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Nintendo’s site says the cartridge must always be inserted in order to play the game, and so it is the cartridge that controls the game license.
On that basis it seems likely you could sell/give the cartridge to someone else, after which they can play it and you no longer can - they’d just also have to download it first.
“72% of that group say real-world rewards are ‘important’ when selecting a new mobile game to download” - says report commissioned by company whose business model is putting real world rewards in mobile games and apps.
Piss off.
I play games to escape the real world a bit and forget it exists, not to slave away doing meaningless tasks for pennies.
It’s definitely not a “rouguelike” because it lacks the number one important aspect of either roguelikes (or rogue lites ) which is random generation.
It’s not really bullet hell because while the enemies can shoot the focus is not on dodging bullets but on finding any viable way to manage the hoard, which could involve kiting or tanking, dependant on your build.
So what common elements does the genre have, if we look at games like Vampire Survivors and Brotato?
- Victory is defined not by achieving a set objective, but on surviving a fixed time or number of waves
- Shooting is automatic (you don’t have to fire, only move)
- Camera is usually top-down to help with visibility
So maybe:
2D Wave-Survival Autoshooter
That’s just natural. Discord has a huge weight of numbers. People stay where they already are, unless there is significant motivation to move.
Matrix would have to be MUCH better than Discord in terms of features to attract people to move their whole communities and friend groups, not just simply on-par. And that’s pretty tough.
So yes - we’re basically waiting for Discord to continue its slow march into enshittification.
The console hardware is cheaper to produce vs other consoles, so it’s not like they are losing on the hardware and aiming to make the money back later - they designed the hardware to meet a specific price point, and to capture a certain market.
Having captured that market though (kid owns a switch and now the kid wants games) they can pretty much set the price of games high and keep them high.
As a gamer buying for yourself, with every purchase you are weighing up the cost of the game against how much you personally want to play it. If the price is too much you will choose something else, or wait for a sale.
As a parent buying for a child, however, if the child says “I really want the new Zelda game for my birthday please!” then they get bought the new Zelda game, no matter how much it costs.
Nintendo are very much aware what their business model is on this one, and who they are targeting.
For a lot of consumers, especially those who are lower income, the single most important factor is how much money you need to spend at once.
This is especially true because a key market for the switch is children, who have no direct purchasing power themselves, and depend instead on adults to buy it for Christmas and birthdays. So initial cost of entry is critical.
Simply put, ‘parents’ who are buying a console for their kids and expect to buy new games only rarely, have quite different needs to ‘gamers’ who are buying for themselves, and want new games often.
The cause of enshittification is essentially the shareholder pressure for endless and exponential growth that comes from public ownership.
Valve is a privately held company, and as long as it remains that way it doesn’t have those perverse incentives.
Gabe will never allow Valve to go public as long as he is in control, but after he is gone who knows.
The article basically answers its own questions in the conclusion that we’ve pretty much reached the ‘final form’ for consoles - Just like with phones.
In the early 2000’s phones were all manner of wild designs with weird shapes and crazy functionality, but now we’ve settled on the ubiquitous black rectangle of the smartphone. So too now has the console settled on this, a single screen with buttons on the sides.
We saw the lead-up to this long ago with Nintendo’s own evolving line of handhelds, and Sony’s PSP and Vita, and now we’ve seen it on the PC side too with the Steam Deck.
Even Sony are trying to move into making their main console a handheld - the only reason Nintendo were able to get there first is they were willing to do their classic move, and go with a low-power device without much grunt, and rely on the fun-factor of the games to make it good.
Imagine if next cycle Nintendo came out with a dual screen beast, a-la the DS. These days, more and more games on consoles are cross-platform and work on all systems, with few exclusives. That doesn’t work so well if your system has super unique hardware and deviates too far from the single black rectangle. They’d be shooting themselves in the foot.
I think if Nintendo do something truly off-the-wall again, it will only be because there has been some new tech shift in the market and Nintendo jump in to get first mover advantage. Like a new type of VR that works super seamlessly, or something none of us have though of yet.
But for now here we are. The ubiquitous black rectangle has arrived.
The nice thing about Gator Game was that movement felt so good and fluid. It really is just a game about jumping and climing and bouncing around like a hyper kid.
Given the game doesn’t have ‘combat’ they really really needed to get traversal right because that’s the main draw, and they succeeded in that.
I got lost a few times too, but I think they did a good job of providing mitigation for that with specific large landmarks you can see at least one of from anywhere, like the big tree, the mountain, the windmill.
I understand what the devs were trying to do by not having a map. When a map is there, especially an always-on minimap, I basically spend my whole time with my eyes glued to that tiny corner of the screen rather than actually looking at the world. So I can respect the decision to try and do without any map.
Exactly, it’s not on Nintendo to fix, this could be happening anywhere in the chain.
Could be within the stores or their suppliers, or it could be returns from end-customers.
My personal bet would be scammers buying games with cash, taking the games and then shrink-wrapping the box before returning them for a cash refund. And then they flip the cartridges on eBay or whatever.
