I think “great” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Valve is probably ignoring TF2 so that fans switch to deadlock which is tf2-overwatch-dota2 adjacent.

Deadlock kind of seems like it might be a spiritual successor. It won’t be the same but it’s got a lot of similar DNA. It could be what people expected Overwatch to be.

I would bet it’s more like “gaming has expanded to a larger market”. Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I’m not talking down on anyone, and I don’t care if that’s where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.

Also, console games have always been way more “casual” as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.

It’s not about making good games. It’s about acquiring assets then liquidating them, marking them as a loss.

Finally I can conquer the bayou with my feudal army.

If this isn’t an RPG about making shiny stones I’ll be very mad.

I think it’s a classic problem in arts. The initial game was easy money: make a good Harry Potter branded game and if it even did 1% of the numbers that the books did it’s a slam dunk.

The cost to add DLC is enormous and based on the way the game was received (lots of controversy when it came out) and the natural fall off of any videogame player base, the money might still be good, but it won’t be guaranteed. And that’s the only thing corporations as big as WB care about.

It’s pretty close to a perfect storytelling experience. Extraordinarily unique.

Yeah the dark future is that AI takes up all of the office type jobs that just require reading and writing text and the only jobs left are physical labor that everyone is forced into to survive whether we need to do it or not.

My hope is that when we have AI to do these “intellectual” jobs and machines to do the manual labor there will necessarily be not enough work for everyone and society will be forced to reckon with the fact that we have so much abundance that humans don’t need to work if they don’t want to. Something that’s been true for a while but has been swept under the rug for a number of reasons.

I would argue smart phones were the last game changer (iPhone was 2007 I think). If you’re privileged (like in the grand scale of the world), a smartphone is a quality of life upgrade. But all over the planet, the access to wifi combined with a super cheap smartphone allows people to start businesses they otherwise would have been able to, open and manage bank accounts etc. when it would have never been possible.

I kind of see the logic of dismissing AI as a trend, only because pointing to each tech dad and claiming it will change the world gets old, and saying “I called it” 10 years later when it does change the world doesn’t really do anything.

But at the same time, chat gpt3 is only a little over year old, which I would mark as the beginning of public enthusiasm and attention for AI. Really great voice recreation AI is even newer, and both are already shredding through entertainment, calling out a “plateau” when it’s only “plateaued” for a few months is a little hasty.

Edit: I know the person I replied to wasn’t on the other side of this, I was just continuing the convo.

When you see ai-related stories just remember: we’re currently living through what, in another 10 or 20 years, will be remembered as the takeoff of AI. Wherever it goes, either heavily regulated or widespread, AI is only going to get exponentially better and it won’t just be artists crowing about losing their jobs to it.

I for sure drop frames on low settings with my low-end machine.

I just keep telling myself that when I retire I’ll be glad for all the random games I bought.

Every millennial who got a good, high-paying job only to have no time to spend on the games they can now afford to buy on a whim.