501–510 of 798 posts
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If Rockstar ever gets acquired, this will be one of the most expensive deals ever. They routinely sell games in the dozens of millions of units.
Contrary to popular opinion, Rockstar is actually not a competent game developer.
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> Most developers don't work with them, and their customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. That's a bit insulting. Mario and Zelda are a few of the consistently best game franchises. Smash Bros gamers aren't "uneducated" > It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater market. The mobile game market is bigger than the console and PC market.
The switch is also a huge market for indie devs now. Just a crazy amount of indie games in the switch market. Hell one company, Brace Yourself Games, leveraged their game 'Crypt of the Necrodancer' into a connected zelda licensed game called 'Cadence of Hyrule' that just won some awards. The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is fading quickly.
I fully agree with you, but that narrative has started changing only in recent times. Not that long ago, I would have mostly agreed with the premise that "Nintendo is a thing unto itself."
If my memory serves right, Nintendo was dipping feet into it since at least GameCube/Wii era, but only with Switch they started seriously being, in my eyes, a not "unto itself" kind of an entity.
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>Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox The biggest problem that Microsoft has with the Xbox is lack of AAA exclusives. If the next Elder Scrolls game is going to be released for Xbox and PS5 - what's the point of this exercise?
"Not exclusive to XBox" could just be PC as well.
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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.
if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3 was still decent. why did they have to mess with the program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great, but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience. they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the same but with a c…
Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise. Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they wrote most of the strongest story content in all four games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault of this broken engine relationship between DICE and BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat even first and second party games as if they were third party customers to get the best results.
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…
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Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro, traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy games are difficult to come by.
Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord is a much more ambitious and polished game.
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They've managed to make a Dota 2 tutorial that's worse than the 2014 one. And matchmaking for the new players is just brutal, there is no retention.
Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We are both playing occasionally in lower brackets. Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying to win vs lower rated opponents. Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. Peop…
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If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have to allow alternate stores as well. The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the console makers also own the biggest money making game studios as well. Go Epic, go!
Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off. I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a data center when generic blades exist?
Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have.
...
DRM and Anti-Cheat.
Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it, and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to make cracking it easy.
Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.
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Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster and absolute embarrassment to the studio however [1]. [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8
So? Lots of studios have flops. The point is they've had plenty more successes since Skyrim. I even forgot to mention DOOM and Prey. And don't forget, FO76 wasn't even made by the main studio. Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably taking it all off steam), is part of the price too. Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76 flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off? Making a who…
Bethesda/Zenimax as a whole has had a very rough time of it recently, but their IPs alone are ridiculously valuable and id Software has been killing it lately. I wonder how much Microsoft intends to shake things up. Also, if MS just wants development studios and IPs, I imagine a lot of the publishing arm of the company will be redundant. I wonder what MS intends to do about the publishing staff.
I really hope that they move away from the ESO/MMO format that they've focused on the last few years in regards to Elder Scrolls. I'm a huge fan of that series, but I just have zero interest in playing MMOs, and it's clear that they've been trying to push further into that space as opposed to shipping high-quality single-player games.
ESO is by ZeniMax Online Studios and FO76 is by a separate studio inside Bethesda Game Studios. Nothing to do with the team that works on mainline TES and FO games.