Well, for starters Xbox was dead on arrival, they had no system sellers lined up and the series S has held this generation Xbox back since the beginning. Sony on the other hand started off well, but then got the GaaS hard on and almost all of their gaas projects are failing hard. That’s why they barely have a library of exclusives.

Not to mention this generation has also been a technological flop (not just on the consoles side but also on the PC side). The next big thing to change gaming is ray tracing, but the tech is still too raw to fully utilize it. Because of that we’re largely getting the same tech as last gen, just higher fidelity.

And considering console exclusives started coming to PC I think there’s even less of a consumer pull towards consoles. A lot of PC gamers owned a console and now they don’t need one because the get to play their console games on PC at higher quality with better performance.

The next generation needs to be marvelous or I think console gaming, as we currently know it, will be dead.

I guess it’s regional bang-per-buck. I just bought a 4070 over a 7800XT because it cost only 20€ more and for that 20€ I get a better upscaler (I personally find DLSS visually better than FSR) and much better ray-tracing performance with only a marginal drop in rasterization performance. Oh and also better wattage which is a factor considering my cost of electricity, probably offsets that 20€ over the duration of me using the card. And I got the new shitty Star Wars game for free. I’m not trying to be an Nvidia fanboy here. When I decided to get a new card I was absolutely certain I’m getting an AMD card because Nvidia cards were supposed to be overpriced as hell. Well, turns out bang-per-buck Nvidia card came out on top.

I think my 4070 example is probably why they’re going to target more budget cards, because xx70 cards are already outside the budget of the average gamer. If you look at the Steam hardware survey xx50 and xx60 cards make up the lion’s share of the cards from the last 3 generations. There’s literally only 3070 in the top 10 most popular cards, everything else xx60 or xx50. 3080 is the first xx80 card and that’s only 15th most popular and 4090 is the first xx90 card while being 30th most popular. Why waste resources trying to compete with xx70, xx80 or xx90 cards when you could just beat the xx60 card and get most of the market.

I do hope their plan works out for them.

No idea what you want to say in the first paragraph. I understand that you think it’s toxic to have a different opinion? Pretty sure that’s not what you meant.

I most likely misunderstood what you were saying so we had a miscommunication. I don’t think the miscommunication is particularly relevant so I’ll leave it at that.

There is a big difference between corporations and people. Bigotry against people cannot compare to bigotry against corporations. And then there’s a difference from that to an industry. Most notably there’s something called “industry standard” which (most often) the market leader sets and the competition copies in an attempt to catch up. To resist this means to potentialy lose money, something only few companies want or tolerate.

There is a difference between corporations and people, but the underlying fallacy is the same. If companies A, B and C are bad it doesn’t mean all the companies from D to Z are also bad. And industry standard doesn’t mean every company will follow the industry and industry standard doesn’t guarantee making money. We have a lot of examples of companies following the industry standard and flopping hard, and we have examples of companies that don’t follow the standard and are wildly successful.

I can recommend searching for Cory Doctorow’s idea of “Enshittification” to get an understanding why companies might use costumer favourable policies at their beginning which they revoke in favor of more money later. It’s what made Amazon big, or Facebook. I’m sure you won’t, but there might be readers of this dialogue that might be interested.

I’m well aware of enshittification and I completely fail to see how that’s relevant in this particular instance. In fact your entire premise of “they might add it later” makes no sense because literally the best time to have DRM is at launch when the potentially demand is the highest, and once your game is pirated the cat is out the bag and adding it later makes very little sense.

No, I don’t know Saber’s internal politics toward this, and no, I don’t share your chipper attitude towards their intentions.

That’s fine.

I do recognize they were nice to their customers, which is a good thing. But they were recently acquired by Beacon Interactive which doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. The future remains unclear. I don’t know where their path will take them, neither do you. You trust them at your own risk.

Beacon interactive was founded by the co-founder of Saber interactive for the purpose of buying out Saber from Embracer. That was literally the second result (the first one was a completely other company called Beacon Interactive Systems) on DDG if you searched for Beacon interactive. Google has the article a bit more downward as most suggestions are about that other company but in the top results are Saber interactive wiki page that has the exact same information. I can only assume that you did a search just to confirm your “company bad” bad and didn’t look any further because it took just a nudge more effort to find out that Saber interactive is effectively an independent company.

But I guess it doesn’t matter because you automatically assume company bad, so it’s not like that is going to change your mind.

