Hey if I could sell a million copies of a game for just a dollar each as my cut of a bundle, well I’d be a millionaire!

The question is: did Disney commission the Percy Jackson series or did Rick Riordan shop around for publishers like a traditional book author and happen to get picked up by Disney?

It’s the Texas sharpshooter fallacy writ large. You can always pick the winners after the games are written. The hard part is picking a winner of a game beforehand.

Those are books published by Disney written by established individual authors. They’re not gang-writing books the way they make movies.

You have to include the risk of not succeeding. Without high graphical fidelity to differentiate yourself, you’re forced to compete on gameplay alone. Large companies like Nintendo do not know how to make hits reliably. That’s why Nintendo keeps recycling old franchises.

Look at all of the indie games that no one plays. There are thousands and thousands of developers out there making games. The vast majority of them never succeed. It’s just like trying to become a New York Times best selling author. Notice how Disney hasn’t cracked the novel as a medium. That’s why they spend all their money on big budget Star Wars and Marvel movies and TV shows.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for was not the lack of time, it was the lack of desire to play games.

The guy seems like a shill. A hired goon who successfully destroyed Ross’s movement, just like they planned!

Shamelessly stolen from a Simpsons meme group I frequent.

It’s self-consciousness (less charitably called hack writing or selling out). These are game developers trying to chase market trends rather than following their hearts.

Some are honestly trying to make games that they themselves would love. But it does have a bit of the feel of “I love ice cream and I love dill pickles, so why not dill pickle ice cream?!”

No? The SNES was in fierce competition with the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. They didn’t call it the console wars for nothing.

That’s probably why I haven’t bought a Nintendo console since the original Wii. I keep looking for a reason to do so but coming up short.

I still love the NES and SNES, as well as some N64 and GC games. I definitely would like to try some of Nintendo’s newer games, just not at the prices they’re asking for! I am absolutely spoiled for choice on games to play.

Because I don’t think it’s worth it to pay $650 Canadian for a console based only on a few Mario/Zelda/Metroid games?

Because your previous comment conflated exclusives with first party exclusives.

I can remember when the SNES had countless 3rd party exclusives. Now we can’t expect any?

The value prop of the Switch 2 is not compelling to me.

Because everything else can be played on a Steam deck!

How many exclusives is the Switch 2 going to have besides the usual Nintendo first party stuff?

Your quote contradicts your claim. Steam is not a platform, it’s just a store. The platform is Windows, Mac, or Linux.

They did this for people with WC3 CD keys.

I wonder if I’ll get access to it with my WC2 original CDs.

They’re really in a bind though. Indie games are great because there are thousands of indie developers out there making games and we get to play any ones we want. All the indie games that fail don’t matter because we don’t need to pick the winner ahead of time.

AAA studios can’t operate this way because they can’t predict what will be a great game that everyone wants to play. The only leverage they have is that they can afford to hire a large team of artists to create all the graphics.

It’s really the same situation that Hollywood film studios are stuck in and the result is basically the same. Hollywood makes their MCU graphics extravaganzas and AAA studios makes their Call of Dutys.

I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.

Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!

So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.