The $10 games were trash in 1982. You’re going to spend 30 on something like Q-bert https://www.polygon.com/2014/6/4/5779048/atari-et-ads-commercials-videos-1982

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

in 2025 Money, that’s $99, assuming you got it used I gave you 50-60

is there even anything wrong if a game only takes your attention for a hundred hours

I don’t think so, but you’re the one who mentioned it :)

but I got hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay out of Qbert. Can any of the leading games in the last decade do that?

$10 in q-bert days is like 50-60 now :)

Can any of the leading games in the last decade do that?

Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere project, Factorio, Minecraft, Dreamlight Valley

Arcade games were great because it’s what we had. Sit a kid in front a Q-Bert now and try to get 1000 hours out of it.

Stuff is getting too big, there’s too much emphasis on making it pretty to sell it rather than making it fun, but I don’t know that we could go back to arcade games. I fear our nostalgia is a half-dose of Stockholm’s syndrome.

Here’s the details on the financials

https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/exclusive-the-numbers-behind-epics

They’d been paying a fortune for other ways to get more titles which never panned out. Steam said fuck the little guys so they’re trying to capitalize on that right now.

Balatro isn’t gambling so win:win

He just needs to stop, Trumps bro-circle jerk is already full.

True, we shouldn’t be ‘backing’ them.

Consumerism and capitalism essentially dictate that large-scale gaming can’t exist without publishers. Studios need to get funded, and most developers struggle with tasks like publishing, marketing, analytics, and handling payments. While a company could theoretically manage all of this itself, it demands a lot of specialized talent, which schools only teach to a limited extent in a manner relevant to the gaming industry.

Publishers (almost) can’t help but be somewhat offensive to the public. They are there to make money and (the good ones, at least) put money back into the market so they can make more money.

Valve is less offensive than many/most. Gabe was an underdog story. Valve released some damn fine games before they primarily became publishers.

requires less development time

Here, step into this 200GB repo with about 50 third party plugins and someone else’s game engine and find all the states that aren’t exactly like they are on the design docs, and do it at scale, across a cluster of servers that all have to interact.

20 years ago, i’d be right there with you.

It’s actually hard for a big game to do those things. The people making the cheats are as good as the developers and only need to find one nick it the armor every time.

FWIW, I’m against kernel-level anticheat, and I didn’t downvote you :)

You can’t argue that it’s violent, but it’s like Tom and Jerry Violent

News Outlets are dead to me.

combination of stupid actions

IT was certainly a combination of stupid actions. But about the time the called his mother, it got kinda personal.

Yeah, the repack of that store requires some calls home and fake accounts.

I’ve honestly seen all I really need two of the game by watching a couple of people play it on YouTube. It’s pretty, it’s neat. If it would have came out on steam back in the day I would have bought it without a question.

I’m so salty I STILL won’t buy Satisfactory.