NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me

  It just… can’t appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?

  Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),

  Dude… Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon… and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.

  I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.

  Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?

  I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget “should” be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then… EA done fucked up.

  To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.

  Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.

  Then don’t pay for it? Again, you (and I) don’t fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.

  You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways

  Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren’t massive layoffs every week?

  Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.

  Again. If you actually CAN make the “jack of all trades master of none” (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but…) game… you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are “mostly happy” and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are “ridiculously happy” (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2’s week two sales were 17 million in 2018

  They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.

  Let’s actually break that down.

  Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.

  Ubisoft… is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren’t the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.

  CO also is a game that came out of the “infinite money” of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which… is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.

  Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?

  You wouldn’t because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.

  The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.

  AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).

  Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days…).

  Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can.

  And they do.

  I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (…) At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about

  So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.

  Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”

  MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.

  Doesn’t matter. It might not be a 100% amazing game but it was still a 90% amazing game which… is still really fun.

  Because

  all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.

  Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.

  ---

  Again, just to be clear: Very few studios can pull this off. We all make fun of RGG for how much they reuse everything but… that drastically lowers costs and lets them get out a solid 30-70 hour game once or twice a year. And studios trying to turn an A game into a AAA game is literally how THQ died.

  But Rockstar is… well, a bunch of rockstars. They CAN do that. They do this through a lot of abuse of labor and manipulative marketing but… it works.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨On the prospect of an $80-$90 GTA 6, former PlayStation boss says 'it's an impossible equation' for big-budget studios to keep their prices down⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.

  But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.

  Maybe you aren’t excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.

  Going purely by “vibes”? I could be “okay” with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mr. Deepfakes, Largest deepfake porn site shuts down forever due to critical service provider terminating their service permanently.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The 404 Media article is much better (than a screenshot…) www.404media.co/mr-deepfakes-the-biggest-deepfake…

  it was a tube site with UGC. So more likely they lost user/account data (hopefully to sources that will leak that shit) and don’t want to try to start from zero in the modern hellscape where there is no reason to use them over any other non-consensual porn site.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Overclocked Nintendo Switch Modded With 8 GB RAM Is Capable Of Running PlayStation 3 Games via RPCS3 Emulator Surprisingly Well⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Nobody sane is actually going to use a device like this.

  But it is a fun tinkering project that will be guaranteed to “go viral”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did the western world just suddenly go back to pretending wrestling is "real" for some reason?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  WWE is a special beast. They embraced The Internet a lot earlier than most media and their social media and astro turfing game is on point. It is why you’ll hear that every single wrestler on the planet’s life goal is to be in the WWE Hall of Fame ™ and why Roman “The Rock’s Cousin Who Was Such A Charisma Void That All His Lines In Hobbes And Shaw were cut” Reigns and whoever the hell is the greatest story ever told on television ™ and so forth.

  Spend a bit of time discussing wrestling and you rapidly realize you are talking to a “bot” in that different statements trigger the exact same response from different people.

  So it is less that The Fans think that cena taking time out of his busy schedule of caping for a rapist sex trafficker was truly amazing and more that people on twitter and PR folk on The Subreddit told them to think that and they are repeating it.

  As for the other aspect:

  Why is this in my sports news next to last night’s hockey scores instead of next to an article about who was the bitchiest on the lastest episode of Real Housewives?

  Because wrestling is “event television” in a way that only sports really is anymore. Andor is one of the greatest shows of all time but, unless you are doing a Reaction podcast, it doesn’t matter if you watch that episode from Season 2 tonight or tomorrow or a week from now. Wrestling and sports? People DO still want to watch that “live” because they are afraid someone will spoil the score of the Bulls game (in large part because we grew up with sitcoms where that was the joke). So, in that regard, it makes more sense to cover it with sports rather than to cut into a movie review with how taylor swift’s boyfriend caught a ball real good.

  Which… gets to the last point that is not WWE specific. A lot of people don’t have the time or money to watch it live. This mostly goes back to when PPVs were 50-90 bucks and when all weekly shows were on TV that a lot of “cord cutters” didn’t have. But it also just speaks to the general lack of an attention span. A LOT of the Internet Wrestling Community (IWC)… don’t actually watch wrestling. They follow live threads or watch clips and then they wait for Dave “It’s cool, he just didn’t like her tits” Meltzer to give them a star rating.