It is incredibly toxic, do you think that I do that? Over a “Why the over specific denial”?

But you did. Everyone else was either optimistic or “yeah, whatever” about the statement, only you went “there must be something wrong with the statement”. You are literally the only person in this thread questioning if it’s genuine.

It’s a lived example of the “one bad apple spoils the bunch”. There are quite a few bad apples in the publisher space, some on the developer side. Do normal people just not recognize patterns in an industry? Are normal people apathetic about how an industry treats them?

This is how bigots talk. “Some black people are bad people so I will treat all black people as bad people”. “Some immigrants are bad people so all immigrants are bad”. “Some young folk are lazy so all young folk are lazy”. etc.

People notice patterns, as I pointed out with Ubisoft and Blizzard and EA. But people don’t make sweeping generalizations based on those patterns. Just because Ubisoft is shitty doesn’t mean we should be questioning everything Larian says. The problem isn’t skepticism, the problem is that you’re making huge generalizations to then be skeptical which leads you to make unfounded criticism.

I’m just going to repeat what I said. Normal people don’t go “but what if they’re lying” any time something is said. They do it when it’s the same entity doing the saying, like if Ubisoft said they’re going to try something different normal people wouldn’t believe then, but normal people don’t generalize everyone. Just because Ubisoft or EA or ActiBliz has told lies doesn’t mean EVERY developer tells lies. It’s incredibly toxic to think everyone is lying.

Actually I found it pretty disturbing that you’d make shit up just to throw a shade, so I’d consider the concern genuine even if poorly communicated.

Seriously, normal people don’t go “but what if they’re lying” any time something is said.

Have you considered taking therapy? Because you’re literally making up shit to hate on a game, it’s not healthy.

You mean the “at launch” part that the writer added to the article and isn’t a part of the official Saber statement? Something you’d know if you read the article past the introductory paragraph?

“Will this game have DRM?”

“No.”

“Why are you overly specific?”

Yeah, it’s definitely more of a case of being just unlucky because it’s not a common issue with the dock. Took me quite a while to find that wire trick.

I think Steam Deck is great and a huge impact on both Linux gaming and handheld gaming. My only gripe with the Steam deck is trying to use it in docked mode. I’m not sure if it’s the TV or the official dock but the only way I could get it working is when I disconnect all the wires from the dock and then connect them in the right order. I think it was 1) connect deck to the dock 2) Connect HDMI to the dock and finally 3) connect power to the dock. If I don’t connect it the right way the signal from the dock to the TV gets fucked up and I either get some really crappy resolution that doesn’t even get properly aligned, weird almost white noise or just straight up black screen. Not really a big issue for me since I mostly use the deck when away from home, but it still that using it at home is such a hassle (at least for me).

In his mind Epic doesn’t need independence from Microsoft because Microsoft isn’t taking a cut of his Fortnite money. Microsoft is bad but Apple and Google take it to the next level. Imagine if Microsoft needed companies to verify their software and with that verification Microsoft can take a cut of every purchase done in that software. So if Steam was verified games sold in the steam software would cost more than opening up a steam website and buying from there. That is Google and Apple in a nutshell. That is actually the case with Twitch subs, they cost more in the Twitch app because of the fee Google adds.

It’s an anomaly in terms of success. It’s not an anomaly in terms of how a good game becomes a success. There’s no successful game that people haven’t heard of. Nobody knew about vampire survivors when it came out so it didn’t get sales. It got sales when people started to hear about it. Same with among us. In fact letting people know a game exists and making it appealing is probably more important than having a good game. The day before is a great example of that.

It doesn’t matter how good reviews the genre gets if nobody knows it exists it’s not going to sell. I guarantee 99% of the people reading that article had no idea this game even existed and if this article made waves on reddit this game would definitely see a spike in sales. So far it hasn’t really made waves so most people are still unaware of this game. In light of that it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the game is not selling.

Also sidenote, holy fuck this game has an unmemorable name. I had to open the article again so I could find the steam player numbers. That name is definitely not helping the sales.

That applies to games people know about. If nobody knows about your game then it doesn’t count. For example Vampire survivors barely made any money on the first few weeks of its early access release. In fact it didn’t really start making money until youtubers/streamers essentially advertised it for free.

Cmon man. You call it a complete lie and then proceed to lie through your teeth?

