WERLD PREMIEEEEEERE

Transcript:

Much like Darkest Dungeon, game development is a dynamic and challenging effort where tough choices must be made using imperfect information. Making and releasing a game is an uncertain endeavor, with treasures never guaranteed. But that uncertainty should lie in the marketplace, not with fundamental business terms around which a project was built.

We believe Unity has made a grave misstep in introducing a poorly thought out fee mechanic and then compounded that threefold by making it apply to games that have already been released. We are sympathetic to the idea that companies must sometimes change how they operate, but these changes should be carefully planned, communicated, and enacted in such a way that partners may choose whether they wish to accept these new rules for their next projects.

We built Darkest Dungeon II using Unity, and a large part of our decision to do so was the relative cost certainty around the license and subscription model. We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on licenses, and far more than that in engaging Unity to help us with parts of development. It is hard for us to imagine building another game with Unity unless we know we are protected from the possibility of massive changes to how we pay for that technology being introduced at the whims of executive management.

Part of game development is knowing when a mechanic is not working and then having the courage to swallow your ego and undo the mistake. We call on Unity to recant this blunder.

Let's put a cap on how much excess energy the body can store as fat. Sure, some amount is fine and has a number of uses, but just let me poop some excess calories out. I'd only need more if I were to hibernate.

Thinking on it, I want to hibernate too, please.

While we're at it from animals, how about upping some of our regeneration? Teeth don't regrow? Naw, constant regen please. I get too big of a cut and I get a scar? Let's let everything regrow from being lost if you can survive without it. Also why doesn't the brain heal? Most important part of the body and each crack's there for life. Let me get my serotonin back already, slacker.

Also what's with this getting assigned a gender thing? You don't even get to know what it means before you have one! And then we build society as if this coin flip was the seed to the tree of life. Let people choose and switch naturally, please and thank you.

So make something new. Microsoft is in desperate need of defining series rather than Halo and Gears of War, both of which are the types of games he's criticizing here.

How are there so many hero shooters but zero good ones?

Interesting considering "record engagement." I can't imagine that was just a lie, was it?

There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon's web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.

I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.

So far up his own ass he's back out the mouth and heading for a second entry

Seems a lot like competing launchers, a lot of companies want a slice of the pie that Valve discovered but aren't willing to do the same amount of work. I've heard good things about the Ally, at least.

I don't see the methodology in here, so any influence I could guess is pure speculation. The mentioned lack of strategy games is a possible culprit. This would also prevent people from discovering an interest, as new eyes wouldn't be on the genre. I'm sure a lot of people discovered they like some RPGs via Baldur's Gate 3. One I might suggest exploring is that as gaming expanded in audience to different types of people, the new members would proportionately be less interested in deep strategy skewing the average interest as a whole. As a guess, a lot of people who have gotten into gaming via their phone are more interested in things that can be done while focusing on something else or something with a shorter run time than the typical strategy game.

I feel like Steam would make more than 12 billion pounds in the time it would take for a take over to finalize

Unfortunately, creative industries are notoriously difficult to get into and so anything that will help someone "get their foot in the door" will seem attractive to those who dream of getting in.

I am unplugged from a lot of advertising, but this seems very much like a game that is spreading due to word of mouth/direct exposure rather than purely marketing driven. I know that I usually wait at least a year to pick up games, especially multiplayer games since I'm almost always playing those solo. Enough people I know actually got this one and praised it, though, leading me to break my habits and pick it up.

The fact that CoD had ads later in the show made it all the sweeter

I fucking hate corpo garbage. It's not even warning no growth, just less. "It won't be as much bigger as it was during the pandemic induced soaring. Quick, make a short sighted decision for immediate gains without regard to long term effects."

It wasn't great, but expecting great from this would be like expecting actual game industry insights from E3 in the latter half of its life. They've been slowly easing out of some of the egregious things they do, even, like advertising 'robots'

I will say that some of the speeches were extremely rushed for the amount of fluff they have in there, and I didn't care for all the rapid fire "no one cares about these" awards. I'd actually like more expounding on some of them, like talk more about game soundtracks, audio design, accessibility, and "impact" in their categories. You could probably fit this in just from cutting out each time someone said 'world premiere.'

They've succeeded in at least giving 'Game of the Year' a point of reference, even if every game in the world can get a Game of the Year edition. They'll have to try much harder if they want it to be the prestigious event they're dressing up as.

Let's put aside the many, many problems of insurance companies in reality and talk in terms of two parties acting in good faith for ease of demonstration.

Let's take random person Alice who has insured her wrench set at Insurance Company X. Her wrench set is very important to her job and she only believes in high quality tools, so it is quite expensive. So expensive, that if something were to happen to it, she might not be able to replace it right away. Instead, she pays Company X for an insurance policy. Alice can afford to pay a little bit every month and so this is a good set up.

Uh oh, an impromptu stomp band raided Alice's store and appropriated her wrenches as drumsticks. They're ruined! Luckily, Alice is insured and Insurance Company X pays her for replacement wrenches.

Unfortunately for Company X, Alice needed new wrenches before her monthly payments would exceeded the price of the wrenches. So how did they have the money? Well, they have more customers than just Alice. They use some of the money that they get from others to help buy the wrench set in the same way some of Alice's money is used with other problems as a way to socialize the losses.

