MrFinnbean
@MrFinnbean@lemmy.world
- Comment on To make video games for Gen Z, be authentic 2 days ago:
I dont agree with this article at all. There are still as much intrest to longer single player games than before. Its just that the audience is wider now that 15-30 years ago.
Back in the 90’s and 00’s gaming at home had pretty high level of entry. PC side was just starting up and installing and trouple shooting games were much more cumbersome than now days. If you bought a console you basically committed to the games on that console. Thats why games were catered to much narrower audience. Those audiences are still there, but now that the bar for starting to play games is so much lower there is completelly new group of gamers on the market.
- Comment on A sudden epiphany. 1 week ago:
Opposide for me. I realised i enjoy playing games much more than making them.
But im happy for you that you found a thing you can be passionate about and spend time working on it too.
- Comment on Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff' 1 week ago:
At the moment you are my favorite person and i hope your socks are never wet and your food always warms up evenly in the microwave.
- Comment on Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff' 1 week ago:
I honestly dont know if this is sarcasm or not.
Game engines like unreal engine and unity have huge prefab libraries that contain both free and paid models and people can share or sell their own prefabs too. The problem with those are that you cant just pick models willy nilly as it can make the game feel like patchwork quilt when every asset has little different art style. Also in bigger production games things like polygon counts start to matter a lot, so in some cases its easier to make assets from the ground up than start to fiddle with existing models.
Most bigger studios have pretty large internal libraries they can pull from. Like for example mountain lions in GTA V and Red dead redemption are almost identical. They even use the exactly same sound in both. And bears in Skyrim and Yao Guai in Fallout 4 have same skeleton and some of the animations are fully reused.
- Comment on Asset reuse in videogames is essential, and we need to embrace it, says Assassin's Creed and Far Cry director: 'We redo too much stuff' 1 week ago:
Thank you stranger! I had forgotten Dink Smallwood completely. Core memory unlocked!
- Comment on Epic Games needs Fortnite players to "help pay the bills" as the multi-billion-dollar company raises V-Bucks prices while making Battle Passes and Crew way worse in value 1 week ago:
What youvare talking about? Any good service does not let anybody who contacts them change the login email just because they say they have lost the access to it. Thats like basic security.
- Comment on Sony is testing dynamic pricing: one game - different prices on the PlayStation Store 2 weeks ago:
Yes, predatory use is what i fear.
What i can gather from the article at the moment they are testing what is the percentage they can discount the game and make most profit still from it. I dont inherently see any proof they are aiming for full dynamic pricing.
If they give for group A, 50% discount and make 1000 sales from 70€ game they make 35 000€.
But if they give group B, 25% discount from 70€ game they make the same 35 000€ with only 667 sales.
Then they have group C as a control. If the control group will make as much money as the other groups they know for sure discounts are not good busines.
Simple so far.
After the initial numbers they most likely will follow the retention. If i were there i would follow each group weekly and take a note how much money each group generates. At this time it would be best that each group gets the same discounts and adds etc. My hypotesis would be that people who buy only games from big discounts are more unlikely to buy games at full price. Meaning that even if there were more sales there would be less income and the customers have lower CLV. It does not mean they are bad customers per se, but it would mean they are not the core customer group they should focus their effort on.
If they are doing what they are doing to figure out their audience really is, this is not predatory. A/B testing is unfortunaly the best way test it, and to company as big as Sony, the data they collect is unmeasurable in value. Everyone of us had been part if some companys A/B test at some point. Adds, news site headers, youtube videos, hell even telemarketing calls do this all the time.
Im not saying they are not looking into to dynamic pricing, but with what information the article gave me i cant say that they are.
Sorry for the long text. I wanted just to justify why i dont see this for a reason to immediadly jump in to conclusion that Sony is trying to screw everybody up.
- Comment on Sony is testing dynamic pricing: one game - different prices on the PlayStation Store 2 weeks ago:
Exactly what i was thinking. A/B testin is the best way to get data.
What worries me more is what they are going to do with that data and if it will lead to predatory business model or not.
- Comment on women 3 weeks ago:
Ah. I feel dumb.
- Comment on Farming for self sustainance 3 weeks ago:
Not touching the animal part, but human slaves? Im confused. Do you think farming just happens without any labor? Or do you think that working on your own farm growing food for your self is slavery? Or do you see all work as slavery?
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
You have a point with that, but as long as consoles are easy to use they have their audience. I have both pc and ps5. I do mostly prefer my pc, but i honestly cant deny that ps has its merits. The time i have owned the one console i have needed to upgrade my pc twice.
As long as there is no convinient way for less computer savy people to play casually, consoles will be a thing.
And before you start to crusifix me, remember most people playing games do it casually and like it or not, those people are the majority and the audience that bring biggest part of the money in to the industry.
- Comment on Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform 3 weeks ago:
There are some proper games for the phones. Most of them are ports like disco elysium, octopath traveller or balatro, but because the dont get a lot of downloads in app store and google play, the platforms tend to push free games over them. And that makes sense for them, because they also profit from every transaction and ad that those games show. Quality single pay games just have one purchase per player and the audience for them is way smaller.
