None of those games are that recent.
Discounts over time are a perfectly standard part of their pricing strategy. It’s not even mildly unhealthy. Resellers don’t count at all, because that’s always their strategy.
The unusual part of suicide squad and skull and bones is that they’re brand new games. The discounts are not huge because there’s a problem with the market. They’re huge because they’re dogshit excuses for products and nobody is stupid enough to buy them.
The list of words in order also definitely is.
And a lot of them are trying to stay matched to the real one.
One company can’t be a cartel.
The other benefit with Costco is that they have an extremely generous return policy.
Some obvious stuff has different rules (electronics is 90 days, stuff like tires that have clear expected lifespans have their own rules), but it is extremely liberal. And my experience is that I pretty rarely have to use it, because while not everything is a premium product for a bargain price, they tend to ensure that the suppliers for products they sell have reasonable build quality and make stuff that isn’t trash designed to fail.
It’s decidedly not free if you have to buy physical products to get it.
The friction of a physical purchase is relevant.
But all the rest of the slot machine mechanics in terms of dopamine juicing sounds and animations are still there, and they’re the biggest issue.
That’s a loot box with extra steps. You get loot box physical trash and loot box digital trash. TCGs are the original microtransactions.
Now, the extra steps are a small barrier that makes it slightly less bad, because you have to physically go to a store or at least order and wait to get them. But it’s not that much less bad.
No they didn’t.
“You have to rebuy your games, that you can’t play anywhere else” isn’t just “not the best way”. It’s straight up horseshit with no possible way to be valid. It’s also the biggest reason it tanked.
The only thing about stadia that was in any way redeemable was the fact that they didn’t mess around and gave full refunds for any game purchase.
It’s already proven. Repeatedly.
Nintendo and every lawyer involved should see obscene fines for the blatant harassment.
Emulation is not piracy.
There is an abundance of precedent that emulation is not copyright infringement and is not in any way illegal. You can absolutely make money on an emulator and there is absolutely nothing they can do.
The courts aren’t. Nintendo is.
Emulation has already been litigated to hell and back. It’s very clearly legal, including relying on users pulling a blob or two from their hardware for the whole thing to function.
It’s a far cry better than Google or Amazon making you buy the game on their service specifically.
It’s still cloud gaming. So it still sucks. But at least they’re not trying to force you into a shitty locked in storefront. (Though not keeping your Steam login is definitely a pain point.)
Black flag, more ships/weapon paths, maybe some fleet commands for bigger battles, expand the shipping jobs thing to feel like you’re really commanding a fleet.
Or none of that and just call it a pirate game.
If it was actually like Black Flag I’d be all over it.
But it’s live service shit.
The other dumb part is that when their manufacturing capability does significantly improve, AMD will happily sell similar chips to other people. And Valve won’t care in the slightest. Because all they want is people on PC so they buy games, many of which are through steam.
Linux being relevant is a bigger benefit to them than any revenue from the deck, and they’ve already demonstrated that it’s capable of pretty much any game that doesn’t actively exclude it.
The problem is that “don’t let people game you” is extremely difficult.
It’s many, many orders of magnitude easier to provide a useful search of sites that tell you the truth about what they are than it is when 99% of sites lie to you.
The writing was always stupid, but 3 turned extra-self-congratulatory-stupid.
I mostly don’t play multiplayer, but some games just aren’t the same single player.
Madden, for example, the AI just is too complex for them to handle it at a high enough level for the balanced but competitive strategy game football can be. All Madden is hard, but it’s hard by cheating. Playing against humans is how you get the chess match. I’m sure there are various other genres focused on strategy that are similar. AI can beat advanced humans in clean games like chess or go, but probably not on a PS5 and not with messier strategy games.
3 months is recent.
A game having a significant sale 6 months or a year later is perfectly normal behavior. It tells you absolutely nothing about the industry. It’s worked that way for decades. It’s not the tiniest bit unusual.