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ampersandrew

@ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

Posts
71
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1477
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2 yr. ago

  • Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games]

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  • Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn't produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they've got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.

  • Capcom doubles down on its decision to go pay-per-view during the Street Fighter League despite the fact that nobody really likes it

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  • As one Reddit commenter put it: "I thought Capcom organised this circuit as a marketing tool for the game. Makes no sense to charge viewers to watch it. And esports is, unfortunately, still way too niche for that to be profitable."

    It's shooting themselves in the foot, not their audience. Their audience has plenty of Street Fighter tournaments to watch.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • It wasn't always worth it back then, hence why it was supported with ads or a subscription. Did you ever patch your game back then? Even that was subsidized by ads; the devs didn't host the patch files themselves in most cases. Live services, which are unfortunately all too often synonymous with online games, host their own servers, and you're paying for them with microtransactions. If a game uses the platform's matchmaking for peer to peer multiplayer, which was just about all of them on Xbox Live in its early days, then you're using the servers your subscription was paying for. Even today, many still use these features. But you're correct that the ones not using these features are still locked behind that subscription on consoles unless they're free to play.

  • 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames

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  • There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I'm not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it's possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn't have been, and that was devastating on those people's lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.

  • 'Valve does not get anywhere near enough criticism': DayZ creator Dean Hall says the 'gambling mechanics' of Valve's monetization strategy 'have absolutely no place' in videogames

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  • He's right. It's despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they've unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They've done a lot of great open source work, and they've helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they've created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they're not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.

    Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn't mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the "Paradox model" of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.

    It's been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don't feel it's worth it, you don't buy it. They don't obfuscate the details of what's in the expansion; they don't make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It's the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn't feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn't like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • Hosting servers isn't free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it. It's easy to forget that that someone used to be advertisers via GameSpy for so many games. Now, on PC, you're paying for it via digital purchases on the same store that hosts the servers.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It's not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will. Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft's own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want. Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.

    I'll grant you that there's room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it's out.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • When Microsoft can't do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it's a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K's games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • If you're fine with just Big Picture Mode rather than what SteamOS or Bazzite are doing at a lower level, more power to you, but for a lot of us, it makes a huge difference in the experience, and it sounds like Microsoft's FSE hasn't gotten all the way there yet.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • Background processes can spawn pop-ups, update reminders, notifications, etc. If you listen to Dan and Bakalar's chat on the Bombcast, even with Bakalar on the proper FSE like he's supposed to be, you'll hear examples of the controller inputs just not working the way they're supposed to, often because something else spawned on top of it. You can hear the same in this GameSpot review of the Xbox Ally X from Tamoor Hussain. And I can tell you from experience, this happens on desktop Linux distros on handhelds as well.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • As far as I know, this same advantage isn't granted to anything other than Steam Deck. On desktop, you often have a Vulkan shader step before the game boots that I rarely see on Deck. I could be wrong though.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • Back when Xbox Live first hit the scene, that ~$4/month definitely got you a better experience than you got for free. Now that's not the case.

  • Microsoft's ambitious new Xbox: Your entire Xbox console library, the full power of Windows PC gaming, and no multiplayer paywall

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  • Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It's not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will.

    A big difference here, and something that it sounds like the FSE did not nail, is that SteamOS doesn't just boot into Big Picture Mode; it intercepts how popups and game windows are drawn to the screen so that you never lose focus of the game window. It doesn't force you to get out a keyboard or use the touch screen to enter a login password or PIN. It's got those important considerations for the ways a game machine differs from any other personal computer. Microsoft, with all its wealth and the code base of Windows in its control, can make those same changes, but maybe they didn't plan for it in their code base that now surely goes back almost 30 years at this point. Best of luck to those engineers.

    New technology Microsoft is developing, alongside the "fixed" nature of the hardware, should eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that sometimes come with PC gaming. Things like compiling shaders, etc, shouldn't be an issue on the new Xbox, for example.

