ampersandrew

Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.

And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?

That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you’re in a market dominating position like they are.

Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.

This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it’s stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can’t ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it’s doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I’m no analyst. There’s certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there’s no Blu Ray copy of it, you’re just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else’s machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.

Gen Z is coming through and they’re going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I’ve got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?

And when consoles aren’t so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it’s not like there’s a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.

It’s not a story when it’s a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It’s a story when it’s hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.

Some of these things really do seem to be luck of the draw. Maybe they run A/B tests. Did you get bombarded with ads on Windows 10? I did. My friends had no idea what I was talking about. I for sure got nagged over and over again to use OneDrive back when I still used Windows, and stories like this one were in the news all the time.

The case Nintendo was making, as I understand it, was that their site provided pretty clear links to sources where you could circumvent encryption, even though they weren’t doing it themselves.

Whatever their reasons, I’m glad they opted for this. It makes the game translate better to controllers, and that’s just a more comfortable way for me to play games.

Just play The Outer Worlds if you haven’t already. It’s Starfield if they threw out all the parts that didn’t work, and it’s got a sense of humor, too.

This deal happened because Embracer is shedding debt, and this is how you shed it. They just listed their debt a few months ago as 2.12B, so this and Gearbox will go a long way toward getting it down to a level they can actually afford. Meanwhile, it’s very hard to track what they still own, but one of those things is Tomb Raider. They’ll also have tons and tons of smaller bets. Alone in the Dark, Titan Quest II, and Gothic look to still be under their control, for instance.

It has been the beginning of a paradigm shift. This is just to lay people off without paying severance.

But can’t you see the other comments in this thread? Clearly this encourages piracy for some reason and is worse than EA somehow.

Preservation is why it’s important to have emulators as soon as someone has figured out how to get one running. Nintendo should be embarrassed that pirating their games often lets these people experience their games better than if the games were run through official channels. I was sure tempted to pirate Metroid Dread instead of buying it, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it, just wanted it for free, or had some notion of retribution toward Nintendo. I was tempted because the Switch is terrible hardware, I prefer to play games on my PC, and it would run better on my PC. I think that was the last Nintendo game I bought. I haven’t pirated any Switch games to date, because the only actual retribution I want toward Nintendo is for both my money and my time to go to games where the companies are less shitty. I’m not going to fault someone for wanting to play Tears of the Kingdom at frame rates higher than 23 FPS and resolutions better than 540p with no anti aliasing, and the best way for Nintendo to cut back on that piracy is to make the game for PC like everyone else is doing these days, but they know the upside of Switch sales is worth more to them than what these pirates cost them. Piracy will also preserve the game better than Nintendo ever will. I honestly don’t care what the percentages are of freeloaders by comparison, because it doesn’t matter.

EDIT: Oh, btw, I have pirated plenty of their back catalog, and I’m sure you have too. I’d love to buy them, like I bought Sega Genesis games and like I bought old Mega Man games on Steam, but how strange! There’s no legal way to buy those old Nintendo games digitally. You can only rent them in perpetuity. Nah, I’ll just pirate them.

The 3DS and Wii U digital stores were just decommissioned, and preservation is a bullshit excuse?

Long-term, it is in fact cheaper to not pay 900 people than it is to pay them.

If only costs, personnel, and risk could be divided that easily.

I think the new management at Sony agrees, but what that means is that people get laid off.

On a Game Mess Mornings (yesterday, I think?) it was something like $600M profit on a $7B investment, which are some thin margins, and things are trending in the other direction, which means it’s not sustainable. Anyone looking at $300M budgets for a Spider-Man game and $200M for Horizon could wager a guess that it’s not sustainable. The blame still lies at the feet of Sony for stretching themselves so thin in the first place and then axing these people who potentially uprooted their lives to take these jobs, but it doesn’t make sense to keep throwing money at things like PSVR2 games or live service schemes that won’t make their money back.

I know they’re aware that they made a game that’s nothing like old Rainbow Six, and that’s the part that sucks. If they want it to outgrow its legacy, they ought to call it something else and make an actual Rainbow Six game again.

When it first launched, the biggest departure from Rainbow Six was a guy who could revive people by throwing a syringe at them.

This is the kind of exceptionalism that bums me out. It’s still a server that no one in the community can control, which means it will still have downtime while the game’s making money and will disappear entirely when it isn’t making money. It still means you arbitrarily can’t play if you’re in a situation where you have no internet, like on a train or in a cabin in the woods, and it means that your session will get interrupted with no workaround if something happens like Steam’s matchmaking servers go down for maintenance for 15 minutes on a Tuesday; or when PSN gets hacked again. It means this game won’t even be playable in 10 or 15 years for as excited as people are about it right now, and that’s why I’m disappointed to see people making an exception for it that they didn’t for all sorts of other live service games, because if Helldivers 2 shows that this stupid business model still works, companies will continue throwing money at it and making more of them.

Helldivers 2 is still selling tons of copies even though everyone is saying that the servers can’t handle the capacity. No one seems to care over there, so I can see why the Nightingale devs thought no one would care with their game either. I thought we were recovering from live service, but Helldivers shows we haven’t.

Camera movement and perspective can have a huge impact on selling the images as “real”. You can have a drone hover over a race car, and it will look fake, because your brain tells you it’s a video game; “Here’s to You” from the beginning of MGSV: Ground Zeroes still looks better than most cut-scenes because it emulates a person holding a camera.