[HN Gopher] Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Soft...
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Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5B
Author : MaximumMadness
Score : 934 points
Date : 2020-09-21 13:29 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bethesda.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bethesda.net)
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Here's hoping Microsoft can force Bethesda to make a good Fallout
| game again
| colesantiago wrote:
| Seems like a better deal than the vapid fad that is TikTok, in
| addition to them partnering with Oracle which looks like a
| marriage made in a hellstew.
|
| Well done Microsoft and Bethesda.
| toyg wrote:
| TikTok is not an investment in tech, it's an investment in
| relations with the US public sector. The fact that it comes
| with an actual company attached is almost irrelevant for
| Oracle.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| MS has plenty of "relations with the US public sector"
| already, they won the DOD JEDI contract. They didn't need to
| spend anything on TikTok.
|
| TikTok is a fad, like Instagram and other social networks.
| toyg wrote:
| _> MS has plenty of "relations with the US public sector"
| already_
|
| Indeed, which is why in the end they didn't go for it and
| oracle did: one of the two cared about improving the
| relationship more than the other.
| redisman wrote:
| I'm not sure about this take. Are Facebook and Twitter fads
| 15 something years later?
| colesantiago wrote:
| Sure, but we are talking about Microsoft here.
|
| You should look at the rumoured purchase price that Microsoft
| was willing to pay for TikTok.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| Bethesda was already trending this way however this has deep
| implications. Ultimately I think it's going to slowly kill the
| core of the modding community as modding is forced into the
| platform and new users are displace the modding culture.
|
| The modding will no longer be able to truly edit the engine
| itself through some reverse engineering and be forced to utilize
| the APl/scripting framework. Third-party tools will be locked
| out. Obviously this has happened already on the console platform.
| There's still the PC platform but that could be locked down
| further as well.
|
| Think about the time and fostered talent that it took to make
| some of the communities amazing tools. For example script
| extenders for elder scrolls series. As mods are now centralized
| in official 'the store' the community grow around which will
| never allow mods like the script extender for developers to make
| advanced innovative mods. Even if other modding communities like
| the Nexus allow for that It's going to continue to fragment the
| community and the talent which is foster within the community.
| Then you throw paid mods into the picture... Thus begins the
| death of the open source pillar in modding.
| CivBase wrote:
| I'm not sure where this came from. Are you saying that
| Microsoft is opposed to modding?
| dschuetz wrote:
| Nvidia buys ARM, Microsoft buys Zenimax and eats Bethesda. Next
| thing: Tesla buys Intel.
| paule89 wrote:
| Nooooooooo! Not Bethesda. Why? I still have bad memories
| regarding Rare and Lionhead. Although Rare redeemed itself with
| Sea of Thieves.
| chx wrote:
| Where's the money? Wherever I look I can only find revenue for
| the gaming industry but I can't find any profit forecasts.
| Example: https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/02/superdata-games-
| hit-120-1... or https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/video-
| games-300-billion...
|
| Does anyone have better data?
| eezurr wrote:
| That's funny, I watched Bethesda's history documentary by
| noclip[1] last night. Bethesda studio is/was owned by ZeniMax[2],
| which in recent history purchased/hostile-takeovered a bunch of
| studios. ZeniMax's CEO is a lawyer, hence their long history of
| litigation tactics. And according to the article, Microsoft
| bought ZeniMax, so in theory it just bought a basket of gaming
| studios.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKn9yiLVlMM [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Softworks
| gigatexal wrote:
| We'll never get a Doom game or any other games for that matter to
| be first-class supported titles on Linux then. It'll have to be
| Proton and Valve funding this and the community. I don't like
| this.
| afpx wrote:
| If they make a Minecraft / Skyrim hybrid, I'm in.
| ck425 wrote:
| Please no. Isn't that what they tried when they made Fallout 4
| and it's easily the worst of the modern fallouts.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm, MS buying Obsidian was sad news, mainly because their titles
| became inaccessible on Mac/Linux.
|
| This, not so much. Fallout 3 was the last great Bethesda title.
| Well and New Vegas but that was Obsidian.
|
| Completely lost interest in them with Fallout 76.
|
| Edit: Oh wait, there's also Dishonored since Arkane is owned by
| ZeniMax. But that was never available on non-windows OSes so it's
| not much of a loss.
| vwat wrote:
| So this is it! Bethesda is officially dead. ESO was the early
| prognosis and 76 was the death rattle. This is the funeral.
|
| Morrowind was a masterpiece of a game. Oblivion was amazing.
| Skyrim was quite special and carried the genre forward but left
| behind important bits from morrowind. The job of making the
| spiritual successor to oblivion and morrowind is now officially
| open to anyone because Bethesda will never do it.
| cwxm wrote:
| It's interesting. Despite all the money that these studios have,
| my favorite games of the past few years have all been indie games
| (Rimworld, Factorio) or smaller studios (Paradox Plaza games such
| as EUIV, Stellaris). I understand that the majority of the
| industry's revenue is generated from these bigger studios, but
| acquiring first party developers doesn't make me as too
| concerned. What I'm concerned about is distribution is controlled
| by a few parties to a higher degree on desktop, like it is on
| mobile.
| gspr wrote:
| Paradox are an absolute gem. My god, these people owe me
| hundreds of hours of my life! And I'm not really into games.
| burtonator wrote:
| Serious question... have we just given up on modern anti-trust?
|
| We're going to have the US as one large corporation now? No
| competition?
| skohan wrote:
| I believe it was in the 80's when they changed the
| interpretation of monopoly to _only_ be illegal if it can be
| proven that the consumer suffers. So in a way, yes we have
| given up.
| disease wrote:
| Is there any chance future Fallout/Elder Scrolls game become XBox
| exclusives that do not get ported to PC?
| Tsiklon wrote:
| I would hope this would not be the case - in the past few years
| Microsoft have gone out of their way to build bridges with the
| PC gaming community, bringing their traditional first party
| titles (Forza, Halo, etc) to PC.
|
| With Fallout and The Elder Scrolls' history as PC only titles
| in their early iterations I would suspect this bridge building
| will continue
| Ciantic wrote:
| I doubt this. Microsoft has spent last years integrating PC
| gaming under XBOX brand too. E.g. XBOX Game Pass for PC, or
| adding controller support etc.
|
| They even promote so called "Xbox Play Anywhere", and tried to
| make it normal for the new XBOX so that you can buy a single
| game and play it on PC and XBOX. However the gaming studios
| haven't yet to my knowledge approved it fully so they want to
| sell you the game twice.
|
| After all the PC gaming benefits Microsoft too.
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| From a strategy perspective this is an absolutely massive win for
| Xbox. Their entire strategy [1] for the next generation of
| consoles is breadth vs depth, essentially saying they cant beat
| Sony in exclusives so they'll offer way more value for a lower
| price.
|
| What this acquisition means is that the gap between potential
| Xbox exclusives/Day 1 releases and what Sony has is much smaller.
| Realistically there is a very low chance that any of the IP from
| this purchase becomes Xbox-exclusive, but even an early launch on
| Xbox shifts momentum massively.
|
| [1] https://pausebutton.substack.com/p/level-69-the-next-
| generat...
| als0 wrote:
| Microsoft bought the legendary game company Rare some time ago.
| That acquisition didn't go well, so I hope this works out well
| for Bethesda.
| lewisj489 wrote:
| How did it not go well?
|
| > Kinect Sports Rivals
|
| Great game
|
| > Sea of Thieves
|
| Another great title
| wpdev_63 wrote:
| If you played Rare games from the 90s you would understand.
|
| Also those games while not considered 'bad' weren't exactly
| considered system sellers.
| gimmeThaBeet wrote:
| the things Rare has been known for were platformers (Banjo
| Kazooie, Donkey Kong) and FPS games (Goldeneye, Perfect
| Dark).
|
| Perfect Dark Zero in 2005 was probably the last title in
| either of those veins, which was a launch title for the 360
| (soon to be 2 consoles ago!)
|
| Sea of Thieves is certainly a feather in their cap, it's just
| a bit disappointing that we haven't been able to see Rare
| take a modern crack at the things they were so known for, if
| that's even possible now.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Most of the Rare staff responsible for those games have
| left in the decades since (many of them formed Playtonic,
| which was the pitch behind Yooka-Laylee)
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| To expect a company to produce the quality/type of games
| that they made 20+ years ago is a bit unfair, don't you
| think? I'd venture to guess that the folks behind those
| games left the studio along time ago anyway.
| carterklein13 wrote:
| I hope that was long enough in the past where they've done
| their DD and learned their very-much-needed lesson.
|
| Pre-MS Rare was my personal golden age of gaming. I don't
| really play anymore, but man do I think fondly on those days.
| AkelaA wrote:
| That was more then 18 years ago though, back when Microsoft was
| very new to the console game. They've had a lot of successes
| and failures since then. A more recent example would be Mojang
| which has gone extremely well for them - Minecraft is now the
| best selling game of all time with 147m copies by 2019 compared
| to around 14m back in 2014 when the company was acquired -
| largely down to their successful pivot to mobile and console.
| boltefnovor wrote:
| The other end of this consolidation is that there is an
| uncountable firehose of great indie games released all the time.
| duxup wrote:
| I got the impression that Bethesda was going full cash grab from
| here on out ... I'm hopeful this opens a window to them stepping
| back from that.
| joeloya wrote:
| This acquisition is good news for investors after publicly losing
| to Oracle on the TikTok deal.
| skohan wrote:
| For investors maybe, but probably not for consumers. It seems
| likely this will result in people having less choice about how
| and where they can play the games they enjoy.
|
| I find it troubling that good news for the former group seems
| to trump bad news for the latter.
| francis_t_catte wrote:
| Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of EA,
| Activision, and Ubisoft after Bobby Kotick forces them all to
| merge. Facebook will bungle up any chance they have of capturing
| the gaming market after writing a cryptic paragraph about their
| legal right to request blood samples from all Oculous users in
| the TOS. Valve will quietly exit software development altogether,
| and pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware
| manufacturing experience. Can't wait for the future GAAS market!
| RobRivera wrote:
| Where can I preorder the butterfly cloud9 knife?
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Microsoft and EA have some deal now revolving around Game Pass
| Ultimate which grants you access to EA Play also.
| vlunkr wrote:
| As long as no one buys From Software everything will be ok.
| Praise the Sun.
| dijit wrote:
| FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired.
|
| I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis
| acquisition. Which was not the first.
|
| He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios
| so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could
| not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian
| government.
| mcrider wrote:
| Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I
| don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind
| that move (but sounds interesting)!
| dijit wrote:
| Standard: I am not a lawyer disclaimer here.
|
| The way it was described to me was that there's two major
| types of fine that the canadian government will levy
| against large companies that dump lots of workers at once.
|
| 1) More than 50 people within a 4week period.
|
| Usually this means that the company must continue paying
| employment benefits on behalf of the company for a period
| of a year (iirc).
|
| 2) More than x% of your company being closed down.
|
| You can get around #2 by claiming redundancies or claiming
| that you've moved the job to another canadian state (or,
| centralised a position), but once you give the studio its
| own legal entity and place an MD in charge (who is legally
| responsible for the studio) you can't do that any longer
| because the parent company continues to have a legal
| presence in the country, but operations are considered
| separate/independent.
|
| Thus, if you close down the studio you've effectively
| terminated 100% of employment there which will garner super
| heavy fines.
|
| Also also: Ubisoft doesn't want to piss of the canadian
| government either because nearly their entire profit exists
| in the tax break that montreal gives game companies.
|
| .. but, like I said, this was told to me only a few times
| by a few high level directors and it was when we were
| talking about Vivendi trying to buy us, and they were also
| not laywers, so it could be a lot of chinese whispers.
|
| But I've spoken to Yves, and while he's a really genuinely
| nice person... he will salt the earth before he sells the
| company.
| sequoia wrote:
| I'm guessing here but the Canadian gov't often subsidizes
| tech & other engineering companies, so the strategy may be
| "have the company avail itself of as many subsidies as
| possible" with subsidies that commit the company to
| continue operating in City X for Y number of years.
|
| example tech subsidy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scienti
| fic_Research_and_Experi...
| criddell wrote:
| If Epic is successful in their lawsuit against Apple, then I
| think it's only a matter of time before the consoles will have
| to allow alternate stores as well.
|
| The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument that people like to use
| to defend closed console stores isn't as convincing when the
| console makers also own the biggest money making game studios
| as well.
|
| Go Epic, go!
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Following from alternate stores on consoles, we're not far
| away from Valve's SteamBox, i.e. prebuilt PCs marketed for
| living room play. I'm disappointed the idea never took off.
|
| I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux. If
| cloud gaming gains more traction, the industry might just do
| that. Why develop games to run on custom-built blades in a
| data center when generic blades exist?
| criddell wrote:
| > prebuilt PCs marketed for living room play
|
| That's been a dream for a long time:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
| andoriyu wrote:
| > I would love the game industry to fully embrace Linux.
|
| Take a look at what all linux games are lacking and what
| nearly all AAA game that aren't on linux have.
|
| ...
|
| DRM and Anti-Cheat.
|
| Let's forget that DRM is trash. Publishers want to have it,
| and they don't care about our opinion of it. You can't
| really "port" DRM, you have to develop a whole new one for
| Linux and figure how to prevent easy-peasy eBPF programs to
| make cracking it easy.
|
| Anti-Cheat is another story. Valve and Easy Anti-Cheat are
| currently working on bringing it to Linux. You need that
| and you want that for any online game. Probably not as hard
| as DRM, but still requires a lot of linux specific work.
| duncanawoods wrote:
| > The hardware-is-sold-at-a-loss argument
|
| Kind of ironic how bad an argument that is when discussing
| anti-trust. It's a form of dumping to distort the market. It
| prevents new competitors becoming viable purely by selling
| hardware.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Ouch! This cuts deep because of how close to actual future it
| sounds. Especially
|
| > Valve will quietly exit software development altogether, and
| pivot to building custom vanity knives using their hardware
| manufacturing experience.
| apatters wrote:
| Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think that
| there are no good restaurants anymore.
|
| My top 4 games by playtime in the last few years were Rimworld,
| Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress and WoW Classic. Honorable
| mentions go to Spelunky and Stellaris. It's to everyone's great
| regret that a single one of these titles was purchased by one
| of the shitty publishers you mentioned, fortunately it's the
| one that's on its last legs.
| ManBlanket wrote:
| There's no end to enjoyable ways to waste your time when it
| comes to enjoyable games across time and genre, plenty of
| fish. Games media like all media loves hyperbole. Who cares
| about Caves of Qud if you can get MAD about a GIRL fighting
| in WW2? Fallout 75! For all I care the AAA industry can
| cannibalize itself until there's only 1 studio left slaving
| away in the Call of Duty mines. Games are made by people.
| There will always be more games released every year by
| middling and small studios than you have time. Now more than
| ever if someone has thousands of hours to burn on an
| autistically singular interest, we'll always have good games.
| As I get older and the world sinks into a fervor of self-
| preservation and tribalism, I realize the number of fucks I
| have for Bobby Kotick or loot boxes has dwindled to none. In
| fact, I'm running out of those real quick in general. So
| congratulations on joining the Microsoft family Bethesda, I'm
| sure your children will have non recessive genes and normal
| sized heads.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Europa Universalis 4 is way better than Stellaris, friend.
| munk-a wrote:
| It's interesting - they're very different. The historical
| setting and investment into events to try and keep things
| on a historical path add a lot to the game IMO by allowing
| a mostly balanced but asymmetrical game - France can
| usually ROFLstomp everyone but an overly aggressive France
| can easily be ROFLstomped themselves. That said, I think
| EU4 still falls on its face in the late game with mechanics
| like Absolutism absolutely pulling the breaks off the train
| and making Ulm WCs possible - in fact EU4 is sorta
| confusing for that reason, there are essentially two (maybe
| three if you want to count the reformation+counter
| reformation) games there and a portion of that playthrough
| may be more or less appealing to individual players.
| Stellaris definitely has some distinct phases but without
| trying to railroad players the mechanics flow from one
| phase to the next in a much smoother manner.
| epicide wrote:
| You make a good point to bring up indie development (WoW
| excluded), but I think looking at the storefronts is also
| important.
|
| For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have your
| own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals, privacy
| concerns, and plenty more.
|
| That's not to say that every game on a store has these
| issues. However, I think the lesson from mobile app stores
| is: don't discount the impact that a storefront can have on
| what's allowed to succeed. Stores can exert their control
| with more than just removals.
|
| Indies can't escape this. Even if they wanted to sell their
| game independently, not being on one of the big stores hurts
| visibility. Not all of them get the luxury to be able to
| expect their users to follow them to their own
| site/store/etc.
|
| Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for a
| lot of these otherwise-independent developers. Again, if the
| big conglomerates get what they want, this won't always be
| the case.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| > For these big conglomerates, the trendy thing is to have
| your own games store. Complete with exclusivity deals
|
| How else are they going to get people to use these stores?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Also the fact that the Epic Games Store exists is a step
| towards countering Steam's monopoly on mainstream titles.
|
| People complain about the loss of functionality like
| screenshots or the in-game browser when using Epic. And
| there are exclusivity deals. Complaints against those
| things are valid, and the actual implementation of the
| storefront needs a lot of improvement, but I'm wondering
| if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for
| consumers and developers.
|
| To me it sounds like a lot of consumers were happy with
| the monopoly and saw the exclusivity deals as disruptive
| as they had to migrate their friends list and set up a
| lot of things just to play that one hyped title. But when
| it comes down to the hard issue of staying afloat I can
| see how the money Epic offers to game studios is
| enticing.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| The exclusivity deals were disruptive because they took
| games that were promised to come to steam and made them
| exclusive.
|
| The customer has no benefit from the lower cut epic
| charges.
|
| Epic doesn't treat everyone equally. Big games like
| Cyberpunk 2077 are allowed to also sell on other
| platforms, while smaller games either go exclusive or go
| with everyone else.
|
| Competition is good, but I'd rather have GOG be that
| competition to Steam than Epic purely based on their
| anti-DRM stance.
| eropple wrote:
| I don't much care for EGS, but Epic is paying small
| developers _a lot_ for that exclusivity. In the current
| indie market, that chunk of change can be the difference
| between profitability and failure.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Or, as the above user put it, the difference between
| making a creative masterpiece or a clone made to exploit
| the system.
