EncryptKeeper
@EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world
- Comment on 10 hours ago:
They are inherently a sweat fest by their very nature and they appeal to a crowd that enjoys high risk high reward gameplay. Theres nothing wrong with you for not being into it. Not everybody’s dream job is being a fireman and running into burning buildings before lunch.
But it’s one of those niche genres that scratch an itch that more casual games don’t.
- Comment on 10 hours ago:
I hear the game is supposed to be fun so I suppose I should give it a shot. But styling they give the characters and weapons, essentially junk weapons and raiders from Fallout wearing whatever goofy scrap they can find puts me so far off. Like not everything has to be perfectly tacticool but like, something closer to the Metro series would be dope
- Comment on Xbox consoles and games will no longer be sold at Walmart and Target, according to employees 5 days ago:
I saw a post saying it’s untrue but their only evidence seemed to be that their Target had not removed anything g last time they checked. Meanwhile I have seen a half dozen posts from employees and customers showing the Xbox stuff being removed.
- Comment on Space battle games for casual player? 1 week ago:
Not sure I’d describe that spreadsheet simulator as casual lol
- Comment on Is it me or does it seem like review bombing on Steam has become so much worse recently? 1 week ago:
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 1 week ago:
Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.
I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:
- They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
- Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
- Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
- Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 1 week ago:
Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online
What you’re both missing here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.
As console adoption increased, as did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…?
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
No lie you can and do fix Minthara and become one of the most wholesome a devoted couples in the game.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
I don’t mind subscriptions for ongoing infrastructure as much. My problem is with using a subscription to replace ownership.
- Comment on Xbox: "Price Increases Are Never Fun For Anybody" 2 weeks ago:
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
- Comment on Former BioWare lead writer reads the runes on EA-Saudi deal and speculates that 'guns and football' are in, 'gay stuff' is out, and the venerable RPG studio may be for the chop 2 weeks ago:
Fret not, anything they aren’t going to actively milk will likely be sold off to try and pay back the $20 billion dollar loan they took to make this purchase.
- Comment on EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm 2 weeks ago:
Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.
- Comment on Steam Autumn Sale 2025 Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
I’m seeing a lot of games with what seems like a much steeper discount than usual. First thing I do when there’s a steam sale is look at my wishlist and sort by discount and there are a lot of games on sale for 90% off, many of which only a couple dollars.
- Comment on Ghost of Yotei | Review Thread (89/100 OpenCritic) 3 weeks ago:
They are because those same people are boycotting anyway for toe other reasons.
- The game features a female lead this time around.
- the voice and performance actress of the player characters is left wing
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Patch Due Out Today, PC Performance 'Our Top Priority,' Gearbox Says 4 weeks ago:
It’s so funny that this was their mindset when it doesn’t run well on my PC which cost close to $2,000.
Randy is so out of touch he thinks people with $2,000 available in discretionary spend are “the poors”.
- Comment on I Got This Right, Right? 4 weeks ago:
There aren’t. The majority of political violence is committed by those with right wing ideologies.
- Comment on 'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash 4 weeks ago:
There’s a difference between a game being way outside of your specs because it’s graphically very advanced and your hardware is old, and a game just being unoptimized slop that expects its users to deal with by throwing higher specs at a fixable problem.
I have a brand new 5070ti that can play all kinds of UE5 games with much better graphics than BL4 at 4k resolution with ray tracing at a decent frame rate without relying on frame gen. And I’m in the top few percentiles here.
- Comment on 'Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers' is Randy Pitchford's tone deaf retort to the performance backlash: 'If you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed' 4 weeks ago:
Sure, but powerful systems don’t run it too well either. Especially given how mediocre the game looks visually.
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing 5 weeks ago:
Right but how do you know that didn’t impact the score? For all we know they knocked it down a point for that.
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing 5 weeks ago:
How do you know that?
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing 5 weeks ago:
Depends on the game. In a looter shooter like Borderlands, it’s the looting and shooting
- Comment on Borderlands 4 Launches To Mostly Negative Steam Reviews Over Performance Issues And Crashing 5 weeks ago:
They noted the perforemance issues in their review
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 weeks ago:
It’s only subjective in that it’s not entirely impossible for at least one person out there to enjoy the mechanic. However at the same time there has been a general consensus made that it’s not a good mechanic. Your opinion may be the equal of any one other persons opinion, but what I think you’re not understanding is that is that it’s not the equal of the many opinions of the majority of people. If you expect your one opinion to hold the same value as the collective opinions of everyone else, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
as a sort of olive branch of understanding that opinions are opinions.
That’s not a great example to your point because the weapon degradation mechanic of BOTW is also widely regarded as a bad mechanic. It’s the most disliked mechanic in that game.
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks 5 weeks ago:
I think he’s being upvoted and you’re being downvoted because boss runbacks have been around for a long time and both the industry and community have since come to a consensus that they’re just objectively bad game design. They don’t add anything of value to a game and their existence is a detriment to the experience. I don’t think you’ll find a single person who holds the opinion that they’re fun. People like yourself may tolerate them, but a tolerable inconvenience is not the same thing as fun. You’ve actually gone exceptionally out of your way to avoid calling them fun.
Like with anything, not all personal opinions are going to be held in equal regard. And your take here is going to be an outlier so I wouldn’t be surprised if you continue to get this reception.
- Comment on Civilization 7 developers Firaxis have laid off an unspecified number of workers, 2K confirm 1 month ago:
Well they removed the ability to play as “A civilization” in the game called “Civilization” so yeah everyone I know has swore off it.
- Comment on Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? 1 month ago:
What I would also note is that the story in BG3 is still very linear. The branching paths are small deviations along the main path and can affect the ending, but the story doesn’t really change a whole lot so it’s not as daunting as it sounds.
The differences in choices in BG3 are more like flavor so that the story doesn’t railroad you into a certain character archetype. Replaying BG3 and making different choices mainly just rewards you with different companions and cutscenes, new paths through the 3 main areas, and more or less different side quests or even parallel main quests.
- Comment on No Man's Sky: Voyagers update releases today, introduces customizable "colossal, fully furnished, completely bespoke Corvette-class starships" 1 month ago:
In the endless exploration, yes. In the myriad of slapped together mechanics that don’t really tie into the exploration at all, no.