ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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Some of that may as well be considered active sabotage on Apple's part.

They're good outliers to cut out from a sample set. If you want to use the survey as a developer to determine what your audience looks like, how much merit is there in factoring in a player base that mostly only plays Dota 2 and PUBG for major patches or something? And don't forget that the other way to look at that sample set is that for every Steam Deck customer out in the wild, you can double it to find how many Linux users there are, which is a number in the millions.

GamingOnLinux does a good job of tracking the data separated to just the English language, which shows how much effect China has on the survey as well as a decent approximation of the rest of the audience's Linux usage, which is closer to 4% these days, post-Steam-Deck.

Any surge also has more to do what China did or did not do that month than how many Steam Decks they sold.

Okay, that helps. Both are on PC, but it's unlikely this 11 year old plays them on PC, as this is primarily a game people play on consoles in either case. Both will also have physical versions. If I were a betting man, I'd bet they want the PS5 version, but that's like a 65% chance. I'm not sure what your situation is, but surely you could ask the kid's parents, right? Also FYI, FIFA is the old name for the series, and starting with this year, it now goes by EA Sports FC.

GameStop gift cards probably won't help you if they want the game for PC. There are also a lot of games that you can only buy digitally. Do you know which game you want to get for them? That could narrow it down. Otherwise, you might have to get even sneakier about finding out what platforms they have access to.

2017 is ancient history compared to the current economic climate, and that sale came out of an attempt to make games episodic to their detriment. $300M seemed low considering the buyer makes that money back with probably 1.5 Tomb Raider games, and Deus Ex and all of those other Eidos properties are a bonus. Yes, the deal seemed crazy for Square Enix at the time.

People were taken aback by how little they sold for. IO Interactive bought themselves back from Square Enix some time ago.

Borrowing money was cheap until it wasn't. When they bought the old Eidos stuff, everyone thought Square Enix was taking crazy pills. Now, given that everyone's cutting back right now, it looks more like they knew something Embracer didn't.

The trend for a long while was to have an in-house engine to save on costs, but many of them, including the RPG companies we've been discussing, have moved off of those engines and onto Unreal.

Okay, cool.

According to the article, that's not what they find objectionable.

They're certainly not solving problems by staying on this engine and kicking the tech debt can down the road.

It never in any way implies that it's transferable or applies to other games.

Right, but the lawsuit is over the fact that it never says otherwise either. Pay to win is neither here nor there. It could be just for cosmetics, and the suit still stands. To be clear, I'm not a lawyer, and I've never played any of the games this is in reference to. Pay to win just doesn't seem to be a part of this at all.

This isn't about pay to win.

If you ask me, a lot of the systems they built for open worlds like Elder Scrolls and Fallout make far less sense when you're an interplanetary space traveler, like waking up a person at your home base to give you a tour of your new club, because they're on a day/night schedule where they walk between their room and the living room. And it's not like open worlds or even Bethesda-esque RPGs haven't been built in Unreal before.

Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows. If they could have upgraded it to handle modern needs, I think they would have. Sarah Morgan looks like plastic in just about every lighting environment I've seen so far except for the room you meet her in. The conversation system may be an upgrade over what they were able to do with Daggerfall, but compared to its contemporaries from the likes of CDPR and Larian (even BioWare's old Mass Effect trilogy), it really feels lacking when they can't implement proper directed camera angles or performance capture.

Their side quest designers (referring here primarily to "activities" and non-faction quests) are either terrible at their craft or confined to an engine that can only easily spit out fetch quests where nothing interesting happens on the way to fetch the macguffin, once again, like their contemporaries can and do; the bar has been raised since the days of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.

When flying, the game loads you into an area where you always have to fly the "last mile" and dock, and the only reason I can imagine you would build it that way is that they couldn't make their engine load the space they need to load in a seamless way, like their competitors making other space games.

The game isn't bad, but it does feel like it came out of a time capsule from over ten years ago with a bunch of features they tried to implement that their engine couldn't handle. If you have to tell your customers, one on one, why your game is actually fun, you're doing something wrong. Hopefully Microsoft finally makes them throw out Creation and start from scratch for ES6 on Unreal or something, taking a hard look at what their competitors are doing better than them in the RPG space.

As long as it requires a server to operate, then yes, it will go away one day. That it failed to turn a profit even before the economic downturn, according to that Reuters article they cite, doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it's going to run for very long.

UNI and SG are themselves far more successful than most games. So yes, not as successful as those two, but still more successful than most. Evo is also a kingmaker, and you can see spikes in all of the announced Evo games when they're announced and present at Evo.