The short answer is no.

The long answer is, you might, just might be able to approach slightly higher specs than a Deck for the same cost if you do a custom build, assemble it yourself and get some wild deals or get lucky with a used but still good component.

Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.

If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.

I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.

The estimates I’ve seen from people going off of PS achievements for the game put total PS sales at about 15,000 compared to about 10,000 on Steam.

So that would equate to roughly an all time PSN concurrent player count high of 1,000.

The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

47 playable days.

All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

…

Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

15 playable days.

All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

…

Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.

Its an enormously overproduced Overwatch clone with zany characters that seem to be going for Guardians of the Galaxy, an art style that is basically just bizarre, and gameplay from a decade ago.

Sony wanted their own Overwatch, after seeing its success, then spent a huge amount of time and money developing it, and this is what they came up with.

Oh, right, it isn’t free to play, costs 40 bucks, and then also has an astounding amount of microtransactions.

EDIT: Based off of current active player count, Concord has cost approximately $200,000 dollars per active player to produce.

Better hope they are all omega class hyper whale spenders, I guess.

He hyped up a huge groundbreaking project for like a year… and it was a cellphone game that a 16 year old could make in 3 months.

Oops thats just the teaser for the real game!

Which came out years later and was basically what a 21 year old could make in unity in about 6 to 9 months, and was never finished.

In the Source engine and for many other shooters, A+D and W+S do not result in a null input, they are two registered inputs that by engine and game design cancel each other out and result in a null output.

It is as you say in that 1 and -1 result in 0, but this is done in the game’s movement code, intentionally, to force players to learn to only press one of the two opposing keys at once, as a skill.

Theres a reason many pc FPS players consider the source engine to be the gold standard for control responsiveness and player movement design/feel, and this is one of them.

Its not from an inability of the game or engine to handle too many inputs.

Also I am fairly sure the macro set up you are describing to allow for the strafe cancelling is a null bind, which Valve has also banned.

Either way, you are not understanding the entire concept of intelligent, dynamically sensitive key switches in the keyboard itself, resulting in dramatically (for a twitch shooter) decreased reaction times from the same actions done on a different keyboard…

This is different than just setting your mouse dpi to be more sensitive, or your analog sticks to be more sensitive, or your whole keyboard to have less travel time.

Having a hyper sensitive keyboard basically always results in a lower skill/dexterity player accidentally doing even more w/s or a/d nullification or unintended movements. This new tech is different.

It reduces the skill and dexterity required to play like a seasoned pro by intelligently changing the travel threshold dynamically depending on how far pressed the keys are and whether they are being released or being pressed down.

You say its like getting mad about mouse look in the 90s, and Valve, the people who revolutionized online multiplayer shooters in the 90s, is saying, no, its not, in fact, its so bullshit we are banning it.

FFS, the companies that are marketing these keyboards are themselves saying it either is cheating or is basically cheating in their marketing material and public statements.

And yes, while it has been technically possible for a long time to do weird things with inputs, most games and communities that take themselves seriously view certain forms of this as cheating.

Its getting banned now because now we have keyboard manufacturers just straight up releasing keyboards with features that exceed in speed what used to only be done by a handful of people with too much time on their hands.

I feel like the onus should be on the development team to make hardware or software macros impossible or unnecessary.

This is what they are doing.

They like the mechanic of jump tossing, which was previously often done with macros, so they’re altering the game to make it easier to do, making macros unnecessary.

They do not like … augmented strafing, as they feel it gives an unfair advantage to those with more expensive kit, so they are implementing server side detection methods to make it impossible.

Ive outlined something at least 90% accurate to how this works in another post I just made.

We are talking about the keyboard itself intelligently adjusting its sensitivity thresholds for keys conditionally, and also intelligently cancelling keyboard input signals, all according to software/hardware on the keyboard itself.

Its happening at a lower level than the program receiving the inputs from the keyboard.

The differences are in 10s of ms, but this becomes a huge advantage of artificially granted, reduced reaction time in extremely fast paced twitchy games.

Also, a macro usually refers to a situation where a key is bound to give the input of multiple inputs simultaneously (jump+grenade), or, a set, timed recording of specific key presses, all initiated by pushing one specific key.

Sure, you could make a macro for strafe left then right then left then right for 3 seconds… but this keyboard tech makes it so you can have a faster reaction time and have the ability to do the equivalent of making up such a ‘dodge dance’ on the fly, customized to your exact situation at the time.

