily be made backwards compatible with it.

But steam OS will have more installs than any other Linux variant just because of Valve’s brand recognition alone and the FOSS community will target it as their primary platform for software compatibility as a result.

I agree but steam OS is going to be a hell of a lot more popular and have more support as a result.

borderlands wasn’t the first looter shooter. that was hellgate london.

Welcome to American corporate status quo. Short term profits are all that matters. Evidence of unsustainable patterns are ignored because the shareholders demand it.

Indie games and small publisher titles are my bread and butter. They keep the spirit and innovation that I grew up with alive.

I miss firefall. It was very innovative and enormous. The devs were trying new ideas in the alpha all the time.

Not every game is an MMO requiring vast server farms. A game like the crew 1 that is past it’s prime is not expensive to keep a few servers running for. It’s a negligible cost.

They could also put in the time to give players the tools to host their own servers, or simply allow offline play. This used to be standard for all PC games. They chose to do neither of these things in an obvious effort to force players towards the sequel or their other games. They should not be permitted to do anti-consumer things like this.

On places like reddit, Lenny, etc where there is a vocal minority complaining about this. The vast majority of consumers don’t come on here nor do they keep themselves informed. They’ll grumble at the price a bit, then buy it anyway.

I love invading people’s games and then never hacking them. It doesn’t tell them you’ve invaded so you can just mess with them covertly and pretend to be an NPC.

Every power supply expert has stated that it’s dangerous to use any kind of extender or adapter with 12vhp

Concord suffered from being too safe and generic. There wasn’t a single thing about it that didn’t seem generic and played out. It was originally conceptualized around the time when overwatch 1 was super popular and then they took way too long to finish it. The fact that it was pursuing an outdated trend and doing nothing original with it is why nobody had any interest in it.

Gamers could have identified that it was going to flop from a mile away, but the people calling the shots were businessmen and shareholders, not gamers. The industry has been hollowed out and enshittified because it’s been taken over by non-gamers who want to turn all games into soulless child casinos.

It wouldn’t be the first artistic industry ruined by capitalists and it won’t be last.

Big name studios are usually publicly owned which means they have shareholders to answer to and they demand a return on their investment. That means no risk taking which means no niche genres. It’s why shareholders (ultra wealthy people) are the enemy of art and why publicly traded studios all go to shit after enough time.

And indie devs don’t want to touch the sim genre because it’s an incredibly challenging thing to make and would take most people years and years to get anywhere on it. Their only shot is having an angel investor to keep them afloat.

This is only a problem for capitalist shareholders (aka the ultra wealthy) who need to extract more wealth from consumers than they did last quarter but they’re already at the limit of how much they can do so. Now the largest barrier is time and attention.

I’d say try it out to see if you like the gun mechanics and movement/different classes. If you do then you’ll love the game even more when you get to the higher difficulties. If it’s not your thing, you can refund on steam if still under 2 hours of playtime.

The tech industry chases acquisition and investor money only now, not consumer demand or innovative achievement. It’s all just people trying to get rich, mostly so they can escape the effects of late stage capitalism.

shareholders are poison to gaming

If a corp has shareholders to answer to, they will only churn out unfinished dogshit.

Very few people actually need or more make use of the power that nvidia’s high end cards provide