471–480 of 798 posts
Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanit…
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Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like so…
Change = risk If you want to build new IP and there isn’t established funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise money from gamers to go build the game.
All of these consolidations of power are nuts. Feels like we need another round of trust busting in the next 10/20 years to help introduce real competition back into the markets.
That said, I don't know if this is necessarily a good thing either. Strictly as a video game publisher, Microsoft has been doing pretty well for themselves over the last five years. They've definitely stood out as one of the more consumer-friendly publishers, but the market is full of notoriously bad publishers (Bethesda included) so being one of the better ones isn't very praiseworthy.
Microsoft also has their own jaded publishing history which includes some pretty bad moves at the end of the 360 generation and beginning of the Xbox One generation. The Kinect was a very high-profile failure. The original Xbox One was met with a strong backlash for lacking support for physical media. They played a significant role in the integration of "microtransactions" into full priced video games. Although they have done many great things over the last few years, I'm still weary of them as a publisher.
I think the jury is still out on whether this is a net positive for the video game market, but it will definitely make the upcoming console generation very interesting.
Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and pivot to building custom vanit…
Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that there are no good restaurants anymore. My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the one…
The year is 2040. Gigaconglomerates Tencent, Activision Blizzard Ubisoft (ABU), Microsoft and Apple gatekeep the entire gaming industry. Rebel guerilla groups of small publishers and indie developers rise up to take control of their encampments.
I'm sure Disney will be there too. After they acquired Star Wars it's been a looming presence ready to swallow and regurgitate forever any entertainment properties.
I'm astonished Disney hasn't yet acquired Nintendo.
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Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version). Epic has nothing to offer me. Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release an early access level title with exclusivity deal on epic's playform just so that they gain access to further funding to finish the game and release on Steam for th…
I began gaming for the first time (unless you count playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week, mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3 was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but actually enjoyable. I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of love as well.…
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The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took games that were promised to come to steam and made them exclusive. The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic charges. Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go with everyone else. Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that compe…
I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small developers a lot for that exclusivity. In the current indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference between profitability and failure.
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3x Mojang makes it sound like MS got a really good deal on Bethesda, at the time they bought Mojang they were really buying a single (very popular) game, while with Bethesda they get a huge back catalogue, some really big franchises, and ID with all their knowledge of engine development.
FYI, Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and has probably sold more copies than every game Bethesda has ever made combined.
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This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s. Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever. It's up to you to move on.
Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can’t fault them for milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from the “Hey! This worked! Let’s just keep doing this!” IP milkage. Game dev, like so…
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Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.) They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that on ZeniMax. I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I don't t…
Wow you say "only $4.3 billion" for not huge company.