I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.
I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.
Nah, it doesn't just linearly double like that. If it takes 10 people to build, test, and support the launcher for Windows, it doesn't take 20 people to support Linux, since most of it is going to be the same across platforms. A 1.8% increase in sales also isn't the best prediction. On Steam, the vast majority of their players and revenue are accounted for by just a couple of the most popular games, and a lot of that is dictated by what games are allowed or successful in China. If your game isn't selling in China, your addressable market is actually much closer to being 4.5% Linux. That's not to pick on China, but China is a massive market on its own, and it's the difference between the case where you're selling microtransactions in Counter-Strike 2 or if you're selling a metroidvania.
Thanks a bunch. If I get the answers I'm looking for, maybe GOG will be my go-to.
Are you sure you're thinking of the right game? This game lists LAN play on its features and allows you to host private servers. It's been on my radar for precisely those reasons.
Less incentive, but 1.7% of a huge number of customers may still be profitable.
Neat. I was aware of Heroic before, but I haven't heard of this. This does change the equation for me, because now there's a data point that GOG can use to see where my money's going and how they can get more of it. What can you tell me about their refund policy? Are the results on ProtonDB just as reliable for GOG versions as they are for Steam versions of games? Does Heroic pre-compile Vulkan shaders the way that Proton on Steam enforces it? Whatever answers you don't have, I can do some of my own homework, but I'm intrigued now.
Do you have a source on Heroic getting a cut? I can't find it in their FAQ.
Setup is annoying, and feedback on whether or not it's working is a bit rough. I've lost data by misconfiguring it before. You have to run a background daemon on a device where battery life matters, so I tend to shut it off when I'm done. Syncing saves with SyncThing requires knowing where those save files are, whereas being built into the launcher client means they already know where those saves are, and that step is already done.
I want auto updates for my games so close to "always" that you can only tell it's not 100% if you squint a bit. I use Syncthing in other contexts, like syncing emulator saves to and from desktop and Steam Deck, and it's not quite as easy as Steam cloud saves.
Yes, that's the selling point, but I also value automatic updates and cloud saves most of the time.
Yeah, but I want things like auto updates and cloud saves as officially supported features rather than something they can revoke from Heroic at any time.
They don't even need to invest in its development. They just need to integrate it as a launch option.
Please give us Galaxy on Linux, GOG, so I can shop with you over Steam.
The question for me is how much less I'm willing to pay for a game that made me wait past GOTY/spoiler season to play it, because I'm not paying $70 for it anymore.
They're called platform fighters. And I doubt this thing has an offline mode, so no thanks.
It felt more like a retroactive beta, like taking back a move in chess saying your hand was still on the piece when they realized it wasn't working out.
Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.
And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?
That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you're in a market dominating position like they are.
Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.
This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it's stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can't ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it's doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I'm no analyst. There's certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there's no Blu Ray copy of it, you're just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else's machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.
Gen Z is coming through and they're going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?
And when consoles aren't so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it's not like there's a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.
I'm back into Final Fantasy VII, which I've never finished before. I've been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It's very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I've got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I'm lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you're trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I'm hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.
I'm replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I'm not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I'd enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.
I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.
Now that I've finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I'm back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.
Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.
That’s no excuse to try to get a user’s account banned.
I'd say it is. They highlight the part of Steam's rules against harassment, and while that's always subject to interpretation, they feel that this counts, and I'm inclined to agree.
The steam group had like 1000 people now it has almost 200,000 after the whole debacle.
Before this group blew up, YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers were already making their bullshit conspiracy theories. People try to paint this as Streisand, but that's ridiculous. The Streisand effect is trying to hide something, which you still seem convinced they're trying to do despite highlighting their clients on their web page and getting listings in the credits of the games they work on. What it looks like to me instead is that:
- sensationalist YouTubers paint this company as the devil
- this curator is made in response
- it gets a natural, human reaction from the people targeted by this group
- the YouTubers from step 1 use that reaction to mean whatever they want it to mean
In no way did I foresee a way that this group didn't continue on the same trajectory with or without Sweet Baby responding to its existence.
SomeOrdinaryGamer made a good video highlighting stupidity from both sides.
I've seen one video from SomeOrdinaryGamers, and it was too many, but he's cited in this article as perpetuating the bullshit conspiracy theories, so I'm good.
Sweet Baby Inc doesn't even remotely do what many think it does, but on the modern internet, that doesn't matter
Sweet Baby Inc doesn't even remotely do what many think it does, but on the modern internet, that doesn't matter
There's a warning at the top, but I'm curious as to the "why". The comments that may or may not be visible seem to be a roll of the dice as well. If I respond to someone in a comment, I have no idea if they can see it.
Gameplay footage of Timesplitters 2 remake has surfaced online thanks to a former developer on the project.
I'd heard they spent a few years making TimeSplitters into Fortnite before making a proper TimeSplitters game, but if this was what they had toward the end of development, maybe we're better off with this game getting cancelled. And that sucks.
They still seem to be working with Microsoft on their next project, but they're hopefully in a better spot as a result of this transition.
Gearbox is leaving the Embracer fallout behind as devs wait for a answers on what’s next
That title sure is editorialized. Thanks, Kotaku...
I don't see a buyer disclosed, but Gearbox carries a substantial number of studios along with them.
A group of private investors is said to be buying the…
Sold to a group of private investors. $500M sounds like too much money, but whatever keeps those people employed and making games, I guess.