| munk-a wrote:
| I have one particular example of this I love since it
| happened _right_ on the borderline. I own Anno 1800 on
| steam, but if you don 't you can't (at least for the
| foreseeable and likely future) - Ubisoft pulled Anno from
| the steam storefront shortly after launch _but_! Probably
| due to some contract shinnanegans with steam, they
| continue to offer expansions + DLC to users who own Anno
| already on steam while new users remain locked out from
| buying it anywhere except UPlay + EGS. Ubisoft has moved
| a few things over to EGS but I love the Anno example
| because it landed just as EGS was gaining fame so it sits
| in the weird middle ground of technically being on steam
| but not really.
| dijit wrote:
| Be a bit mindful blaming ubisoft for stuff vanishing from
| Steam.
|
| A significantly large part of why Ubisoft started cozying
| up to Epic was not because of the 5% stake tencent has in
| it.
|
| It was because Steam pulls all kinds of nasty shenanigans
| but ubisoft will not state any of it publicly because it
| would hurt their relationship.
|
| Steam has outright pulled all ubisoft games before, and
| ubisoft took the blame. People assumed it was because ubi
| wanted to push uplay; but it was all about someone at
| valve deciding that we'd violated some rule about content
| distribution.
|
| We gave UK players of AC:Syndicate a country specific hat
| which wouldn't have made sense to the global market.
|
| They didn't warn, we woke up to see that kotaku[0] had
| run an article about it before we even knew ourselves.
|
| This is not an isolated incident, just a dramatic one
| that I remember as my own personal shifting point w.r.t.
| steam, because I'd only just started working at Ubisoft
| and was hating on uplay and was quite fond of steam.
|
| [0]: https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-pulls-big-games-from-
| steam-165567...
| tubularhells wrote:
| Steam has been good to me with their native Linux client,
| Linux client support, proton compatibility tools and
| community tool support (glorious eggroll proton version).
| Epic has nothing to offer me.
|
| Furthermore, I know some gamedevs personally who release
| an early access level title with exclusivity deal on
| epic's playform just so that they gain access to further
| funding to finish the game and release on Steam for the
| actual shot at success. They take advantage of the money
| to fund their work, but have said that the numbers do not
| compare to that of Steam.
| qchris wrote:
| I began gaming for the first time (unless you count
| playing on my roommates' XBox in college) this past week,
| mostly for The Witcher 2/3--both on Linux. The Witcher 3
| was never supposed to run on my platform, but somehow
| Steam and Proton/Wine made that not only possible but
| actually enjoyable.
|
| I know technically they're doing it to make money, but I
| can't help like feel it's also something of a labor of
| love as well. It would have been much easier to leave
| people in my (our?) position behind, so I appreciate the
| heck out of Valve for putting in the effort. I imagine
| they're going to have my goodwill for a long time as a
| result.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you want to be cynical, Proton was made from the
| scraps of a contingency plan that was the Steam Machine.
| When they realized that Microsoft wasn't going to force
| their platform onto users, they gave up on Steam Machines
| and I guess they leveraged the tech to something else.
| sangnoir wrote:
| That's not being cynical - that's just facts on how and
| why SteamOS was conceived and developed
| epicide wrote:
| Yep, and Post-Its were made from the scraps of what was
| supposed to be a really strong adhesive.
|
| It speaks more to me that they _released_ Proton rather
| than shelving it after losing the original motive.
| ntauthority wrote:
| ... and unrelatedly, on the other side, the latest
| appeasing thing called WSL was made from leftovers of a
| plan to run Android on Windows Phones, which was dropped
| when Google refused to allow Play Services run there.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| Phoenix Point was a game I cared about a lot. Then one
| day, they announced they would not be making a Linux
| version. Not long after they announced it will be Epic
| exclusive for a year.
| tubularhells wrote:
| I feel ya, I dropped it so hard I even forgot the game
| until reading your post.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Steam has been good to me with their native Linux
| client, Linux client support, proton compatibility tools
| and community tool support (glorious eggroll proton
| version)
|
| Reminder: Valve was _forced_ to double-down on SteamOS
| /Linux by Microsoft's then-intention to shutdown 3rd-
| party storefronts on Windows. I have a complicated
| relationship with both Steam (as a Proton user) and Epic
| (for pulling Linux support on a multiplayer game I
| already own!), but I still appreciate more competition in
| the arena: GOG alone won't cut it.
| tubularhells wrote:
| Yes, but they have been owning that decision ever since.
| If that ever changes, I will reconsider. Until then they
| have me as a customer.
| grawprog wrote:
| >if a Steam monopoly would have been any better for
| consumers and developers.
|
| Well steam runs on and is actively supported on linux,
| Epic takes games that used to support linux then removes
| linux support and makes the games exclusive to their
| store.
|
| So for me personally, a steam monopoly would be better.
| The epic game store's existence has actually caused games
| to be removed from the platform I use. It's taken away
| choice from me. If it stopped existing, I'd be happy.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Better customer service, user experience, and game
| selection. All these various online game stores should be
| required, by law, to allow any publisher to put their
| games on the platform for a standard publishing rate. No
| exclusivity, no special rate setting. Those are classic
| anti-competitive tactics, and this is yet another front
| to fight that battle on.
| ehnto wrote:
| I also quite like a lot of the blockbuster games as well as
| the indie games. An indie dev will never release a game
| like Red Dead 2, for one example. I definitely play more
| indie games, but I would rather the blockbuster market be
| healthy too.
| cpach wrote:
| I feel the same about the movie business. Indie films can
| be awesome, but some kinds of movies are hard to do
| without a large budget.
| teddyh wrote:
| Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal economy
| and society. But we got rid of that, losing the practical
| ability to make pyramids in the process, because we value
| other things like democracy higher.
| bobthebuild123 wrote:
| Uhh we still build things like pyramids all the time -
| Three Gorges Dam, Burj Khalifa, One World Trade Center -
| it's just we don't build pyramids themselves anymore.
| komali2 wrote:
| Hm. The pyramids were an architectural and supply chain
| genius stroke considering when they were made. It also
| took fantastic human sacrifice to achieve that. One world
| trade center was built with the assistance of trains and
| semi trucks brining ore to smelters and steel to the
| construction site, electricity, cranes etc.
|
| Minus the slavery, have we really expended that much
| human effort and equivalent wealth and time on something
| in the modern era? The only thing I can think of is Free
| software products, shit like Linux.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| The Large Hadron Supercollider?
| Const-me wrote:
| Pretty sure Appolo or Space Shuttle both were more
| expensive projects than the pyramids, even adjusted for
| inflation.
| TrevorFancher wrote:
| This is only tangentially related, but because you are
| all leaning on this pyramid analogy so hard, I thought I
| would mention that many scholars now believe the pyramids
| to have been built by some type of salaried (and very
| skilled) labor. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt
| ian_pyramid_constructio...
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I don't think the Three Gorges Dam was built by something
| most would call a democracy.
| pengstrom wrote:
| The Burj Khalifa was notoriously built with more or less
| slave labour, so maybe not the best example.
| kingbirdy wrote:
| > Pyramids are hard to build without a super-feudal
| economy and society
|
| [citation needed]
|
| The 10th-tallest pyramid was built in Memphis, TN 30
| years ago [0] and it's now used as a Bass Pro shop. Say
| what you will about working conditions in the US in the
| 90s, but I don't think it'd be fair to call it "a super-
| feudal economy and society".
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Pyramid
| monadic2 wrote:
| Yea building a pyramid is easy, you just need to invent
| the internal combustion engine first.
|
| That said, pyramids seem to have been built with hired
| labor so the point is pretty muddy regardless.
| sildur wrote:
| Call me skeptic, but I'm not really sure that pyramid
| would be able to stand in place 4500 years. Same shape,
| way less durability.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Right now, Steam is still the leader and obvious home for
| a lot of these otherwise-independent developers.
|
| HN: TEAR DOWN THE APPLE STORE MONOPOLY! Also HN: Steam is
| cool and pulls 30% from developers.
| pier25 wrote:
| Steam does not control Windows, does it?
| larssorenson wrote:
| It's worth drawing the distinction that Steam, as opposed
| to Apple and their app store, does not hold an exclusive
| monopoly and cannot dictate where users can install
| software from. If a Dev doesn't like Steam, there are
| other publishers and store fronts that they can peddle
| their wares through. Similarly users can go elsewhere to
| buy and install, even direct from the manufacturer.
|
| Steam being the de facto choice is another issue
| entirely, and yet another discussion for their fee
| structure.
| Angostura wrote:
| > Right now, Steam is still the leader
|
| I wonder how they compare to Apple.
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| Apple probably doesn't have much revenue from the OS X
| desktop store, but if we're talking about total gaming
| revenue, Steam is around $5 billion/year and Apple is
| around $20 billion/year. Although I'm pretty sure Apple's
| # represents gross sales, not their 30% cut. I don't know
| if Steam's # is the revenue they receive after their cut,
| or if it's gross sales. If their # is the cut they take,
| they'd be far ahead of the App Store in terms of gross
| profit.
| tubularhells wrote:
| From a gamedev friend, there is no money on macOS. iOS
| and apple arcade is a viable option, but on Steam, the
| macOS sales are not worth the headache support and
| development gives you. Lots of quirks to work around with
| macOS, and more to come with the ARM transition as apple
| will surely blame developers for performance problems
| with x86 titles. Not to mention that the yearly developer
| fees that you have to pay to keep a game's long tail on
| the store. It eats into profits for Indies.
| mcphage wrote:
| > but on Steam, the macOS sales are not worth the
| headache support and development gives you. [...] Not to
| mention that the yearly developer fees that you have to
| pay to keep a game's long tail on the store.
|
| What yearly developer fees do you need to pay to keep a
| macOS game on Steam? Is it to Valve?
| tubularhells wrote:
| Nothing yearly for Steam, it's a one-off fee, I think
| about 100 USD these days (it changed over the years). For
| the macOS store it is a 100 USD a year or so, and of
| course they take their cut from your sales. I prefer
| Valve's way of doing business.
| mcphage wrote:
| Oh, okay. You started talking about whether it's worth
| releasing a Mac game on steam, and then brought up a
| yearly fee, so I was having trouble following where you
| transitioned.
| Macha wrote:
| The mobile gaming market and PC/console gaming are
| basically two distinct markets with very little overlap
| though.
| krzyk wrote:
| Give Factorio a try
| aplummer wrote:
| We seem to have near identical taste so can I add: - they are
| billions - Kerbal space program - faster than light To your
| awesome indie games list
| szundi wrote:
| Kerbal is so awesome, it brought me back some authentic
| gaming experience
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| For anyone into games like this, I also highly recommend
| Cataclysm: DDA
| alasdair_ wrote:
| Isn't WoW Classic published by ActivisionBlizzard?
| wwright wrote:
| WoW Classic is Activision, isn't it?
| xevrem wrote:
| correct, Activision-Blizzard
| shakezula wrote:
| Stellaris wins hands down for me in most time played.
| Honestly such a good game.
| iaw wrote:
| Dead Cells, Enter the Gungeon, Binding of Isaac, Papers
| Please, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spelunky 2
|
| All fantastic games better than most major studio titles.
| intended wrote:
| The absence of civ6 is lamentable, but then we do only have
| so much time to find to pursue hobbies like work and careers.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You could make the argument that because of Steam having such
| reach / monopoly on the PC gaming market, Steam (and by
| extension Valve) is effectively the publisher of games like
| that, and a very large one at that. There's GoG that mostly
| focuses on vintage games, and Epic that spends tons of money
| to get (timed?) exclusives on indie games + free handouts,
| but I'm not sure how well it's working for them to get market
| share.
|
| But granted, the indie game market (and mid-sized publishers
| like Paradox) are super important right now to fight against
| the AAA / massive budget game devs and publishers.
|
| Mind you, ID has been a bit of an underdog for a long while;
| their games are / were good, but did not become crazy big
| like their EA / Activision counterparts; the 2009 Wolfenstein
| sold poorly ("only" 100K units in the first month); The New
| Order, its sequel, did a lot better (400K sold in about a
| month and a half), and Doom 2016 was a hit.
| kleiba wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but was id actually involved in
| the 2009 Wolfenstein or in New Order? I think not. However,
| they did develop Doom 2016...
| andoriyu wrote:
| 2009 - they were producers, but the development was done
| by Raven Software and published by Activision. So not
| really involved other than owners of IP?
|
| New Order - not at all, maybe as engine developers. Right
| for that IP were transferred to MachineGames in 2010
| right after ZeniMax got hold of them.
|
| As for Doom 2016 - they enlisted a lot of outside help
| after Doom 4 was scraped. Bethesda's game directors
| helped them a lot because they already figured how to
| make "old ip" to sell well with modern gamers (see
| Fallout 3).
|
| side note:
|
| I don't think id managed to get deliver a lot of good
| games since John Romero left. (just like John Romero
| didn't deliver many good games since the separation)
|
| John Romero and John Carmack were like a dream team, but
| without each other it was meh.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| They are involved for the technical aspects beyond merely
| MachineGames using id engines. MachineGames in a lot of
| ways acts like another id software studio, but it is free
| to form its own flavor.
|
| MachineGames also has (uncredited?) work on Doom 2016 and
| Doom Eternal.
| kingtobbe wrote:
| Wolfenstein was made by Machinegames. Though there is
| quite a bit of overlap between the two studios during
| production.
| liability wrote:
| FYI the 'id' in 'id Software' is lowercase. It's a word
| (not an initialism or acronym) so 'Id' would be more
| grammatically correct, though the name of the company is
| nevertheless lowercase.
| someperson wrote:
| id Software -- the makers of Doom 2016 -- is owned by
| ZeniMax Media, which has been acquired by Microsoft as per
| the featured article we are discussing
| pascah7 wrote:
| GoG does have a bunch of new games though. And IIRC they
| are owned by CD Project Red who are doing some big games
| now :)
| msikora wrote:
| Both CD Projekt Red and GOG are actually just
| subdivisions of CD Projekt.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah GOG hasn't "focused" on vintage games for at least
| half a decade now (and the switch from GoG and the
| original acronym to branding wise it's just GOG and its
| own "word" these days) and while back compat remains a
| core strength (though one as much exported at this point
| as most Publishers have paid attention to what GOG was
| doing and released many of the same games with the same
| tricks [ScummVM, DOSBOX, etc] on Steam and other
| platforms) has kept up with Steam (and Epic) on every
| major AAA release and a large swath of Indies so long as
| the publisher will allow a DRM Free release. Plus of
| course CD Projekt Red's own AAA releases (Witcher series,
| Cyberpunk) as obviously they want DRM Free publishing
| where available.
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm not certain if you enjoy remakes or not - but I think
| GOG is pretty much single handedly responsible for making
| them a thing. Things like AoE2 (Age of Empires) HD & DE
| probably wouldn't exist if AoE and AoM (Age of Mythology)
| didn't get a bunch of surprise sales on GoG. I'm hoping
| it'll also lead to some of the older IPs that died off
| with the likes of SSI getting resurrected into new titles
| - Imperialism 1 & 2 were pretty amazing games long before
| the likes of Victoria 2 came about.
| djsumdog wrote:
| There are a lot of great Indie titles, and you can get a lot
| of them DRM free on Humble or Gog.
|
| I've loved a lot of Devolver's stuff. The Red String Club,
| Hotline Miami I/II, Katana ZERO .. all super incredible games
| with gameplay and story that's just as fun as the any of the
| big AAA shops.
| msikora wrote:
| I'm loving Annapurna Interactive, games like What Remains
| of Edith Finch and Outer Wilds have been amazing. 'What
| Remains of Edith Finch' feels like a (shorter) AAA title,
| no compromise in production values whatsoever.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| Same, Devolver is phenomenal. Enter the Gungeon and Fall
| Guys are both smash hits too
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Focus Home Interactive publishes some great AA games. I'm
| very glad publishers like them continue to exist.
| munk-a wrote:
| Devolver is astounding, they really keep snapping up indie
| projects that do exceptionally well - don't forget Reigns
| in that list it's definitely on the lighter end but it's
| very well put together.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| This is absolutely right. The best games now are from
| independent developers who are themselves barely making it.
| The games you listed were some of the breakout successes of
| indie games but there are a ton of fun, interesting indie
| games out there that are dying from lack of revenue.
|
| There seems to be an overall issue now where the quality of
| the good produced and the benefit to the consumer is divorced
| from the value extracted by the producer.
|
| For instance, you can make a mobile game company that
| aggressively monetizes re-hashed bubble-poppers or match
| three games. With that, you focus not on innovation of
| pleasing the customer but on making the most money per
| customer so that you can feed it back into your marketing.
| The most exploitative game wins.
|
| This is a more profitable strategy than simply trying to make
| a fun game that people want to play.
|
| With most consumer markets, we find similar stories of
| customer exploitation being a better play than simply making
| a great product. This is not as much the case in B2B.
|
| How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like
| consumer choice is working out very well.
|
| Maybe marketing is at the core of all of this malignment.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > The best games now are from independent developers who
| are themselves barely making it.
|
| I wish it was true, at least for my favorite genre.
| Technically speaking, a small team of developers can create
| excellent games when it comes to creativity, design,
| playability etc. but for some titles there is need for a
| good story, then turning it into acceptable animations,
| large worlds, complex graphics etc. that's where probably
| only a major game house can deliver because of the number
| of writers, developers, designers, actors needed. My
| favorite games of all time were the Mass Effect trilogy;
| they were technically great, but the writing, character
| development, voicing and direction was their point of
| excellence. I would take ME1-3 story arc over most recent
| titles. Unfortunately many game studios think only in terms
| of FPS and technical trivialities that cannot turn a dull
| story plastered with FPS scenes into something that one
| still remembers after 10 years. Not been a gamer for a
| while, so I may have missed a lot lately and would love to
| be proven wrong (details welcome!).
| whynaut wrote:
| take a look at Nier: Automata or Dragon Age (1-2, and/or
| Inquisition). Both easily enjoyable if you like ME.
| dcrn wrote:
| Seconding Nier: Automata. Rarely have I been as blown
| away by a game as I was with that one.
| piti166 wrote:
| Thirding (?) this. The integration of gameplay elements
| into the story and the story itself are simply amazing.
| It is similar to Undertale, in that the gameplay is
| relatively shallow, but is paced perfectly with the
| story.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Might be apocryphal, but legend has it Bethesda escaped
| bankruptcy by taking massive chances with Morrowind. They
| wanted to go out with a bang, and, creatively, the result
| was amazing.