  It has become a lot more prevalent in the AEW era where we have “something else” on weekly TV (no. TNA didn’t count. I loved TNA but that shit was the #4 promotion even when there were only two on TV in the US) and the “AEW style” is still heavily informed by The Indies and New Japan where people try to tell a self contained story in every match rather than relying on six months of promos on TV. You will RAPIDLY notice that the IWC will barely mention character work that is not part of a clip released by the company or one that was so good that wrestling twitter clipped it themselves. A live thread might lose their shit over how much rotation a tall lady got on a powerbomb spot and then immediately “forget it” because wrestling twitter didn’t care and the company didn’t bother to release a clip of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don’t even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.

  My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don’t have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don’t like something and you can make informed decisions from there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah.

  There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with “game preservation”. I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.

  Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with “No DRM” to boot. And… overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.

  Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for “video game preservation” without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the “feel” of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are “just” writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.

  For a release starting “from scratch” with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of “I don’t care who uses this support library” and “I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain” and so forth.

  Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was “close enough” to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.

  I dunno. I won’t at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are “defending modders” while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean… if you actually care about the people who make your mods you SHOULD want them to be compensated. Even a simple quest mod or weapon mod is hours of work, if not days or weeks.

  And while there is an argument as to whether Bethesda should receive a cut of that… people tend to not want to have that conversation about Valve and Steam so…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Morpheus Actor Laurence Fishburne Reveals He Was Turned Down for The Matrix Resurrections — So He Might Not Be Back for Matrix 5 Either - IGN⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:

  Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.

  Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.

  spoiler

  Basically, the first act of the movie is (re-)awakening Neo so all the marketing makes it feel like a reboot of 1. Except then it takes a pretty big shift as we find out that everyone who fought in the original wars is old and retired, if not dead. And The Machines want Zion to return as a power source except a faction of The Machines believed in Neo and fought, leading to basically the premise of the MMO where there are two big factions. One wants to return and the other wants to stay free. And a key part of The Matrix is that it requires a Neo and Trinity to provide just the right amount of rebellion (which is more power) but to torment them so that they can’t ever move on and have a happy ending. And the rest of the movie is basically The Kids rescuing Trinity and Neo and Trinity both having The One powers. Culminating in basically a repeat of the ending of 1 where they challenge The Machines and fly off into the distance. All while a fucking ska cover of Rage’s Wake Up plays. And… that is kind of what made me really like the movie even if I really fucking disliked watching it? Because… we (GenX/Millennials) fought our fight and… what did we accomplish? The world is a shitty place that gets shittier by the moment (exponentially in 2025…). We choose to go back to our cages because we are too afraid of the world outside of it and our lack of comforts. And that is what the movie was about. Humanity escaped The Matrix because of Neo… and Humanity went back in because the outside world is scary. And Neo and Trinity are going to have to fight our war again and maybe we’ll care this time but we probably won’t. Rage Against The Machine should have been the anthem of a generation and it mostly was ignored or loved by the machine de la Rocha et al were raging against. And… that is also the thing that gets too real. Because we have a generation that were inspired by what we did. But… what fucking kid even cares enough about Rage to want ska covers? Much like… what kids actually care enough about The Matrix to want a sequel? The sequel is still for the crowd that largely didn’t learn the message of the originals.

  So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mods of the era largely fixed the scaling and the modern day best practices largely are based on that. Mortismal did a good video on Oblivion last year-ish where they talked about it but it mostly boils down to:

  Just stop leveling in (if memory serves) the mid-late 20s. That more or less is what you will get with 60-70% of your levels coming from combat skills and is around where your DPS levels out. The mods of the time basically just tweak the leveled lists to plateau out similarly.

  There was other more stylistic choices (stopping bandits from getting full daedric and glass gear) but that prevented the very common problem of “I didn’t optimize my build and now I can’t clear oblivion gates”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall Unity Review⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Devil Daggers came out in 2016. Daggerfall has been free on basically everything since 2009. So… you probably should name and shame whatever outlet let you spend money for TES2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doom: The Dark Ages | Official Trailer 2 | Available May 15, 2025⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  DOOM Eternal was very much designed around engaging with all the systems. The problem being… you don’t actually need to do glory kills, crucible kills, grenade kills, etc for the first few levels on the lower difficulty settings. So when you DO get to the later missions… you are now learning how to play the game against encounters designed to push you to your limits.