This show is an aggregator of news stories normally, sometimes with original reporting from Jeff Grubb. In today's edition, Grubb brought in stories reporting that Starfield and Indiana Jones are in Microsoft's talks for PlayStation releases, with Indiana Jones being looked at for some time down the road after initial launch. Grubb adds to this reporting by saying that he's seen financial projections around acquisitions like Bethesda, and this multiplatform strategy was not always the plan. They thought that Starfield and others would do much better for them by remaining exclusive, so he posits that these changes are almost certainly in response to how the likes of Starfield did in sales and Game Pass subscriptions. Grubb also reports that Gears of War is being looked at for a PlayStation release.
To pepper in some of my own opinion here, I don't see a world where Xbox survives this as a traditional console. And as a result of that, I don't see a world where Sony left unchecked by competition will behave. I think this could be the beginning of the wildest shake-up to the video game market since it began.
Death Stranding 2, Until Dawn for PS5/PC, and more
You know how in the early 2000s, a lot of PC games got sequels on consoles, and players complained that they removed complexity from the game to make it work on consoles? This feels like that. I don't see anything here about quests, skills, character sheets, or different ways to solve problems depending on your character's strengths. The skill point system from the previous game is replaced with a more commonplace XP system, judging from the UI; note that I've never played the pen and paper game, so maybe this is closer to what the pen and paper game is or has become in the past 20 years, for all I know, but I really appreciated how Bloodlines 1 did it.
I knew back when this game was handed to The Chinese Room that something like this was possible, but I thought surely they'd respect the reputation of the project they're working on and try to do it justice. Surely they'd attempt to make an actual sequel to that game, even if they aren't good at it. It doesn't appear so.
Looks at Ara: History Untold, Avowed, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, and Visions of Mana.
I was already excited for Avowed, and now Indiana Jones looks to be as good as I'd hoped but far better than I expected, hot off the heels of Bethesda's live service endeavors.
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a…
And a look at the flawed, marketing-centric rationale behind designing games to disappear, leaving the customer with nothing.
The Nintendo Switch 2 is supposed to launch in September 2024, according to a press release from Ai Shark (formerly Game Shark).
The Nintendo Switch 2 is supposed to launch in September 2024, according to a press release from Ai Shark (formerly Game Shark).
UPDATE (in article): Both Digital Trends and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier have now reported receiving statements from Altec Lansing that seem conflictingly to double down on the Fall 2024 date and also claim the date is "guesswork." What's likely happening here is that Altec Lansing was, in fact, making an educated guess on the date of the Switch's release based on internal industry conversations as well as analyst models. Whatever the case, we'll have to wait for Nintendo's official word to find out the real date.
Okay, it's happening, everybody stay calm.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there's a precedent for this: a pirate MMO server has been granted an official license to continue operating legally. At the moment, it sounds like this is a deal applying to this one City of Heroes server, but hey, baby steps. City of Heroes was the only MMO I ever got really into; I had a max level telekinetic Defender named Spoonman whose battle cry was "All my friends are skeletons!" mapped to the F10 key. I don't intend to go back and play it again on this server, but this game, and every other MMO, deserves to be preserved. It should be standard that we're allowed to run our servers if we so choose, but publishers probably only went down the path of making an MMO in the first place because they were after that sweet, sweet subscription revenue.
The title is a bit clickbait, and I don't even necessarily agree with all of the points that Danny O'Dwyer makes here, but it's a good look back and forward at FPS games.
Personally, I'm exactly that person that Dave Oshry talked about, where people are waiting for the new blood in the development scene to loop back around and make FPSes that are closer to what we got starting approximately in the 2000s, which I'd argue lasted until about halfway through the 2010s. I want a well-paced campaign, where the levels don't feel like mazes but feel like they're somewhat rooted in a believable setting, with a handful of multiplayer maps built out of the assets used to make the campaign, not expecting it to turn into an e-sport but allowing for the pleasant surprise where it might. Co-op is welcome. Split-screen ought to be mandatory, as should LAN. Live service nowhere to be found. Open world is more likely to be a detriment than an enhancement, from what I've seen. I'm looking for the market to start catering to this demographic, that I fall into, again.
It's cancelled.
> > > To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage. > >
Those are not your only two options. Multiplayer games are not inherently live services. Some of my favorites are from a console generation where patches were impossible and the mode was thrown together in a few weeks of dev time reusing assets from the campaign. The winner of "best multiplayer" just days ago was not a live service game.
Get ready for future Batman and Harry Potter games to want even more money from your wallet
Seems like someone can't read the room on how poorly Suicide Squad is going to go after almost 9 years in the oven.
The UK-based developer was re-established just two years ago to revive the classic FPS series…
Facing closure, potentially unless Embracer finds a buyer, but a handful of devs have already been spotted looking for work, so layoffs have started.
The upcoming PlayStation 5 Slim has started to appear online, and with that comes fresh information about how the optional disc drive will work with the Digital Edition of the console.
Putting an early expiration date on your hardware purchase.
If you want to play Activision's classic skateboarding game offline, you need to play on Steam Deck
Only on Steam Deck. So that means it's trivial to allow everyone to play the game without an internet connection, but they just chose not to.
Epic Games has launched the Now on Epic program to incentivize game developers to bring games from their back catalog to the Epic Games Store.
It's an incentive for devs to put their back catalogues to EGS, after they just laid off 800 employees because they spend too much money. Is it just me, or does everyone besides Epic know what the problem is with EGS?