|
| That success and the fortune they now had to protect seemed
| to hemorrhage their creativity or vision or concern. After
| that, we got Oblivion and Skyrim. Nice but very _safe_ and
| uninspired games. And the best Fallout was the one from
| Obsidian Entertainment, not Bethesda Game Studios.
|
| Success kills? Money kills?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| With limited resources, bad ideas are ruthlessly trashed.
|
| With limitless resources, all ideas are valid.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Squaresoft did the same thing. Their big creative "here
| goes the company" game was to be their final project.
| Final Fantasy.
| psyc wrote:
| Sixteen FF titles, a dozen spin offs, and two feature
| films later...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > The best games now are from independent developers who
| are themselves barely making it.
|
| ....yayy?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| How do we reign back in the markets? It doesn't seem like
| consumer choice is working out very well.
|
| consumer choice is working as intended. They are fine
| playing "free" games supported by the 1%, and many nowadays
| won't pay >5-10 dollars for a game unless it's from a very
| established IP.
|
| Even without the mobile market, The story isn't much
| different. You either throw yourself out there in a sea of
| indie games, or you find a publisher to pitch and give your
| IP rights to in exchange for stability. The latter is just
| harder to do nowadays
| komali2 wrote:
| If we're willing to regulate gambling (which we are,
| because we do regulate it), then I don't think we can
| simply wave our hands at mobile games and say "bah,
| consumer choice. They play the games, don't they?"
| dplavery92 wrote:
| For what it's worth, the "Free to Play" sector that
| dominates a lot of market share isn't just the gambling-
| lite, pay-to-win mobile sector anymore. We're talking
| about major titles like Fortnite, League of Legends,
| DOTA2, Rocket League, Hearthstone, and Valorant, which
| have millions of concurrent players, dominate streaming
| services, and often have high-production e-sports events.
| Even the latest title in the Call of Duty franchise
| offers a Free to Play Battleground mode.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Many indie developers are barely making it. Some are
| killing it. New ideas come from indies, but sometimes from
| big companies too. Big companies depend on distribution and
| marketing, small companies depend on innovation. I have
| been in video games for twenty five years. It has always
| been like that.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Where it seems to have broken down is via vertical
| integration.
|
| When publishers were publishers and developers were
| developers (80s and 90s), it seemed like there was
| healthier competition. Even if there were a _lot_ of
| abusive deals struck.
|
| Now that we have giant, integrated publisher +
| development conglomerates, there's zero incentive to step
| out of that structure to publish a popular indie game.
|
| It feels like news sites prohibiting links to external
| sites, and the world's the poorer.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| It feels like the video games industry has done the
| reverse of Hollywood.
|
| Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system that
| handled production, distribution, and exhibition by a
| single entity to a system where production, distribution,
| and exhibition were done by separate entities.
|
| It feels like game development went the reverse way.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Someone can correct me, but I'd put blame for the trend
| on EA / Madden NFL (~1990?).
|
| It showed what kind of profits you could make off yearly
| refreshes of software, while minimizing development
| costs.
|
| Why would an MBA take a chance on new IP when they have
| the above as an option?
| quanticle wrote:
| It's important to note that the only reason that
| Hollywood went from a vertically integrated system to a
| disaggregated one is because the US Government filed an
| antitrust suit that forced the disaggregation [1]. And
| now that that antitrust pressure is gone, we see
| Hollywood slowly returning to a vertically integrated
| system, where studios, distribution networks and theaters
| are all operating in close conjunction to push movies
| that "ought" to be profitable [2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Param
| ount_Pic....
|
| [2]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-slow-death-
| of-hollywo...
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| I actually feel compelled to express an opinion regarding WoW
| classic:
|
| It's a garbage money grab.
|
| The idea that there is a huge nostalgia fueled demand for the
| original experience doesn't absolve a multi-billion dollar
| developer from a complete lack of support or quality of life
| improvements to the game.
|
| There is just too much overlap with the fact that they can
| literally re-release a game with practically zero development
| costs.
| mdavidn wrote:
| Blizzard did not charge for WoW Classic. It merely requires
| an active subscription to the regular game. There's no
| additional purchase or subscription.
|
| The company invested significant development into Classic.
| The project started as a fork of Legion, in order to
| benefit from a decade of anti-bot measures, compatibility
| fixes, and Battle.net integration (auth and chat). They
| then ported the original game forward and added "layering"
| to avoid crashes that plagued the original game in 2004 and
| 2005.
| hn_acc_2 wrote:
| That's not fair...
|
| 1) Costs were not zero for the re-release. The only version
| of the game data (stats, items, enemy spawns etc.) was in
| the form of an original database backup (from an old
| employee's personal stash!). Classic runs on the modern WOW
| engine, so work was required to shoehorn the old data in
| and reimplement systems and interfaces which don't exist in
| the current WOW engine.
|
| 2) Before Classic's release, by far the most vocal crowd
| making demands of Blizzard were shouting their slogan "NO
| CHANGES". I really don't find it surprising that Blizzard
| has not made major changes since the majority of the player
| base requested as such...
| teawrecks wrote:
| If you think wow classic had "practically zero development
| cost", you don't know what you're talking about.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Not to mention the biggest gaming phenomenon at the moment is
| _Among Us_ , which was made by one developer and one artist.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I've been playing a lot of great retro-inspired shooters from
| the new 3D Realms and New Blood. Plenty of great indie stuff
| on PC.
| jugg1es wrote:
| You should try Factorio!
| 13415 wrote:
| Well, not everybody has the same tastes. I mostly don't like
| the aesthetics of indie games, especially not the "indie
| feel" or any kind of pixelated or animation-style graphics. I
| will not play anything that reeks of "design".
|
| Instead, I prefer realistic-looking graphics, with moving
| trees and clouds. I've more often than not spent too much
| money on new AAA just to look at the graphics and barely
| play. Unfortunately, games with AAA-graphics with a good
| story and great original gameplay (no sequels!) seem to get
| rarer, and the disappearance of independent top-notch game
| studios could be a reason for that.
| Galaxity wrote:
| Realistic graphics are no more AAA than well done "indie
| feel" graphics. Realistic-looking games can just as much
| "reek of design" as you put it. Many of those indie games
| have AAA-graphics with good story and original gameplay.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Indy is great if you like one of the genres where they excel
| (e.g. rogue like, deck builder, walking simulator, retro,
| traditional RPG, etc.). However, if you are into genres like
| modern FPS or open world action adventure then good indy
| games are difficult to come by.
| cheschire wrote:
| It doesn't take many to saturate those markets though.
|
| If you're looking for a good indie shooter, look at
| Diabotical[0]. It's more Quake than Quake Champions was, or
| even Rocket Arena for that matter. There's plenty of pro-
| level gameplay on Zoot's stream[1] as well.
|
| 0: https://www.diabotical.com/
|
| 1: https://www.twitch.tv/thisiszoot
| [deleted]
| int_19h wrote:
| Mount & Blade series is an interesting counterexample to
| that, although I'm at a loss as to how define the genre
| ("feudalism sandbox"?). The first games were very clearly
| indy, but they capitalized on that success, and Bannerlord
| is a much more ambitious and polished game.
| Bayart wrote:
| TaleWorlds were pretty lucky to stumble upon a community
| that could keep their game running for over a decade.
| munk-a wrote:
| M&B is actually published by an arguably large company? I
| don't know where folks put Paradox in the ranking but
| they're certainly raking in the money with both internal
| dev & publisher only projects.
|
| And they're making a new World of Darkness RPG for the
| first time in forever.
| int_19h wrote:
| It was originally self-published indy, Paradox picked it
| up sometime during their betas. In 2015, TaleWorlds
| decided to return back to their indy roots, and got the
| publishing rights (for all already-released games, as
| well as M&B2: Bannerlord) back.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Yeah, open world games generally take a large team to
| create tons of content and a large tools/pipeline team to
| get said content in engine. So yeah, I doubt we'll see them
| dominating that space any time soon.
|
| I can't think of a good reason though that there aren't a
| few very successful indie shooters though.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Maybe not "indie," but you don't have to look to the big 4
| publishers for the best FPS and open-world action games
| these days.
|
| Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 came out of CDProject Red. My
| favorite FPS of the last few years (Hunt: Showdown) came
| out of Crytek.
| bhewes wrote:
| Ha, in Demolition Man every restaurant became a Pizza Hut
| after the corporate wars.
| randito wrote:
| Don't forget Factorio -- aka if Software Development were a
| computer game with tech debt, copy/paste and literal bugs.
| failuser wrote:
| I wonder what Lucas Pope is up to. There have been no press
| since Return of the Obra Dinn.
| ionwake wrote:
| Is it possible to play dwarf fortress on mobile yet ?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yes, see dfremote -- iOS only though I think but works
| nicely with an iPad Pro and the pencil (provided you have a
| machine capable of running docker somewhere)
| tootie wrote:
| My kids love Nintendo and Minecraft, but they also love
| Untitled Goose Game, Factorio and Frog Detective. Indie games
| are probably more available now than ever.
| logicOnly wrote:
| This is the inevitable trend of gaming since the 90s.
|
| Small team makes innovative and interesting game. Gets
| bought, makes a good sequel, then milks IP forever.
|
| It's up to you to move on.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Bingo! CoD, Quake, Doom, Civ, Madden, Street Fighter,
| Mortal Kombat, All of Nintendo... you can't fault them for
| milking an IP though when fans vote with their wallets. I
| would love new stories, new hero archetypes, new
| consequences, in games and I think indie have done a decent
| job at showing it can be done. But even indie suffers from
| the "Hey! This worked! Let's just keep doing this!" IP
| milkage. Game dev, like software dev, has gotten more and
| more complex. What was once a vision of unity and standards
| is now Unity3D or micro-fracture SDK's of the same graphics
| pipeline concepts and a wasteland of bones from those who
| came before you.
|
| I know from experience. The "I'll write my own engine" bug
| bit me in 2005. I wrote Reactor3D on XNA in 2007. Worked
| with Bill Reiss while he masterminded XNASilverlight which
| eventually would become the basis for MonoGame, which we
| all love and adore.
|
| What's interesting is the non-mention of itch.io
|
| I think if enough people want new and interesting games, it
| will get done. Dev's are surprisingly open to ideas, it's
| the publishers (money people) who have a problem with
| change.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| Look at when Blizzard tried starting new a new IP with
| Overwatch, I'm sure they did okay but Overwatch doesn't
| have the same legendary luster that Warcraft, Starcraft
| and Diablo have (or had).
| Gengar wrote:
| Overwatch is pretty successful.
| gabereiser wrote:
| My daughter became an overwatch pro-am (she's in college
| now). So I have a slightly different take. Overwatch was
| extremely successful new IP.
| munk-a wrote:
| Overwatch is definitely a big success - it's not the
| biggest competitive FPS on the market (probably fortnite
| if you count that - otherwise _maybe_ CS:GO?) but it 's
| up there. They also own Hearthstone which baffled me on
| release since it's so far out of their wheelhouse - but I
| believe they're making bucket loads of money off of that
| still... it's a literal collectable card game ><.
| shuntress wrote:
| To directly name some of games you seem to be implying
| are automatically bad; I'm personally very happy with
| Doom (2016), Doom Eternal, Breath of the Wild, and Mario
| Odyssey. I am glad that ID and Nintendo have been
| "milking" these IPs.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Not implying any sense of quality, just naming some IP's
| that have been milked.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think there's a difference between continuing an IP and
| milking one.
|
| When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different studios
| who each create vastly different experiences, that's
| milking and I generally don't like it. The whole point of
| an IP is that you know what to expect, and having
| different studios working on the same IP is contrary to
| that goal.
|
| Nintendo does not milk IPs, IMHO. They actually put a lot
| of though into their games and ensuring the the
| experience is top-notch. Compare Nintendo Zelda games to
| the few non-Nintendo variants: they've all been trash.
| Which is exactly why Nintendo rarely outsources games.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > When the same IP gets passed to a dozen different
| studios who each create vastly different experiences,
| that's milking and I generally don't like it. The whole
| point of an IP is that you know what to expect, and
| having different studios working on the same IP is
| contrary to that goal.
|
| I think a distinction is if the Publisher treats the
| individual development studies as functionally equivalent
| black boxes. With Activision's brutal management of Call
| of Duty as maybe the key example. Where CoD assigned
| studios often go bankrupt after a couple games, and
| several have spun off after great hardship and will
| presumably never work with Activision again given the
| choice.
|
| One fun exception from the more "indy" side of things
| that comes to mind is the playfulness that resulted when
| Croteam and publisher Devolver let a bunch of indy
| developers play with the Serious Sam franchise and
| created some fun games in a variety of styles outside of
| the FPS the series is known for.
| hueho wrote:
| > why Nintendo rarely outsources games
|
| That's an overstatement: Nintendo co-develops a lot of
| titles with other studios, outsource a lot of their
| smaller IPs (mostly to Japanese studios), _and_ is being
| rather friendly to letting people do smaller spinoffs of
| their big properties.
|
| Examples of third-party colaboration, in no particular
| order:
|
| - Koei Tecmo co-developed Fire Emblem: Three Houses, did
| both Fire Emblem Warriors and Hyrule Warriors, which are
| franchise spin-offs using their Dynasty Warriors engine
| and gameplay, and Nintendo trust them so much that their
| next canon Zelda game will be a Breath of the Wild
| prequel developed by them, using the Hyrule Warriors
| label.
|
| - Bandai Namco is more or less the main developer of
| Super Smash Bros since the Wii U/3DS iterations, with
| Sora Ltd being essentially just a consulting company run
| by Masahiro Sakurai. Bandai Namco is also co-developing
| the new Pokemon Snap, and developed Metroid: Other M.
|
| - Capcom developed both Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons
| and Minish Cap, two portable and very well regarded
| entries in the Zelda Franchise.
|
| - On the Mario side, pretty much all of their Mario sport
| titles are handled by Camelot, with the exception of the
| Mario & Sonic Olympic series, which are published by Sega
| direcly, and their highly praised portable RPG series
| Mario & Luigi was developed by (sadly defunct) Alpha
| Dream.
|
| - Then there was that time when they gave the Mario
| franchise to Ubisoft and they made a Rabbids-crossover,
| XCom-like game, which is just too goddamn funny to not
| put in here separately (especially since it was also
| fairly well received by critics).
|
| - Good-Feel, another Japanese developer, made entries to
| both Kirby (Epic Yarn), WarioLand and more recently,
| Yoshi franchises (Wooly World/Crafted World).
|
| - There is a metric shitton of Pokemon spinoffs (that's
| probably where you will find the worst offenders of bad
| outsourced games, to be quite honest, but even then there
| are series like Pokemon Mistery Dungeon, by Spike-
| Chunsoft, which are very well regarded).
|
| - And as a another Zelda example, Cadence of Hyrule, made
| by the Crypt of the Necrodancer developers.
|
| There are more examples, but overall a large part of
| their output nowadays is made by third-parties, with of
| course a lot of their projects - big and small - being
| handled by their in-house studios. That's not even
| counting the fact that some studios readily associated
| with Nintendo, like Intelligent Systems and HAL
| Laboratory, are actually independent (they just like
| working with Nintendo).
|
| Sorry for the large response, I was bored.
| fedorareis wrote:
| > The whole point of an IP is that you know what to
| expect, and having different studios working on the same
| IP is contrary to that goal.
|
| Is that actually the point of an IP? I would argue that
| an IP is more like Star Wars where the games that can
| come from it can vary in format and mechanics. And less
| like Battlefront where the expectation is a specific set
| of mechanics and game modes. I would argue that if
| someone where to make a non RPG Mass Effect that would
| still be within the IP and wouldn't go against the core
| concept of IP.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| Change = risk
|
| If you want to build new IP and there isn't established
| funding you can go start a Kickstarter campaign to raise
| money from gamers to go build the game.
| gabereiser wrote:
| That's the crux of it right there. Funding. Studios that
| have funding secured (or don't need it) should be the
| ones taking those risks. But yes, it's risky to introduce
| new IP, the results can be disastrous. Cliff Bleszinski
| knows this.
| leetcrew wrote:
| if they would just keep cranking out sequels at the same
| level of quality but no real innovation, I would be pretty
| happy. mass effect 1 was pretty good, me2 was great, me3
| was still decent. why did they have to mess with the
| program for andromeda? similar with far cry. fc2 was great,
| but probably too unforgiving for the mainstream audience.
| they dumbed it down a bit for fc3, and fc4 was more of the
| same but with a couple pain points ironed out. then they
| had to mess everything up for fc5, why?
|
| oddly enough, call of duty seems like a pretty good example
| of how to do a AAA franchise. they hit a winning formula
| with cod4, and they haven't really changed anything since.
| I'm not a huge fan of the series, but if you loved cod4,
| you'll love pretty much every game after that.
|
| or an even better example: counterstrike. hardcore cs
| players will complain about subtle differences in the
| engine/hitboxes/netcode over time, but the core mechanics
| are exactly the same as in 1999. if it ain't broke...
