That approach works for some studios and some game projects but it’s no silver bullet. A lot of times gamers don’t know what they want until it’s handed on them on a silver platter which can make taking the correct kind of feedback really difficult. Sometimes outside influence may also stray the developers from their original vision.

That being said, developing game in complete secrecy for years and expecting it to become a success has pretty much the same chance as winning in a lottery. Getting MVP out there asap to see if the game will receive any sort of traction and feedback is generally the best approach unless it already has an audience (sequel or well known developer). It can be prototype, demo or early access as long as it’s something.

[edit] Removed some repetition

Hopefully this wont be full of microtransactions even of the cosmetic kind. Monster hunter world was amazing but Capcom has become more and more greedy for the past few years.

It’s probably really tempting for them to convert Monster Hunter franchise in to a modern live service with bunch of premium cosmetics, battle passes and Fomo traps. Exoprimal and Street Fighter VI are already suffering from these.

It has also secured an age 18 rating, with mention of violence and in-game purchases.

Hopefully they don’t get too greedy.

Capcom has been slowing morphing in to becoming yet another EA, Ubisoft or Activision with the monetization in their recent games (e.g Street Fighter VI, Exoprimal). Battle passes, Fomo-traps, social pressure, skinners boxes, Denuvo etc. At least most of their games are still good if you can ingore all the bullshit.

At least in this you can probably just throw all the pawns with paid costemtics to the nearest ditch for being walking advertisements.

To Each Their Own I guess. Single player games tend to respect players time a lot more and thus usually require a lot less grinding or farming to complete. That being said Grim Dawn does have online multiplayer and community hosted seasons.

Honestly this feels like the only possible way to win against Youtube. Goal could be to just create standardized decentralized platform where number of different companies/organizations can host and serve their own content while still being searchable and accessible from single client application.

Major problem with Mastodon, Lemmy and Peertube is searching and browsing content from multiple instances is still difficult.

Sure but for how long and in what state?

There’s a lot of enshittification going around with games and services with more greedy business practices and it would be naive to think GGG is immune to it. When it comes to live service games certain level of skepticism is healthy to have. Now I do hope we’ll be able to play POE1 even 10 or 20 years from now with it being just as good.

Maybe I am just getting old but I’ve started to spend a lot more time with older games and titles that may be rough around the edges but have some unique ideas and actually take some risks with their game mechanics.

One of these games is Outward which has a lot of walking (quick travel is almost non existent) and serviceable combat system that leaves a lot to be desired. However both of these do give the game some flavor that is missing from many modern games now combine this with interesting “death” mechanic where instead of respawning you’re thrown in to random scenarios related to the area where you died. Another mechanic is backpack which you’ll need to carry any meaningful amount of items and which will limit your movement in battle if you do not drop it with all your items. The way palyer needs to sacrifice health to receive mana is also interesting and how different each mastery tree is is also nice. I do have to admit that I’d like the game a lot more without time limits on quests as they stress really me out.

Another one is Incredible adventures of Van Helsing which is diablo-style ARPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It took me awhile to understand the games mechanics which lead to bad time initially but once I understood the power-up system, focus on flat elemental damage bonuses instead of percentage based ones and how silly some skills where with power-up the game got me hooked. The dialogue and story is also pretty good for ARPG and fully voice acted.

Third one is Wurm: Unlimited which is basically special version of MMORPG Wurm: Online where players can host their own servers with their own tweaks and mods. While Wurm Online is substriction based mmorpg with very very slow progression most Wurm Unlimited servers are free to play and have quadruple experience modifiers making the game a lot more enjoyable. The game is basically medival fantasy sandbox where players can terraform the world, build all sorts of structures, hunt, farm and even do pvp on pvp servers. While a lot of the game is just pressing buttons and waiting for action timers to pass there’s a lot of depth in the game and it can get suprisingly immersive. I do however recommend joining to one of the long lasting servers like Sklotopolis instead of playing the game solo on self-hosted server as the experience is a lot better with small community even if you prefer to do things solo as the world will feel a lot more interactive and a lot less empty.

I second Grim Dawn as it’s clearly labor of love from the developers and still getting updates. I also like the fact that its not live service like Path of exile meaning that it does not require online connection and can be even be modded.

