BudgieMania

The tradeoff kinda made sense at the dawn of streaming, when the transaction was basically trading quality for better pricing and convenience.

Nowadays? Yeaaaaah I don't know about that chief

Crazy to think that we lost all the advantages that streaming offered, kept all the disadvantages, piled on a few more disadvantages on top of that, and people went "sure that makes sense 24 bucks a month worth it bro"

because every additional layer of abstraction disrupts communication with the Machine Spirit even further

Reject the idea of an absolute GOTY, normalize a Mt. Rushmore style "Best of the Year" selection.

Games can be great in so many different ways, many of which are somewhat exclusive with each other, that I've never understood the concept of saying that one was absolutely better than the rest.

To paraphrase Churchill "Never was so much owed by so many to a single man", NTP has been a critical aspect of XXIst century, from making highly complex clusterized systems work reliably to saving you the pain of adjusting the clock in your smartphone. If you have used even a single networked electronic device for a millisecond in your life, you owe the man some thanks.

Oooof that's unfortunate, it was the platform for reasonably priced VR systems that weren't made by Facebook (I refuse to acknowledge their rebrand), even if it wasn't the best software...

This is basically another step towards a situation in which your only VR options are either high end Valve offerings or buying into the Facebook ecosystem.

I'm not surprised about this. The game was developed entirely around what it would have rather than around what the player would do and you can tell.

I can imagine the initial pitch meetings, with everyone going "whoaaa it will have hundreds of solar systems and biomes whoaaah" and no one going "ok, but what does the player do in them". A few other guys enthusiastically saying "There will be spaceship building and you will get a crew and explore with it" and not a soul in the room thinking of "ok, but how will we make space travel work within our current systems and technology? Can we make it substantial?". And this way of thinking probably permeated every second of development for the first few years.

The game is chockful of vestigial systems that they had obviously intended to be more significant and in depth, but ultimately decided not to develop further, yet still maintained in the game in a manner that only harms the game. The fuel "system", the contraband "system"... So many examples of stuff that doesn't add anything to the game, yet was still maintained because man-hours and money went into it I guess, and because the "and it will have that and that" mentality tool a priority over player experience, player agency, and actual game design.

If I can circlejerk for a bit, this is one of the reasons why Baldurs Gate 3's release and success is so timely. How many areas, how many biomes, how many systems, how many quests and how many square kilometers does that game have versus Starfield? 30 times less? 50 times less? Yet it had an overwhelmingly positive reception where Starfield didn't because its elements put player experience first. Yes it has less quests, but most are super modular and super reactive and not afraid to let you solve them in janky or silly ways that go out of the suggested solutions; yes it has fewer areas smaller in size, but you are constantly coming across stuff to do. Etc etc etc.

I'm really hoping that that contrast changes design philosophies just a tad in the future. Start with how a normal hour for your player looks like. Confirm that your technology can deliver your vision before committing to it, experience be damned. Don't reach for the stars, because contrary to what they say, it won't at least get you the moon, it will just leave you stranded in the middle of bumfucknowhere in space.

And, as we saw in Starfield, that means you get yet another annoying load cutscene.

I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.

Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.

Nah, not so much a failure on your part as a failure on the part of a society that elects to glorify people that "move ball good" or "say line funny" over the people that have built the pillars without which our modern society literally would not exist in the same manner.

You see, if you pirate a couple textbooks in college because you don't have resources, but you want to earn your right to participate in society and not starve, it's called theft.

But if one of the top 10 companies in the world does the same with thousands of books just to get even richer, it's called fair use.

Simple, really.

The fact that the same user reinstalling the game counts as 2 installs makes this doubly absurd. The decision is already baffling by itself but the idea that you could take a financial hit for an install that didn't net you any additional income is... Jesus.

Great, so no more Saints Row 2 fix for PC I’m guessing, just great.

Which would be kinda fucking wild considering it was literally someone's dying wish and something they passionately worked on even while they were dying... That project not coming to fruition due to financial quarter this, franchise expectations... that would be absolutely ghoulish.