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > why did they have to mess with the program for
| andromeda?
|
| Obviously everyone has their opinions, but I thought
| Andromeda the strongest sequel to ME1 story content wise.
| Andromeda's failings weren't in the story or the content
| (ME "B-Team" or not, thanks to Anthem's black hole, they
| wrote most of the strongest story content in all four
| games), they were technical. EA absolutely should not
| have pushed BioWare to Frostbite without properly
| productionizing Frostbite as if it were Unreal/Unity with
| a dedicated team and possibly an honest attempt to sell
| it as a product outside of EA's walls, instead of leaving
| it as DICE's in house with BioWare struggling to keep up
| with forked changes. Almost all of the technical problems
| in DAI, MEA, and especially Anthem seem clearly the fault
| of this broken engine relationship between DICE and
| BioWare. If EA wants Frostbite to be the next Unreal (or
| even just an okay competitor to Unreal) it needs to learn
| (five years ago) the lessons from Unreal that you treat
| even first and second party games as if they were third
| party customers to get the best results.
| leetcrew wrote:
| I didn't actually finish the game, so I can't speak too
| much to the story. for me it wasn't even about the bugs;
| I just thought the andromeda open world was the blandest
| of any I'd played at the time. it was like they looked at
| the lunar rover minigame from me1 and decided to make it
| the whole game. I wish they had just stuck to the
| traditional rpg level design of the previous games. I
| didn't much like the combat mechanics in andromeda
| either, but that could just be personal taste.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Well yeah, I loved the ME1 Mako and thought that very
| "Star Trek exploration" concept something strong about
| ME1 that I thought 2/3 deviated too far from, but I
| realize how much of a personal taste issue that becomes.
| MEA's open world could have used more time to bake (and
| still seems as much a restrictions caused by the
| Frostbite engine issue as anything, at least to my
| outside perspective). Also, yes, I find that for an
| FPS/3PS-focused engine, I don't entirely understand why
| Frostbite feels so bad at FPS/3PS combat mechanics, but I
| also have never played Battlefield/Battlefront games so I
| don't know if that is a BioWare/Mirror's Edge fork(s)
| specific problem or a general Frostbite problem.
| apatters wrote:
| Absolutely. It's fine for gamers to indulge in some
| nostalgia, too.
|
| It'd be better for the industry if we all recognized that
| the job of a guy like Bobby Kotick is to eat a steak every
| so often, and then vomit it up for the next 25 years.
| Someone has to drive a garbage truck and there's nothing
| wrong with paying him for it.
| Osiris wrote:
| The trend is definitely moving away from many separate
| games and toward "living" games. Look at how many games
| these days end up just doing updates/DLCs over many years
| rather than releasing whole new versions of the game.
|
| Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for Destiny
| 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the only game
| for the next 10 years with constant content updates. Even
| now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly different than
| Destiny 2 at release.
|
| Microsoft/343 have indicated that "Halo: Infinite" is
| planned to be this way as well, a living game.
|
| Even indie games like Astroneer and Don't Starve are going
| down this route of updating a single game over a long
| period of time.
|
| I'm not sure if that should be considering "milking", but
| it's definitely a change from how things used to be done.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense for most games to work like this:
| once you have a core game, adding content to it is
| comparatively cheap. Which means that the ROI can be
| really high if a point release with new content causes a
| spike in unit sales.
|
| This probably works better for indies than DLC because I
| do think people have developed an aversion to DLC due to
| the big publishers abusing it for cosmetic updates.
| Personally, I'm very likely to pick up something like
| Factorio at full price, knowing that the devs are going
| to be adding "free" content to the base game over the
| years. But I'll skip over games with "season passes" and
| just wait for the complete edition to be released.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > Look at Destiny, there was originally planned for
| Destiny 3, but now the plan is just to make Destiny 2 the
| only game for the next 10 years with constant content
| updates. Even now, Destiny 2 of today is a significantly
| different than Destiny 2 at release.
|
| Destiny seems to have gone through a lot of different
| plans. The plan before Activision was seemingly to stop
| after 1 and make that the live service game, though the
| 1/2 break helped them hurdle a console generation gap so
| Activision might not have been wrong to push for 2 at
| least (but yeah was definitely trying to milk it with 3).
| whynaut wrote:
| Not that they were trying to milk it, but that they are
| currently twisting 2 into something it wasn't. The game
| was not originally written to support also being Destiny
| 3.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I'd argue that was always the Destiny plan to be a
| constantly shifting MMO and Destiny 1 is the real outlier
| at this point. The teething pains right now "twisting 2
| into something it wasn't" seem to be more somewhere
| between "twisting 2 into what it was always meant to be"
| and "Bungie is still learning how to run and build an MMO
| the hard way by ignoring most of what worked for decades"
| (for instance, relying so much on streaming from the
| disc/hard drive over streaming from the server making it
| real hard for them to keep all zones active at the same
| time because they run against disc/hard drive size
| limits; that's Ancient MMO Trade-Offs 101 that Bungie
| seems dead set on doing the weirdest possible solutions,
| though to Bungie's credit they aren't the only ones in
| this current "live service" games era learning this old
| lesson the hard way as games like Fallout 76 and Sea of
| Thieves seem just as likely to hit the exact same wall if
| they try to expand much more).
| shagie wrote:
| The "living game" approach has to do with the cost of the
| DLC and the difficulty at moving the price point of a
| game (while costs to build it go up).
|
| This allows the studio to make money on the game based on
| the continued DLC which needs less development
| investment.
|
| It isn't so much "milking" but rather "acknowledging a
| change in the way games are monetized because the price
| of the initial game isn't changing."
| mrguyorama wrote:
| No, the "living game" approach is because it turns out
| taking a "hat" asset that took an artist like 2 days to
| make (or you literally got for free from your fanbase!)
| and selling it for $5 to the 10 million people playing
| your game makes A FUCKLOAD of money. It's absolutely
| milking. Games make more money now when they are "Oh woe
| is me so expensive to make oh poor me feel pitty" then
| they ever dreamed of even when a game could be made by
| one person.
| trevyn wrote:
| The "Small team makes innovative and interesting X. Gets
| bought" trend is hardly limited to gaming! Or the 90's.
| gota wrote:
| Have you watched Mythic Quest? There's a particular episode
| touching this, that doesn't really require the rest of the
| series and is very good.
|
| Check it out if you can - it' "Dark Quiet Death" from
| Season one
| racl101 wrote:
| > Sure, if you ate McDonald's every day you'd probably think
| that there are no good restaurants anymore.
|
| Brilliantly put.
| balls187 wrote:
| Deadcells ?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Open source gaming is an option too - Cataclysm DDA as a
| thriving example, Nethack, so on.
| BadassFractal wrote:
| Excellent taste in colony survival titles!
| dragontamer wrote:
| River City Girls (WayForward), Factorio, Two Point Hospital,
| FTL.
|
| Plenty of games out there, no reason to keep buying the same
| 3d-action RPG formula from the AAA-studios unless that's a
| thing you like.
| pc86 wrote:
| Stellaris might be one of my favorite games in recent memory
| (granted, I don't play that much).
| kanox wrote:
| A lot of people claim that this is reducing competition but the
| gaming industry seems to be much less consolidated than many
| others.
| eunos wrote:
| Don't forget Tencent.
| actuator wrote:
| Epic is partly owned by Tencent but yeah, they are a very big
| fish, specially with their interests in mobile gaming.
| gertrunde wrote:
| And not just Tencent - there are also other companies, like
| NetEase, which while smaller than Tencent at about 1/6th of
| the size, still takes more annual revenue than EA. (Going by
| figures on Wikipedia).
| eunos wrote:
| And also Bilibili might also join the industry with Fall
| Guys mobile
| https://twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1297205586350747648
| ineedasername wrote:
| We still have large, amazing, original games coming out of
| small studios. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an excellent
| example.
|
| We may get to a point where there are practically no "medium-
| large" developers and only "massive" ones like Microsoft, but
| I'm confident we'll still get great games from outside the
| massive groups.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to include Microsoft in that list. They
| buy game studios so they can close them and shelve their IP
| after several attempts to turn beloved franchises into GAAS
| products. They're less of a game studio conglomerator and more
| of a recycling bin.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Depends on which era of Microsoft Game Studios / Xbox Game
| Studios you are talking about. Also, Microsoft has never
| really shelved IP ever, even Flight Simulator is back out of
| retirement! They've sold IP back to (nearly) the original
| developers, which is somewhat unheard of outside of Microsoft
| (Fasa's BattleTech/Mech Warrior and Shadowrun IP brands are
| back in the "indy space" because Microsoft sold it back; you
| rarely hear of an Activision or EA IP getting sold back to
| small developers). Even Microsoft's worst turnover period of
| developer subsidiaries had some interesting mitigating
| circumstances: Bungie wanted to be independent again (and
| again that's a weird case where you'd be surprise to see a
| developer like Bungie spin back out of an Activision or an
| EA; Bungie themselves had to do a ton of work on their
| publishing contracts to avoid being swallowed up by
| Activision with Destiny), and rumors are that whatever
| happened to Lionhead may have been a suicide, though who
| knows if the story will ever be substantiated one way or the
| other (and Lionhead's IP hasn't been "shelved" for long
| either with Playground Games working on a new Fable).
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| In just a generation we will have our own version of zaibutsu
| and chaebols, isn't that exciting !
| ArkVark wrote:
| Because the 30% 'Standard' commission is fundamentally
| uneconomic. Independent publishers cannot thrive, when they
| could simply be acquired by a platform owner (ie. Microsoft)
| and pay 0%.
| SSLy wrote:
| Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of
| influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna
| Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle).
| wsc981 wrote:
| _> Nintendo is self-sustainable, Apple is exerting a lot of
| influence among smaller studios with Arcade. Like Annapurna
| Interactive (which is nota bene funded by Oracle)._
|
| I feel Apple Arcade sucks. I recently subscribed, cause I
| thought maybe my daughter would enjoy it. But most of the
| games are still too hard for her. So then I tried to play
| some games on Arcade for myself, but can't say I enjoyed it.
| Played a few games for 15 - 30 minutes then got bored. There
| just seems to be very few -if any- really quality games on
| Apple Arcade, at least from my point of view.
|
| A few days ago I ordered the Retroid Pocket 2 [0], I hope
| this device will help me get my gaming fix.
|
| If the Retroid Pocket 2 provides me and my daughter with a
| fun experience, then later I'll order a 2nd one for my
| daughter. I believe old NES/SNES games are probably easier to
| play for a 3.5 year old child compared to most of Apple
| Arcade's offerings. My daughter can already handle a simple
| gamepad, so as long as the game doesn't use too many buttons
| (4 directions + A/B/X/Y), a game should be playable for her.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.goretroid.com/products/retroid-
| pocket-2-handheld...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Have you tried any NES games lately? They're super hard!
| SNES games are better but they're still almost all very
| difficult.
| wsc981 wrote:
| _> Have you tried any NES games lately? They 're super
| hard! SNES games are better but they're still almost all
| very difficult._
|
| NES games might be hard. I never really had a NES while I
| was young. But I do know for sure some SNES games that
| will be easy to play. E.g. Mario Kart & Unirally. There's
| some videos on YouTube that shows other games that are
| playable by young children [0]. Super Double Dragon isn't
| too complicated either I think and the Retroid Pocket 2
| can be connected to a tv using HDMI cable and can use BLE
| to connect controllers. So that way I can play together
| with my daughter at the same time, to make it even easier
| for her.
|
| Here's a video that suggests some NES games for children
| [1].
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwn1IM7GV10
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dmF3FbZwlQ
| myko wrote:
| Apple's entire approach to gaming is broken. I tried to
| play various games on my iPad Pro and AppleTV recently and
| just getting a controller to work is a shitshow. Half the
| games that work with controllers have weird moments where
| you need to touch the screen.
|
| It's fine for extremely casual or touch based games but
| doesn't work for anything serious.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Annapurna Interactive has had their name on so many creative,
| well-done projects recently. I had no idea they received
| funding from Oracle, but quite frankly that just makes me
| think (somewhat) better of Oracle, not less of Annapurna.
| bananaoomarang wrote:
| Annapurna was founded/is run by Megan Ellison, Larry
| Ellison's daughter, if it seems curious!
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| I'd disagree here. Would recommend checking out this piece
| [1] on Nintendo's failure to expand as an IP brand.
|
| https://www.matthewball.vc/all/onnintendo
| actuator wrote:
| I would never want it to happen because of how much I love
| Nintendo. But I have always thought if there is any gaming
| property Apple can really benefit from buying, it is
| Nintendo.
| gambiting wrote:
| If I'm doing the maths correctly - Nintendo's current worth
| is somewhere around $40BN?
|
| Like, that's a lot of money, even for Apple, and then I'm
| not sure Nintendo would want to sell?
| masklinn wrote:
| > I'm not sure Nintendo would want to sell?
|
| Nintendo definitely wouldn't want to sell but it's
| publicly traded so a hostile takeover is always in the
| cards
| gregjw wrote:
| I mean, one of the founders (Megan Ellison) is Larry
| Ellison's daughter, I'm sure he helped it get started, but
| does Oracle as a company have any official activity with
| Annapurna?
| Andrex wrote:
| Nintendo is just two bad generations of hardware from being
| vulnerable enough to sell itself (IMO.)
|
| They had only $4.3 billion cash on hand as of 2018 (surely
| more by now thanks to the success and maturation of the
| Switch.) But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double
| that on ZeniMax.
|
| I wish Nintendo were in such a rock-solid place where I'd
| feel confident about them existing forever like Disney but I
| don't think that's ever been the case.
|
| Edit- The people downvoting me have apparently already
| forgotten about the Wii U. Imagine if they had two such
| systems in a row, without the DS/3DS line as a profitable
| fallback. Such are the possibilities of the future.
|
| When Nintendo's doing well, they're doing great, and everyone
| seems to forget the bad times. The GameCube era wasn't much
| better, but at least the GameCube and GBA were
| profitable/break even from their launches, as opposed to the
| Wii U and especially 3DS post-Ambassador price cut.
|
| Would be interested in a discussion or any kind of rebuttal
| from others who are actually familiar with Nintendo's
| financial history.
|
| To be clear: Nintendo as a company operated a loss from
| 2012-2015. An incompetent CEO could easily exacerbate that
| into a death spiral. Don't take Nintendo for granted, is all
| I'm saying.
| aikinai wrote:
| Over $4 billion cash on hand is an insane amount of money
| for such a small company. Nintendo is only about 4,000
| employees worldwide, so that cash will go a very long way.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > But Microsoft just dropped a little less than double that
| on ZeniMax.
|
| And there you have a key difference between Microsoft and
| Nintendo.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Worst case scenario for Nintendo would likely be making
| Xbox and PS5 games and PC games. I don't think they will
| ever be for sale.
| moomin wrote:
| Yeah, I mean, Sega don't have the mindshare they used to
| when they owned hardware, but they're very much still a
| thing.
| Andrex wrote:
| (replying to both you and the parent)
|
| It's a possibility but pivoting to software isn't easy by
| any stretch, and it wasn't something Sega should have
| even been able to do (financially.) The only reason it
| happened is because Sega's biggest debtor, Isao Okawa,
| forgave that debt on his deathbed.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/business/isao-
| okawa-74-ch...
|
| In a slightly altered timeline where Okawa didn't do
| this, Sega would have went under and its IP's would have
| been sold piecemeal to the highest bidders.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Nintendo has famously large cash reserves rich and a
| quick Internet search suggests they have about 7 billion
| in cash. Things would have to go very badly for them to
| go out of business, especially as they can presumably
| issue new stock to help raise money for a pivot in some
| sort of doomsday scenario.
| sylens wrote:
| I wish Nintendo would just take some ideas from other
| companies in the areas of online play and incorporate them
| into their own products. My friends and I would love to
| play Mario Kart on Switch with each other, but we can't be
| bothered to setup an additional voice chat solution and use
| the dumb lobby system. We also would like to play Mario
| Party online, but Mario Party Switch doesn't even offer its
| main game modes online, just a handful of mini games.
|
| It's frustrating because there's a lot of untapped
| potential.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Wow you say "only $4.3 billion" for not huge company.
| [deleted]
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| You make good points but Nintendo is such an iconic
| Japanese brand, it seems like their government would get
| involved if they were in dire straights.
|
| As a Nintendo baby, it'd be a dark day if some conglomerate
| bought them.
|
| I was just thinking though, if they needed money they could
| easily raise crazy amounts of cash from their fanbase via
| crowdfunding.
| dannyw wrote:
| Their central bank is already buying Nintendo stock and
| is the largest shareholder in Japan, I think.
| LanceH wrote:
| I was expecting you to finish with valve pivoting to hats.
| akhilcacharya wrote:
| I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that
| Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're
| probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next
| year or two.
| dspillett wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. I read Alyx as a very successful
| tech demo intended to push the market sector out a bit and
| make money off the platform and hardware, rather than a
| renewed more games-centric direction for Valve. Much like
| iD's output often being tech demos for the game engines
| that they then license to other studios.
| scollet wrote:
| > very successful tech demo
|
| Can't think of a Valve game that doesn't fit this
| description.
| outworlder wrote:
| Tech demo? Have you played it?
|
| It's a heck of a "demo". It's about the size of Half Life
| 2.
| me_me_me wrote:
| I dunno about this. The current consensus of community is
| that Dota 2 is dying and valve couldn't be bothered doing
| anything about it. Just cashing in while they can.
|
| And Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
| dx87 wrote:
| CS:GO is actually their biggest game now, but it does
| look like Dota 2 is dying. From a business perspective,
| they don't have any reason to try and save it though.
| They've lost ~40% of their players over the past 4 years,
| but are making more money than ever. The in-game
| tutorials have been unfinished for years, their Dota+
| subscription service is all but abandoned (but still
| bringing in millions of dollars a year), and even
| cosmetics are mostly contained to a time-limited
| battlepass to take advantage of FOMO.
| me_me_me wrote:
| CS GO was abandoned by valve, community picked up the
| scene by creating their own leagues and tournaments. Only
| then valve gracefully came back to support CS :(
| murph-almighty wrote:
| CS:GO is also going to trend downward soon with the
| release of Valorant, which is basically the same game
| with a few superpowers attached. All my friends who
| played GO switched over, they're attracting a pro scene,
| I think it's only a matter of time tbh.
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| I've avoided Valorant because it requires kernel drivers.
| But I'm in the minority, most gamers don't even know
| whats involved there.
| overtonwhy wrote:
| The International has been growing every year.
| bootloop wrote:
| I would say since it was made free to play CS:GO (also
| Valve) surpassed Dota 2 and it is still rising.
| nindalf wrote:
| > Dota 2 is dying
|
| I'm old enough that I remember people saying this in
| 2014. Actual data on active users -
| https://steamcharts.com/app/570#All. This indicates that
| it's far from it's peak of 1.2M active players but 700k
| active is still respectable.
|
| > Dota 2 is by far their biggest game.
|
| Not by players. That would be CS:GO
| (https://steamcharts.com/app/730) with 900k active
| players.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 900k active presumably includes the 50% of Deathmatch
| players that are zombies?
|
| It's interesting to see there seems to be some
| evolutionary pressures at play as a couple of new
| routines are being used, not just 'rotate on the spot',
| one or two shoot now (yes, I got shot by an XP farming
| zombie) and one does epicycles which makes them
| surprisingly hard to shoot.
| de_watcher wrote:
| They've managed to make a Dota 2 tutorial that's worse
| than the 2014 one. And matchmaking for the new players is
| just brutal, there is no retention.
| me_me_me wrote:
| Personal story time, few months back me and my buddy got
| asked to help our non-dota friend get into the game. We
| are both playing occasionally in lower brackets.
|
| Both of us created new account to so that noobie wouldn't
| be thrown into deep water right away. Note that me and my
| friend were 'baby sitting' - playing neutrally not trying
| to win vs lower rated opponents.
|
| Out of 10 games 7 had hardcore smurfs in them. People in
| stack dominating their lanes. I don't see how anyone new
| and without any friends could possibly survived through
| such acid pool.
|
| Imagine you are starting to play chess and 7/10 opponents
| are rated master and will crush you. And its kind of
| crush that you can't really learn from either.
|
| I really don't see how dota can grow when there are so
| many alternatives.
| Revery wrote:
| Are you sure matchmaking didn't detect you were smurfing?
