- 0 Posts
- 35 Comments
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.
The point here is that the anticheat solution needs to be written for a specific operating system because it runs “outside” the game in a privileged way to try and detect cheating.
So they have anticheat on Windows, and their own consoles will have a different anticheat system that is specific for the console OS.
Running games on Linux via Proton is effectively an emulation or translation layer, and the Windows-specific anticheat is not going to work with that.
If Sony wanted to provide multiplayer support on Linux they’d also have to provide a native Linux implementation of the whole game, rather than relying on Proton, which sadly not many publishers are doing at all. So its technically quite understandable why this isn’t possible.
Now, personally I think client anticheat is garbage and they should not be depending on that as a solution anyway, but that’s a separate argument!
From the image I assumed this was about a game called “10 minutes of gameplay” which was under threat of being cancelled, but it has loyal fans waiting and “Nobody wants it to die”
As for how my brain could assume even for a second that 10 minutes of gameplay could be a genuine game, I imagined it must be aomething with a time-looping mechanic that does the same 10 mins over and over.
I also thought the name must be intentional satire, and a self-referential poke at those people who believe the length of gameplay is what makes a game good, and want hundred-hour collectathons, whereas this is saying “Yes it only has 10 minutes but look what we can do with them!”
Sounds like a game I’d play honestly - and yes, I did play Twelve Minutes!
Oh cool. That’s good to know. I was mistaken.
Strange the article didn’t menton it, but searching further it seems like you’re right.
I guess they are going out of their way to “big up” the Quest release in the press coverage because that is a separate platform / storefront and so can garner extra sales, while PC and PCVR are the same sale.
Genuinely mislead me to think the PC version wouldn’t have VR, though!
Same experience for me.
As with other titles classed as “walking simulators”, Edith Finch isn’t really a game. It’s an interactive story, and on that basis it’s a good experience.
I found the message and the aesthetic quite impactful, and it left me with some strong feelings when it was done, like when you finish a good book.
Is it for someone who wants replayability in their games? - No.
Is it for someone who wants to spend a few hours immersed in a heartfelt narrative? - Absolutely.
This is something I know about.
The new ARM-based macs are actually very powerful, but as another commenter mentioned, the ARM architecture would normally be a bad fit for gaming as not much runs on it.
That said, there are ways around it.
I’m personally gaming on an M2 Macbook Pro, and am able to play almost my full Steam library of Windows games using a tool called Whisky
Whisky uses Wine (a longstanding Windows emulator commonly used on Linux) along with other toolkits to translate DirectX graphics instructions into Mac-native ‘Metal’ graphics instructions. There is a performance hit in doing this, but the end result is actually pretty good.
The result you get will depend on your hardware. I’m personally running a high-end M2 Max configuration and get 50 FPS on high settings in Deep Rock Galactic (a first-person shoooter game) but lower configurations would be okay for casual gaming.
There is another product that does the same thing as Whisky called Crossover. It is paid (unlike Whisky which is free) but is otherwise similar. You can watch this YouTube video on Crossover to get some idea on how it works, how to set it up, and the performance you might expect.
As for Minecraft, I personally play that too, and it actually runs natively on the new Apple Silicon macs anyway and doesn’t need anything special :)
The article talks about factors like type of game and advancements in technology, but doesn’t mention what is surely a big factor - the age of their audience.
My personal intuition is that 10 to 20 years is the sweet spot because those people who played the original as a teenager will now be in their 20s and 30s, where they have disposable income and plenty of desire to spend it on reliving those happy childhood memories.
If you wait too long for a remake, the market will shrink again because those original players will be more likely to have family, other commitments, and less time to game.
It seems like it can make sense. Platform fees aren’t an initial outlay, they’re effectively a cut of profits based on sales.
For the sake of argument using fake numbers, if a studio spends $1m making a game, and then they put it on Steam and it does $10m in sales, then Steam’s cut of that at 30% will be $3m
So, spending more on store fees than development seems possible - especially if your game is selling really well
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.