The sentence "I lost my gear / They took my gear" has never been followed by a fun part in any videogame, ever

I've seen worse timing than this from swiss watches

If they wanted me to follow some rules that I'm apparently expected to know to make everyone comfortable, maybe they should've taught me that in school instead of trigonometry -_-

I probably owe that man a good part of my living. Proof that even gods are mortal

Swiss watches are famous for their reliability, style and precision

I wonder how many times I will have to see a publisher significantly harm their reputation in the PC market in a yolo bet to set up their own ecosystem and store.

I thought Sony had been conservative and decided against it when their first steam releases hit but with this move it seems possible that a Sony PC ecosystem was always in the works and it just wasn't ready for those original releases. Oh well.

I just hope that these companies don't have the gall to complain about a lack of manpower or expertise availability a few years down the line. Because by coordinating all these layoffs, they are currently creating a vacuum in which a lot of professionals in the industry won't have any chance to acquire experience and develop their skills, and many will probably have to change their career trajectory significantly just to ensure their economic well-being. And once they see how greener the grass is outside the videogame industry, let me assure you, they won't be coming back.

If you are not willing to stick with your professionals through your thin, you don't deserve their availability and effort through your thick.

This, for me, is a good example of why the assessments that I've seen lately about how much Lemmy/Kbin may or may not have caught on, and the assessments about how Reddit may or may not have been impacted by the migration, are way, way too early and kind of nonsensical to make right now.

It is important to understand that Reddit is set on becoming a public company, and for a public company, not taking any avenue that could provide additional revenue is essentially only one step below setting that money on fire. If there's a chance that something will make the company more efficient, you are kinda obligated to do it. This will constantly (and increasingly) lead to policies like this, which sacrifice user convenience or add additional friction to the experience, because an experience that is open, accessible, non-intrusive and non-restrictive inherently implies lost opportunities of revenue at each one of those unrestricted points (which is a weird paradox of digital capitalism, in which to make your product more profitable it has to become worse, which flies in the face of the traditional capitalist theory that you make the most money by making the best product, but that's another story and I don't wanna get sidetracked).

Anyway what I wanna get at, is that each person has their own points of friction (mobile becoming app-only, old reddit dissappearing, who knows) past which they would find the idea of transferring platform less intrusive than the experience they would get by staying on Reddit. And the fact that cutting Google off is even in the realms of discussion shows that Reddit is very willing to reach those points and beyond. If these changes pile up and the friction created in the experience by them becomes significantly greater than the idea of transferring platforms, then it's not outside the realm of possibility that Reddit will bleed out slowly by taking actions like this. Time will tell.

It sure is fascinating how surges in the usage of pirate platforms tend to coincide with eras of worsening value proposition in entertainment. We should really get some top notch analysts on this to get an explanation.

I really really hope that the expectation vs reality of Starfield is the final straw that makes people pause the next time a game markets itself as having an scope and quality that is absurdly beyond anything else on the market.

We have seen this story time and time again and the claims never, ever, materialize on launch. Maybe they get closer to the initial scope over the next few years if they can afford continued development and support, but that's exactly the point, that you need way more man hours and budget than what is acceptable in a realistic development cycle to reach that kind of scope while maintaining overall quality of the game.

The next time that a game claims to have absurd size or whatever million planets or that you can be anything you want or whatever other immense thing like that, ask yourself what parts of the game have taken a significant backseat to achieve that. Because we are well past the point of the industry having proven that the limitations for the scope of a game are not technical anymore, but budgetary. And there's only so much that can be done in 8 years.

I feel so bad for them, there are few things in software dev worse than having to devote significant time and effort to a project that is failed at a concept level

I don't remember names, but many users around here called this to the letter

To further your point, I would add Mixer. Msoft gave up on it just months before Twitch made a series of controversial moves that would have been the perfect moment to strike with an alternative.