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| To fix that problem you have game systems that are more
| random / forgiving in lower ranked games (remove the
| skill).
|
| Then in the harder ranks you can dial back those
| mechanics and make the game more skill based.
|
| Just a little tip for Valve there. I'm sure they're
| reading.
| [deleted]
| 013a wrote:
| People really need to watch (play?) (read?) The Final Hours
| of Half Life Alyx. Its a documentary-like experience
| available on Steam which dives in to the past decade or two
| at Valve.
|
| From the outside, all we see is very few games being
| produced. From the inside, its far more complex; something
| like a Dark Decade for Valve where even they weren't sure
| what they should be working on. Hundreds of failed
| prototypes and ideas. Major technical issues with Source 2
| that took years to fix. L4D3 was under development, but ran
| into huge scope creep (full open world with variable length
| days depending on time of year and hemisphere, variable
| tides based on moon cycle, crazy stuff like that). They
| were working on a tech showcase codenamed ARTI/Artifact
| using a brand new voxel-based game engine separate from
| Source (and after the game was canceled, the name was taken
| and used for the now-released Dota 2 Card Game).
| mywittyname wrote:
| When you hear stuff like this, the acquisition binge that
| so many companies go on starts to make sense.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| When you hear stuff like this, you start to wonder if
| Valve's management style is half as sustainable as they
| would like to think. Without Steam and hats/knives they'd
| be broke several times over with that sort of lack of
| focus and inability to release games outside of what
| seems a decadal cycle. (ETA: Which possibly makes a
| "locusts of gaming" analogy relevant for Valve, hah.)
| deadbunny wrote:
| Except that out of that experimentation came Alyx.
| Everything in that game is outstanding from a technical
| perspective, the way you interact with the world feels
| completely natural.
|
| Sure they could have pushed out a VR game every year for
| the last 5 years to maybe get to the same level of
| interaction fluidity but they would all feel subpar, not
| quite there, like the vast majority of other VR games.
|
| Valves strength is that they a have a structure that
| allows experimentation without a hard deadline, they can
| afford to throw millions at the wall and see what sticks.
| This allows themw to take a decade between large, ground
| breaking projects. They're not beholden to YoY or QoQ
| growth.
|
| They've had what? Two duds in 20+ years? Not bad when you
| consider the rest of their output are beloved classics.
|
| Granted they have a good few money printing machines to
| help them work like this but I would argue that they have
| these money printing machines because they have the
| ability to experiment, because of their structure.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Sort of; unless they make more games, Alyx is "just" a tech
| demo or an attempt to sell more of their VR kits.
|
| It's weird, they've got some seriously good franchises that
| they haven't done anything with; Half-Life could use a
| sequel every few years; Portal could become a massive
| franchise; Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and DOTA 2 are huge money
| makers but I think they're reluctant to make sequels to
| those because of balancing and pissing off the existing,
| invested player bases. (I think that may have happened when
| they went from CS:S to CS:Go, where the latter had very
| lucrative monetization options, lucrative but morally
| dubious because of off-site trading and gambling)
| deadbunny wrote:
| Do we need sequels every few years? Don't get me wrong
| I'll be the first I the queue for HL3 or Portal 3 but
| only because historically it has been a fantastic set of
| games.
| leetcrew wrote:
| as a player, I'm not really sure what would be gained
| from a sequel to csgo. any big change to the mechanics
| would just piss everyone off, and smaller changes can
| just be done as updates to the existing game. csgo was
| only ~$20 when it launched, and it's free now, so I don't
| think there's much financial upside to selling a newer cs
| title. they already make plenty of money off skins.
|
| the only thing I see that they could really change in a
| new title would be the graphics, but I don't think that's
| much of a selling point to the audience. cs players care
| more about getting >100fps on their potato computer than
| pretty graphics.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstand what you mean but pretty sure the CS:GO
| knife market is way bigger than the TF2 hat market, so knives
| fit the joke better.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >Soon we'll just have Microsoft, Epic, and a conglomeration of
| EA, Activision, and Ubisoft
|
| And, you know, all the other independent developers. Of which
| there are a legion.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| The barrier between what indie studios and big studios can
| produce is increasingly shrinking. I'd say the market has never
| been healthier. The sheer amount of content is still
| constrained by some linear function of man hours but there's
| enough crowdsourcing business models like kickstarter and early
| access releases that even small shops can afford to show a cool
| concept and get funded for its completion.
| acolumb wrote:
| I find that funny when Among Us (indie) and Fall Guys (also
| indie) are some of the highest-trending games at the moment.
| Noos wrote:
| Both of them are free, though. The former one only got this
| push due to streamers suddenly playing it together. These are
| kind of "meme of the moment" games more than anything, in the
| same way VR Chat was a bit ago, or Five Nights at Freddy's.
| publicola1990 wrote:
| I think Sega is also a major player, they have bought up many
| studios in recent years including Relic, Creative Assembly and
| Amplitude.
| doomlaser wrote:
| Unity just had its IPO, and the technology is powering a huge
| fraction of games across all platforms, from recent hit Fall
| Guys to Pokemon Go, to thousands of indie efforts, not to
| mention wide adoption in both the AR software industry and as a
| platform for many AI research projects. I don't know what its
| financial future will be as the company has been focusing on
| growth over profit, but it's a significant player.
|
| Tangentially, open-source game engine Godot keeps getting
| better and better, and it's just a matter of time before a
| significant game is made using its tools:
| https://godotengine.org/
| pjmlp wrote:
| According to Switch data, Unity powers about 50% of its
| games.
|
| It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft
| for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to
| reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR
| companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| I wouldn't write off Godot, it may not have the hype or big
| names but it is seeing swelling support from the indie and
| garage developer side of things
| logicOnly wrote:
| Nintendo isn't really helpful to understand the greater
| market.
|
| Most developers don't work with them, and their customers
| represent a tiny less "gaming educated" population. It's
| like using cellphone games as a gauge on the greater
| market.
| santoshalper wrote:
| That's some impressive mental gymnastics to try to
| redefine a market to be more like one you want it to be.
| Here's a tip: Markets are defined by demand, not supply.
| echelon wrote:
| > Most developers don't work with them, and their
| customers represent a tiny less "gaming educated"
| population.
|
| That's a bit insulting. Mario and Zelda are a few of the
| consistently best game franchises. Smash Bros gamers
| aren't "uneducated"
|
| > It's like using cellphone games as a gauge on the
| greater market.
|
| The mobile game market is bigger than the console and PC
| market.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| The switch is also a huge market for indie devs now. Just
| a crazy amount of indie games in the switch market. Hell
| one company, Brace Yourself Games, leveraged their game
| 'Crypt of the Necrodancer' into a connected zelda
| licensed game called 'Cadence of Hyrule' that just won
| some awards.
|
| The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is
| fading quickly.
| filoleg wrote:
| >The whole 'Nintendo is a thing unto itself' narrative is
| fading quickly.
|
| I fully agree with you, but that narrative has started
| changing only in recent times. Not that long ago, I would
| have mostly agreed with the premise that "Nintendo is a
| thing unto itself."
|
| If my memory serves right, Nintendo was dipping feet into
| it since at least GameCube/Wii era, but only with Switch
| they started seriously being, in my eyes, a not "unto
| itself" kind of an entity.
| Noos wrote:
| It still is, though.
|
| I mean, a part of the reason why indie titles work there
| is that Nintendo is refusing to offer a AAA gamepass, is
| using underpowered hardware and is charging a price
| premium for it. They very much are resisting trends and
| are their own thing, and it's kind of hard to really use
| them as a long term market barometer because it can and
| will backfire as often as it works.
|
| They also kind of are in uncharted waters too. This is
| now the first time I think they don't have a dedicated
| handheld and home console, and just have one platform. A
| lot of why they were able to survive mistakes was having
| the handheld market as an evergreen to fall back on.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If you so wish,
|
| https://developer.android.com/games/develop/build-in-
| unity
|
| https://developers.google.com/ar/develop/unity/quickstart
| -an...
|
| https://stadia.dev/blog/unity-production-ready-support-
| for-s...
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-
| reality/devel...
|
| Is it mobile enough?
| the_hoser wrote:
| That's silly gatekeeping bullshit.
|
| By the numbers, mobile gaming _is_ the greater market. It
| 's traditional gaming that's becoming the niche.
| [deleted]
| doomlaser wrote:
| Unity is definitely a big player on all platforms, but it's
| probably strongest on smartphones / AR / simulation for AI
| / and indie developers. Epic's niche with Unreal is more
| high end AAA games / big studio console releases, and now
| apparently Hollywood & VFX. Disney and ILM are using Unreal
| for real-time on-set backdrops in shows like The
| Mandalorian: https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/20/ilm-
| reveals-how-it-used-u...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#U
| n...
|
| The underlying C++ source code is available for both
| commercial engines, but Unity charges high fees for source
| access, and only on a direct per-studio basis, whereas
| Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay $20/mo.
| The vast majority of Unity developers work within its IDE
| and C# API. There are definitely strong network effects
| from the sheer number of developers using Unity, such as
| the amount of documentation, tutorials, and C# code
| available online.
|
| But again, Godot is fully open source and getting
| consistently better as it evolves. It's C++ based, closing
| in on competitive rendering, ported to every relevant
| architecture, and has a full IDE and scripting system. It
| reminds me a lot of the Blender project. At some point,
| some significant video game IP will be built using it and
| shake things up. It's just a matter of time.
| Avery3R wrote:
| > Unreal 4's source is available on GitHub if you pay
| $20/mo
|
| Unreal 4's source has been free to access for a while
| now. The $20/month thing was just when it first came out.
| aikinai wrote:
| How did you leave out Nintendo? :(
| dragonsh wrote:
| Probably missing the largest gaming company in the world
| Tencent here. I believe they will still thrive.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| There are more: - paradox interactive - rockstar, which is
| strong from gta v online and rdr - cd projeckt red, which also
| get income from gog and hyped cyberpunk - valve won't exit
| software devs in short time, their investment in vr is big. I
| won't be surprised if they release vanity knives with lootbox
| though
|
| IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent games
| cannot generate enough popularity. They can only hoped for
| skyrim and are struggling with their old engine.
| tormeh wrote:
| > IMO Bethesda decided to sell to MS because their recent
| games cannot generate enough popularity
|
| Truly mystifying why they'd want to create an MMO. It's as if
| they hadn't been following the news. The success of WoW is
| incredibly hard to repeat, and most studios who try fail, no
| matter how much money they throw at it.
|
| The MMO space has been, WoW aside, a money bonfire for one
| and a half decade at this point.
| maxsilver wrote:
| That, and also, Bethesda already owns the (3rd largest?
| ish?) MMORPG on the planet, with Elder Scrolls Online.
| mattmanser wrote:
| ESO has been pretty successful, 15 million players:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjagneaux/2020/03/30/elder
| -...
|
| I'd guess that the article has it wrong and they're mainly
| on the free tier and that's not the subscriber count
| though.
| ekianjo wrote:
| If Rockstar ever gets acquired, this will be one of the most
| expensive deals ever. They routinely sell games in the dozens
| of millions of units.
| wtf_is_up wrote:
| Rockstar is owned by Take Two Interactive. TTWO's entire
| market cap (including Rockstar and 2K) is about half of EA.
| Thaxll wrote:
| EA is much bigger in terms of revenue.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The people that made GTA great left so that well is going
| to dry up pretty quick
| LinuxBender wrote:
| So more flying motorcycles that shoot rockets? :-) I
| think they ran out of ideas some time ago unless you
| count my example.
| anbotero wrote:
| How do you know? Do you have any source information? I
| had not read of this before
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| GTA V, mainly thanks to their online offering, has been the
| 2nd best selling video game of all time, second only to
| Minecraft... which Microsoft bought in 2014 for $2.5
| billion.
|
| Mind you, Minecraft's income comes from a lot of
| merchandise and spinoffs, whereas GTA is mainly from the
| game itself.
|
| I was curious; RDR 2, also a Rockstar game, is the #14 best
| selling game of all time apparently; I didn't know it did
| that good. The other GTA games are also in the top 50.
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_video_gam...
| puranjay wrote:
| It makes me happy to see RDR2 do well financially. It's a
| breathtaking game that's not just about mindless fast-
| paced action all the time.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I rarely buy new games at full price, but I bought RDR2
| twice: first for the PS4, the on the PC.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Note that two thirds of the sales of Minecraft occured
| after 2014[1].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-26-minecrafts-
| con...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Contrary to popular opinion, Rockstar is actually not a
| competent game developer.
| kevinlou wrote:
| How do you define competency? Games sold, aggregate
| review score, or some other arbitrary metric that you're
| using to gatekeep on game quality?
| recursive wrote:
| I'm curious how you measure competence.
|
| Virtually every release Rockstar does sells millions. And
| from my point of view their games are fun too.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Fallout 4 was a massive hit and they've got a new franchise
| about to come out (Starfield). Wolfenstein + Dishonored have
| consistently sold well.
|
| In May 2016, 5 years after Skyrim was released, it was valued
| at $2.5 billion, now it's being bought 4 years later for $7.5
| billion.
|
| I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but you
| are wrong. Also, Starfield has been written in an overhauled
| engine, so again, wrong[1]. Although to be honest, it's
| probably the same engine with updates and they're just saying
| that to try and stop the small minority of rabid fans that
| keep on harping about their imagined deficiencies of the
| creation engine with every new Bethesda game. That's then
| always a massive hit.
|
| [1]https://bethesda.net/en/article/4IwKWIj174Cb2QNTTtBAEb/tod
| d-... - paragraph 9 "[The new console cycle has] led to our
| largest engine overhaul since Oblivion, with all new
| technologies powering our first new IP in 25 years,
| Starfield"
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster and absolute
| embarrassment to the studio however [1].
|
| [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8
| mattmanser wrote:
| So? Lots of studios have flops. The point is they've had
| plenty more successes since Skyrim. I even forgot to
| mention DOOM and Prey. And don't forget, FO76 wasn't even
| made by the main studio.
|
| Adding the back catalogue to gamepass (and probably
| taking it all off steam), is part of the price too.
|
| Hell, if the price was $7.5 billion even after the FO76
| flop, what would it have been if they'd pulled it off?
| Making a whole new type of MMO.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Fallout 76 is even the exact sort of "live service" game
| that seems to do really well on Xbox Game Pass. (Sea of
| Thieves is often mentioned by Microsoft as a gold
| standard live service game that exceeds exceeds "sales
| expectations" precisely because of Game Pass; it probably
| wouldn't have sold as much as it has without Game Pass.)
| Rumors are that when Bethesda put FO76 on Game Pass the
| player count went way up, though Microsoft remains
| mysterious about actual Game Pass numbers, and FO76 also
| released a major expansion pack and cross-play at the
| same time, so if those rumors are true it may not just
| have been Game Pass but the confluence of things.
| chillwaves wrote:
| That video is a year and a half old. I hear the game has
| improved since then, but I haven't tried it myself.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| So was No Man's Sky when it came out. Though rare,
| sometimes studios do the right thing over time. FO76
| seems to be having a better second act.
| psyc wrote:
| See also, Final Fantasy XIV. From disaster to IMO one of
| the most magnificent games ever created.
| shultays wrote:
| I think comparison is a bit unfair since nms is (mostly)
| single player while fo76 is not. If nms gets good (i
| believe it is good btw, I play it regularly on VR) it
| would still sell 5 years later but fo76 would be dead if
| it can't keep up player count high.
|
| So yeah, a failed multiplayer/mmo game is a bigger
| failure imo, because it is hard/impossible to recover
| from
| noncoml wrote:
| > I appreciate some Bethesda fans have a weird agenda, but
| you are wrong
|
| > small minority of rabid fans that keep on harping about
| their imagined deficiencies of the creation engine
|
| You post comes across a bit aggressive and insulting.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| > ... stop the small minority of rabid fans that keep on
| harping about their imagined deficiencies of the creation
| engine with every new Bethesda game.
|
| Seeing as there are still some ancient problems with
| CreationKit (physics over 60fps, widescreen support, etc),
| I'll be interested to see how much they will overhaul it
| and how many old bugs will have to be fixed by the
| community (see nexusmods "Universal Patch" for any CK
| Bethesda game).
| badsectoracula wrote:
| FWIW the 60fps issue was introduced in Oblivion (it
| didn't exist in Morrowind) and that was because of the
| physics integration. However that is an integration issue
| and something they have actually fixed - in other games
| (e.g. Skyrim VR).
|
| Similarly with widescreen support, there isn't really an
| issue with it, you can use any resolution by modifying
| configuration files but they just... do not bother to
| polish it up.
|
| (note that any bug that can be fixed with normal mods
| isn't really an engine bug but a content bug - though
| some mods do work by hooking the engine executable)
| mattmanser wrote:
| The creationkit games are one of the few that have the
| two critical components that allow this, mod support and
| extensive modding communities.
|
| It's easy to have no fixes, when it can't be fixed.
| shakow wrote:
| > their recent games cannot generate enough popularity
|
| I wouldn't be so sure. Sure, they are not GTA or CoD, but
| Prey, Dishonored or Doom have all sold rather good.
| aero-glide wrote:
| Great, yet another acquisition. So eventually everything will
| become one company or what? I like free markets, at least the
| idea of competition. I hate conglomerates. Am I contradicting
| myself?
| ehnto wrote:
| That depends on your definition of free market, but I think
| everyone likes the golden-years of a free market. The long tail
| of unhindered capitalism has some rough edges, we have some
| laws to help but they're not much use if no-one uses them.
| Covzire wrote:
| RIP Bethesda.
| emptyfile wrote:
| Are you joking? What could Microsoft ever do that's as bad as
| Fallout 76?
| syshum wrote:
| Honestly it is hard for me to see how Microsoft can ruin
| Bethesda any worse than ZeniMax was already....
|
| the new Doom was ok, but the new Fallout was TERRIBLE, as with
| many other recent Bethesda ventures...
