I have done twin-stick shooters like Streets of Rogue and Enter the Gungeon, and I found it to only control better than a second stick.

I loved it, but I rarely use it anymore these days. Often enough, trying to remap the inputs on it errors out in the Steam Input interface, and I’ve gotten tired of fighting with it. I also never used the left pad for anything and would have preferred an actual D-pad. The right trackpad, especially when paired with gyro controls, is so much better than a right stick for every function you could use a right stick for, and I’ve put it through its paces; but that only works when you can map an actual mouse. Often times, the game will explicitly switch between “controller mode” and “mouse and keyboard” mode, and I hate playing with a controller but seeing keyboard glyphs. Also, due to my preferences, and where the market has headed lately, there have been very few games coming out where I need to “aim”, which is where the Steam controller beat a traditional Xbox controller by the widest margin. So unfortunately, between the software being a pain and there not being a compelling reason to bother putting up with it, I haven’t been using my Steam controller lately.

I’ve been looking for deathmatch shooters for a long time, like what we got from the late 90s to the mid 10s. There are very very few. I don’t care if I or anyone else move on quickly, because I primarily want to play with my friends, and the deathmatch mode typically came alongside a campaign and maybe co-op modes. That’s not a prisoner’s dilemma, and the market hasn’t really been making games like that anymore. Same for things like arcade racers akin to F-Zero or Burnout.

I think there’s also an argument to be made that all of this desire to suck up our attention has made it more difficult for the same developers to market their next game, since their potential customers are all preoccupied with something they haven’t stopped playing. It’s extremely natural for most people to fall off of a game after its initial release, and it’s definitely going to happen once they take their thumbs off the scales.

I think the incentives matter. Diablo II is about making number go up, but Diablo IV has an active incentive to slow you down and make that number go up at a certain rate so that they can upsell you again later. And rather than taking a hardline position, I’d at least ask the question out loud: Is it possible to have a business model for a game other than selling a good product at a fair price and not have it eventually evolve into something gross? Maybe the old shareware model, which is basically just a demo, but other than that, I’m not sure.

Loot boxes, for example, aren’t inherently predatory; they can add an exciting and rewarding surprise element when balanced with noble intentions.

When you sell them, they’re unregulated gambling that children can access.

When designing a battle pass, a designer must answer questions like “How much faster should a premium player progress compared to a F2P player?” and “How long should it take for a player to finish the battle pass?” I’ve seen designers balance it fairly, like by requiring 30 minutes of daily play to complete the free track or $5 to unlock the premium pass.

I still don’t see a way that this could ever be anything other than creating an incentive to play the game for reasons beyond the game being fun, no matter how “fair” it is to the person needing to spend money or not. They’re still artificially creating another body in the matchmaking pool that creates value for someone more willing to part with their dollar. If your player base dries up when you stop offering your battle pass incentives, I’d say that was some artificial retention, and it’s kind of gross.

I definitely didn’t need more reasons to hate live services. The business model has always affected the game design, and a lot of the author’s bullet points could be seen as far back as the arcades, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a better business model for all parties than “sell a good product at a fair price”.

Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.

The movie industry is plenty capable of killing itself.

They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.

I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.

It has plateaued some time ago now. That’s not failure, but it’s not about to become Netflix either.

The initial post you replied to was talking about changing the design, not the game design. I think the thread got off course because you interpreted that as game design. As long as users can host the servers themselves, the game design can remain exactly the same. Even if the game can only be played when it’s orchestrated by museum curators or something, that’s still preferable than the game being totally dead. If you’ve ever been to PAX East, there’s always a room with a full networked game of Steel Battalion multiplayer via LAN. Every controller was $200 back in the day, plus everyone needs an Xbox and TV. It was highly unlikely that anyone could ever play this game without Xbox Live, but it can still be done, so where there’s a will, there’s a way.

It’s not online only, but this Thursday night get-together is online-only.

I can find a community for a fighting game from 2012 to get together every Thursday night for a 30-person tournament via Discord. 100 people in a battle royale could work much the same.

