dormedas

@dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That is what my analogy suggests and I suppose how you define wealthy matters, but that’s not strictly what I mean. I just mean prices are starting to striate.

  AAA game devs are spending more on games every year and then suddenly finding out their market isn’t as wide as they hoped. High upfront cost + low demand sounds like a luxury product then, no? In the before times, they would release for $60 and squeeze hard for money. They can still do that, but now - since the price dam has broken - they can release for $80-100 and get more cash per super fan and then drop price aggressively to catch others who balked at the initial price.

  I’ll be clear that the problem is the AAA industry spending too much on games when they don’t need to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Former PlayStation exec says "$70 or $80" games are a "steal": "As long as people choose carefully how they spend their money, I don't think they should be complaining"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nobody rightfully complains when Lamborghini sells their luxury car for hundreds of thousands. Gamers have been conditioned for far too long that indie games cost less than 60 and everything else costs 60. This was the fault of the industry to be sure, but it’s clear the barrier is being broken by necessity and expensive-to-make games are going to climb the price ladder and prices for games overall will stratify like many other markets.

  Interestingly, that’s all Shuhei is saying here. Pay for the games you think are worth it. Games still provide a significant amount of value for their cost, even at higher price points. This is obviously true as we’ve had a decade of base game $60 and ultimate edition $90-100 with people purchasing ultimate editions and such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hideo Kojima says he’s left staff a ‘USB stick of game ideas’ for after he dies | The Metal Gear creator says he wants Kojima Productions to continue creating original games after his death⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe, but I really doubt it. The only reason his ideas even remotely work is because he has a history of wackjob narratives inside otherwise (metal gear) solid games + complete authorial control over the entire product. Give one of his games to someone else to produce and they need to be exceptionally strong and resilient in the face of a team and investors that will naturally - as a part of development - be asking “what about this, people won’t like it, or it doesn’t play test well.”

  The “why” for every little part of the game concept needs to exist or whoever is left in control will have a very difficult time explaining what the value is when that question is raised.

  All this is perhaps superseded if Kojima names an heir in addition to passing along a bunch of ideas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hideo Kojima says he’s left staff a ‘USB stick of game ideas’ for after he dies | The Metal Gear creator says he wants Kojima Productions to continue creating original games after his death⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If he thinks any studio is going to pick up his ridiculous ideas for a game without having Hideo can-do-no-wrong Kojima at the helm of the studio, then he’s as self-absorbed as I think he is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hideo Kojima says he’s left staff a ‘USB stick of game ideas’ for after he dies | The Metal Gear creator says he wants Kojima Productions to continue creating original games after his death⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cuz it’s egomaniacal behavior. He thinks he’s so cool and unique and innovative that his ideas are worth something even after he perishes, sometime in the next TWENTY or so years. It’s not like he’s bedridden right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PS5’s three best-selling digital games in April 2025 were all Microsoft titles [VGC]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Console exclusivity of games is a way to provide an incentive for purchasing your console.

  Imagine you’re a business and you spent millions on the R&D, manufacturing pipelines, shipping logistics, marketing, etc for this cool new console but you’ve got nothing on it by default that people can’t get elsewhere. In this situation, the first console to launch in a given generation would win. If you profit off of the console (you should), any exclusive that converts a user is price of console + price of game gross revenue.

  This helps explain why we’ve had exclusives, but the winds are changing. These game companies which make both games and consoles see the short-term profits from your aforementioned wasted opportunity as more valuable nowadays while largely ignoring the fact that a lack of exclusives will make their consoles less desirable.

  IMO the PC is going to basically cannibalize the console market (everything goes there and goes on sale, emulation included) and PC hardware can be made to last for a very long time despite a higher initial investment. If Valve can get a Console-like experience that’s plug-and-play with a TV, then Sony and Microsoft are in a bit of a bind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Millie Bobby Brown, the Netflix algorithm queen who lives on a farm far with more than 45 animals⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It didn’t even look like Simon’s work to me. The Electric State as painted is very banal. “Sure robots and megastructures exist alongside us but I still have to go to work, or farm, or play in the fields as a kid, and so do some robots.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cyan (Myst, Riven) to lay off 12 people, "roughly half the team"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Would love to see more of the developer providing good information for those laid off so other companies can more easily ingest possible hires.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pokémon Legends Z-A - Nintendo Direct 3.27.25⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Looking alright. It’s a Pokémon game so I know what I’m getting into but it looks fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Upscaling is actually good (as an option)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a game developer and I will 100% confirm that studios have already started and will continue assuming the user has DLSS/FSR/XeSS enabled because it turns out rendering half as many pixels can get you across the finish line.