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I would say the new Doom was much more than okay. One of the
| best playing FPS's I've played. And everything that Arkane
| makes is gold.
| weeeeelp wrote:
| To add to the parent here, Doom was made by id Software,
| which generally has a huge history of making very good FPS
| games. I'm certain they were given a lot of leeway from the
| producer.
|
| Arkane's 2016 Prey was just amazing... shame so few
| immersive sims get made anymore.
| syshum wrote:
| One thing that confused me, is the Announcement says MS
| is acquiring Doom IP, but from what I can tell they are
| not acquiring id Software, so how is that going to work?
| Trasmatta wrote:
| They're acquiring Zenimax, and Zenimax owns id software.
| So id is part of the deal.
| syshum wrote:
| That makes more sense, I now have read the MS Statement
| it was more Clear than the one I read earlier that made
| it seem like they were only buying Bethesda from ZeniMax
| not buying all of ZeniMax...
| Covzire wrote:
| It's not looking good for another TES or FO game unless
| they're already very well under development.
|
| EA has taught the industry that mega corps are where IP goes
| to die a long, slow, cash-cow squeezing death. I'm actually
| more disappointed in ZeniMax/Bethesda. In my mind, there is
| absolutely no possibility that Bethesda will ever produce
| another game on the level of FO3/NV now because corps do what
| corps do which is A/B test and second guess every decision
| until the product is a flavorless lump.
| baq wrote:
| waiting for announcement that facebook or netflix is buying valve
| for an undisclosed $30b
| rixrax wrote:
| Does this mean that future versiona of Fallout will showcase Pip-
| Boys runnig Microsoft Windows?
| LandR wrote:
| Visiting that site without JS enabled just triggers a constant
| refresh loop!
| dkersten wrote:
| This (that Bethesda are selling, not that Microsoft are the
| buyer) isn't really a surprise. It seems that everything they've
| been doing for a few years now was to align themselves with a
| sale.
|
| This YouTube video predicting that's what they were doing springs
| to mind: https://youtu.be/qJt_i2_vsSw
| mrfusion wrote:
| How will this affect VR?
| kar1181 wrote:
| Microsoft now own Doom, Quake, Wolf, etc IP. They own id
| software.
|
| 2020, I'm done.
| r_police wrote:
| Hey, at least we've got that RBG news last week so, not
| everything has been bad this year.
| Firebrand wrote:
| Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox --
| Confirmed by Todd Howard:
|
| >Like our original partnership, this one is about more than one
| system or one screen. We share a deep belief in the fundamental
| power of games, in their ability to connect, empower, and bring
| joy. And a belief we should bring that to everyone - regardless
| of who you are, where you live, or what you play on. Regardless
| of the screen size, the controller, or your ability to even use
| one.
|
| https://bethesda.net/en/article/4IwKWIj174Cb2QNTTtBAEb/todd-...
| bytematic wrote:
| No way this stands
| LGNUITLZCJ wrote:
| Exclsuive to Xbox doesn't make sense given what Microsoft's
| strategy these days but games might be exclusive to Xbox and
| Microsoft Store on Windows.
| m_a_g wrote:
| This reminds how the Oculus founder said that logging into
| Facebook to hop on VR would never be required.
| 42656e wrote:
| They will definitely also release on Windows PCs. But that
| meaningless corporate speak doesn't really confirm that they
| will stay true multi-platform and release games on PlayStation
| and Switch as well.
| fartcannon wrote:
| From now until acquisition, the language internally will be 'we
| have our own identity within Microsoft' and then 3 to 6 months
| later, there will be these offhand remarks from senior
| management about how nameless other employees are confused
| about their place in the company. Then within 1 year, there
| will be an email about how the CEO has decided to eleviate the
| confusion among the staff and unite the company under one name.
| And that name surely won't be Bethesda.
| Pxl_Buzzard wrote:
| You're right that can happen in most cases, but look at
| Microsoft's recent acquistions: LinkedIn, GitHub, Xamarin,
| and game studios like Mojang, Double Fine, Obsidian, and
| inXile. All well-established brand names that have continued
| to maintain their own identity and team culture, albeit like
| any culture I'm sure they've evolved over time.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Lol, basically exactly what happened to the Palm group at HP.
| Except, I believe they ended up firing the whole palm group.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Todd has zero power to make that promise. In my opinion it's
| irresponsible to make the claim.
| selykg wrote:
| Given Todd's history on, well, anything the past decade...
| why would anyone believe literally a word out of his mouth?
|
| As a Playstation gamer, anything Todd Howard related can stay
| on Xbox for all I care. What I will potentially miss are
| games like Wolfenstein and Doom.
| selykg wrote:
| And as proof of why you should never listen to Todd Howard.
|
| https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/130806270290504499
| 3...
| 83457 wrote:
| With Doom and Quake, it would be a shock if that were the case.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Ask Fallout fans what they think of Todd Howard and how he
| disrespected gamers through the launch of Fallout 76. Better
| yet see it in full comedic affect in an internet historian
| video [1].
|
| [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8
| bitwize wrote:
| You're right. They won't be just on Xbox. They'll be on Xbox
| and Windows 10.
|
| In other news, the only 3D API that matters now for gaming is
| DirectX. Which was kinda always the case, except now OpenGL and
| VK fanboys can't go "but... idTech!"
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I think this will be one of the most interesting fallout
| effects of this whole acquisition. Bethesda's tech stack, as
| a developer, is basically worthless. But Id has plenty of
| tech, both tooling and engine, that are viable going into
| PS5/Xbox/new gen GPUs. If Microsoft does intend to push
| heavily for Xbox/Windows exclusives from all the acquired
| components the impact on DirectX as the standard 3D API is
| going to be pretty large. Also the internal transitions from
| current tooling and API will probably be prioritized to get
| early day titles ready for spring 2021 sales season (but
| surely for the holiday 2021 rush).
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox
|
| The biggest problem that Microsoft has with the Xbox is lack of
| AAA exclusives. If the next Elder Scrolls game is going to be
| released for Xbox and PS5 - what's the point of this exercise?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| "Not exclusive to XBox" could just be PC as well.
| macspoofing wrote:
| Yeah, you may be right. This may be the "sleight of hand"
| happening here.
| lifty wrote:
| While statements like these are common when mergers/buyouts
| happen, the final decision down the line will not be his to
| make. Not saying that things will not happen as he states, but
| it shouldn't be seen as a certainty.
| TheKnack wrote:
| When Facebook bought Oculus, Palmer Luckey said that a
| Facebook login would never be required to use Oculus
| products. The Oculus Quest 2 that comes out in October will
| require a Facebook login.
|
| https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-guarantee-promise-
| facebook-l...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| to be fair, Microsoft has been loosening up on exclusives
| as of late. Minecraft is supported on all platforms, with
| the dungeon side game coming to all consoles. Psychonauts 2
| is still slated to come to PS4 and Switch. Ori's 2 games
| are multiplat (the sequel just now releasing on Switch).
|
| I don't doubt there will be timed exclusives, but at the
| current moment it seems like they aren't opposed to
| publishing on non-MS platforms.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Xbox won't even mean the same thing then as it does now.
|
| Would a platform agnostic game only available on the Xbox
| online store count as "exclusive to xbox?" What if it
| required an Xbox Live/GamePass subscription for significant
| features - but not everything? Or they introduced super-
| skewed pricing ($100 for ES6 w/ no sales vs. included with
| GamePass)?
|
| My concern isn't that this won't be true (at the very least,
| they release everything for Xbox on PC anyway), it's that the
| platform will evolve so much that console lock-in won't
| matter, so the promise will elide the real concern.
| acruns wrote:
| Why would they limit there revenue to a single platform? That
| doesn't make sense to me. But I don't play videogames,
| haven't since my kids were teenagers, think Call of Duty. I
| have sold software to corporate, and I can say the revenue
| from software sales far outweigh hardware revenues.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| Targeting all platforms means the Zenimax division within
| Microsoft will make more money. Targeting only Xbox means
| more Xbox will be sold, so Xbox division will make more
| money.
|
| It's not clear which one is a better deal for MS.
| kcb wrote:
| Its not about selling Xboxs anymore. Its about Game Pass
| subscribers.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| They promised with last-gen Xbox One, and have followed
| it up, that all first-party games that launch for Xbox
| will also launch for PC. (Originally this extended to all
| games, but some late releases were xbox-only.) There are
| no xbox-only games for Xbox Series announced, from any
| publisher, that are not available for PC.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think the multi-device strategy is a clear winner. The
| lifetime value of a console itself is probably not
| terribly high. After all, most game companies do not sell
| hardware at all and a few who have eventually gave up
| (Sega, Atari).
|
| Plus, the PC, Switch, and iPad markets are largely
| orthogonal to the XB/PS ones. Content for the former
| probably doesn't compete with the latter, so it makes
| sense to sell in those markets. And lastly, could you
| imagine how Sony execs would feel if their best selling
| PS titles all came from MS studios? That would certainly
| put them in an awkward position to suddenly be
| financially dependent to some degree on MS.
| coliveira wrote:
| Of course, it won't be his decision. It will be Microsoft's
| decision.
| skohan wrote:
| It also begs the question what MS has to gain by buying
| Bethesda/ZeniMax _besides_ exclusivity. Given the fact that
| they own the XBox /Windows gaming platform, would the revenue
| they get selling Doom on PlayStation really be enough to
| outweigh the potential of making it exclusive to drive more
| people to their platform?
| b3kart wrote:
| Yep. Don't make promises when the outcome is not up to you.
| See [1] for _many_ examples of acquired companies going back
| on such statements.
|
| [1]: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes. When Epic bought Psyonix for Rocket League there was
| plenty of reassurance linux would remain supported. After
| waiting the absolute minimum time for people to stop paying
| attention Epic removed linux support and steam distribution.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I don't know why anyone would think Microsoft would be against
| publishing on competing platforms. Minecraft is available on
| Switch and PlayStation. It's all about that $$$
| nindalf wrote:
| That's merely rhetoric. Reading between the lines, it's clear
| Howard is saying "we're going to release Skyrim on XBox Series
| X on launch day".
| djhworld wrote:
| > Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox --
| Confirmed by Todd Howard
|
| eh, I read this as games will still come out on PC and probably
| the odd token Nintendo switch release here and there.
|
| I doubt there will be PS5 releases of Bethedsa games.
| dkersten wrote:
| Given how many times Todd has lied it went back on his word, I
| don't put any weight in anything he has to say.
| the_duke wrote:
| This is a typical, vague PR statement that can mean anything
| and nothing at all.
|
| Microsoft has decided that all their exclusives will also come
| to PC anyway. So Windows, Xbox consoles and Xcloud (streaming
| service) are a given.
|
| This doesn't promise in any way that games will come to
| PlayStation.
| masklinn wrote:
| And even if it weren't a bullshit vague PR statement, once
| the company is sold the original owners have no say over its
| management.
| slg wrote:
| It specifically says "should bring" and not "will bring".
| This is a philosophical statement and neither a promise nor
| even a plan.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They wouldn't; most of their games are PC games first and
| foremost, with ports to other platforms. Sometimes painfully
| complicated ports, like Skyrim's to the PS3 (due to memory
| constraints).
| ianhorn wrote:
| I don't read that as saying Bethesda Games aren't going to be
| exclusives. Or maybe it'll be xbox plus windows. Meanwhile,
| there's this quote from Satya Nadella from press release at the
| bottom of OP, speaking about this acquisition:
|
| > Quality differentiated content is the engine behind the
| growth and value of Xbox Game Pass--from Minecraft to Flight
| Simulator.
|
| "Differentiated content" sounds to me like exclusives.
| anonymfus wrote:
| I believe that he is talking about diversity of Microsoft's
| platforms here and nothing else.
|
| Specifically:
|
| _> Regardless of the screen size, the controller, or your
| ability to even use one._
|
| "your ability to even use one" is clearly a reference to Xbox
| Adaptive Controller
| julius_set wrote:
| People are forgetting that the original Zenimax Studios is not
| exactly the most pro-gaming group of shareholders. Their original
| motivations were to increase shareholder value (I imagine that
| Fallout 76 decision was a factor among this).
|
| I think Microsoft's gaming vision aligns well with Bethesda's and
| they probably have a better vision compared to Zenimax board of
| directors.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Best thing to ever happen to Bethesda Softworks and id. Zenimax
| is a mess of a parent company and has underinvested in id and
| hasn't gotten beyond letting Todd Howard keep going further and
| further off target from what people want.
| shmerl wrote:
| This is an attack on Vulkan, since Bethesda were very strongly
| pushing it. Guess what MS will tell them to do now. No doubt more
| Xbox and DX-only stuff.
|
| So it's a lock-in move and again something that should have been
| stopped by anti-trust, but of course, it's non existent these
| days.
| ck425 wrote:
| Please please please tell me this doesn't mean ES6 will be an
| Xbox exclusive!
| patagurbon wrote:
| It'll be on PC certainly, probably not on PS5...
| binarymax wrote:
| Unfortunately, it probably does mean that you won't be playing
| ES6 on your PS5
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I'm still buying PS5 :)
| dustinmoris wrote:
| > But the key point is we're still Bethesda.
|
| Day one post acquisition? For sure!
|
| A month later? Of course.
|
| 6 months later? Yes, ok.
|
| 1 year later? Maybe?
|
| 3 years later? Never!
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Good move, Sony had up to now more exclusive titles for their
| Playstation lines. Many people wrote off the new XBox because
| there were not enough exclusive titles. Now perhaps next Doom
| etc. will be time limited exclusive for the Xbox.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Cool and if Im not mistaken Zenimax Online's headquarters is down
| the street from me in Hunt Valley, MD. Nice area with nice
| housing that isn't crazy expensive, especially right on the
| border of MD/PA.
|
| Any other Hacker Newers live close to there too?
| javier10e6 wrote:
| From Betheasda news press release: "And, we have a long history
| of working with Microsoft. Our companies share many of the same
| basic principles. We believe in a culture that values passion,
| quality, collaboration, and innovation."
|
| Last week Microsoft was thanking Trump from giving them a chance
| to acquire TikTok. It did not go well.
| refracture wrote:
| Great. Now that you have vast resources to work with start making
| a new Quake based on Quake 1's themes.
| abvdasker wrote:
| This acquisition has interesting timing given that they acquired
| Obsidian not long ago and we know Obsidian is developing a first
| person fantasy RPG (Bethesda's bread and butter). Have to imagine
| M$ execs will be thinking about further consolidation.
| darknavi wrote:
| We all know this was just because Todd Howard wanted Skyrim on
| MORE platforms.
|
| Next week: "Now you can play Skyrim on your Android phones via
| xCloud!"
| screye wrote:
| I genuinely think this is an amazing acquisition.
|
| Bethesda/Zenimax has arguably the longest lineup of critically
| acclaimed franchises in the video game world. Additionally,
| almost every franchise still feels fresh and has pulling power,
| unlike ones like Halo and Assassins creed which have slowly lost
| their thunder.
|
| Additionally, Bethesda had no idea what they were doing with
| their 2 biggest properties - Fallout and Elder scrolls. Hopefully
| with the MSFT acquisition, both will get some direction.
|
| For those that work at Obsidian and MSFT owned game studios, is
| the Work-life-balance still terrible like most video-game studios
| or is it more in line with the 'family frendly' pace at proper
| MSFT ? Am I too naive to think that this might be a good thing
| for the employees and their sanity.
| [deleted]
| tyleo wrote:
| I worked at Turn 10 (the Xbox studio which makes Forza) about a
| year and a half ago. Work life balance was amazing. The tech
| director of the studio made it a huge point that staff get
| adequate time off. He brought it up in almost every dev team
| meeting, "Let me know if you don't feel like you can take time
| off". He also made a huge point about having a sustainable
| team.
|
| I don't know that this is a characteristic of all Microsoft
| studios. Departments in Microsoft can almost be like little
| companies all of their own. It _did_ leave a positive
| impression on me though and I can see myself working at
| Microsoft again in the future.
|
| I left on good terms to see what it was like to work at
| startups.
| screye wrote:
| That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing your
| experience.
| dexwell wrote:
| > Bethesda/Zenimax has arguably the longest lineup of
| critically acclaimed franchises in the video game world
|
| Let me introduce you to a little company called Nintendo.
| screye wrote:
| I am kicking myself right now.
|
| I knew I should have added 'cross-platform'. You're correct
| Nitendo certainly counts. Naughty dog would probably want to
| contend my claim too.
| antonyh wrote:
| Bethesda has become formulaic, with the elements of gameplay
| virtually the same amongst titles. Same across the board really,
| not much genre-defying for quite a while.
|
| Outer Worlds, Fallout, and so on just differ by visuals and
| story, the general jist is all samey samey. No innovation. No
| just single series but across the estate. Nothings been as good
| as Fallout 3 & Skyrim, just repetitions and echoes of greatness.
|
| Is this a good purchase for MS? Maybe, if it's for tech, IP, and
| bringing talent on board. Hopefully they'll add some originality
| in game play elements, not just reskinning.
| scollet wrote:
| > Nothings been as good as Fallout 3
|
| The irony is beyond my mortal understanding, but NV certainly
| flagships the IP today, behind maybe 2.
|
| Both different developers.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Bethesda also includes id and Arkane. Arkane's games in
| particular are incredibly unique and well designed. There's
| still a lot of innovation happening under the Bethesda
| umbrella, even if Fallout and Elder Scrolls are stale.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| The Outer Worlds was by Obsidian (founded by former Black Isle
| developers), and was unrelated to Bethesda's games.
|
| Now of course with this announcement Obsidian and Bethesda are
| sister studios.
| ben_e wrote:
| Outer Worlds and Fallout come from two different developers.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| I for one look forward to playing/streaming the next fallout over
| a cold beer and microsoft teams.
| blondie9x wrote:
| Is the entire world to be run by a few companies? Amazon Alibaba
| Microsoft Huawei Apple Tencent?
| Danieru wrote:
| Incredible that Fallout and Obsidian are now under the same roof
| again. The Outer Worlds was fun, and I want to see Obsidians
| efforts continue. Still, new Vegas 2 would be fine too.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| How is The Outer Worlds? I heard it is basically space Fallout,
| which if that is half as good as it sounds I am all over it.
| lostmsu wrote:
| I am not sure it is half as good as it sounds. Played through
| a few first quests, and got more Borderlands feeling from it,
| than Fallout. It was so gimmicky, I did not continue to play.
| lazyjones wrote:
| It feels like a 10-15 years old game, has no replayability
| (unlike Fallout 3/4) but it's an unusual/interesting
| experience.
| ehnto wrote:
| I think it has a few replays in it, there's heaps you can
| do differently but I guess the question is would you want
| to? I think it'll be a game I revisit, just not right away.