It affected EVGA GPUs during the beta, EVGA accepted the responsibility and offered to replace the cards. However after the beta the game also bricked Gigabyte and laptop (which I think came straight from Nvidia) GPUs, so the issue wasn’t exclusive to EVGA.

As for EVGA no longer making cards. Their cards were highly regarded because they made quality cards. The reason they stopped making cards wasn’t because they did a shitty job, the reason was Nvidia. The official reasoning EVGA gave was that Nvidia made it difficult to maintain consistent profit margins, but the rumors are that EVGA saw the 40 Series specs along with the demands Nvidia had for the manufacturers and didn’t want anything to do with that shit. And rightfully so how poorly the 40 series was received.

Because the user acquisition is how they’ll end up making money. The more people in their ecosystem the more people they have who are willing to spend in their ecosystem.

The free games is probably a good avenue for them to get some potential buyers.

There’s no clear “best execution” as each game has its flaws or quirks. I think Escape from Tarkov is currently still the overall best as it has more or less defined the genre, but it’s not without it’s obvious flaws.

The biggest obvious flaw that will kick in the nuts of new players is the wall of game knowledge they need just to survive a raid, and the game explains nothing. The first timer experience is one where you’re thrown into a map and told “at these points you can extract” and then you’re not told where you spawned nor where the extractions are. Good luck figuring out where to go. Oh and if you didn’t take the right healing items with you better enjoy limping around the map. There are a lot of other issues with game as well that I’m not going to get into because I could write a term paper on everything wrong with Tarkov.

As for the future. I have my hopes on Delta Force Hawk Ops. It’s currently in closed playtest so I can’t play it myself but from what I’ve seen on the web it seems to get the Tarkov formula and is making it more accessible to the casual player so my guess it that’s the one to keep an eye out.

There’s also Dark and Darker but I’m not into swords and sorcery so I can’t comment how good that game is.

Absolutely. It’s a really difficult genre to create games for because you need to balance PvP and PvE so that one doesn’t overpower the other. Then you need to balance gear progression so the equipment you find is a meaningful upgrade over the starting great, but it can’t be too meaningful so starting gear still has a chance against someone who is kitted out.

I don’t think extraction shooter crowd would consider Helldivers an extraction shooter.

Helldivers is a PvE game while extraction shooter genre is primarily PvEvP. I know games like gray zone zero have PvE servers and even Tarkov has added a PvE mode, but a lot of the purists would say you have to have PvP as well. I personally don’t view it that way but IMO that’s not the only thing preventing Helldivers from being an extraction shooter.

Another aspect that extraction shooters have that Helldivers doesn’t is the loot. Whatever equipment you bring into the match is at risk of being lost forever. If someone kills you and takes your gun, you need a new gun because the previous one is gone. Similarly whatever loot you pick up during the raid is also lost when you die. Helldivers doesn’t work that way. You never lose your gear during missions and while you can lose samples you can’t lose credits or super credits. Overall in Helldivers there’s not really much loot to pick up or lose, which is not really true for the extraction shooters that are still alive.

And finally is the “why go into a raid”. In extraction shooters the player generally sets their own goals, either to complete a quest, collect some loot or just do PvP. In Helldivers the reason for going in is predetermined, you do the mission and then you extract. Your “mission” can’t change mid raid like it can in extraction shooters.

At a high level helldivers can look like an extraction shooter, but as I pointed out there are objective reasons that separate helldivers from extraction shooters.

There has definitely been a trend towards extraction shooters and I think there absolutely is market for a more mainstream extraction shooter. I can understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea because it can be a very stressful experience. But I think the lack of a genre giant is what drove Bungie to make an extraction shooter because in terms of mainstream that genre is very much in its infancy and there’s no de facto king (Tarkov doesn’t count because that’s not mainstream and never will be). You nail it and you’ve got a golden goose that’s also really easy to turn into a live-service game.

The issue is that it’s an extremely difficult genre to get right and making it mainstream might end up needing to walk a very fine line. I guess that’s why Marathon essentially in development hell because from what they teased to the public some time ago felt like they didn’t really understand the core of the genre and if you don’t understand the core you’re going to have a very bad time making it mainstream.

I’m also not sure about the pivot to “hero extraction shooter”. Seems like Delta Force Hawk Ops also has gone down that route and it doesn’t look all that horrible, but adding heroes does nothing for the core concepts of an extraction shooter. That is not going to save Marathon.