I’d be really impressed if the oppressed gaming world finally decided No, and withheld purchases or even bought a bunch of brave indie games releasing that month. Realistically, I’ll admit that’s probably unlikely. A lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time, and have never heard about things like union busting, haven’t followed the brain drain of every major publisher, etc.

Part of my point is that we don’t know how much of its implied expansive story is actually singleplayer. A game with three singleplayer tutorials missions that end with “Now play multiplayer!” can likely make a cinematic story-based trailer based around key protagonists, and advertise “A singleplayer experience”; Battlefield has basically done this several times.

I certainly hope it leans towards a complete singleplayer, but the past decade of GTA Online makes me worried otherwise.

GTA Online has introduced many characters and campaigns. It just doesn’t center around a specific voiced protagonist, or hold any kind of long-term writing stakes. It’s possible some of those cinematics come from their online missions as a result.

Lots of live service games have made that effort; apparently even Fortnite builds some semblance of “story” to justify each battle pass? (I don’t play it so I’m not sure)

I definitely remember that pop-in. My entire ship just didn’t exist until I got within 20 feet of it. That specific area (basically the main “hub” of the game, setting aside planet missions) demanded the most of the machine with how vast it was.

I finished this game, and I kinda hate that so many people get locked out by gameplay and performance issues. By the end, your unlocked abilities are great, the story and character development are very well-done, and there’s a lot of optional stuff if you like.

It’s especially impressive given the writing task is “The Empire is winning, there’s no imminent disaster, no sequels can mention anything Cal accomplishes, make an interesting story from that”. It even handles topics like the Dark Side a bit better than other Star Wars media.

Yeah, key detail being, if we started listing car crashes from the past month, it would take up the whole thread.

Some games on Steam are actually run without DRM; so if you find that out for some set of them, you can likely back them up as files.

Would Days Gone count for this? It didn’t hold my attention, but it seems pretty centered around a motorbike.

It’s claiming to be 6 times faster, and then it’ll turn out to be an Electron app.

Don’t get me wrong, I hope otherwise…

I’ve only been getting comics from bundle sites since they give you epubs and PDFs. Kind of a necessity for a non-Amazon eReader.

I appreciate my Kobo eReader though, and it’s possible their online store will be DRM-free? Or, it could be per-book; when I put my own up, they had a checkbox to turn on DRM which I left off.

Unfortunately, the non-spoiler story summaries I’ve seen suck.

Twists like in FF7 where a certain person is killed, or a bad guy suddenly helps you, are big and valuable - they get you really invested in the character impact of the plot. Anything that starts and ends with “big evil god wants to destroy the world” feels dull and unsurprising. It’s part of why I never understood Dragon Quest hype.

Something key to remember is that when a game gets “Mixed” on Steam, eg 50/50, that still means half the people who play it enjoyed it. Half is not nothing.

For instance, Aliens: Colonial Marines. To my knowledge, AI was kinda shit, but could be fixed in a text file, but apparently a lot of people still enjoyed it otherwise.

So there’s probably a lot of these that have niche appeal to people.

I wrote a Python script that says “lol” last week.

50 years from now, it’ll still be runnable, and it’ll still say “lol”.

Unless I update it to say “Ubisoft sucks dick”.

I think the difference is, Sony and Nintendo build their exclusives through close support, while Microsoft and Epic have just tried buying them in.

Amazon and Google have essentially tried the same thing, and gave up because pouring money in isn’t a full business plan.

Jesus Christ, now I have to make a new account to double downvote you; one for the shitty take, and one for unnecessary single-letter censorship.

While I praise the approach of careful hiring and not laying people off, Japan unfortunately also has plenty of employment trends no one should imitate.

Why not go for a bigger company first?

Apple does the same thing with ebooks. When I put my book up for sale with Apple, the terms stated that I could not list it for a lower price at another store. So no, that is not a new form of price fixing.

Also interested to hear what other digital goods stores charge less than 30%, aside from Epic who definitely wouldn’t maintain that if they had the monopoly position.

That’s where it’s good to get an SD card; and set it up so that other flatpak apps install there (might need to mess with Flatseal to configure filesystem permissions)

Look up the “Twintail Launcher”. Pretty easy entry point for several anime games. Theres even a version of proton, dwproton, that’s recommended for several of them.

Also worth pointing out how many very popular games even today have visuals on par with the N64 game. Kids are fine with that; they just don’t want to set up yellow, red, and white AV cables of an N64.