| bzalasky wrote:
| For me, The Outer Worlds was right there with Witcher 3 as
| one of the best games this generation. It really does feel
| like Fallout, but perhaps somewhat less open world when
| you're actually on a planet b/c of map boundaries and enemies
| too dangerous for your level to keep you on track. The
| diverging story lines and open space travel (once you get the
| requisite navkey to be able to land) compensate for that
| somewhat.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| While it IS a great game, it's REALLY short. I've been
| hoping for a surprise DLC to expand the content. (There are
| several other planets in the galaxy map you can't travel
| to. Hint, hint.) I hope the game did well enough to get a
| larger treatment in Outer Worlds 2.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It does feel more like a tech demo than a complete game.
|
| I thoroughly enjoyed it none-the-less.
| chokolad wrote:
| Have you seen this one https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/p/the-outer-worlds-peril-on-... ?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| NO! I didn't know this existed! Thanks for the heads up.
| Turning on the PS4 to buy this right now...
| bzalasky wrote:
| Yeah, definitely looking forward to some DLC content. Did
| you try it on Supernova difficulty? I beat it pretty
| easily on the Hard setting, but had to completely change
| my playing style to get anywhere on Supernova. Went from
| going in guns blazing to a stealth run.
| tschwimmer wrote:
| It's definitely a spiritual successor to New Vegas, but
| overall it's much smaller in scope and (in my opinion) has a
| less satisfying progression system.
|
| Pros: 1. Solid Writing: I found the story to be interesting
| and engaging. There's great ambient world building via notes
| you find and the main story is fairly interesting with lots
| of branching paths. 2. Flexible playstyles: they really
| committed themselves to allowing you to play how you want to.
| There are the standard melee and ranged playstyles, but
| stealth and speed are also completely viable for the entire
| game as well. 3. Combat: Combat is actually pretty good. They
| replaced VATS with a time dilation mechanic that is basically
| bullet time/slowmo. I played a ranged character so it felt
| cool to slow down time and get headshots, etc. Maybe it feels
| less good with melee characters, I don't know.
|
| Cons: 1. Limited loot: This was a big dissapointment. There
| were only 2-3 weapons per category, plus a few special
| weapons thrown in. I felt like I basically had 2 guns for the
| entire game, which was a bit of a let down. It was
| disappointing to get the same generic gun again and again
| from enemies, especially compared to the huge variety of guns
| in NV. 2. Less exciting progression: They changed the perk
| system to be much simpler and there are many fewer perks to
| choose from. Around the mid game I basically had selected all
| the good perks and felt like there was no point in selecting
| new ones. You also get perks from leveling up skills but I
| found that those weren't well balanced and frequently the
| first tier of perk unlocks were way better than the later
| tiers, which didn't incentivize much specialization. 3.
| Setting: This one definitely comes down to personal
| preference but I was not a big fan of the aesthetic. They
| swapped 1950s nuclear age with 1920s art deco. Some of the
| environments and costumes look cool, but generally I found it
| to be less compelling and exciting than Fallout. This is
| arguably an unfair comparison because they had a big body of
| existing Fallout lore to build on for NV but IMO it's a much
| weaker universe - I can't see it being as interesting even
| after they make a few games in this setting.
| clay10 wrote:
| About 1/100th of the content that New Vegas has. The map is
| deceptive at the start making you think theres so much left
| to do when in reality there is about 2 total worlds. The rest
| of the planets are pretty tiny maps. It is a good game but
| its incredibly short, especially when your expectations are
| not managed.
| ehnto wrote:
| I was definitely surprised by the cue for the ending arc to
| begin. I have gotten a fair bit out of the sidequests
| though, so I've still got lots to do.
| baud147258 wrote:
| The writing (and especially the 'humor') was completely miss
| for me, some of the visual was just ok and the gameplay was
| so-so. Of course to each his own, you might enjoy it more
| than I.
| carlosf wrote:
| I really enjoyed it, highly recommend.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Great game, but it's a 3+-hours-at-a-time kind of game. Hard
| to play with lots of time constraints on your sessions.
| ubercore wrote:
| Huh, I kind of disagree with that. It's like Fallout in
| that you can pop in and make some decent progress on a side
| story or just poke around if you have limited time. I
| definitely didn't do very many 3 hour sessions when I
| played it.
| ehnto wrote:
| I get sucked in pretty easily and play for ages. I don't
| feel satisfied if I only play for a short while, as I
| feel like I've just completed a task rather than immersed
| into a world.
| algesten wrote:
| I did two play throughs and was very entertained both. The
| stories and humor is excellent and I like the combat system.
| You can definitely chose play style, whether you're the
| creepy sniper, rambo or hammer-in-the-head. It's just a solid
| fun game.
| gravypod wrote:
| It's Fallout: Firefly. Space western fallout game with quirky
| characters, hard moral dilemmas, and no one telling you
| what's right/wrong.
| nix23 wrote:
| So it is a Lifesimulator?
| mattmanser wrote:
| It's fun, but it's pretty much on rails. It's not open
| world.
|
| In terms of game area progression it's more like
| Borderlands than Skyrim/Fallout. You can't just wander
| around the map to a random town and possibly spend a
| whole game mucking around in that area.
|
| But the quests are more like Fallout NV.
| sbarre wrote:
| I enjoyed the character writing a lot and the overall story
| arc was interesting. The quests could be challenging without
| being too grindy or obscure, but the moment-to-moment
| gameplay was... just ok? It felt even clunkier than Fallout 4
| in terms of how an FPS plays..
|
| The maps and environments looked good but were pretty generic
| in terms of layout and variety.
|
| I don't regret buying it (on sale), but I haven't picked up
| the DLC, and probably won't.. I had my fill with the base
| game.
| ehnto wrote:
| I don't like combat in RPGs anyway, but it did feel like
| less of a chore than combat in Fallout games. Maybe they
| just got the "grind/success" ratio closer to what I prefer.
| sbarre wrote:
| I'm with you on that, but I still find the game forced
| enough combat on you (especially the end game) and it
| didn't feel good.. I felt like a lot of my deaths weren't
| due to my mistakes but to the gameplay being janky.
|
| But of course I'd say that. ;-)
| dkersten wrote:
| It's ok. It scratched that "Bethesda fallout" itch better
| than Bethesda did, but ultimately I found it got a bit
| monotonous and dull after a little while. It's not a bad
| game, but it's no masterpiece.
| gravypod wrote:
| I bought xbox game pass just to play The Outer Worlds. Best fun
| I've had playing a game since FNV and watching Firefly. If they
| pooled the resources for their studios it would be amazing.
| mastax wrote:
| For context: $3B more than Dismay paid for Star Wars.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Heh they're our biggest customer. I sure hope MS doesn't force
| them to use MS software instead _cue I'm in danger meme_
| acomjean wrote:
| Microsoft bought Bungie in 2000. -(Halo was going to be for mac,
| and demoed by Steve Jobs who I guess made it look so great Bungie
| sold.)
|
| released a bunch of very successful games as xbox exclusives.
|
| 7 years later Bungie left microsoft as its own company again.
| (not sure how that happened.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bungie
| cwhiz wrote:
| By 2007 Bungie had been fully absorbed into Microsoft.
| Microsoft retained the rights to Halo and held a minority stake
| in the "new" Bungie, LLC. I assume by 2007 any vesting periods
| were over and MS came to a mutual agreement with the Bungie
| shareholders to allow them to spin off.
| Mobius01 wrote:
| Also note they Microsoft mismanaged the Halo property royally.
| The most recent failure the delay of Halo Infinite, that
| allegedly has been in development for over 4 years and will
| miss the launch of the new Xbox console due to poor quality.
| Microsoft also run Rare almost into irrelevancy after the
| acquisition. Not the greatest track record there.
| ordinaryperson wrote:
| Honestly Halo started to go off the rails at Halo 2 and that
| silly cliffhanger ending. And I'm still not sure I understand
| the plot of Halo 3.
|
| So I don't know if you can pin the blame for what happened to
| the Halo franchise on MSFT.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| > 7 years later Bungie left microsoft as its own company again.
| (not sure how that happened.
|
| My guess is Microsoft got to keep what it really wanted, the
| Halo brand.
| scollet wrote:
| Practically sold the xbox by itself.
| [deleted]
| liability wrote:
| A lot of people dislike Bethesda's management, is there now any
| risk of ex-Bethesda managers or executives poisoning the other
| game studios Microsoft owns?
| CivBase wrote:
| Bethesda/Zenimax as a whole has had a very rough time of it
| recently, but their IPs alone are ridiculously valuable and id
| Software has been killing it lately. I wonder how much Microsoft
| intends to shake things up.
|
| Also, if MS just wants development studios and IPs, I imagine a
| lot of the publishing arm of the company will be redundant. I
| wonder what MS intends to do about the publishing staff.
| save_ferris wrote:
| I really hope that they move away from the ESO/MMO format that
| they've focused on the last few years in regards to Elder
| Scrolls. I'm a huge fan of that series, but I just have zero
| interest in playing MMOs, and it's clear that they've been
| trying to push further into that space as opposed to shipping
| high-quality single-player games.
| redxdev wrote:
| The team that works on the mainline Elder Scrolls games
| hasn't so much as touched MMO or GAAS games - they've been
| working on Starfield which we know next to nothing about, but
| there's been no indication it's an online game. Even before
| that they made Fallout 4 which was a traditional singleplayer
| game.
|
| ESO is by ZeniMax Online Studios and FO76 is by a separate
| studio inside Bethesda Game Studios. Nothing to do with the
| team that works on mainline TES and FO games.
| greenduck wrote:
| All of these consolidations of power are nuts. Feels like we need
| another round of trust busting in the next 10/20 years to help
| introduce real competition back into the markets.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| For now I think we'll wait and see; while the big companies
| slowly poison the well with microtransactions and live
| services, ruining games to push for sales, the indie market is
| massive, turning single developers pottering around in their
| proverbial basements into millionaires and spawning franchises
| left and right.
|
| I mean Minecraft started off like that. Terraria is following
| behind it. Among Us, a $4 game on Steam released in 2018,
| suddenly became a meme and huge out of nowhere. Fall Guys, made
| by a small studio that mainly did web, Flash, Facebook and
| mobile games for most of their existence, came out of left
| field and created the top game of last month, which (if played
| right) is an instant brand because of their simple yet
| infinitely customizable cute characters.
|
| There is still real competition because the big publishers
| cannot stop the small developers.
| ketzo wrote:
| I think the real worry would be Steam (Valve) being acquired.
| Without such a ubiquitous and relatively open platform for
| distribution, indie devs would have a much harder time making
| any money.
| zaptrem wrote:
| Considering their flat structure and Gabe Newell's aversion
| to outside control/anything that might compromise his
| team's vision, I don't think Valve will be on the table for
| many years.
| CivBase wrote:
| Normally I would 100% agree, but the barrier for entry is so
| low that I'm not sure that consolidation in the video game
| market. There are plenty of issues which plague the video game
| market (software ownership rights, anti-competitive exclusivity
| deals, workforce abuse, literal gambling for children, pre-
| order "culture", etc), but I don't think this is one of them.
|
| That said, I don't know if this is necessarily a _good_ thing
| either. Strictly as a video game publisher, Microsoft has been
| doing pretty well for themselves over the last five years. They
| 've definitely stood out as one of the more consumer-friendly
| publishers, but the market is full of notoriously bad
| publishers (Bethesda included) so being one of the better ones
| isn't very praiseworthy.
|
| Microsoft also has their own jaded publishing history which
| includes some pretty bad moves at the end of the 360 generation
| and beginning of the Xbox One generation. The Kinect was a very
| high-profile failure. The original Xbox One was met with a
| strong backlash for lacking support for physical media. They
| played a significant role in the integration of
| "microtransactions" into full priced video games. Although they
| have done many great things over the last few years, I'm still
| weary of them as a publisher.
|
| I think the jury is still out on whether this is a net positive
| for the video game market, but it will definitely make the
| upcoming console generation very interesting.
| d0gbread wrote:
| I think you're right from a "person looking to play a good
| video game" perspective but what's easily overlooked is the
| data to be gained and who gains that data.
|
| Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have
| unprecedented insight into user behavior and that is power,
| and that continues to consolidate.
| holidayacct wrote:
| What makes you believe this is a consolidation of power? Some
| of these companies may not be able to survive a long term
| recession.
| didip wrote:
| Now both Obsidian and Bethesda are under the same roof again.
| Interesting turn of events.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| One weird thing is that Deathloop and Ghostwrite are timed
| exclusives on PS5. I'm assuming that'll still happen because of
| contracts, but I wonder if there will never be another Bethesda
| game on PlayStation afterwards.
| gerardnll wrote:
| We are going to a world of very big corporations dominating the
| industries. Market tendency is to concentrate capital. And I'm
| not sure this is a good thing.
| sbarre wrote:
| The upside being that in the game industry overall, it's never
| been easier to get started and to reach a wide audience.
|
| So while the inevitable trajectory of AAA gaming is
| consolidation, we are still seeing more and more indie
| developers break out and succeed at a larger scale, and there's
| no reason why that phenomenon shouldn't continue (or even
| grow).
| aloisdg wrote:
| _Laugh in cyperpunk_
| runevault wrote:
| Something I'm curious about here is if MS will put in the effort
| to fix the relationship with Carmack. Bethesda and he have been
| on bad terms since he left fully to go over to Occulus.
| bstar77 wrote:
| This just further confirms that my energy and money is going to
| the indie space. The level of enjoyment I get out of Factorio,
| Cuphead, Cogmind, Crusader Kings III, Curious Expedition 2, EXA
| Punks, Elite Dangerous, Kenshi, etc is so much greater than any
| AAA title I've touched in the past 5 years, yet these games are
| cheaper and most can run on a potato. I want to play games, not
| interactive movies.
| Medox wrote:
| Speaking of punk and non-AAA, I'll throw in Frostpunk. Now,
| speaking of winter survivals (and non-AAA), The Long Dark is
| also a masterpiece.
| dkersten wrote:
| Speaking of Frostpunk, I would love to see more games set in
| that world. I would love a Frostpunk RPG for example,
| something a bit like Divinity Original Sin, or maybe Disco
| Elysium, but in the Frostpunk world. Or maybe a Life is
| Strange style story game.
| sali0 wrote:
| I recently got Frostpunk and love it. Beautiful, stressful
| game
| Server6 wrote:
| I'm not sure why we can't have both. Indies aren't going away.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Paradox isn't exactly an indie
| masklinn wrote:
| Yeah Paradox is a publisher so there are indie paradox games
| (e.g. cities skyline) but CKIII is from one of their internal
| studios so... not indie.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| What does it mean to be an indie game developer? If you're
| releasing with the help of a publisher you're no longer
| independent.
| masklinn wrote:
| > If you're releasing with the help of a publisher you're
| no longer independent.
|
| Dear diary, I was today years old when I learned that
| Stardew Valley is not an indie game.
|
| > What does it mean to be an indie game developer?
|
| There's no hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking it
| means the devs are not subordinate to the publisher.
|
| There are games for which the publisher contracts a
| studio, therefore the publisher decides and has the last
| word, these are not indies.
|
| There are others where the publisher provides funding and
| / or assistance (e.g. managing distribution channels),
| but doesn't take much or any active part in the
| development process. These are generally considered indie
| games.
|
| There are also games which are entirely self-published.
| These are also, obviously, indie games.
|
| Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, or The Witness are self-
| published indie games. Fez[0], Stardew, or Bastion are
| not (published respectively by Trapdoor, Chucklefish, and
| Warner).
|
| Hell, World of Goo ultimately self-published because they
| didn't manage to convince a publisher, would that have
| made them "not indie"?
|
| [0] literally one of the subjects of Indie Game: The
| Movie
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| > Dear diary, I was today years old when I learned that
| Stardew Valley is not an indie game.
|
| The snark was unnecessary... Thanks for the rest though.
| supuun wrote:
| Since couple of years ago, Stardew valley at least on pc
| is self-published
| yxhuvud wrote:
| On the other hand Paradox publishing parts grew out of
| distributing their own games using IP that they have
| developed themselves all the way back from the late 90s.
| ram_rattle wrote:
| This is honestly better acquisition than tiktok!
| horsemessiah wrote:
| Another example of capitalism tending towards monopoly.
| ryneandal wrote:
| Looks like the total being reported elsewhere is $7.5B.
|
| - https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/370520/Microsoft_buys_Ze...
|
| -https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1308028640488292352
| sgerenser wrote:
| Even 7.5B is still only 15% of the failed TikTok deal. Seems
| like a bargain in comparison.
| ryneandal wrote:
| 3x the Mojang purchase[1], and I still think it's worth it.
|
| 1:
| https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1308029942018510848
| [deleted]
| jon-wood wrote:
| 3x Mojang makes it sound like MS got a really good deal on
| Bethesda, at the time they bought Mojang they were really
| buying a single (very popular) game, while with Bethesda
| they get a huge back catalogue, some really big franchises,
| and ID with all their knowledge of engine development.
| criley2 wrote:
| FYI, Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and
| has probably sold more copies than every game Bethesda
| has ever made combined.
| mrlala wrote:
| And merchandise up the fucking wazoo... that's probably
| where microsoft is getting a lot of minecraft money as
| well.
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| I swapped my numbers, thanks for the heads up, fixed now.
| stockerta wrote:
| Damn, I really wanted to play Skyrim on the PS6. At least GTAV
| will be on it.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| is no one else concerned that microsoft has been acquiring
| literally everything?
| skee0083 wrote:
| Elder scrolls 6 literally when?
| vaccinator wrote:
| tiktok didn't work out and they had to do something with that
| money...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I was looking at my list of favorite games when I realized that
| all my favorite games are indi, except for Fallout/Elder scrolls.
| KSP, Subnautica, factorio, minecraft, papers please, FTL, EVE,
| x-plane, city skylines ... they all at least started as indi
| titles. Then I look at fallout and oblivion, the only non-indi
| games I've really enjoyed in the last 10+ years. There is
| something difference about them. So when I see microsoft buying
| Bethesda, I worry.
| swebs wrote:
| Coincidentally, they're all games that work very well on Linux.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| True. And another reason to worry. Microsoft at large may be
| less linux-hating than it once wase, but Microsoft games have
| never been linux-friendly and show no substantial moves in
| that direction of late.
| coding123 wrote:
| No mention of playstation says a lot...
| munificent wrote:
| Every time I see these posts, I think of Demolition Man:
|
| _> Now all restaurants are Taco Bell. Taco Bell was the only
| restaurant to survive the franchise wars._
|
| Out of all the dystopian sci-fi movies, who would have thought
| Demolition Man would have it right?
| genpfault wrote:
| > Now all restaurants are Taco Bell
|
| Or was it Pizza Hut?[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/alternateversions
| defterGoose wrote:
| Or was it a combination pizza hut and taco bell?
|
| https://youtu.be/EQ8ViYIeH04
| DJBunnies wrote:
| Maybe we'll get a followup to new vegas.
| G4E wrote:
| We had it, it's called The Outer World ;)
|
| (I know, I know...)
