ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Which is funny, because they're not built to last.

Factorio's a great one for this, as is RimWorld, but specifically on the modes where there's no combat in the former and "base builder" difficulty on the latter. Lately, Palworld has been filling this slot for me. Just build stuff, occasionally tackle enemies, and listen to podcasts while you do it.

Oh, I don't intend to play either game. I just enjoy watching games that are bad for the industry crash and burn in the market.

I'm going to keep eating the popcorn I got out for Suicide Squad.

I'm not saying that this game will be the best example, but there are lots of ways the co-op of a game can be really great for reasons beyond it just being a game you play with your friends. Off the top of my head, my favorites are the ones that really make you communicate in order to overcome the challenge. This developer also made Magicka and the first Helldivers, and it was so easy to accidentally friendly fire your teammates in those games that everyone gets plenty of laughs out of it.

I'm so desperate for FPS games at this point that there's a decent chance I'd be into that.

But it doesn't run Alan Wake 2 at 4K. The Steam Deck is great value, but a console gets way better bang for your buck when output to a television, and at around the same price. Gaming PCs need to close that gap.

It's also a cheaper/easier point of entry, though I think we're rapidly heading to a future where all gaming is done on something that's just a PC, whether that's Windows, something that's good at hiding that it's just Windows, SteamOS, or something else.

Square Enix is reportedly set to significantly overhaul how it makes games following flat sales despite the release of a mainline Final Fantasy game.

Bro, you only put it on one platform, and not even the biggest one at that.

No exclusives and it seems like a clear path to no Xbox. No future for the Xbox and it seems like a clear path to losing access to all of your digital content that only works on Xbox. These are the reasons I stopped buying consoles a long time ago, but I understand this to be a large part of the outrage. Me personally, I just see a market where Sony runs away with a monopoly if Xbox isn't there to keep them in check, and I thought this was why the ABK purchase happened in the first place.

Was Redfall ever meant to be a live-service game?

Yes. Even though a lot of it never made it into the final product, it still scared off a lot of their talent over the course of development, and the game retained the always online component.

Not sure what live-service game Bioware were ever producing

How soon we forget. Anthem followed Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. There's also The Old Republic, but they staffed up a different location for that one.

Yes. We know it for a fact for the first three. Good chance Naughty Dog survives just fine, but it was definitely a setback.

If it makes you feel any better, this game almost certainly bombed and lost tons of money.

Dread Delusion was one of the best games I've played at PAX. I was bummed to see it launch into early access, but I guess they needed funding in a hurry. I'm definitely going to pick it up once it's done.

I played a few hours of Palworld, and it's serving the role of a podcast or second-screen game quite well. It's still early goings, and I'm around level 10 or so, but it's doing for me what Pokemon hasn't done in decades while simultaneously combining it with aspects I really enjoy from Factorio.

I'm also coming close to the end of Pillars of Eternity, I think. I'm in the second DLC, and I hit a huge difficulty spike, as quests available around my level have seemingly started to dry up, but I ended up grinding a few bounties and got to level 14, which got me over one difficulty spike and hopefully paved the way to keep me moving.

Besides that, I picked up Tekken 8. This is the most I've enjoyed Tekken since the third game, and I also think I'm done with it. A lot of the game makes sense to me in a way that Tekken 7 didn't, and I've come to respect it more than its predecessor for that and other reasons, but I don't think it's for me as far as being a fighting game I'd like to compete in. I can see the path to improving from here, and it looks like a lot of memorization rather than application, where I just need to know what each move or string looks like to be ready to defend it, and until I reach that point, it's just a lot of frustration. So instead, I choose to avoid that frustration and go back to fighters that I enjoy more. It's a lot of fun at a casual level and in single player mode though.

Single player is not the opposite of live service. Suicide Squad can be played single player. Baldur's Gate 3 can be played multiplayer.

The second one of them becomes exclusive, they lose me as a customer too. But I think history shows that they tried that already.

I don't have a subscription to it either. Their games aren't exclusive to Game Pass, and you can still buy them a la carte. In fact, my point with Palworld is that many more people still opt to even though the intuitive answer is that it's cheaper to rent the game for one month than it is to buy it outright, but I think people have a pretty firm grasp at the value you're giving up to not own it outright. It was a long con to get people to buy games from the Windows Store too, and people rejected it. They can't squeeze blood from a stone if the market doesn't want something. The online subscription service that is doing the nasty stuff that you're afraid of is Nintendo's; there are games there only available via subscription. Not to say you're wrong for where you draw the line in the sand on what you will or will not buy, but nothing indicates we're anywhere close to that doomsday scenario.

By every metric we know of, they're very far from achieving it. Even with some of the largest companies by market cap now in their ownership, they're still nowhere close to owning the breadth of games that get made. Palworld still sold more copies on Steam than there were Game Pass subscribers who tried the game out as part of their subscription. Growth for Game Pass has slowed dramatically to something in the ballpark of a plateau, and subscription services for games only accounted for 10% of spending. This was two weeks ago that Matt Piscatella of Circana said that the idea that subscription services would take over gaming is unsupported by the data.

On PC they don't do those things. Or rather, they tried, and the market rejected it.