Ah yes, in-game currency is fiction. That’s why it costs real money, and publishers mandate developers lock down the game as much as possible to ensure no one circumvents the ‘fiction.’ The mind boggling profits they bring must also be fictional.

Fuck, I hate GaaS.

Haha, online games licensing sucks. It’s almost as if, when we discovered we could distribute media freely and infinitely by digital means, we should have restructured how media and licensing works for these products. but we didn’t, and now we have bizarre situations where publishers try to delete their own games from existence rather than spend some upkeep for music licensing

Yup, and in the re-release for the gamecube, you could pop the chao in your copy of Sonic Advance 1/2 or the GBA to emulate the effect.

blessed image, i loved raising chao, but i never had access to online guides as a kid so i never bred the rare ones. hell i never really saw a chao die to begin with to know they reincarnated

also, just to be a dick, my sister told me they were pronounced “k-o” and not “chow,” so I spent a lot of my childhood being confidently wrong

HogLeg’s success is pretty crazy if you think about it. Ignoring the sales we’ve looking at today, take yourself back to the launch of HogLeg. It kept up pace with Fallout 4 in terms of active players and achievement completion rates. This is huge to me. They’re both singleplayer RPGs, so they’re both vying for the same type of audience.

But.

Fallout 4 was a hugely anticipated sequel to one of the most renowned series in all of gaming. Harry Potter had almost no presence in gaming beyond nostalgic shovel ware titles.

Fallout 4 was developed by gaming darlings, a company known for producing huge open worlds with strong volumes of content. HogLeg was developed by shovelware developers with no major releases in their history.

Fallout 4 is a first person looter shooter, one of the most ubiquitous and successful genres out there. HogLeg is an action roleplaying game, still admittedly a safe genre but doesn’t have the genre conventions that makes it possible for anyone with FPS experience to pick up a Fallout.

And finally, Fallout 4 targeted gamers. It’s a gamer’s game, you know? It’s for lore nerds and RPG fans and tacticool nuts and all the rest. HogLeg was for Harry Potter fans. It needed to drag fans across media types to secure a big enough audience.

I truly, truly did not expect HogLeg to find the success it has. And to be honest, it’s quite a mid game! It’s a visual accomplishment and adherence to the universe means that it’s a treat for any Harry Potter nerds, but the rest of the game is as close as generic as it could get.