  It was already fairly standard practice to try as hard as you can for performance, and when that fails to bring you to native resolution, just cut some resolution (for example, to 900p from 1080p).

  However, I do want to add that DLSS/FSR/XeSS is great technology for the low end of the market who can’t afford insane rigs but do get to have a slightly sharper image than previous upscalers could accomplish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cybertruck Crashes in Light Snow as Driver Shouts "NOT AGAIN!"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fuck the cybertruck but I agree. To me, it looks like a firm layer of ice and a distinct lack of tires which can handle ice or chains failing that. Cybertruck’s weight is doing it no favors here either, and the load helped pull him down the hill. Chains would have made a huge difference in this condition.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s Sergey Brin urges workers to the office ‘at least’ every weekday⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The science actually says that 60 hours a week, when maintained, is less productive than 40. You can gain productivity in the short term by mandating overtime, but the limit is around two weeks. You also pay for it in lost productivity the following weeks anyway, so it’s more a shifting of productivity.

  If he actually cared about productivity (which is related to service/development and eventually profit), he wouldn’t be saying this falsehood.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Day 214 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing until l forget to post Screenshots⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m working my way up the generations and I need to replay Alola in the Ultra games since I only had Pokemon Sun before and had different livingdex rules when I played it. A bit unfortunate for time-sake, but I really liked the Alola games. Good luck on your dex!

  To add some naming inspiration, my friend and I like dumb nicknames like:

  Blingo Splorp Gunch Slizbop Boizo

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Playing Dragonsweeper because of Ars' article. Did I have any way out of this without guessing?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You sort of need to keep track of creature count but I feel like the game should do that for me, and not in a menu.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The PlayStation Network outage proves PC gamers were right to resist its mandatory sign-in requirement⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I read an article testing the same disc drive in multiple PlayStations and they continued to work. My guess is that Sony pays for console X to be able to use a disc drive when one is inserted, and then pays for console Y when one is inserted. They probably can check the ID of the disc drive, but they also probably don’t care that much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The PlayStation Network outage proves PC gamers were right to resist its mandatory sign-in requirement⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.

  I want to address this section by the author. Should any old disc drive work offline? Yes. Do PlayStation’s? No.

  In the interest of saving money, Sony doesn’t pre-pay for the Blu-Ray Disc Association License, so they use the internet to know when to pay the license fee on behalf of the user. So from a legal standpoint by an entity which does not want to get sued, their course of action to save money requires this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.

  I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).

  No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.

  Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.

  It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.

  I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

  However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSN Is Still Down After 14 Hours And No One Knows Why⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

  Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially in console.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Broken Mindset Of Modern Graphics & Optimization | LTT Response With Industry Breakdown⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, this video is highly antagonistic like the rest of theirs. On the whole, they’re talking about the right thing, but the video tends towards generalization and ragebaiting.

  Also months and months later there’s yet to be any news or progress on their “alternative” Unreal Engine fork that fixes TAA or whatever, despite the host talking very quickly over technical rendering jargon. You’d think with the ability to do that, they could manage to … disable TAA in Unreal. Vibes feel like a scam.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Bought a PlayStation Vita in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do not yet have a PS3 and did not have one in the past, so the answer from me is no, and I unfortunately know nothing about that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Bought a PlayStation Vita in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hacked mine recently and have been playing some PSP games in multiplayer with a real PSP over ad-hoc wireless that just works. It’s beautiful.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Venezuela fines TikTok $10M for fatal social media challenges that led to the death of 3 teenager, intoxication of 200 others⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  $10M is a nothing fine to them. As far as they’re concerned, this is the cost of doing business.

  Next time go bigger.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bioshock creator Ken Levine discusses the future of narratives in games⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The AAA industry has made some really great games but I see - increasingly over time - a lack of interactivity in the games in favor of heavy movie-like narrative. It is unfortunate that adding depth of interactivity in a AAA space requires an immense amount of work to polish those interactions to look good / real / natural. However, we’re running up against graphical performance issues. It’s time to bring back those interactions, perhaps sacrifice a bit of quality to polish these interactions up, and make games that have more player choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New PlayStation Portable report backed by Digital Foundry⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  PS2 base models were BC to PS1 PS3 base models were BC to PS2 (and PS1) even before they added digital-purchased emulated copies. PS Vita has a built-in PSP that can play digital versions of those games as well as PS2 ones. PS4 had a very limited selection of PS2 games released digitally for it.

  PS5 is BC with PS4.

  They could do a lot better, though. Their digital offerings are extremely limited and have yet to tackle the issue of emulating the cell processor at reasonable speeds.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.

  After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 15th⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Destroying filthy xenos in Space Marine II with my battle-brother in online campaign co-op.

  What a treat. Also Pokémon Platinum.