“Our Board”:

Epic Games, Take Two, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, etc.

Do you ever hunt around Facebook Marketplace? When electronics drop in value enough, often times, people will just give them away. I have. It’s (sometimes) less hassle than trying to haggle with people over a few dollars for severely outdated hardware, and my goal at that point is to get it into someone’s hands who will use it rather than have the stuff go to a landfill. Even a very outdated PC will still play tons and tons of great games for cheap or free. They frequently won’t be the latest and greatest, but there’s less and less correlation these days with high game quality and high system requirements.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the classes.

Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part.

They absolutely do. And again, I probably wouldn’t mind if all of the sites they shut down were hosting games that could be legally purchased in a consumer friendly way, but they can’t. Shutting down the Switch emulator built on ill-gotten code is one thing; buying out the legitimate Switch emulator is a super dick move.

Sony already does this too

Thanks for reminding me. I don’t think of Sony much at all, honestly, but they do tend to lock their retro games behind a subscription, some of which can only be played that way. I think they tend to be time-limited and eventually return to sale in most cases? So not quite as bad as what Nintendo does, but still not admirable. I know you went in a different direction with this, but their subscription incentives are theirs to decide; I just hate it when something is only available via subscription when it doesn’t have to be.

In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.

Boycott is a strong word. All of the other reasons I don’t buy their stuff is because of what they do with the revenue that I would give them, but in this case in particular, it’s because I don’t buy bad products when I can instead buy good products. I’m certainly not about to spend $530 plus sales tax to play Tears of the Kingdom at acceptable frame rates on a machine that’s going to sit under my TV collecting dust when I’m done with the game. I already have a PC that could run it if they made it available there, and it would still run it better than Switch 2. Of course they’re doing what they’re doing because it’s more lucrative for them, but if that’s not aligned with what matters to me, then I’m not inclined to give them my money. There are so many other games out there worth playing instead that respect me more as a customer.

About my lowest threshold for success is that this at least makes disclosures about what you’re buying more prominent and restricts the ability for software licenses to just alter the deal and pray that they don’t alter them further. Even better disclosures would make the raw deal you’re getting become more poisonous before the point of sale. Especially as an American, I’m going to have wait a few years after any legislation goes through before I can trust online multiplayer games again.

• They put their money towards suing the shit out of emulation projects and removing ROM sites.
• This is compounded by the fact that they won’t even sell you those ROMs anymore. They only make them available to rent in perpetuity. People are rightly skeptical of a future where Microsoft only makes their games available via Game Pass rather than it just being an economical option, but Nintendo is already doing the thing that people are afraid of.
• They’re the last holdout that won’t put their games on PC in an era where console exclusivity doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no reason to play Zelda at 20 FPS and 360p when, at the time of release, my PC was already quite capable of running the game at acceptable resolutions and frame rates. This is just willfully selling people an inferior product when they have the ability to deliver a better one. Then they have the gall to charge their customers, who already paid $70, even more for an upgrade to finally run those games at acceptable performance on their next console. And in case you think this is me justifying piracy, I didn’t pirate the game; I didn’t play it at all.
• I’m a competitive fighting game player, and the way they fight against their own fans for trying to compete in Smash Bros. is atrocious.

I’m not parroting anything. I’ve looked. Sure, sometimes you get a port of XCOM or Slay the Spire, but then it’s not going to carry over progress back to my PC, where I’m more comfortable playing at home, and my reluctance to buy a version of the game like that explains why there isn’t enough money in trying to port the kinds of games that I like to mobile. Sometimes a game has a port, but it fell out of compatibility with modern Android and never got updated; and let me tell you, that’s a great way to convince me to stop looking. Even crazier is when something like Fire Emblem Heroes happens, because it’s adapting a traditional handheld/console game into an interface that makes way more sense for controlling the game, but it’s not a proper version of that series; it’s a gacha game. If I have any kind of extended anticipated desire to game on the go, my Steam Deck is just a better answer than trying to find the few games I would like that also got Android versions, because I’m going to spend more time playing them at home anyway.