  Which, weirdly enough, meant that DOOM Eternal was actually best played on Ultraviolence. Because on UV? The first level will take you the better part of an hour (… or two). But after that? You know what you are doing and the rest of the game flies by… until the fucking DLC which is some of the best video gaming I have ever experienced. I remember being physically exhausted after some of the DLC levels and having that “This is REALLY not good but also holy crap” feeling.

  And before people poo poo TOO much on a game that is five years old: DOOM Eternal WAS DOOM 2016 except with a bigger focus on rushing forward to eliminate key enemies rather than waiting behind doors as choke points and treaing it like an early 00s “cover shooter”. And… that is exactly what DOOM 2 did back in the day. Archviles could resurrect anyone and Pain Elementals were endless sources of Lost Souls. So you also had to be ready to push your way into a room to take outthe baddies.

  ---

  Not sure how I feel about Quake 202-err, DOOM The Dark Ages. Gonna be there day one because I have been playing DOOM for basically my entire life (I am the guy who still replays the original once a year). But what we have seen so far feels like it was a really big over correction to DOOM Eternal. Which… is also kind of what happened with Quake versus DOOM 2 (and Final DOOM and The Plutonia Experiments and…).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Somewhat informed tinfoil hat time:

  In the short term? Nintendo likely have drastically decreased the supply to the US (and Canada since allegedly that was routed through the US in the past?) and are counting on tariffs not changing TOO much over the next 40 something days. Same with being able to route shipments from different countries. So they’ll take a hit but it won’t be more than they already baked in to the MSRP.

  Whereas for peripherals they did NOT already stock up on that in the US and all of those are going to be getting hit by tariffs at varying levels.

  THat said? Going forward? My money is on Nintendo taking a page out of nVidia and AMD’s book. The MSRP of the Switch 2 will remain 450 USD or whatever it is. But Nintendo will conveniently not direct sell those and it will be up to Best Buy and the like to jack up prices to cover it on their end. But hey, Amazon are the bad guys, not Nintendo.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lords of the Fallen - Version 2.0 Trailer (Free Friend’s Pass, Shared Progression Co-Op)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So what bigotry did they add with this update?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Skyblivion fan project lead reacts to Oblivion remake news with "all love and no hate"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It really really really doesn’t.

  We can already see it with stuff like the Beamdog remasters. People insist that it is totally better to play BG2 with these five mods, that launcher hack, etc. And everyone except for the usual suspects just say “Buy the Beamdog release. It has almost everything you want and is zero effort”.

  Also, the mere existence of a fan project (that will never release in a satisfactory manner…) shows that Bethesda is super mod friendly and blah blah blah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 - The Final Patch: New Subclasses, Photo Mode, and Cross-Play⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Been a minute but I only remember that being bad for the fight

  spoiler

  against the hive of bug (?) thingies and the evil gnome

  . But I ran a wizard MC so I had CC and light nuking down by then.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 - The Final Patch: New Subclasses, Photo Mode, and Cross-Play⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What? You aren’t a fan of a mandatory minigame that can cause instant failures at any moment and is all but guaranteed to during the lead up to the penultimate dungeon (note: Fail states on that can and should be disabled)? Or are you talking about said penultimate dungeon being nothing but translucent enemies with mind control who respawn unless you do the exact opposite of every other battle in the game and rush in to take out their spawners?

  In all fairness, you can trivialize a lot of the hell in Kingmaker just by metagaming and preparing for the endgame early. If you don’t… yeah.

  Whereas WOTR’s ridiculously plentiful enemy type(s) are much less obnoxious (and very clearly telegraphed the entire game) and they got rid of said endless failstates.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To add on to what others have said:

  It is also part of the white supremacist manual* and we have seen it for decades. It used to be that people would “joke” about how their thoughts aren’t “politically correct” before they say something. But mostly it was the idea of accusing people who care about… anything of being a “social justice warrior” and so forth.

  The idea being that you make people react with “Ugh, not again” rather than “Yup, that is fucked”. It equates both sides and encourages people to become “apolitical” because they are privileged enough to not have to actually care.

