Tar_Alcaran

Also, live-service games endeavour to stay relevant forever.

For, say, God of War, you’ll eventually be done with it. You’ve played all the things, you put the box on the shelve and move on to another game. But for these forever-games, you can play them forever.

And that means that if you want to launch a game in that market, you can’t rely on getting players who just put down God of War and want something roughly similar. You need to not only be better than Fortnite, but you need to be sufficiently better than people will abandon years of investement into Fortnite to go play your game.

The barrier to entry is HUGE, and it’s made much worse by the idea that the new game might dissapear, meaning you wasted months (or, occasionally, days, lol).

A big feature AND problem with the live-service market is that gamers STAY engaged with the games. The majority of players play your random RTS for a few weeks, maybe a month, and then move on. But these live service hero shooters keep pumping out content to keep players invested and build in a ton of engagement sinks so you won’t leave.

As a result, you can’t have “The next Marvel Rivals” like you had “The next Command and Conquer” or “The next Battlefield”, because everyone is still playing the current Marvel Rivals. That results in a completely saturated market. If you want a player, you’re going to have to drag them away from their current game, which they’re comfortable with and have a massive investment in.

If you’re releasing the next Assassin’s Creed, you don’t need to be amazing, you just need to wait for people to finish the last one and deliver something pretty nice. Maybe it’s better, maybe it’s worse, but the field is empty so who cares. For Live-Service, you don’t just need to be better than the rest, you need to be sufficiently better that all the players are willing to abandon their huge investment in the other game and switch to you.

And well, your game might dissapear any second, while their game has been around for years and surely will stay around foreeeever.

time is the one resource Big Tech steals that we can’t ever get back.

That’s an odd argument, since DIY takes significantly more time than just buying a solution.

By… Stepping outside and talking to people? I think all neighborhoods have that ability, even if we don’t really use it much.

Because you, and everyone, is in a huge bubble.

Normal people don’t give a shit where stuff is hosted, or if it’s hosted at all. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less what happens to their catpics if their phone gets crushed and they don’t want to use a separate messaging platform just to talk to you.

The things you think are important absolutely don’t matter to them. Most people don’t give a single second of thought to where their documents should live, and will just download it again on a second device instead of synchronizing anything.

It’s really nice that these things exist, but why would someone do anything with them if they literally don’t have a purpose for it?

Simon is just a moron who comes to the wrong conclusions constantly. I also found it extremely annoying to play a protagonist who is just demonstrably wrong about everything, and has emotional outbursts at everyone trying to improve the situation.

I fully agree.

Having Simon as the main character constantly had me feeling like one of the reveals would be that the scanning process was imperfect and somehow left him mentally damaged. Alas, it seems he was just naturally gifted with the emotional control and abstract reasoning abilities of a toddler.

I get that it’s hard to explain a story in the internal monologue of a first-person character, so having them be oblivious is a great way to explain things to the player. But Soma felt likt it was actively insulting my intelligence by assuming I needed a drool-proof keyboard.

Fair point. I was more concerned about dropping it in, and then catapulting a small metal disc into some very expensive electronics.

There’s a bit of difference doing it on a gameboy, and doing it in a running PC with spinning fans and such.

The loss condition is a lot less fun, and the quicksave sucks

EA being on the recieving end of what they’ve been doing to others for years

He compared it to Human Revolution. When is the last time you heard anyone compare anything to Human Revolution???

It was also really weird that he compared Cyberpunk, as a setting, to a whole bunch of other media that are all older than Cyberpunk. Only Blade Runner predates it.

Ah, the “we have StarCraft at home” RTS

If anyone asks me what fragile masculinity looks like, this will be my example for the month.

Yeah, but that’s mostly because it’s lumpsum. Over time, it’s not much at all.

When I calculate the “time of fun per euro spent” I’m always shocked how cheap videogames are. Even something like the new Doom, which is 70 euros for 16 hours of play, comes down to €4.40 per hour (or just under 14 minutes per euro). And we consider that ridiculously expensive for a “short” game.

Try doing anything for < €5 per hour.

Then I look at something like Warhammer total war, and I’m up to 132 minutes per euro spent

“uhoh, we’re not popular enough to have our servers filled on beta weekend, so we won’t generate enough hype!”

The system works fine in, say, Conan, or Ark, or whatever survival game because those are small groups. If you’ve got thousands in a server, it’s going to be a mess.

Hell, even Ultima Online had the brains to keep player houses to specific areas. This is not a new problem.

Yeah, see, nothing in my hands, or up my sleeves!