Chained command macros really only make sense in MMOs or fighting games, they don’t usually make much sense in FPSs.

So, keys on a board normally have a specific travel distance (depending on switch type) that they must be pressed to flip between ‘pressed’ and ‘not pressed’.

This tech uses fancy keyboards with fancy switches and fancy software (on the keyboard) to change the required travel distance of one key to register, dependant on the travel distance of another key, and then also alter the output state of the other key.

So, if normally you needed 80% travel to register a key… lets say it takes a player 100 ms to push D to 100% then another 100 ms to fully release D and fully push A to 100%, simultaneously.

Timeline:

0 to 80ms of nothing.

At 80ms, D is registered, strafing right

80 to 120ms, or 40ms of strafing right.

At 120ms, D is unregistered.

120ms to 180ms of no movement.

At 180ms, A is registered, strafing left.

180ms onward of left strafing.

An initial delay of 80ms, 60ms of nothing, then leftward movement after 180ms.

Thrown on fancy bullshit, and the software say, changes A to need only a 20% travel to register while D is past 80%, and this also cancels D once A gets past 20%.

Also, this software says that if no strafing inputs are being received, and then one is, that input only needs 20% to register.

New timeline:

0 to 20 ms of nothing.

At 20ms, D is registered, right strafing.

20 to 120 ms of right strafing.

At 120 ms, D is unregistered and A is registered, left strafing.

120ms onward of left strafing.

Now you have an initial 20ms delay, absolutely no non strafing time, and you get to left strafing after only 120ms.

So, you’ve now initially started moving 4x faster, totally eliminated your non strafing time, and gotten to your end desired strafe direction in 33% (60ms) faster than before.

This is a huge crutch in a fast paced twitchy competitive game.

I have seen videos of these keyboard being used with floating/flying characters in OW2 and it basically allows you to jitter your character 2 meters to the right and left almost instantly, such that it looks like you are fighting against someone with movement hacks. Nearly impossible to hit someone doing this… without an aimbot, lol.

The title is more general, and not incorrect.

In CS2, Valve is going to be banning Snap Tap / Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions in addition to any kind of bind that allows one key to execute multiple game inputs, like jump throws, which is automation, or a macro.

While the exact definition of ‘automation’ can be argued to death, its clear (to many players and also Valve) that having a specific fancy keyboard that compensates for a players low dexterity to allow them to perform as if they have much higher dexterity constitutes cheating in a game where a whole lot of the trained skill … is dexterity.

… Bungie split off from MSFT in 2007.

Kind of the whole reason the Destiny games exist.

I can understand an indie game dev with no budget using a vocaloid type thing to generate some voice lines when they cannot afford voice actors, or mockup some concept art of characters to the base models off of, or generate some random background content in an otherwise hand crafted world, maybe even use it to add some contextual spice to a list of prewritten dialogue text.

There are ways that a small or even medium sized team can use ‘AI’ tastefully.

But churning out an entire AI generated script with entirely AI gen art to slap together a ‘dating sim’ is obviously a very crap way to use AI.

And for a larger scale studio, one would think that these kinds of time and cost saving tools would be ultimately pointless or detrimental, as a competent staff should be able to turn out far higher quality content and systems with distinct styles.

Instead they will likely just expect to be able to replace staff and churn out samey looking sounding and feeling garbage because who cares! Saves costs, lowers dev time!

Except they will end up having less staff, being told to use AI, finding its limitations and constantly baby sitting it when it is relied on to do far more than it can actually do.

As a bit on an aside:

What is perhaps most baffling to me as someone who has modded games for a long time is that in this ‘AI’ revolution… I have yet to see any actual improvements to what game devs typically call AI, you know, the little brain of finite state machines or what not that actually governs what NPCs do.

I have not seen any breakthroughs in say making an RTS or FPS or ARPG type enemy do things that you would typically only expect from a human player, better pathfinding or tactics or strategy.

Only thing I can really think of is motion matching, as it uses a fairly complex algorithm to ‘intelligently’ blend anim states into each other far more convincingly than just a tree of anims with blends.

I realize this is because ‘AI’ nowadays refers to ‘generative AI’, but its just very annoying to me, having used the term AI for decades to mean the situational intelligence and decision making capability of NPCs.