The Future™

41 games played, top 2 make up >80% of play time. Sounds about right.

Nuclear block plus a culture of not feeding the trolls means the only toxic accounts I’ve run across are just a day or two old. Block and move on. The experience can only be as negative as each user lets it be.

Actually explains a lot of decisions by game publishers the last 5-10 years if their official position is that games are meant to collect dust on a shelf rather than being played.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

They’re streaming in the 3d world detail, but the rendering engine is installed locally.

Playing on xCloud will just stream in the visuals that are rendered remotely, so a lot less bandwidth, but then you have the lag, and need a subscription.

Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.

Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).

American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.

A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.

Tencent and Guillemot combined are considering a buyout of other shareholders. Most of that is Guillemot, with Tencent increasing their share very slightly from 9.2% to 10%.

A rather obtuse reference to removing the OtherOS feature well after purchase. I tried to adapt it to game terms, but admit it’s a stretch.

Out of all the boardroom discussions, raising the price was actually the most consumer-friendly suggestion from Sony. Others included:

• Deleting the original version from users’ libraries.
• Re-printing the original on disc, but including a rootkit.
• Compiling a list of original version owners and leaving their personal details in plaintext on the web until they upgrade.
• Downgrading the original to 480p, telling users the original graphics were just a bug, and selling the higher-res upgrade.

Nintendo patents video game inventory system.

Not the onion.

(Not a patent lawyer, and I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but come on)

Sounds like just the publishing side was affected. Lots of other independent developers are kind of in limbo in the short term, which does suck.

Hopefully they can get out of any contracts and go to a publisher not associated with that family.

They do point out that they will be monitoring how it’s used, and could adjust things later.

Sounds like corporate-speak for “if people abuse this, we’ll lock it down harder.”

Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn’t like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve’s hand in changing the policy.

The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.

Sony bought all the “Xbox is dead” talk (true or false doesn’t matter, Sony believes it), and has started the high-end gaming console monopoly pricing.

Gameboy Advance had single-pak link (buy one copy, play with up to 4 linked devices) 20 years ago.

Greed has defeated the technology, though.

How dare my meddling not work out, you’re all fired!

• HL3 rumors
• HL3 announcement
• HL3 release
• HL3 is finished by multiple independent people, confirming the whole thing isn’t just a troll job by Valve <— This is when I start to believe it’s actually happening.

It was an early game pass title, priced at $60 to get people to sign up for a $10-15 subscription instead. If it had been released at ~$30 like the AA game it was, I believe it would have gotten a lot more leeway in the player reviews.

I did enjoy one playthrough. Most obsidian games beg the player to go again, but it didn’t seem worth another 15-20 hours for a slightly different ending. Replay value is what’s really missing for me.

Expectations are key. It’s a pretty good game at the right price, but anyone expecting New Vegas in Space is left disappointed.

Square 🤝 Nintendo
Charging 2-3x too much for games you already bought.

Having never heard of this before watching the video, I feel like I know even less about the game after watching.

$30 for the early access plus a bit of micro transaction currency.

Questionable value, but a terrible headline.

The mod includes everything needed to downgrade other stores’ copies. To the end user, the idea is to make it as transparent as possible. This will work on Steam (with some work) and GOG (with less work), but not Epic(at all). Calling out one storefront unnecessarily would be “provocative bullshit” but in this case, it matters.

The first is on GOG as well, for only a few cents more.

No, no. All the NPCs are supposed to have 7 fingers on each of their three hands. It’s in the lore.

I saw so much praise for this game, which got me to buy. Then I genuinely felt like I played a different game than everybody else.

Not that I thought it was bad or anything, I just walked across the landscape for 2h15m and then haven’t thought about it since.

But why pay all those programmers when all they had to do from the beginning was a simple

#include “ai.h”

Don’t worry, though. It’s not in development hell, it’s going to be a AAAAA game, and that takes time.

Same reason people would buy an S when they could get more power, more storage, and a disk drive with an X: price. $450 vs $600 isn’t nothing.

Aren’t there only two companies making large-scale sports games these days? If it’s not EA, then it would basically have to be 2K.

I hear this. My life is survival mode. Games are for turning off that part of the brain for a little while.

I almost bought myself a SCUF controller until I realized it’s all run through iCue. Even if they made the best hardware, the experience will suffer until they get some decent software.

OP did the right thing by using the linked headline, but that headline is incoherent.

It cost an extra $200m in expense due to impairment (it wasn’t worth as much as they originally put on the books, so they had to write it down).

The only revenue impact is a note that it didn’t sell as well as Hogwarts Legacy, which was released in the same quarter last year. The article conflates those two things into one for the headline, which is just wrong.

“Two popular games with little else in common can be shoehorned into my pet narrative” is a bad title, though.

99% of gamers knew this years ago.

It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.

It’s Sony, so they’ll advertise Linux support, then pull it with a firmware update in 3-4 years.

And then when these games continue to flop critically, and never reach the player count they forecast, it’s the developers’ fault and layoffs abound.

It’s all about publishing something, even if it’s hollow click bait.

Pure speculation: of the people who don’t like Epic, maybe 25% are legitimate, principled objections to their business practices. The rest are split evenly between people who just want to manage their entire library on a single platform, and folks just going along for the hate-ride because it seems like the “safe” position to take.

From a technical stance, Steam and GOG are superior platforms (for different reasons). For equal-price purchases, I can’t think of a single reason to choose Epic over other options. But claiming a game for free? That doesn’t make anyone a bad person.

What’s next, Final Fantasy doesn’t have a canonical timeline?

Tell it to only update on launch. If you then ONLY launch the game through the Script Extender, this doesn’t count as a steam launch, and it shouldn’t update. You don’t necessarily need to be using any SKSE mods to launch that way, it just bypasses the normal launch process.

At least, that’s the way it has always worked in the past. If you installed SKSE through Steam, YMMV; just get it direct from the dev website.

Edit: Just tried it out, and this mostly works. “Online Services” are disabled until you update, so any Bethesda.net mods installed inside the game itself may break, but mods installed from Nexus appear to be fine.