I think the issue here is people knew Diablo 4 was filled with monetization, season passes, cosmetic items etc and they bought it anyway and are complaining about it after the fact. The correct way to respond to sleazy companies is to take your business somewhere else. Reward games for being good, not for being cash grabs.

Epic should count their blessings considering what the game started as and the billions they raked in during the meantime. I bet their active player count is well down from its peak though. Probably the kids grew up and/or got fed up of all the monetisation.

As for Disney they’ve tried many times to get into gaming and failed. I wonder if their corporate culture which is a subtle blend of naked greed, political correctness, risk aversion and schizophrenia over licensing IP just scuppers them every time. I’ve played a couple of decent games but most of their content is either shovelware or naked cash grabs. Even when they make a critically acclaimed or successful games, there is a sense that if they don’t get ALL THE MONEY, then they’ll shitcan it right then and there. Look at Disney Infinity or Club Penguin as examples of games that were killed for very unclear reasons.

Every single Uncharted was groundbreaking for its time. Not just the narrative, but the gameplay and the technology itself. They delivered again for The Last of Us and sequel. So two A-grade franchises under their belt.

Doesn’t mean they’ll have another hit but it stands to reason they’re not sat on their asses doing nothing right now. They’re either working on a TLOU spinoff or a new franchise or both. Now I’m not privy to what they’re up to but I’m sure if you google “Naughty Dog rumors” you might pick up some hints. e.g. one rumour suggests a game codenamed Paradox whose description sounds oddly close to what the Fallen London (Sunless Sea / Sunless Skies) franchise is although I doubt it would be the same, mores a pity. Fallen London is such a mad premise it shocks me it hasn’t gotten it’s own TV series.

They must be up to something. They have the pedigree to deliver a new IP franchise and for all anyone knows that is what they’re doing.

You’d think when Fallout 4 was panned, and when Fallout 76 was panned that somebody in Bethesda might have said “hey maybe we need a new game director”. And also “maybe we need a new game engine”. Instead they went with the tried and trusted and shat out Starfield to the acclaim of nobody.

Online services like games consoles and the likes of Steam / Epic should really allow games to be bundled such that users can choose to only install the “recommended” content rather than everything - the textures for their display & graphics card and multimedia and other assets for their region & localization. If a game is level based they could even grab it the first time it is used, rather than all up front. I bet in a lot of cases it would shave 30% off the download size.

Another source of bloat would be duplicate content - a hold over from hard disks where the cost of seeking an asset meant game data files would hold duplicates of assets wherever they were needed to load-in which increases bloat. In the days of SSDs, that should no longer be necessary but I bet a lot of games still do it anyway. Publishers just need to decide if they’re going to support HDDs or not and if the answer is not, then stop bloating games for no reason.

Fallout New Vegas is still considered to be one of the best Fallout games ever. I expect there was significant overlap in the development period with Fallout 3 though so just subtracting one release date from another doesn’t represent the amount of time in development.

Vice City was more like 18 months of development, some of which overlapped with GTA III. I suppose it helps to have a working game engine and an experienced development team who can iterate on something they’re already made.

I still use Twitter but I think honestly that I could live without it and I reckon most other people could too. It’s just force of habit more than anything else. Mastodon, or Threads, or Blue Sky would all be quite happy to pick up the slack. I actually use Mastodon too but I wish the news media would produce feeds for it rather than rely on mirrors.

The place has become a cesspool tbh and with no moderation it only gets worse with each passing day. Blue ticks actually pay to elevate their moronic hate views above others so more moderate and normal voices get drowned out. Musk is mulling charging everyone money to “combat bots” (bullshit), and mulling pulling out of the EU because of their pesky requirements about moderation. I wish he’d do all this stuff and bring the whole thing crashing down.

The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.

I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn’t. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they’ll never have to actually deliver on their promises.

Serves people right for crowdfunding a game let alone one built around some libertarian wet dream where you have to buy your way to success, dropping thousands on content like spaceships.

If they can charge for something then they can adequately explain what the thing is they’re charging for

I wonder from a cost benefit analysis if even its even worth the effort. If someone is playing a game under emulation then most likely they never had the intention of buying the game. So what’s the point of using anti-emulation checks? It’s just an additional cost (and drag on development / testing) that doesn’t translate into extra sales.

I think Hogwarts sold well because it was a genuinely good game which captured the spirit of the franchise, a decent story line, an explorable world and had some decent combat mechanics.

I think the JKR boycott did help in an underhanded way because most of the protesting was shrill straw man character assassination. People tuned it out and bought the game anyway based on word of mouth. The real losers in this nonsense were gaming websites who undermined their own credibility by boycotting the game or scoring it badly just and turning the review into a diatribe about gender politics.

Hogwarts Legacy also sold a shit tonne, in part because you got the whole game, not half a game with a “season pass” or pay to win DLC.

TakeTwo / Rockstar seems to outsource this work onto a 3rd party porting house which does the minimal effort to port the thing on time and on budget. Look at the debacle that was their GTA “definitive” edition which but was so buggy, broken and gimped that it was universally panned. I wonder if Grove Street Games will get the porting gig for RDR or if Rockstar will foist it out on someone else. And charging $50 for a port is taking the piss in any event. If it were a remake, or reimagining with a new engine then maybe, but just porting all the code and assets and tossing in a few extra textures? No way.

There are quality porting houses (e.g. Bluepoint), and really RDR is a game that should be given to someone who cares about the port and is given the time and money to make it work.

Ironically the only way to use some old Macbooks these days is to put Chrome OS Flex on them. Apple is far more aggressive about killing off old hardware when it feels like it. You can still use them as-is of course but over time the browser and other web based apps degrade and refuse to work because of issues with TLS, CA certs (expired), discontinued backend APIs and unsupported web content APIs.

I think its more that Google supports them for only so long and then they go bitrotten. The final update for these devices should also unlock the firmware so people can wipe the device and install Linux or something on it.

I’ll give the game a go but I’ve played so many MMOs to know the warning signs of a game using grind (travel, upkeep, etc.). If that happens I’ll be gone as fast as I signed up.

And I say that as a veteran of Asherons Call, Everquest, EQ 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert, Company of Heroes, Company of Villains, Guild Wars and many more. I think I played EQ for 18 months on subscription but the amount of grind convinced me I’m not going to put up with that any more. When those other games resorted to the same BS I was gone.