It’s funny that Aftermath is writing about bad game journalism practices when they themselves have an initial “you must register to read our articles,” but then after registration, hit you with an actual hard paywall after a couple of articles.
If they want to paywall their content, that is their prerogative, but they could at least be up-front about it, instead of only telling me about it after I went through the trouble of creating an account.
I thought it was like 60-80GB last I played, which was a couple of years ago.
Warframe on Android? That game already takes up a shitload of disk space on a PC, how would it fit on anyone’s phone?
Maybe I just don’t look at the right parts of the internet to end up seeing it, but I haven’t even really seen anyone talking about hating it.
It’s kinda crazy how quickly people just… stopped talking about Starfield after release. Like, even if it ended up being bad or disappointing, people would’ve at least still been talking about it in that capacity.
Starfield was one of the most hyped releases in years, at least since Cyberpunk, yet when it finally released, it seems like the entire gaming world played it for a few days, collectively decided, “eh, this is alright I guess,” then moved on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mood towards a game shift so rapidly from massive hype to complete indifference…
Been going through Gotham Knights on Gamepass, it’s solid. It doesn’t stand up to the best of the Arkham series, but it’s at least an interesting twist on the idea, and the Arkham formula still holds up.
Also been on a totally random RollerCoaster Tycoon kick. Haven’t played in years, but for some reason I felt like getting into it again. It’s incredible how well it still holds up.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II
Deus Ex
Man, the “only a Sith deals in absolutes” line was really one of those things that sounded a lot better on paper than it actually turned out to be.
Even beyond the obvious self-contradiction, “dealing in absolutes” is such a weird attribute to describe as unique to the Sith… Like, the identifying mark of a Sith isn’t their hunger for power and control, nor their mastery of the Dark Side, it’s that they aren’t moral relativists? Really?
I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there’s too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn’t 100% ready.
Unfortunately, there’s no real good answer for this as a consumer… If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.
The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it’s not even remotely close to being a reality. I’d say that if the game appeals to you and you don’t mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don’t.
Other than Wedge and one random Y-wing, everyone in the other squadrons were dead.
The public lobbies have (usually) one of the least toxic player bases in online gaming.
The reason that it’s so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.
I don’t have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn’t really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn’t already provide. If the quality of Steam’s experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don’t really have any complaints about Steam?
Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.
It’s not too hard to roll back changes on a wiki. Any attempts at sabotage wouldn’t be very difficult to undo.
They don’t actually let admins shut down their wikis or remove content from them. They can leave and start a new wiki, but they have to leave the old one in place (for which Fandom could potentially just find new admins), and they can only link to the new wiki from the Fandom wiki for a period of two weeks. With Fandom’s SEO, there’s a good chance the Fandom wiki will still be ahead of search results of a new wiki even after migration. Source
I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn’t all that appealing these days.
I miss Wikia…
Even at Gamepass’ highly aggressive price, it seems clear that it’s not killing off one-time game purchases. Unlike how Netflix was able to destroy Blockbuster and greatly reduce the prevalence of physical media, Gamepass lacks any critical convenience advantage compared to its competition. Steam and other digital storefronts have already destroyed the market for physical game media, so Gamepass’ competitive advantage can only extend to price and selection.
You’re right in that game streaming services will probably implode on themselves as the model proves unsustainable in the presence of competitors, but I think the effect will be more localized than what’s happening with TV and movie services. The available selection will likely never reach the immense size needed to seriously pose a threat to Steam before collapsing, so I expect a return to status quo to be much easier than with TV/movie streaming.
And at the end of the day, while I try to make my principled moral stands as a consumer where I can, life is too damn short and the ills of capitalism too all-encompassing for it to be worth it to me in this case. AAA gaming has been on a slow, gradual backslide long before Gamepass came into the picture, so it’s not like the success or failure of game streaming is going to change its long-term prospects that much. Might as well save some money while I can.
Pretty much every good new thing introduced these days inevitably goes to shit at some point, so I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.
I’m subscribed for now because the value is still really good, but yeah, I’m fully expecting the other shoe to drop and MS to start jacking up the price once they decide they actually start needing to make money on it. I’m also willing to bet that we’re also going to see a bunch of copycat services that will split up the available content behind 15 different paywalls and diluting the value to the consumer for each of them.
I honestly don’t know why all these tech companies keep trying this whole strategy of pricing at near or outright losses to build market share before raising prices and reducing quality in an attempt to transition to profitability. Almost every time it ends up pissing off customers and driving them away, at which point you have a crappy, overpriced service that still doesn’t make any money.
I mean, common issues surrounding subscription-based services and the lack of ownership of digital content aside, the full price of $10 a month (for the base rate, at least, I know they have some “Ultimate” package which combines the Xbox and PC programs) is actually a pretty good value on its own, given the size of the selection.
Even if you only play a few games per month on it, you’re still getting pretty good value compared to buying those games individually. For example, once Starfield releases, you could play it for six months on Gamepass before buying it up-front would’ve been a better deal, and that’s if you never play a single other game on the platform.
It’s also nice to be able to try out games without having to commit to purchasing them. I’ve found a number of games through Gamepass that I’ve enjoyed which I never would have tried otherwise.
However, I have a strong suspicion that video game subscription services will end up following a similar trajectory to TV/movie streaming services at some point… Gamepass doesn’t really have any major competitors, and has been priced very aggressively in order to build market share, and it reminds me a lot of Netflix in its early digital stages.
I think it’s inevitable that other publishers are going to try and get in on the action, balkanizing the available content into too many services for consumers to care about, and diminishing the value of each service individually.
I also fully expect that MS will start driving up the base price of Gamepass at some point, once they feel like they have enough market penetration. The reduction of the $1 trial might already be a sign of that, but I’m hoping we’ll still have some time before that happens. I might stay around at $15/month, but if it reaches $20 I’m probably out.
I played CDDA for a while about 5 years ago. I really enjoyed it for a while, but after a certain point it seemed like the devs just got more interested in simulating fiddly minutiae to micromanage in excruciating detail over actually developing interesting new content or fixing existing broken systems.
NPCs were an absolute mess around that time, but the devs were messing around with implementing individual vitamin and mineral meters and making installing bionics more fiddly.