By the numbers, that demographic appears to be shrinking, not growing. PC has grown while consoles have shrunk.

Surely someone out there is paranoid enough to be wiresharking constantly. Sony games get hit hard in GOG reviews for telemetry that I’d probably never think twice about.

When they’re new and “incomplete”, it’s no different than how patches used to work for games before clients like Steam. I bought Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, and I can get updates through Heroic or Galaxy, or I can use the installers for each patch or DLC.

That’s called survivorship bias.

It’s only empty if you haven’t been paying attention.

We used to get multiplayer games that weren’t dependent on some server that we don’t control, and now they’ve all turned into this. Then we read about all the layoffs that happened because this model is inherently unsustainable, and we have a giant gap in the medium’s history of games that we used to be able to play but now cannot because the business made a gamble on a type of game that sometimes becomes a money printer.

Those are a few different incentive systems in place. YouTube does what it does to be friendly to advertisers. Call of Duty does what it does because they’re too stupid to realize that censoring mention of your competitors actually draws more attention to them. But you’re here on Lemmy right now, presumably, because you were fed up with something on reddit and decided to move, and you can do the same with which video games you play.

To be fair, I told my friends that I thought The Finals would last only 7 months, but it stabilized around a little north of 10k concurrent players, which is probably fewer than the devs were hoping for but enough to keep it going.

My wife played that game for longer than I’ve played most games, and she only ever played it with a controller. She also liked Littlewood, Disney Dreamlight Valley, and Cozy Grove; she only ever used a controller for them.

I am looking at metacritic, and your MK9 critic score does not match what I see. Here is the PS3 version of MK9 (84), and here is the Xbox 360 version (86). Did you dig up the score for the PC version that I’m having a hard time even finding on their site? Back when we were in that weird period where console developers were way worse at making PC versions? The 360 version of just about any third party game was the main event back then.

User scores are a non-factor to me, as anyone with any petty grievance can and will just leave a laughably low score, and you’re going to see larger swings for high profile games; definitely more for games that launched in the 7th gen and later, when metacritic was a site that entered the public consciousness. The newer games just plain sold more copies than the older ones, largely on the back of reviewing better than the PS2 era. And MK vs. DCU was MK8, if you’re counting how they arrived at 9, 10, and 11 (Shaolin Monks would be a spin-off), so there wasn’t really a large gap there.

It used to be quite common for game dev studios to be multi project, as it kept up a steady cadence of releases, kept multiple disciplines of development work busy in a pipeline, and provided redundancy against any one project failing. Now when it happens with a studio this size, people don’t believe it can work.

It is not. They’re still working on Star Wars.

The competitive piece is one aspect, they could try new game modes that are not just reskins and points like MK Karting, Chess, Konquest, etc.

They still deliver this. Not those modes exactly, but they’ve always had modes beyond the competitive multiplayer. Their marquis feature at this point, and likely the reason MK games are some of the best selling games of the year of their release these days, is the story mode, and NRS’s peers keep trying to do something, anything, that comes close. The towers are another major driver, but not for me; I really enjoyed the Krypt in X and 11. Between that, the story mode, and versus play, there was absolutely no question that I got my money’s worth out of the game. Sadly, the Krypt was replaced with Invasions in MK1, but I don’t think it was a popular feature with anyone, so hopefully Invasions will be gone from future games.

The modern games all under perform against the ps2 games on metacritic.

Deadly Alliance through Armageddon: 79, 81, 75

MK9-MK1: 86 (9), 83 (X), 85 (XL), 82 (11), 88 (11 Ultimate), 83 (1)

The one you cited as having fanfare for not being shit was after the PS2 games (and 4 and vs. DC) built a reputation of being shit…I’m not sure how that supports your argument.

The single player release at EOL sounds like spinning up your own local server and connecting to it.

I applaud the dev for having this plan, but talk is cheap, and my interest in this game can’t start until the private server is available. I get that you want people to congregate in the official server, but they’ll do that naturally anyway.

In case you care about the things I care about:

What is the end-of-life plan?

Project Rebearth let’s you play on a 1 to 1 replica of planet earth. that is only possible when data gets streamed over the internet, even in a single player mode. This also means that servers need to be maintained, which costs money. I cannot maintain these services until the end of time but since you are buying the game, you have the right to an end-of-life plan so you know what you’re getting into. I have the ambition to keep the official game server live for 3 years. this is roughly up until the year 2029. Depending on the active player base at that time, this may be extended. I plan to allow for custom game servers about a year after the game release. When the official server terminates, you will still be able to connect to full-featured community servers with the game you bought and paid for.

I was watching V for Vendetta, a movie about how people allow a fascist government to replace a democracy, because it was November 5th, a crucial political date in that story.

There are edge cases. Older ports, notably Total War and Civilization plus a few other edge cases I’ve found, will either crash when trying to talk to each other or refuse to do it. You can likely sidestep all of these issues by just running the Windows version via Proton instead. I believe the problems those ports had were something to do with underlying libraries and how they keep time, but I admit I don’t know for sure.

I know you mentioned this game to me in this community in the last couple of days, and now this update came along and surprised us all. Would you mind confirming if a dedicated server can be spun up for local play only, with no internet? And if so, does the game have bots to fill out a private server?

Dropping the first bit of proper news on Steam since early 2024 after the release of Battlefield 6 is certainly a choice

Not a terrible one. 4 people can play this game for less than the price of one person playing Battlefield 6. You can capture everyone that’s on a budget or can’t play BF6 due to Secure Boot requirements.