I personally as a consumer see so much wasted potential with mobile games. I remember when i had one hand held machine for tetris and another machine with shmup while my tamagotchi was dying somewhere. When i got gameboy it was crazy how i could take multible games with me when going on a long trip. Now we have almost always in our pocket a machine with multitudes more power than anything back then, but because how apple and google have build their enviroments devs dont have incentive to make quality single purchase products because they wont get the visibility they need.
Sites like itch.io are too small to make a difference. It would need some big player like Steam to add mobile game category in to their app, but apple and google are making it really tedious to install and update anything outside their own controlled enviroments that understandably serve for their biggest audience, who are children.
- Comment on Consumerism ahhhhh moment 4 weeks ago:
Were you in market for buying the car when you saw those adds? I you werent then they did not loose a sale even if you hated the add.
Can you honestly say, that if you were in really need of a car and there would be opportunity to buy a yaris with good price and it would be good fit to your needs at the moment, you would pass it just because some add you saw at some point?
Was it so effective you repeat the name of the product years later in some random discussion on the internet?
I think the adds worked pretty much as intented.
- Comment on Consumerism ahhhhh moment 4 weeks ago:
Sometimes even if you buy from different place the owner of the companies are the same. Like if you ask offers for new windows in norther europe the three biggest companies are owned by same company.
- Comment on Consumerism ahhhhh moment 4 weeks ago:
I bet i have heard the same add, even living in Finland. I live close enough to border so i get good mix of Finish, Swedish and Norwegian adds. And every single one of those are way louder than the podcast is.
- Comment on Consumerism ahhhhh moment 4 weeks ago:
I bet you were thinking about some add when writing this.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls 6 Is Powered By New Version Of Creation Engine 4 weeks ago:
Well go mod something else then. Ill manage just fine without your help.
It sounds nitpicky because there are only like handfull of games that let people mod the game as much as skyrim does. The vast majority of the games just soils them selfs if you touch the files. Its not perfect, but its better than most.
- Comment on Elder Scrolls 6 Is Powered By New Version Of Creation Engine 4 weeks ago:
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times. Most games dont have any kind of mod support and they just stop working completelly if you do anything beond texture change.
Bashing creation engines modding is like yelling in a desert about how the water in the oasis would be better with ice cubes. You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
- Comment on Mewgenics becomes the most-played roguelite ever on Steam 4 weeks ago:
Well its does not mean “fuck all”. It means the games are run based and randomised.
Also Rogue had zero meta progression.
- Comment on Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps 4 weeks ago:
Ah. The romance of giving the right colour knicknack 20 times to somebody and get the relationship meter to green.
- Comment on Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps 4 weeks ago:
I think i might have touched this subject before, but im really torn how many games handle sexuality of the characters.
I kind of hate how in many games every dateable character are main character-sexual. I feel like it robs the characters some depth when they dont care of the character is he/she/other. It makes the characters feel bland amd plastic.
But on the other hand games are a medium where player should be able to craft their own story and feel accepted, so devs should limit and hinder the player as little as they can. Especially when the real world can be so hostile towards the sexual minorities.
- Comment on Games you fell out of love with. 5 weeks ago:
I have been thinking about loosing the “romanticism” with games a lot and i feel internet and the large amount of games available are big factor to it.
Back in the olden days as a kid living in the boonies i had only handfull of chances in the year to buy a new game. And when i had, i had allready made a decition that today i will buy something, before i even knew what was available in the store. Going in the game shop was a mystery. I did not know anything about the games beforehand unless i had seen one in the friends house. The purchase decition was made allready at home, but the product was chosen at the store by looking the package game was in and the few description words on the case. Some if those games i bought was really bad, but i could not just refund them so i played them anyway. And if i liked the game a lot i might play it trough multiple times a year.
Now when im buying something i know allmost everything about the game beforehand from reviews, if the game does not click the moment i start it, i will just refund it and when i finish the game its likely that i will never start it again because i have allready something new to play.
- Comment on Games you fell out of love with. 5 weeks ago:
I could say every Final Fantasy game after FF9
But real answer is GTA V. I loved my first playtrough and enjoyed the game a lot. Since then i have tried to start it fresh half a dosen times and every time i just loose intrest about midway trough.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Nostalgia sells and people who have played those games when they were young are now working age so they have money to spend.
Also the first game is over 20 years old so there are complete generation of people who havent played the original and getting more people intrested on the IP is good for the next new GoW game.
You may groan, but i 100% see why companies are doing this. And personally i will play these and im glad they are being made. Its not like they are milking the same game like The Last of us remake was or how ever many different releases Skyrim has had.
- Comment on Gaming market melts down after Google reveals new AI game design tool — Project Genie crashes stocks. (A.K.A . Investors panic because they don't understand what "real" videogames are) 1 month ago:
So its a glorified a procedural generator that does not save anything it makes?
What the fuck. Its like saying game devs are being replaced because people see dreams when they sleep.
