‘Recovering’ development costs by using a government enforced monopoly on game mechanics.

I love that your criteria for being dead is that you don’t like it.

It sounds like you like the large scale (32 or 64) battle FPS games, whoch are not as popular currently as they do tend into the issue you mention which is not having enough players makes matchmaking drag out happens faster than small team short round games.

I do play block ops 6 because it is one of a few cross platform games one friend enjoys. It isn’t terrible, just an average cod game, but it doesn’t have the vehicle maps like modern warfare and I kinda miss those.

I also play Helldivers 2 which is 3rd person that has first person aim down site options, although it is 4 player vs environment.

I do miss the battlefield games, they were hella fun back when I played them.

While I agree there is a high chance that any particular game tends to go down the monetization path, not all do.

Like anything else, live service does have a place in gaming but it absolutely does not need to be forced into everything.

I am really enjoying Helldivers 2 and it is a live service that is doing a great job of avoiding the FOMO aspect of most live service games while providing the benefits of a worldwide, changing campaign that has content added slowly over time to encourage continued engagement. It also offers daily challenges, but also rewards everyone for group efforts so it doesn’t punish for not playing every day.

The recently did an oopsie by going too high with the in game price on the collab with Killzone that would be the road to being predatory, but they listed to the response and handled it well enough. Sadly, this is the exception and not the rule.

All that money and updates still require restarts.

It apparently works well enough.

I can play any number multiple repetitive/nonlinear games that don’t require keeping track of a story or events. So racing games, most FPS, etc. Right now I can switch between Helldivers 2, Call of Duty, Forza Horizon, Valheim, Tekken, and so on at the drip of a hat. I do end up customizing controls so they are similar within a genre, so HD and COD get trmapped to my standard first person shooter control scheme.

But I cannot stay engaged with more than one game that has a storyline/things to rememeber like the Witcher, Red Dead Redemption 2, or Horizon Zero Dawn even if they have handy in game reminders for what to do. Switching between stories is my dealbreaker for playing at the same time. I also have trouble sticking with a story long enough to complete those types of games which is a bummer because I like the idea of them.

Hell, I’m surprised it is over 10% with how many of the most popular games have been around for years.

That could also be done by having improved techniques to quickly dispatch the rats without needing to also scale up the character’s toughness so their bites are less effective.

They can be a nice addition, but the article is written as them being a necessity for player engagement.

And I agree, but Marvel Rivals’ progression problem goes deeper than its battle pass: there just isn’t a lot to earn or play for.

Games that are fun to play don’t need that crap to keep players engaged.

Looks like you meant to reply to some other post.

I didn’t assume, you broadcasted it with ‘modern identity politics’ bullshit.

They mean ‘women protagonists bad!’

Based on a random deleted post with no confirmstion.

[X] Doubt

In the MW II remake I couldn’t use Assault ar first for my AR build load out but I think they eased up on it after a few months.

I’ve omly played three CoD games and they all have had funny language restrictions for the load outs.

I can’t even name my SMG load out ‘smegma’ or my sniper load out ‘shut up Wesley’ so they probably allow half of the slurs.

They knew what they were doing when they wrote that clickbait title.

The loading screen with the red string connecting tacks on a board has a bunch of random lines connecting nothing. Alll that stuff looks like AI slop, although the Santa stuff looks even worse than the defaults.

Negative reviews are the least likely scenario for banning someone in game, as the person has already reviewed it and needs no further acesss on that account for their stream.

More likely they will punish people with an ever increasing range of ‘inappropriate’ that seems somewhat reasonable at first (hate speech) and end up with some minority group (LGBTQ+) being silenced through a chilling effect.

That song sounds like what AI would spit out if it was told to make a song that sounds like an anime intro that includes every fucking cliche from a superhero team up.

Yes, the song gets even worse as it goes on.

Probably counterstrike back in the day, possibly battlefield 2 including the Project Reality mod. That was back when gametime wasn’t really tracked and I had a lot more spare time Possibly WoW, but I only played for a couple of years or less and for a few hours a day at most.

Currently my highest is Forza Horison 5 with like 1200 hours. Have a few others with 500+ hours although a few are inflated at least 100+ hours because the game locked up on closing and counted as played for several days multiple times.

What was the best prize you’ve won so far?

That’s a good 'un!

Juntax? Who you want me kill?

It’s been a couple decades and I don’t know how it was spelled, but that’s what I remember hearing. Loved playing the Horde.

Yeah, at the time I assumed that the people intentionally spreading in game were just trolling because there was no actual danger to themselves. Reality proved that tons of people are fine with harming themselves as long as they harm others at the same time.

and it really has overwhelmed our infrastructure."

By underestimated excitement they meant player count straining their ridiculous approach of streaming massive amounts of data through the game instead of preinstalling.

The word consumer is so demeaning

It should be, and it is accurate in this case.

Apparently the announcement was made in stealth mode.

I’m so sick of action rpgs including crafting or an endless list of slightly different weapons. Give me a small mix of situational weapons at most and let the gameplay be how difficulty works.

While additional cosmetic options can add variety and personal expression to the game

I guess if bragging about spending extra money to advertise for some company is personal expression, sure.

They took all the parts people complained about in the beta and dialed them up. Especially the predatory monetization.

Unattainable achievements aren’t achievments, they are lies.

Some might be extremely difficult or tedious though.

An article about Joker 2 has the novelty factor of bombing as a sequel to Joker, which was a massive hit. They will got a lot more views on any one of those five Joker 2 articles than they will from multiple articles about a game nobody heard about.

More views = more money. It doesn’t matter whether something is more ‘worthy’ or not.

My point is mostky about people’s expectations and that people who want news on games probably aren’t interested in gaming articles from papers/major news sites and companies in general aren’t looking to advertise on gaming articles in the same way that makers of fashion would want to advertise in the theater section.

I really like this post btw, I never really thought about how sparse reporting on games is outside of dedicated sites.

That has more to do with New York having a thriving theater scene and a NY newpaper promoting a local thing that is popular with its readership and the companies that pay for advertising. It is something that sets NY apart from a lot of other locations, even if theater is pretty common in most areas.

Kind of a chicken and egg when it comes to games, since readers won’t be expecting games news in mainstream sources they don’t dedicate resources to writing the articles. That makes business sense because most people who are looking for game news already have a number of web sites to choose from.

John Carter didn’t get that much attention either, and what it did was mostly about the leadership changes in Disney tanking the advertising and not about the movie itself.

At one point I decided to get all the cars that I didn’t already have and used the auction house to get what was left. While i got most in under a week, there were still two cars that took a couple more weeks to find available even at 20 mil when checking twice a day.

Holy hell the interface is so terrible, and probably contributes to even more bots than if it was fairly straightforward to use. Car names aren’t consistent with the list of cars, there was no ‘cars not owned’ filter, and the nine buttons to place a bid plus the delay every time anything happened including being outbid made trying to get a deal nearly impossible.

Yup, streaks exist to encourage the feeling similar to a sunk cost, just like rewards programs.

You just described a poorly managed company, which only continues to exist as a capitalist vulture that feeds on other companies.

Poorly managed can still make profit by running companies into the ground.

A business only needs to do layoffs when it is managed poorly.