    I don't know if it's actually new technology, but what Valve does for the Steam Deck is to either handle this server side or to have people with a Steam Deck essentially upload their completed shaders back to the server to be distributed to everyone else's Steam Deck, sort of like BitTorrent. This is what I expect Microsoft will do.

    Right now, I'm told the current plan is for the next Xbox specifically to have no paywall for multiplayer.

    It's insane that they've kept that paywall for so long when it would be the easiest way to make their console more enticing than PlayStation, before they did this pivot of theirs. If the goal was Game Pass anyway, make online free and make that library on Game Pass attractive. The reason online is free on PC is because your store purchases are supporting the infrastructure that someone like Valve provides, and we crossed the threshold on consoles where digital purchases are the majority some time ago.

    Where the Xbox Ally is disadvantaged, at least for Xbox console users, is the lack of the Xbox console library. There are more Xbox Play Anywhere (dual-license PC and console Xbox games) than ever, but most AAA publishers aren't on board with this ecosystem just yet. Increasingly, though, it'll become the default ecosystem for publishers, particularly if they want to support a PC gaming universe where they get 88% of the revenue rather than 70%.

    This is a delusional paragraph in the wake of the Epic Games Store.

  • When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game?

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  • I was a big fan of Uncharted 2 and 3, but Uncharted 4 stopped giving me control of the action and started making it barely interactive or just a cut-scene, and I found The Great Circle to be an excellent counter to that, personally. Even if you saw a T-pose, it doesn't seem right to call it a typical Bethesda thing. There's a big difference between Bethesda, the developer of Elder Scrolls, and Machine Games, the developer of Wolfenstein and Indiana Jones; they don't even use the same engine between them.

  • When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game?

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  • In Borderlands 4, there's a side quest to cure someone of being a psycho. You need to get a handful of macguffins and plug them into this elaborate machine. There's a lot of whirring and build-up, and then the machine essentially zaps the psycho and makes him explode. "He's cured!" It got me, lol.

  • When was the last time you actually laughed while playing a game?

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  • There were actually good, written gags in that game, too. Plus the general "Indy found himself in a place where needed to improvise and punch some Nazis" sort of gameplay that the game did so well. I can't even recall a single bug from my playthrough.

  • ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS

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  • New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It's the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.

    The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren't just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn't even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux's favor when tested. I don't think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn't reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn't mean that it's still happening.

  • ROG Xbox Ally runs better on Linux than the Windows it ships with — new test shows up to 32% higher FPS

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  • Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it's far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven't shopped with either in over a decade, so I'm not the best candidate to check.

  • Rise of the Tomb Raider -SteamDeck

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  • I started a new run of Baldur's Gate II to see if I can actually be good at it this time.

    Of more recent releases, I've also been going through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and The Alters, both being very good resource management games in space.

  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages

    www.gamingonlinux.com /2024/10/steam-games-will-now-need-to-fully-disclose-kernel-level-anti-cheat-on-store-pages/
  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it

    www.theverge.com /2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling

    www.theverge.com /2024/9/10/24167932/ps5-pro-sony-specs-announcement
  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    FINAL FANTASY XVI available on PC September 17th

    store.steampowered.com /app/2515020/FINAL_FANTASY_XVI/
  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    Mouse: P.I. For Hire Official Gameplay Trailer

  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    The Plucky Squire | Release Date Trailer (September 17)

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    Weird freezing on Wolfenstein: The New Order. Only on desktop, not Steam Deck. Is Valve interested in a bug report?

  • Games @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered on PC has been ready for at least seven months, it’s claimed | VGC

    www.videogameschronicle.com /news/the-last-of-us-part-2-remastered-on-pc-has-been-ready-for-at-least-seven-months-its-claimed/
  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    SOLVED Is there anyone here fluent in Lutris who can help me decipher this install script?

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.ml
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    Crunchy audio coming through some Proton games on desktop but not on Steam Deck

  • Linux Gaming @lemmy.world
    ampersandrew @lemmy.world

    How does Heroic Launcher work for WMV-encoded videos on GOG games run through Proton?