As you might guess, this requires more people. More people contributing at once means a bigger pool of money that can cover bigger individual losses when the time comes. As such, Insurance Company X uses a portion of the money they get to recruit more users and thereby make their system work better.

But also greed. Lots and lots of greed.

Not to defend this game in particular, but criticizing a game for its length vs cost alone is a bad trend that leads to Ubisoft-esque bloat and padding. There are plenty of shorter games that were well worth the price (Revengence, Titanfall 2, Portal 2, hell, most of Valve's full single player games to name some)

This is all I can ever think of when games brag about so much procedural generation.

It felt it at the time. I also think this was the same time that 76 was revealed? I remember reading that they were trying to boost their value for the incoming Microsoft buyout by getting some live service games on their docket (76, Youngblood, Redfall). As meh as they've become, the feeling I had playing Oblivion for the first time is a dragon I don't think I'll ever catch again, no matter how much I chase.

In no particular order:

Metal Gear Rising Revengence

Psychonauts 1

Bladed Fury

Ori and the Blind Forest

Titanfall 2

OneShot

Undertale

Unpacking

Portal/Portal 2

Bastion/Transistor

Any member of the Shadowrun RPG trilogy

Little Inferno

Planetarian

We have the technology to make an infinite variety of characters and we're just using it to recreate the limitations of real life.

No, however I think there might be a bit of a trap here that skews perception for some. Namely, that the automatic tools are intended to fix problems simple enough that more technical minded people would attempt the solutions it uses themselves before resorting to a troubleshooter.

They're probably waiting for The Last of Us Remastered Remastered for that

Unfortunately they're trapped. If they lowered the price of food and raised the price of admission to compensate people wouldn't notice. In fact, they wouldn't even make it to the food to see, they'd just know that one cinema has $10 admission and the other has $20.

They could advertise that they have lower concession cost to attract people, but there would be enough people thinking "I'll just go to the cheap one and bring my own food/not buy food." that momentum wouldn't move into their favor.

Not who you asked, but I also refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I am constantly listening to music/podcasts/audiobooks on my phone while out and greatly prefer using wired headphones over wireless for a number of reasons-

-Bluetooth can be finicky in connection. No matter the pair I've used, just the act of walking can make the connection falter at times and there's no way to fix it

-Bluetooth headphones have a much worse cost/performance ratio than wired when it comes to sound quality.

-I use the mic when taking calls and even a cheap wired mic is dramatically better than any bluetooth one

-Wired headphones don't have a battery. This is huge for me. I hate, hate, hate it when caught out and my headphones run out of battery. Additionally, batteries put a life span on electronics that I like not having to think about with my headphones.

-Simplicity. If I want to use my headphones, I plug them in. If I don't, I unplug them. I can quickly switch to a new device when I want to use them on something else. I don't have to think about what they are paired with at any time or fiddle with it when swapping devices

-Small case, but I like that when I need to take my headphones out for a bit, I can just ease one out and leave it wrapped around my ear rather than deal with the case just to talk to a cashier

NY main criticism as an observer is that they don't seem to use anything except for the Minecraft aesthetic, as if that is the key to what made Minecraft popular. You'd think these games would have some building aspect to them.

Turns out pissing everyone off wasn't the most profitable of strategies. I'm sure they'll give it a few more tries before ruling it out, however.

The biggest thing holding me back from getting one has been the console lock. I have a PS5 but would want to use it on PC more. I've thought about saving for an Index but know that the moment I buy one is the moment they announce Index 2

Man, I miss early mobile gaming. There was a period where you could go down the trending list and find quite a few interesting games. Now its flooded with rip offs, trash, and gacha games. You'll occasionally find one where the dev cared, but the majority of anything worth playing there are just mobile ports of console/PC games.

The Game Awards is by no means innocent of this, but it has glimmers of sincerity at times and this is one of them.

Really wish Sega would experiment a bit with lower budget and lower stakes games with these dormant IP.. Crazy Taxi could be great but I don't think it will be a smash success. There's plenty of room for more good middle shelf games which I think this would be perfect for.

Walmart's not going to be a good model, there, as while the chance of abuse being the cause might not be 100%, it hangs out near enough 100 to know more than a few intimate things about it.

If you're asking someone to collect your groceries, maybe pay them to do so. Tips are broken as a concept, so whatever there.

Which is weird because they don't seem to understand a lot of the appeal of Minecraft and tend to boil it down to the aesthetic. When seeing talk of Minecraft dungeons, I was amazed that there was no dungeon crafting tool. Seems like it would have added a ton of value to a game and made it far more related to a game about... crafting.

I swear, every third white male protagonist is named Jack.

I expect a large amount of this is the disastrous Xbox One launch as it was an exclusive there for a while. The PC release having features stripped didn't help, but I imagine the idea of investing additional money at that point felt like throwing good money after bad. I mainly hope that Insomniac doesn't become just a Marvel studio, though.

As someone who hates talking on the phone, I do not mind a bit that we're moving away from voice communications

Cinematic was fun, but was not expecting a hero shooter from it. Was a bit deflated when they revealed it as "5 v 5 shooter"

Roses are red, this drink's made from laudanum...

Cool, cool, cool, but where's Jarjar? Asking for a friend