- Comment on Gaming market melts down after Google reveals new AI game design tool — Project Genie crashes stocks. (A.K.A . Investors panic because they don't understand what "real" videogames are) 1 month ago:
They would be capable of imitating a counter for some timeframe but to actually keep track of it over a long gaming session?
The article was little light on the details, but if the whole game is run on ai thats what is going to happen. But if AI is creating real code and the game it creates has real files that are saved on the computer, things like point counters are not anymore tied by the limits of AI’s memory.
But i just dont see how AI in its current state could make large cohesive projects.
Also there is no such thing as artificial intellect. AI is just nice marketing word for something that tries to mimic what real AI would be.
- Comment on Anon wants to talk about video games 1 month ago:
I always default to answering with this when somebody asks questions like that.
Darwen childcare:
It’s like regular childcare, except with more dogs, and less care. The idea is simple, but will take some finesse to perform.
- Construct a box. It should be 3x3, leaving a 1 tile center free. The walls should be wall grates and the corners should be actual wall. Alternatively, perhaps ideally, the center tile could be a floor grate (not a hatch). The roof should be either a floor grate or a hatch.
- Place a child into the box. Creative abuse of levers, wall deconstructions, and hatches can be used.
- Place 12 years worth of ☼Dwarven Syrup Roast☼ and assorted booze into the box, by “dumping” it onto the roof and then opening the roof via lever, causing the items to fall down. For this reason, the floor would need to be solid to accommodate a food stockpile.
- Place a female dog in the box.
- Wait 12 years to unleash disaster.
The premise is fairly simple. Animals enclosed in a tight space will lash out randomly, often attacking a dwarf in the same tile. This extends over time to create a biological danger room, where the dwarven children are subjected to 12 years of consistent dog biting, scratching, and watching the dogs kill each other, quickly leveling up the child to legendary dodger, perhaps wrestler/kicker/biter/etc if the dwarf manages to counterattack. Not sure if a dwarf will counterattack an animal. The child will eat the food from the floor that he’s been staring at for the past 12 years, and will ideally be comforted by some lovely mist falling right beside him. Once the years have passed, and the child grows into a scarred, hardened, tough-as-steel dwarf (don’t forget agility, endurance, etc) who doesn’t care about anything. Or, keep the lid closed, and throw in a weapon and shield, and replace the dogs with goblins.
The only issue is trying to get the child to survive without going berzerk. But then again, that might just turn into training for the other caged children, right?
- Comment on New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA 1 month ago:
Was it any good game? It has been sitting in my library for ever, but i heard its kind of meh, so i have been putting it of.
- Comment on New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA 1 month ago:
Morality systems are easy to break anyway.
I would say its more that morality systems are hard to implement.
If you make simple system where you loose karma from stealing and gain karma from donating money for orphans player can exploit that system easy. You would need to figure some other system. One could be system where after stealing or donating a certain amount you get a status that permanently raises/lowers your karma. But it really cant be permanent either because it takes away from player agency. How would you turn those things to a points. I mean stealing last coin from beggar cant be same that stealing a coin from a millionare. Also this kind of karma system makes so the quests in the game are black and white. You cant make a quest where dooming 12 orphans to die saves thousands from a plague.
How to implement the karma? Everybody magically hating you for low karma is just unrealistic. Should karma effect only some random events and set story points? Sounds fine, but then devs need to implement that system to the storypoints and its not easy to do so without railroading the players. Like Paragon/Renegate in mass effect 2. It made it so everytime the opportunity came to choose from the two, it took away from the real choise and it became just desition to wich stat you want to raise. Also choosing neutral choice was never good option, because in the end game you need to have one or other stat high enough to get trough gated discussions. You could roleplay and choose what ever you feel right, but then some late game options are just locked from you.
- Comment on Why are people still romanticizing No Man’s Sky’s “redemption” arc? 1 month ago:
The sneering was only half intentional. And personaly i quite enjoy discussing things like this.
But i still strongly disagree with your view. Hello Games was small studio at the start, but they havent been ringing the indie bell for their game and in my opinion they havent stolen the limelight from indie devs. Games like Terraria and Stardew valley are still celebrated games and people are praising those games and the work devs have being doing with the updates.
Following your logic one could argue, that companies behind those games are not anywhere near the small indie teams people imagine them. And we should be angry for them too, because they take the spotlight from games like Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid, that have been passion projects for years before those earlier two even were concepts.
The main thing that makes No Man Sky different is that those succesfull indie games were good from the beginning, while NMS was horrible and borderline unsalvageable game, but the devs kept working on it and making it slowly better. A effort most companies wont do.
So in my opinion people should be happy and support Hello Games, because that shows to the other companies, that even if the first release of the game is bad, it is possible (and profitable) to keep making the game better.
Of course, if we lived in perfect world we could consider what HG is doing a bare minimum, but we live in a world where what they do is exceptional.
Also i strongly disagree about they doing minimun professionally. They have kept the now almost ten years old game playable, added vr, new console supports. If you want to see what minimal is take a look of Assasins Creed Unitys state in 2025.