  And that is more or less it now. The idea is that if any character has even a hint of melanin, all the usual chuds will lose their god damned minds and try to destroy it. And yeah, everyone hates asmongold et al. But they also hate the people who “take the bait”. And the studios rapidly learn that it will mostly hurt their sales to have anything but the whitest of white cis men as heroes and the whitest of white big titty girls as damsels.

  Then EVERYONE is happy. The devs/film makers/whatever don’t have to worry about death threats (hmm. Do you think that best friend might be Jewish? Better play it safe and still threaten to hunt down and rape that guy’s daughter). The people who care about basic humanity don’t have to say anything. And the chuds get to live their fantasies.

  *: couple decades back there was a pretty major “leak” of a neo nazi handbook for how to indoctrinate people. And it is terrifying how often the same tactics are used. It is probably on archive dot org somewhere?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Baldur's Gate 3 - The Final Patch: New Subclasses, Photo Mode, and Cross-Play⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To clarify:

  Rogue Trader is Owlcat, not Larian. They are also gods of CRPGs and tend to have really good dialogue and character writing. But Larian’s thing is more the environmental systems whereas Owlcat tends to prefer to go REALLY hard on the core rulesets as well as the way branching narratives work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should we boycott games with loot boxes?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It is important to question what you think a boycott will do.

  Do you think you are going to make a giant movement that changes the world? If so… you should stop eating those lead paint chips. Consumers, historically, will only engage in a boycott if there are alternatives. Shop at Walmart instead of Target. VERY short term you might get someone to boycott Amazon for a few days but… just check “leftist” forums like resetera for everyone immediately losing their shit over how a few older activision games they will never play are on sale.

  Video games, contrary to what people will say, don’t really have alternatives. We’ll joke that The Last Descendent was “waifu frame” but the people who love Warframe very much have reasons for not wanting to play TLD and vice versa. Let alone games like Call of Duty where there really is nothing close to an alternative.

  So “boycott to fix the world” (and I am gonna expand on what THAT would be shortly…) ain’t a thing.

  So… now it is up to why? Personally, I “boycott” Ubisoft and have for the better part of a decade at this point. I think the last game I bought “from them” was GR Breakpoint and I got that years after the game was basically dead and on a hefty discount (see: lack of alternatives). I am under no illusion that my wallet is going to lead to yves et al leaving their own company out of shame for their role in enabling a culture of sexual harassment (and allegedly more). But I do know that I feel a lot better when I look at myself in the mirror and most games I am interested in DO have alternatives.

  So do you think you are going to change the world? Cue Nelson Muntz. Do you just not want to contribute to the culture of loot boxes personally? Go for it. And it doesn’t matter what people on not-reddit tell you.

  As for what you think will happen: I think we can all agree that Nintendo upping the… Err, let me rephrase that. I think we can all agree that any company other than Nintendo upping the base price of a game to 80 USD (pre-tariffs…) is REALLY bad for the industry. But… inflation IS a thing and while game sales have skyrocketed… game dev has too. Money has to come from somewhere. And RMTs (lootboxes, cosmetics, etc) and constant flows of DLC have actually been great for the industry. It, for two decades or so, stopped the endless “ramp up, ramp down” model where people would be hired to work on a game, fired when it went gold, and then hired again 6 months down the line if it got green lit for an expansion. Get rid of RMTs and we go back to that for all but the largest studios because you don’t need artists when you are fixing a bug in Batman’s cape and so forth.

  So, personally? I buy and play games that I like. And a lot of that does have to do with the monetization model. Something like Warframe is RMT based and has some sketchy purchases but also is (mostly) playable as a free game and is built around “free” content. Whereas something like Genshin Impact is marketed as “you never have to spend a dime” but… yeah. So the games that “do it wrong”? I am… kind of already “boycotting” them because I am just not interested in them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo president responds to Switch 2 price increase fears amid Trump tariff fallout⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I and many people with a Cool PS2 can attest that AMD hardware has no problems running Switch games.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo president responds to Switch 2 price increase fears amid Trump tariff fallout⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  nVidia genuinely does not care about gaming. It is just a way to have a few extra bins to increase effective yields for their datacenter/AI chips. If Nintendo wants to buy in bulk they’ll sell in bulk. And if Nintendo doesn’t like nVidia’s prices they can talk to AMD… like the other consoles did.

