ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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106

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2,451

Joined

1 yr. ago

This game is set in Florida. It's pretty evergreen. Especially given the political climate for the past 8 years

Nah, you can unsubscribe after a month. If the price of the games you want is more expensive than a month of Prime, you come out ahead, and it can frequently work out in your favor.

I have no ill will toward Gerstmann, but there came a point where he became very unentertaining, so when I heard he was gone, it was a good signal for me to give them another try, and Grubb fit into that old Gerstmann interviewer role very well while also being a more positive guy and someone who might break some news. They had a really good group, and Blight Club was an all-timer Giant Bomb show.

If you listen to episode 888, you'll hear pretty quickly exactly why they got fired and why they thought it was important to do what they did.

I fell off just post-pandemic, but I came back when Gerstmann left, and it was great for a long while again.

Yeah, it just launches a web browser in the client, but behind the scenes, it's using a referral code in partnership with GOG to make sure they get a cut. So you can support DRM-free and Linux gaming support at the same time.

Yeah, there's always someone bringing this up, but you can't just run Steam on it, and that's what's about to change. Xbox games still go through cert and need explicit ports above and beyond the PC SKU.

It's looking like GB is now dead. At the very least, I'm confident I'll continue to get Blight Club and Jeff's news show, even though they won't be at a site called Giant Bomb. Hopefully everyone else found a place where they can land on their feet. Their personal brands are stronger than Fandom's.

Breaking news: Grubb seems to have been let go.

If Episode 888 is the last Bombcast, it will leave the world with the integrity that created it in the first place. Give it a listen, when you get around to it.

See my other comment below, but the gist of it is that they were told to pause streaming for a while as everyone tries to figure out a path forward. They put out one Bombcast that rebelled against the new Fandom "values", and you can find a link to it if you look through Bluesky or the Giant Bomb reddit. They're still paused, and it's been about a week now. It might be the end of Giant Bomb, in which case, Grubb, Mike, and Dan have sworn to keep doing Blight Club, and the others are probably preparing their parachutes too. It also might not be the end of Giant Bomb; nothing's been decided yet, and everyone currently still has their jobs.

They've been owned by Fandom for a little while now, and they even made some good changes lately, but then someone a few rungs up the corporate ladder was replaced with someone who decided to make a pretty huge change to the company that basically compromises the entire point of Giant Bomb, if not also Gamespot.

Giant Bomb also going through some shit right now. They just put up a podcast with a big middle finger to their new bosses, and it got pulled.

EDIT: Giant Bomb may be dead as of this afternoon.

Another option is to buy through Heroic Games Launcher. Heroic gets a cut, and GOG sees what they'd have to do to earn your entire dollar.

The breadth of the Game Pass catalog is far larger, and Microsoft isn't exiting the console market, as much as they don't care about exclusivity. So personally, I doubt it, but I don't have a crystal ball.

A lot of games priced at $70 right now are having a rough go of it, so charging more on top of that isn't going to help, but there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50. If your game isn't as hot of a commodity as Mario Kart, you're probably going to try to lure people in with a lower price.

They'll only get Game Pass on PlayStation with Sony's blessing, which is unlikely. And the next Xbox will just be a PC. I don't think any of the consoles are in the market of selling units at a loss anymore. Those days are done. So with tariffs and inflation, this is the only way it could go.

You haven't even played the games I mentioned. How on earth would you know? Also, take a look at the credits of Crash Bandicoot, and learn something about how games are made. 84 people, including the publisher and marketing. Naughty Dog itself was only 9 people. Here's Indika, a cinematic puzzle/story game, not a far cry from 2018's God of War without the combat, an indie game from last year; the development studio dwarfs Naughty Dog from the 90s. UFO 50 is an indie game from last year that has 50 full, new, original games contained in it, designed to portray a fictional game development studio's catalog from the 80s. It was made by 6 people over the course of 7 years. And I'm clueless, huh?

Trying to raise the "standard" price to $80 will have very nice ripple effects of more pricing diversity, where each game will really consider what it's actually worth, which we haven't had for a long time. Even now we're getting first-party Microsoft titles releasing at $20, $30, and $50.

The Metal Gear Solid games are some of my favorites, and I've played all of them. If you're referring to the PS1 Crash Bandicoot games, those were made with similar team sizes and "levels of effort" as most games that would be called "indie" are today, for very similar economic reasons. Blue Prince was made over the course of 8 years largely by one person, and I guarantee you he wasn't trying to find a way to make bank by doing little effort; a famous development talk pointed out that people getting into game development to make big bucks with little effort would have been better off opening a Subway franchise instead. Balatro was also made largely by one person, and it was a nominee for Game of the Year last year. Split Fiction was made with a team size and project scope reminiscent of MGS2 or 3, and it too will be a Game of the Year contender.