81–90 of 134 posts
> may
Weasel 'game journalists' like this is the reason gaming is dying.
The world is WILL not may. It happened before and it will happen again because publications like this are nothing more than pr department for gaming companies.
I think it's silly that the conversation on preserving games revolves around hardware. The hardware is irrelevant. It's about the right to create digital backup for personal use. Whether the game is downloaded or burned on a disc, it's just software. The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more fo…
All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure. A lot of games are alr…
I think Switch is just following the other consoles eventually. This lead me think, is there any 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit native handheld (not Pi emulation) market? I guess the primary difficulty is to make games for them, so most likely just a small hobbyist market. I still think kids don't really care about graphics though, at least when they are young.
In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam. The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since i…
Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example. While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it. Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version re…
I never buy digitally from Sony, for example. The discs get discounted far earlier than the occasional digital sale.
Plus since we're talking about preservation, I don't trust Sony to make my digital purchases available indefinitely.
The only content you really own is the cracked version from pirate bay...
In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam. The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since i…
Fortunately for everyone, all of the "stream games as a service" initiatives failed completely. Consumers aren't really interested due to obvious drawbacks, and vendors aren't interested in provisioning enough or good enough hardware to solve those drawbacks.
Eventually I got a gaming video card and canceled - for now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, but in general it's easy to archive games from Steam and (as long as the publisher doesn't use any 3rd-party DRM) they're trivial to crack. I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. So from a game preservation standpoint Steam isn't that bad…
> I buy my games from Steam because of the convenience and to support the developers, but if, say, Gaben kicks the bucket and Steam suddenly closes/turns evil I can just as easily pirate all of my games back. I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy. You can't be sure you'll be able to find copies of less popular games in the future, having the control over our own computers to do th…
Has anyone in the gaming press asked him if he has a continuity plan, I wonder?
> I'd recommend pirating copies now to keep as backups while it's still easy.
That's the smart thing to do. But Steam/GoG are so convenient...
I think it's silly that the conversation on preserving games revolves around hardware. The hardware is irrelevant. It's about the right to create digital backup for personal use. Whether the game is downloaded or burned on a disc, it's just software. The main problem used to be about piracy, but I think now it's really about making games as a service (even if they're not online for gameplay) because it allows more fo…
All games with a budget over $10m will be online-only gacha soon enough because it would be fiscally irresponsible to do anything else. The only reason you can still "buy" large games - to whatever extent you still can, you're mostly leasing games if you don't pirate them anyway - is irrationality and inertia on the part of publishers, which I doubt will last forever under shareholder pressure. A lot of games are alr…
Single player games will still exist though, and companies will still try to make them online games that can be patched often and have online stores (latest assassin's creed does this), but we should all agree this is no longer the same product. If a single player game becomes a service, it is no longer about a self-contained experience that exists like a movie or book. I guess here is where consumers need to demand that certain game genres be treated as art, and as such be sold like products instead of services.
Edit: I guess not:
“you must have enough free space in your Nintendo Switch 2 system memory or microSD Express card”
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
FFS. I never thought this day would come with Nintendo.
In the computer games industry pretty much everything has been download only for some time as the assets are too large for DVD and BD never caught on for PC. Places like GOG provide unrestricted offline installers but the majority are provided via a storefront like Epic or Steam. The worst case scenario for preservationists is for games to become a streaming service via cloud gaming, which publishers may like since i…
Interesting point about PC going digital-only as Nintendo is a fascinating counter-example. While they offer digital downloads on the eShop, their pricing actively discourages it. Case in point: I just bought my kid a new first-party Switch game. Physical copy on Amazon was ~25% cheaper than the identical digital version on Nintendo's own eShop. Even my 9-year-old noted how illogical it seems, the physical version re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well. If you want to play an expensive Nintendo release that effectively never goes down in retail value, it's reasonably safe to buy it, play it, and resell it if you don't want it indefinitely. Nintendo never lowering their prices helps anchor the value high even in the resell market most of the time. I haven't read enough about this to know if the gamekey wil…
> And physical, at least to date, retains resell value as well. That stopping being true as soon as the DS line started and they switched to flash memory that will degrade over time when they don't have power. People's DS games are already failing. The same will happen to switch games. Only a few hardcore collectors are going to pay money for a cartridge that doesn't let you play the game anymore.