  Most speculation was around 400 USD for the switch itself for the given specs, tooling, etc. The Steam Deck is a different process but their LCD model is pretty indicative. 450 was a bump that would account for economic uncertainty and give them room to drop back down for regular discounts and the like.

  Then trump trumped the bed and the previously expected buffer zone just isn’t enough. Which is why we are seeing the massive price hike.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con may have the same stick drift problem as original Switch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Been more than a minute since I touched my PSP but I remember the stick on that (and the Vita?) being pretty dogshit. Less of an tilting analog stick and more of a weird slidey one. It is Nintendo so whatever they do is amazing and perfect but they probably wanted to use the same parts on both the pro controller and the joycons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con may have the same stick drift problem as original Switch⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless they change away from using cheap potentiometers, it will.

  For those not aware: A potentiometer (“pot” from here on out) is effectively a resistor where you move a contact back and forth. When it is at one end, the resistance is very low because electricity barely moves through the resistive material (often graphite). When it is at the other end, the electricity needs to move throughout the entire stretch of graphite. With very basic math you can figure out what percentage X and Y you are at which translated to analog movement.

  Designed well? The contact moves across the resistive material in a way where there is no damage (scraping). Given infinite time it will eventually become a problem but that is well beyond the lifecycle of the console.

  So why do analog sticks wear out so fast? Because they aren’t enclosed systems. Dirt and dust WILL get into the chamber and then it gets caught between the contact and the material and scrapes up said material. This leads to drift in the sense that dirt causes the contact to stick and loss of precision as material is scraped off. That is why electric contact cleaner was a great stopgap but couldn’t actually repair any damage.

  So why is the switch in particular so shit at this? Because an xbox or playstation controller has a big rigid plastic cover that more or less seals the pot off from the environment. It isn’t perfect but you are getting very little dirt and dust into the controller and up that dome.

  The switch? It is a rubber flap over the joycon that you can lift up with your finger. Great for cleaning, horrible for keeping clean.

  I haven’t looked too close at the new joycons but I would be shocked if they changed that design. So they will almost definitely still suffer from excessive drift REAL fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FromSoftware's focus hasn't shifted to multiplayer, Miyazaki says, despite Elden Ring: Nightreign and The Duskbloods⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If anything, Duskbloods further confirms this is a B game. They took a mode of Elden Ring/Dark/Demon Souls that people have historically loved (jolly coop) and built a game around that. It is no different than building a game around dodging (Bloodborne), blocking/parrying and traversal (Sekiro), or even just one off arena fights (… MANY of the Armored Core expandalones).

  They built it for Nightreign. They did a much scaled down version for Duskbloods as a way to get a sack of cash from Nintendo and to pressure Sony into letting them go back to an IP they like (Bloodborne).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨First-party Switch 2 games—including re-releases—all run either $70 or $80⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The reason the switch 1 was emulated so fast was a hardware vulnerability on nvidia’s part. Presumably we won’t see that again.

  Also: While switch games DO run better on a steam deck, they don’t run great. And I think estimates put the switch 2 at closer to a PS4 than PS3 in terms of power? But even PS3/360 games don’t run gerat on a Steam Deck.

  Not to mention nintendo’s lawyers putting the fear of mario into the emulation community.

  So in a few years? I could see MAYBE some proof of concepts. But I doubt we’ll actually be able to properly emulate switch 2 games until at least 2030.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Switch 2 Rollout Was So Convoluted It Made Us Want A Steam Deck.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Its almost like those “politics” are related to why the pricing is weird?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Switch 2 mouse mode (such potential)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You DO realize that a port is not just as simple as picking the dropdown in your editor to compile for switch versus xbox versus PC, right?

  There is a substantial amount of effort to do any kind of port. And for one where the default experience is a 1080p handheld display? The kinds of games that only have M+KB support (because people are also forgetting the “KB” part…) are not the ones that run the best on tiny screens.

  Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely corner cases. But we literally went through this with the Steam Controller a decade or so ago (15 years?). Consoles are a giant part of the market and targeting xinput gets you an interface that works on all of those AND improves the experience for a lot of users on PC. Versus finding a way to downscale your input to just a mouse and 8-10 buttons?

  The number of third parties that meaningfully benefit from the switch-mouse are going to be very small. And most, if not all, of them will also have gamepad support for people who don’t want to have to sit at at a table with a surface that is compatible with said switch mouse.