ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

You know how most people never heard of this company or care that it exists? My understanding is that they consult on games to make them more inclusive. So you have a gay character written into a game, perhaps the result of this company's contributions or perhaps not, and then a bunch of people complain that Sweet Baby made the game woke or some nonsense. How did I hear of this? Steam forums became a cesspool for people crying about this company. If Suicide Squad bombs, it's because they consulted with Sweet Baby and went woke. Indiana Jones maybe features a woman in the trailer who looks like more than a damsel in distress? Sweet Baby's doing.

There are a lot of benefits to the sequel model in some circumstances. You get to have every permutation of a game and its versions rather than overwriting previous versions of a game that arguably might be better for their own reasons.

Man, this site on mobile is like psychological warfare. You read a paragraph, and it's interesting, and you scroll down a bit to read more, and they spawn another ad that takes up ever so slightly more of the screen until the article is a postage stamp in the middle like I'm playing Quake on an old machine in 1997.

Well, they finally started appealing to me, because the new crop cares less about trying to survive and more about building stuff.

Also known as the Daisuke Ishiwatari method.

A Linux OS isn't enough either; I know from experience with a GPD Win 2. You really need a distro that is built with gamepad controls at the forefront. There are far too many ways for things to steal focus from the game window or require keyboard input unless you intercept those calls the way Valve does on SteamOS.

I know my resistance probably doesn’t accomplish much

It does. Besides not giving that game your time and money, you're instead putting it in some other game that's making what you want, and they probably need your time and money more to keep doing that.

I can tell you from experience that you'll have a better time with plenty of old Assassin's Creed games by not having the DLC in the picture to affect your opinion of the total package.

Do they sell a good product at a fair price? Do I know what's in it and get what I'm paying for? Is it future-proofed such that what I bought won't disappear if the seller turns off their servers? Does it refrain from using shady tactics to manipulate me into buying something I don't want?

If the answers to all of those questions are "yes", then it doesn't bother me. For instance, Paradox games. Lots of people seem to feel like they need all of the content for a given game, but I don't understand it. They released what they had for a full game at launch, and then while a large portion of that team can move on to prototyping their next game, a smaller team remains behind to come up with some goodies that you can modify that base game with to keep it fresh, if you're interested. It's low cost for them to improve the game at a systemic level, and if what they put out isn't good enough, you can just not buy it and still play the game you already enjoyed. It isn't any less complete just because they decided to attach more game to it, and this is far better for both parties than selling a sequel every year that's the same as last year's but with a tiny bit extra.

When it comes to cosmetics like Mortal Kombat's, it doesn't bother me that they exist. They're horrendously overpriced, so I never even consider buying them, because they're terrible value. There's also the shop timers that would fall under "shady tactics to [attempt to] manipulate me", so that's not cool. Far worse though is how much of that game is arbitrarily tied to server checks, including a couple of unlocks in the base game. Also not cool is that they replaced Krypt with Invasions. The Krypt was a metroidvania-esque dungeon crawl, and while it too was designed to get you to grind a bunch or spend a bunch of extra money, it was actually fun to solve. Invasions is just bot matches but worse, and it's tied behind server checks, because people like me used Cheat Engine to bypass the Krypt grind in MKX rather than spend $20 on Kombat Koins. I really enjoy MK, but they're stepping right up to, and sometimes dancing over, the line.

This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it's very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They'll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.

I just started typing in common video game title words in Steam's search, and I found several games just called "Void". We can extrapolate that scenario out and say maybe a new game is the first one on Steam to be called Void, but maybe there was an old DOS game called Void that came to Steam later after rights issues have been resolved. There's also the very common situation of a remake and its original version both being available on Steam, and maybe different companies own the rights to each one, like Star Wars: Battlefront. Perhaps these and other reasons are why those checks don't exist, but maybe they will now if these sorts of scams become more common.

It sure sounds like the money spent on those deals makes less and less sense, so I'll bet we see less of them going forward. Already the exclusivity period for this game is down to only about 3 months.

No, as per the article, this is a person pulling strings.

It has been the beginning of a paradigm shift. This is just to lay people off without paying severance.

But can't you see the other comments in this thread? Clearly this encourages piracy for some reason and is worse than EA somehow.

On the other hand, maybe they took a look at Helldivers and decided to keep going down that route anyway.

Assassin's Creed has just been doing numbers basically since forever, which is why Ubisoft turned into a machine that puts out one of those games every year. Valhalla was no exception. Mirage, however, is the exception. Ubisoft showed their lack of confidence in the title by pricing it lower. It was no secret to those who followed its development that it was spun out of a DLC for Valhalla, and reviews reflected the amount of effort Ubisoft put into it.

Preservation is why it's important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn't because I couldn't afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven't pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I'm not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don't care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn't matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I'm sure you have too. I'd love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There's no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I'll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Long-term, it is in fact cheaper to not pay 900 people than it is to pay them.