It remains to be seen with GGG will do with Path of Exile 1 when they release Path of Exile 2, it would be cool if they would release something like POE Unlimited a premium version of the game that would allow people to play the first game as single player experience, mod it and host their of servers.

But in this day and age it’s much more likely that they’ll just force people to move on to their next big thing.

Quoting what I said in earlier reply:

Neither of these where completely empty when I found them. Been updating them and filling some gaps in the wiki for the fun of it.

I have not created any wikis myself I’ve just contributed to few that I’ve found which unfortunately have been hosted on fandom.

The problem is that the content is already in wiki fandom and there are no contributors invested/interested enough to migrate all the information to alternative wiki. These fandom wikis have no teams just random individuals making contributions of various sizes.

If I do ever get invested enough to a game to actually create a wiki I’ll definately use something else than fandom.

Well old games like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut or Moero Chronicles.
Neither of these where completely empty when I found them. Been updating them and filling some gaps in the wiki for the fun of it.

Many would consider both of these games “dead” by many metrics but people can still buy them, play them and have fun with them.

All too common within attention economy for people to go for the more popular choice.
Search engine algorithms tend to make things even worse.

But there are games out there that might not even have wikis if Fandom didn’t make the barrier of entry so low.

Does this mean self-hosting the wiki?
Because that increase the barrier of entry by tenfold as a lot of publishers/game studios do not host their own wikis.

Fandom hosts a lot of wikis for long forgotten nich’e games and with these games there usually isn’t enough interest to move to another wiki. When it comes to these wikis theres rarely if ever a team behind updating the wiki and more often than not the content is just being updated and maintained by random invidividuals who just happen to be engaging with the content at given time. The very low barrier of entry makes this possible as you don’t really need to join a team to edit pages or even coordinate with other people.

When playing one of these games I like to record and share some my observations and findings about games mechanics etc but more often than not the only wiki I can find is fandom wiki that is either incomplete and possibly even abandoned. I cant be bothered to create my own Wiki for these games so I’ll just start editing that one instead because it’s easy, the foundation is usually already there and I don’t need to bother taking any sort of responsibility/mantle of maintainer or admin.

While Fandom may not be the most optimal choice and there may be better ways to host wiki out there its still better than some obnoxious google document or poorly formatted steam guide that no one else can edit.

We can make fairly accurate assumptions on prisoners rights simply based on the fact that the prison is located in Finland. Here’s article from Yle (one of the most trusted news organizations in Finland) describing finnish prisons.

Prisoners are not really in a position to negotiate, meaning you can push this work on them in a sort of non consentual way that is below what modern society should strive for

Well the article does mention that the prisoner “Marmalade” was not forced to do any of this.
In fact the article mentions that she could have spend her time in her cell, doing online courses or doing chores for the prison for little cash. The fact that wired managed to just book an interview with the prisoner also makes it quite risky for the company to subject the prisoners to any traumatizing material.

The only problem I really see with this is the fact that this doesn’t really prepare the prisoners for live outside the prison in any way.

The museum of babel already exists.

However with generative A.I you dont need artwork for every combination of pixels. Machine learning seems to be really good at finding patterns in everything we may do or think.

With generative A.I we can use this information to create increasingly more human like output. In terms of art mimic and blend art styles, create new designs based on existing ones etc.

Much more elegant and way cheaper than using brute force algorithms.

For my understanding artistic works get copyright from the moment of their creation. This would allow one to pick battles based on how lucrative they may potentially be.

You dont really need art museum of babel for this but you just tons of different works that may contain unique characters, structures or objects similar to what someone might be able to imagine or has already imagined.

You may draw fan art with disney characters but its actually illegal to sell said art work without Disneys aproval until copyright expires. Now if anyone can start churning out for example A.I generated web comics left and right the chances for almost identical designs increases by a lot.

Allowing people to copyright A.I generated art could lead to huge issues where someone could just churn out generated images like no tomorrow and throw out copyright claims left and right. It could even lead to situation where you can’t really create any art because it’s probably something that’s already been generated by someone or close to it.

If the story or it’s presentation is lacking then it’s something a lot of players may want to know before buying the game.
Now how much it should affect the actual score depends on the reviewer.