I think that part of the difference there is also that Apple is really good at marketing their products into "the cool thing to have" and a status symbol, a lot of their products don't necessarily gain steam based purely on their functionality but more based on their ability to make it the hottest latest thing to have.

But you don't understand, I totally need that 30$ Oceania expansion for my Wingspan that I will play maybe twice a year

Well it was replacing the tile-silliness of Windows 8, any OS that booted would receive some goodwill in comparison

Don't these places keep their own source?

There've been some cases of remastering projects being affected by the loss of some of the source material, such as the Silent Hill HD Project

Which is why I find the negative attitude of so many of these companies toward emulation and fan conservation of abandonware so frustrating, there's a proven track record that they cannot be trusted with the task.

And we have been paying for it ever since. They will never make that mistake again lol.

Time to make yet another character

This time I won't go STR/FTH, I swear

(I will)

Subscription-based services already change the agreement of a transaction too much in favor of the provider, because it goes from "convince me that your product is good enough to go through the hassle of obtaining it" to "convince me that your product is bad enough to go through the hassle of cancelling it". It is only fair to try to tilt it in favor of the consumer as much as possible.

Wonder if they regret having used that development time on Starfield instead of a new Fallout, because with this renewed interest due to the show a Fallout 5 would have done ridiculously well

Yeah this type of "thing in Reddit happens..." articles have been going on for a long time, ever since it took off. It's what drove me off traditional media and into reddit in the first place, so many articles were "Redditor does this" "Redditor discovers that" that I eventually was like fuck it why wouldn't I just go to the source of all of this lol

I really wanna hear what the proposal is for removing "unqualified" jobs en masse without implementing universal basic income.

The low pay and bad conditions of "unqualified" jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are "stepping stones", a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.

If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people? Are we so drunk on cyberpunk-esque lust of AI evolution that we are fine eliminating the means of entry to society for so many?

Wish I could feel sorry, but so much of the NFT audience responded with such smugness and superiority to any warning and criticism, that it is hard to summon any other feeling than schadenfreude

I'm surprised that they found yet another new way of making the Superstonk folk look like a delusional cult

If this is true... Oof...
Like, imagine losing your job because somebody decided to drop over 70 milion in something like this... I bet everybody affected would have predicted that this needed to be canned way earlier. Yet the people responsible for this unforced error will be largely unaffected because since business is accepted to be a gamble at times, I guess that means you get to make stupid mistakes that ruin hundreds of livelihoods for no reason and just go oops, my bad, we'll have to do a tactical restructuring I guess.
Seriously, the first trailer was unanimously received with "another one of these games?" reactions. There is no excuse for any dollar spent after that! Anybody could have told you it was a miss! Aaaarrrgh.

Also much less important but still frustrating, knowing that so many properties under SEGA have struggled to get a budget and support, while they were spending all of the money in a fire pit instead. Now that it's been cancelled, we can say ANYTHING would have been a better use of that money. Don't ever let SEGA tell you that anything would be a bad project ever again! Oh, SEGA, you still think a localized port to modern platforms of Valkyria Chronicles 3 would be a bad project? Well let me tell you, it sure as hell wouldn't have lost DOZENS OF MILLIONS.

And in that line, nothing hurts more for me personally than knowing all of the issues that the Total War franchise has had, with products that didn't get the development time they needed, additional content policies that went way overboard with pricing, very small degree of evolution and investment between entries... And the money that could have gone to that consistently performing franchise that has no true substitute competitors was instead going to... To burn it in a pit with funny colors and masks and dances and...

Man, I just cannot. Man.

People watch the announcements, they put up with the awards

Straight up the same playbook that other entities used in the past to get your grandma to install unwanted search bars in internet explorer. No wonder Windows Defender is so advanced, Microsoft has a lot of experience as the developer of the most popular malware in the world.

common firefox w

and yet chrome will still be the default for most people

Bored with driving your car with a wheel and pedals? Change the default handling device in your vehicle