I was quite intrigued by the article and thinking I’d put this on my wishlist, until I saw “multiplayer”, and suddenly all my interest is down the drain.
It feels like some developers are making live service games simply to chase the revenue stream, not because the specific game they are making would actually be better online.
As someone who loves mods, I’m totally I’m agreement.
Mods vary greatly, from ones that add tiny quality of life improvements, such as a ‘sort’ button on your inventory, right through to huge visual overhauls and new characters and mechanics changes.
Personally I like to always play games in a fairly vanilla way first with QOL changes only, and then when I’ve played it through once, the mods can keep things interesting.
That’s why mods are great, because they give you, the user, the choice.
Using established characters in your own works has long been accepted in Japan, especially for smaller doujin works, and that’s awesome. But the analogy between that and modding just isn’t the same.
If we apply the ‘modding’ analogy to manga, that would basically be taking someone else’s published work, applying white-out on half the frames, drawing in partial new contents of your own, and then republishing it. That would be incredibly disrespectful of the author to use not only their character, but their exact art in such a way. Very different from creating a whole new derivative work.
I’m personally very in-favour of modding, but I can understand why the Japanese in particular, when seen through that lens, do not like it.
Of course they do, but let’s unpack that.
When people buy a new car who already have one, they generally do it because either 1. they think it will bring some material benefit over their old car, or 2. they want a new car simply for vanity reasons.
Looking at the PS5 Pro, there will absolutely be people who think “I want to upgrade to the Pro just for bragging rights” but I’m pretty sure the majority of consumers wil simply think “This doesn’t play any games my PS5 can’t already” and pass on it.
I agree with all of that, pretty much.
If Asus or whoever else dropped a “steam deck killer” I’m pretty sure Valve wouldn’t even blink.
Valve didn’t make the deck because they wanted to make money on hardware. I expect very much they made it specifically because they wanted to encourage the move of steam gaming from the PC to the couch, and they needed some hardware to prove their point with - like with the Steam Link where they tried this before, and that time failed.
If it later ends up being other companies in the long run who make the hardware then no worries, the mission was already accomplished.
This is a tricky one, honestly, because the steam deck straddles the line between PC and console.
If you were a Sony fan, you’d be rightfully upset if Sony released a new PlayStstion every year, and made new games only for the new hardware. It’s just not long enough to feel the hardware has ran its lifespan, and you feel cheated.
Conversely in PCs, the expectation is that the hardware slowly improves constantly, and new hardware doesn’t stop you playing all the latest games on your old hardware; the only limiting factor is how far your old hardware can be pushed before the performance is too poor. And that is YOUR choice as a user, not an artificial choice imposed on you.
I’d expect that any Steam Deck 2 is going to be more like the PC model - it won’t create exclusives or stop people playing the new games on their old deck, it will simply be better and faster.
So on that basis I wouldn’t personally have a problem if Valve put out a deck every year.
All that said however, I think waiting several years is the smart business move. People have longer to enjoy their hardware while still feeling like they have the “latest model” - it’s psychologically better from the consumer perspective.
There may also be an argument that longer release cycles makes things less complicated for devs (less devices to test on) and also keeps the hardware going for longer, because devs will be incentivised to optimise performance for the current deck (which they might not be as much after a new one comes along)
For real. It’s an amazing game that just can’t be the same again once you know all its secrets.
I bought it for two of my friends, and they both ended up hating it lol. I don’t blame them, but I think it’s very much to do with the mentality of how you approach the experience.
One friend just got plain stuck and gave up. The other found it frustrating that they were doing the same thing several times over, and just wanted to rush as quickly as they could to make progress.
Personally, I enjoyed the slow pace of discovery. I loved that feeling of being a true explorer, discoving facets of lost civilisation. Watching in melancholic awe as a world crumbled around me. Finding just a small piece of new information was always a joy, and made it feel worthwhile to get there, even if I’d done 90% of the journey before.
Slowly getting richer in a game where the only currency is knowledge.
Google absolutely made a calculated decision when they decided to allow device manufacturers to fork AOSP and introduce closed-source modifications. If it wasn’t for that, I can’t imagine OEMs would have wanted to get on board, and so we wouldn’t have seen the huge adoption that happened, and Android might have become just another failed operating system.
I do truly wish for a fully open-source “Linux on the phone” type experience, but what always kills that is apps, because companies just don’t make them unless the market share is there. Even Microsoft had to pull out after pumping so much money into Windows phone, and I think most of the reason was because they couldn’t incentivise developers to make apps enough.
So I’m glad at least I can run Calyx, and have just a tiny bit more freedom while still keeping the apps I need, even if it’s nowhere near perfect.
I’m sure what Intel are doing right now is having both their tech people and their lawyers frantically explore any and every option which might let them get out of this.
Which is why there is radio silence, because they don’t want to make any statement which admits liability, or even acknowledges the problem.
But yes, if the problem is real they had better suck it up and recall the whole lot.
They can hardly avoid screwing up, really.
The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it’s a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and “Just Work” to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.
Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn’t going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won’t be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.