MolochAlter

Neither of those people were ordinary in any way tho.

Very small font on very thin paper.

That would be quite smart of them tbh.

Yeah I mean, it’s got upsides and downsides, like everything. Unparalleled access means anyone can make something, which means a lot of things that have niche appeal can find their audience, etc.

It also means a lot of things without any appeal will be out there.

It’s not good or bad in itself but it can be impractical on the consumer side of the equation, and it makes even the remarkable stuff very likely to just disappear in the shuffle.

Sure, but the stock is tanking now, and the regulations are not on the books.

Like, I agree there needs to be an overhaul of a bunch of regulations regarding monopolies and such, but this doesn’t help analysing the current situation where they’re not in place.

That’s just generally all of media right now. We are at perhaps the highest level of accessibility for media creation we’ve ever been, but that means that any schmuck with a pair of thumbs and time to waste can make something.

High accessibility means abysmal signal/noise ratio, turns out.

You realise this isn’t make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.

If a stock dips low enough it’s possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.

Speculation on the stock market isn’t the reason the market exists, it’s a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.

If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.

Because it’s pressvertising.

Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it’s not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.

As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game’s actual release, it’s positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver’s parody of a corporate shill? It’s pressvertising.

It’s access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we’ve seen what happens to outlets that don’t kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.

So in short: it’s a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they’re just advertising the game uncritically. It’s literally just source-washed marketing material.

Here’s to a multi-year long process to port the campaigns from BG1 and 2 into 3.

I mean, would you? It looks like the most generic checklist driven product I’ve seen yet.

It’s so spineless it may be more lobster than game.

Both of your points are only partially correct.

I think we can state as a truth that they have less potential profit.

Wrong, they just take less effort and have a more constant revenue stream.

Potential for profit means nothing, when so many attempts at milkable forever games end up like Suicide Squad or Concord.

Also you can come into them half baked and pull the plug if the game doesn’t sell (because it’s half baked) like they’re doing with SS and they did with the Avengers game.

They spend more money.

They don’t, you can’t spend money you don’t have, whales are working adults.

Kids spend money for less. Better ROI, not higher payoff.

You make the 18302nd skin and troves of kids will badger their parents for fortnite bucks so they can buy it but not everyone will. The upside is that making a skin costs you single digits percent points of the profits, so even if one or two are a dud, you’re fine, the good ones will make up for it.

It’s a business model you can throw money at once the game’s got an audience base, which is very attractive to companies, because it’s uncomplicated and reliable.

If anyone’s got a code they’re not using I’d happily take it off their hands 😇

Henry and Hans are going on a lads holiday. Awesome.

Of course, just because there’s an audience doesn’t mean you’re pandering to it.

Fundamentally, integrity is an internal concept.

Only you can know if you have it, because only you can truly know your motivations.

As long as your moral choices are truly based on your own principles and you would do the same regardless of observation, then you have integrity.

External factors can only give you reasons to pretend you have integrity, but they can’t prevent you genuinely having it.

Given the fact that neither side demonized him, this may be one of the few cases of actual “mentally unstable lone wolf” with no sane or reasonable motive.

How big do you think my ass is?!

Is there a preferred metric to measure this by?

For the sake of my asscheeks’ preservation, I’d say “if in ~20 years (that’s how long it’s been, god I feel old) it’s regarded with the same high praise and fondness as Bloodlines.”

Preferred by me of course.

But honestly, I’m definitely going to at least pirate and play it, and I’m a man of principle, so I’ll own it if i think I was wrong.

Your word picture is just so funny that I want to root for the game’s success just to be the person that quotes this comment and @s you, even if I tend to agree with your assessment.

Nobody ever spares a thought for my asscheeks! Everyone just wants to see me fail! Assless and suffering! But I’ll show you!

They could be your favourite football team, too, that still doesn’t fill me with confidence on their level of preparation for this.

Bloodlines was an extremely ambitious mix of immersive sim and RPG, in the same vein as early Deus Ex, TCR’s most gameplay heavy game has an ineffective monster that takes several seconds to kill you and myst style puzzles.

There’s a mismatch in milieus here.

Don’t be, this game won’t quietly peep its way into obscurity, it will be an uproarious fart all the way across the halls of the internet.

If it even does, it will come out and literally nobody will like it because a) it has an impossibly high bar to clear even in the hands of competent devs and b) it’s been made by walking sim developers as their first attempt at a real game with gameplay beyond simple puzzles.

I will literally slice off my own asscheeks, cure them into honey glazed ham, and serve them on rye if it comes out as anything resembling the success of the first.

Worse, they’re a walking sim developer.