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Bethesda and Obsidian are now sister studios - it is
| possible...
| G4E wrote:
| Yeah actually, I oversaw that. With the original dev from
| Obsidian and the license from Bethesda, it is not that far
| fetched.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| How many writers who worked on New Vegas are still in the game
| industry? Obsidian's latest games writing was pretty mediocre.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Microsoft is just trying to recreate console lock-in without
| having to subsidize hardware so much.
|
| (1) Microsoft is trying to expand their gaming division, but
| struggle with first-party games. This acquisition is an
| acknowledgement that MSFT needs Bethesda creatives.
|
| (2) Microsoft's big strategy right now is to build their Xbox
| ecosystem - they're pushing GamePass, Xcloud, etc. heavily, and
| trying to become Netflix for games.
|
| I'd guess they're basically buying Bethesda's key franchises to
| drive GamePass subs. They'll build them quick, lock you in with a
| $10/month sub, and let Bethesda slowly merge with the mothership.
|
| Short term, I'm excited because I want these new games! Long
| term, I fully expect Bethesda to get hollowed out.
| QuixoticQuibit wrote:
| I don't see how $10/mo is at all profitable with them adding
| all these AAA games to it.
| darknavi wrote:
| Think of how many people have Netflix that don't even use it.
| They want to get Game Pass to the point where it's a de facto
| standard that a gamer has Game Pass.
| ianhorn wrote:
| Maybe $10/mo towards games from studios they own is more
| profitable than $10/mo towards games from elsewhere?
| curiousllama wrote:
| 1 - They'll break the sub out into tiers.
|
| 2 - Netflix is around the same price - a big enough market
| smooths it out.
|
| 3 - The press release defines their market as 3B people. I
| wouldn't be surprised at all if their internal business cases
| target 1B+ people.
| the_duke wrote:
| Microsoft has hinted that it's a financial success already.
|
| It's probably the gym membership model. Developers get money
| for actual time played. The market of users that just play
| from time to time and don't really care about the 10$s is
| probably substantial.
|
| I fall into this category. I only really get an urge to play
| every few months. And unless there is some specific game I'm
| interested in, I just pick something from the Gamepass
| catalogue, which is already pretty substantial. (it has/had
| great games like RDR2, GTAV, Witcher 3, Subnautica, No Mans
| Sky, ...)
|
| While cancelling the subscription and then re-subscribing
| when needed is actually pretty smooth (re-subscribing takes
| just 2 button presses), I don't care enough to do it.
|
| And all the "idle" revenue probably allows Microsoft to play
| decent rates to publishers, so they actually incentivized
| enough to put their games on the service.
| save_ferris wrote:
| I'd be curious to know what kind of impact that $10/mo/user
| would have compared to the traditional game sales cycle from
| a revenue stream perspective.
|
| Say that the system has a current-gen lifespan of 5 years and
| users run their subscription throughout the duration of the
| service, that's $600 per user assuming no price increases. I
| don't game nearly as much as I used to, so that would cost me
| way more than I've spent the last several years on games.
|
| The shitty thing about a model like this is that I can't just
| power the system on after 6 months and just play without
| turning the subscription back on.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Netflix has something like 150,000,000 subscribers. $10-15/mo
| adds up quickly.
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| What's your take on the potential long-term success of Game
| Pass?
| bnycum wrote:
| I've been using Game Pass for roughly 18 months. Really like
| it so far, though I've gotten it for "free" through MS
| Rewards. I'd probably have a different opinion if I actually
| paid for it monthly.
|
| The thing that is missing are the huge AAA games, but I
| honestly can't see most of those coming to Game Pass. They
| may come but like 1-2 years after initial release.
|
| Minus like the Forza and Halo series, most of the MS owned
| studios developing games are fairly shorter in length. Don't
| take that the wrong way though, even though they are shorter
| some are real gems. Just don't expect to play every game on
| there for 20+ hours or anything.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Definitely a winning move. Netflix beat Blockbuster, TiVO,
| AND cable's on-demand video services with a worse content
| library and harder UI (initially - those boxes sucked) -
| because it was cheap, easy, and felt free. GamePass recreates
| that, at least for casual gamers.
|
| Plus, GamePass locks you in like consoles once did. That
| stickiness in recurring revenue is hugely valuable in itself,
| and because it has a network effect (this was basically the
| reason for the ongoing console wars).
|
| Combine that with cloud gaming, and the lock-in and UX just
| gets better.
|
| Their main barrier is good content. Thus the splashy buy.
| anonymfus wrote:
| _" It's obvious that the current trend is creation of the one
| single worldwide company owning all the businesses and all the
| countries."_
|
| Vladimir Lenin, 1915.
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| WE SAW What Happened to Lionhead Studios!! Fable is no more.
| Thaxll wrote:
| So the ps5 will never see a single Bethesda game? It's huge.
| pier25 wrote:
| Also iD, and Arkane?
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Wow, what a press release!
|
| Microsoft is serious about great content for its Xbox/Windows 10
| platform.
|
| The press note still caused some fear in me. Years ago (FASA?)
| such a move meant closure, since MS was not really in the gaming
| industry business content wise.
| trey-jones wrote:
| It's nothing but heebie jeebies for me. Just Anti-Trust issues.
| I guess in 2020 we don't do exclusivity agreements, we just buy
| the fuck out of you.
| paulpan wrote:
| Having just watched Netflix vs. the World documentary
| (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8407418/) last week, this
| acquisition seems to be inevitable as game streaming is taking
| off and will eventually become the defacto means of playing video
| games.
|
| Microsoft's endgame is to increase the subscribers to its
| GamePass subscription so akin to Netflix's insatiable appetite
| for video content, Microsoft's will be for video games. But since
| IP development for games is expensive, time-consuming and hard to
| break into, it's arguably easier to acquire game studios
| entirely.
|
| The impact is so wide-ranging: what becomes of Google Stadia and
| Nvidia GeForce Now? Same goes for Sony and Nintendo. The most
| interesting one could be Apple, who clearly does not want game
| streaming to be the norm.
| likeclockwork wrote:
| I don't see how both game streaming and high resolution/high
| refresh rate displays can both be the future. The bandwidth
| requirements will keep going up and high resolution particle
| effects can create terrible compression artifacts.
|
| Local processing power is also not standing still in time, the
| capability a given price purchases is increasing year upon
| year. Do you imagine a future where people have limitless
| bandwidth, with low latency, and only use incapable thin
| clients?
| bytematic wrote:
| Technology will catch up. Also inputs will be pre-processed
| and rendered so latency can be minimized.
| paulpan wrote:
| Agreed that bandwidth and latency remains a challenge for
| most people today, especially for non-urban dwellers. For
| streaming to be the norm, there has to be a fundamental
| change in how ISPs treat internet connectivity and how the
| government regulates it. Maybe I'm overly optimistic in how
| things will play on in this front - in addition to newer
| technologies like SpaceX's Starlink platform.
|
| The main point is that Microsoft is pivoting its gaming
| approach to the "gaming-as-a-service" and selling
| subscriptions, rather than the previous one of selling
| hardware and individual games. The digital-only editions of
| both the upcoming new Xbox and Playstation underscore this -
| plus you can even buy a subscription bundled with a console.
| Buying up studios help them achieve this vision.
| [deleted]
| MrWiffles wrote:
| This seems like an attempt to address the "Playstation has better
| exclusives" argument.
|
| Still buying a PS5, not an Xbox Series X. I can (hopefully?) play
| all Microsoft exclusives on PC.
| mirko22 wrote:
| Can we now have Obsidian and inXile work on Fallout?
| wpdev_63 wrote:
| Holy sh!t. Bethesda is huge!
|
| Well I was just thinking the other day that Microsoft really
| doesn't have any first party studio that are really as good as
| Sony's first party. IMO they didn't release a game 'this' gen
| that makes picking up a xbox one worth it. This could change that
| with fallout and doom. Also this allows them to bring the ID tech
| engine under their stewardship....
|
| I just hope that they don't trash the franchises in an attempt to
| bolster game pass.
| jhasse wrote:
| ID tech is one of the biggest Vulkan users. I really hope they
| don't port it to Directx 12 instead :(
| bzb5 wrote:
| When I saw Doom 2016 running on OpenGL I was shocked. I
| would've never thought you could write an AAA game with it.
| It made me wonder why game developers use DX instead.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| If you want to target Xbox, you need to write a D3D
| renderer anyway (although the Xbox API has some significant
| differences, if I understand correctly). There's little
| point writing an OpenGL renderer if your target platforms
| are Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation (which has its own
| graphics API).
|
| Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL generally
| runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D does.
| gambiting wrote:
| I work for a large video games company and we usually
| write two backends - DirectX for Windows and Xbox, and a
| special one for PlayStation. That is changing _slightly_
| with Stadia, because that forces us to write a Vulkan
| renderer too. But on the few games that have it, the DX12
| performance is better on windows than that of the Vulkan
| renderer backend - so we haven 't released it to the
| public.
| KitDuncan wrote:
| Please do release it to the public! Just for Proton and
| to experiment/bechmark.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| As much as I'd like that, I can hear from here the
| outcries from the gaming community.
|
| "Your game is bugged! It doesn't work! I want a refund!"
|
| "But the vulkan renderer is only tested on Stadia, it's
| not officially supported and the game is free."
|
| "I. Want. A. Refund."
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Put another way, then: doing so would mean taking on a
| considerable support burden.
| shrewduser wrote:
| you should release vulkan for proton / linux users i
| think
| smileybarry wrote:
| > Also, my understanding is that on Windows, OpenGL
| generally runs into more issues with driver bugs than D3D
| does.
|
| I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but it
| definitely has a bad rep on Windows. Initially
| (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista) OpenGL support on
| Windows was done by a OpenGL -> DirectX translation
| layer, so performance was always worse in OpenGL mode
| unless a game's Direct3D implementation was especially
| awful. This stopped being the case when NVIDIA started
| shipping a full OpenGL driver. (I'm not sure when AMD/ATI
| started shipping theirs)
| qayxc wrote:
| > Initially (throughout XP and maybe some of Vista)
| OpenGL support on Windows was done by a OpenGL
|
| Initially (Windows 95), OpenGL support was provided
| directly by the OS. Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft
| stopped updating the OGL version of their reference
| driver, so users were stuck with OGL 1.1 unless the
| graphics card driver shipped with a custom OpenGL
| implementation.
|
| So whenever an application uses an OGL version higher
| than v1.1, it is provided by the graphics card driver and
| that has nothing to do with DirectX. There is no
| translation layer in that case (unless of course, that's
| what the driver does internally, but that's up to the
| manufacturer).
|
| TL;DR Custom OGL drivers shipped with every graphics card
| that supported OGL in Windows since 1998.
| orclev wrote:
| Because game developers mostly don't pick the backend, game
| engine developers do. The vast majority of game developers
| pick a game engine and that drives most of their other
| technical decisions. There are really only a dozen game
| engines that have enough market share to matter, and a
| decent chunk of the biggest ones were built on top of DX
| for various reasons. OpenGL, while a great concept, was a
| fairly flawed execution for quite a while (its gotten a lot
| better in the last 10 years or so), so I can at least
| partially understand why in the past someone who doesn't
| care at all about cross-platform support might have steered
| clear of it.
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| This is right of nose and defines exactly why MSFT pivoted to
| the Game Pass strategy - there were no console-moving titles
| (besides Sea of Thieves, that game rocks)
|
| What we could see now is these games coming to Game Pass early,
| or even getting Xbox exclusive content. Theres a low chance
| they dont drop on other platforms (Skyrim on your Windows
| phone?) but still a big chip for MSFT to have on hand.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their
| stewardship.
|
| It doesn't have to be id tech, but can they make Todd Howard
| use some other engine than whatever Gamebryo monstrosity
| Bethesda Softworks been using for 20 years?
| the_hoser wrote:
| Only do that if you never want to see another Elder
| Scrolls/Fallout game release again.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Combining Bethesda with Id could be a winning formula as long
| as Bethesda is bullied into getting out of their comfort zone
| redisman wrote:
| That hasn't been true for a while now. Xbox Game Studios has
| acquired Rare, Obsidian, Double Fine, Ninja Theory, Mojang...
| actuator wrote:
| If I am not mistaken they have some few PS5 exclusives under
| development. Is there any new IP that Bethesda is working on,
| which can be potentially a Xbox/PC exclusive?
| iamericfletcher wrote:
| Sans Socom 2 remake, PS5 is going to be absolute garbage.
| dkersten wrote:
| Given how many of the PS4 exclusives were absolutely
| amazing (some of the best games in the last decade in my
| personal opinion), I have no reason to think that PS5 won't
| have some incredible games too. Hell, between Demons Souls
| and the next Horizon Zero Dawn, there's enough there to
| make me want one.
| aixi wrote:
| Demon Souls remake?
| manojlds wrote:
| Deathloop too, which was just shown off in the PS5 event.
| Doches wrote:
| Reading this the second time, I think it might be one of the
| best "we're being acquired by X" announcements I've ever read.
| Excited but restrained, and it acknowledges (somewhat
| implicitly, but still) that there's going to be _quite a bit_
| of trepidation in Bethesda's fanbase over the change.
|
| "WHEN THE HELL WILL YOU TELL ME ABOUT STARFIELD?" and the rest
| of that paragraph actually fills me with a pretty high degree
| of confidence that this will go well. That, and Nadella-era
| Microsoft's surprisingly good track record in recent
| acquisitions.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Really? I was immediately unimpressed when they started
| trying to claim they did it so they can make better games,
| rather than because Microsoft offered them a boatload of
| money.
| darknavi wrote:
| Why not both? So far Microsoft has been pretty "hands off"
| with the development process of a lot of the IPs it has
| acquired.
| the_hoser wrote:
| No, not at all.
|
| They've been pretty hands-off with their most recent
| acquisition, but one studio does not a trend make.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Looking outside of the gaming space their recent
| acquisitions seem to have gone fine, no? For example
| Github seems to go well, Linkedin was always pretty shit
| and unethical, so I'm not sure it's any better or worse.
| Citus seems to still be going well and still offers on-
| prem or enterprise versions on other clouds than Azure.
| Xamarin is more open-sourced since Microsoft took over.
|
| IMO, (and if you told me I'd say this 10 years ago I'd
| say you're crazy) of the big tech companies right now I
| think MS might be the best steward.
| ssalazar wrote:
| Skype is a very loud example of a poorly handled
| acquisition by Microsoft.
|
| The client has been turned into a real fan-spinner and it
| seems like they sacrificed a great standalone service for
| something that pushes consumer and business users towards
| tight integration with Microsoft's platform.
|
| 2020 _could_ have been a banner year for Skype; instead
| Zoom is now shorthand for any video meeting whatsoever.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Yes, Skype was handled incredibly bad. I don't think MS
| knew what they bought and both the client and the
| platform turned from being the kleenex of voip to similar
| to seeing a yahoo email nowadays.
|
| I think MS'es ways have changed since then though,
| looking at acquisitions since 2013 to 2015-ish they seem
| to have been handled better IMO.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Also, an argument can be made that some of Microsoft's
| mess was being too hands off with Skype. A lot of Skype's
| own development woes were projects they started back
| while owned by eBay and simply finished in time for
| Microsoft to get the blame. Also the whole "Skype for
| Business isn't Skype and doesn't share anything but the
| brand name" was a hands off decision that was dumb in
| retrospect.
| the_hoser wrote:
| Maybe, but that really depends on how independent
| Microsoft's gaming business is from the rest of the
| company.
|
| I'm still waiting on the other shoe with github.
| DominikD wrote:
| No Microsoft game has monetization as bad as Fallout 76. So
| whatever Bethesda does from now on can't be worse than what it
| does today. ;)
| gdulli wrote:
| I only started Fallout 76 this summer so I can't speak to the
| bad state it launched in. But the recent major update got
| good word of mouth and it was on sale for $15. I haven't paid
| a dime extra and I've had a full single player experience
| that matches or succeeds Fallout 4.
|
| If you just want another single player Fallout game, this
| game is a steal and has no monetization problem. What I can't
| do is build up a camp using a lot of different trinkets from
| the store, but luckily I don't care about that.
| iruoy wrote:
| What would you say is Microsoft's worst game for
| microtransactions?
|
| I've played Forza Horizon 4 for a while and you can buy cars
| in that game, but you earn enough points that they all become
| pretty cheap after only a few hours in the game.
| gambiting wrote:
| The biggest issue for me was that certain in-game cars were
| locked behind the spin-the-wheel game, and
| while(thankfully) there was no way to spend real life money
| for more spins, it still felt absolutely shit that I could
| have 100+ in-game hours, hundreds of millions of in-game
| currency, and yet no, I can't have that Mercedes E63 AMG,
| because it can only be won through spins. In Horizon 3 you
| could just buy any car at any point, it was just a matter
| of getting enough currency.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Thankfully Microsoft experimented with the real money
| payment for sort of the "spin-the-wheel" equivalent in
| the mainline Forza Motorsport series (off hand I can't
| remember if it was 5 or 6 that was the absolute nadir),
| and learned enough from that failed experience (and a
| similar one in I think it was Gears 4 and Halo 5) that it
| never infected the Horizon series.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Horizon 3 was a lot of fun, but 4 just got repetitive and
| boring. It felt like the same game with really dumb
| gimmicks like being able to buy houses.
| gambiting wrote:
| Agreed, I do actually think that 3 was a superior game,
| even if 4 had a prettier map.
| Aeronwen wrote:
| You can't buy them in-game without buying them with real
| money first. Once you unlock the car pack, or spend 1/3 as
| much to unlock that particular car, you can buy as many
| extras as you want with in-game money.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Halo 5, Warzone REQ packs could be a money sink for certain
| kinds of players. Personally, I haven't spent a dime on the
| game except the initial purchase - but it really soured the
| community that one could spend real money on power weapons.
| Given that many items in REQ packs are single-use rather
| than permanent unlocks it can be a whale magnet as well,
| and I absolutely do not think game developers should be
| allowed to capitalize on people with addiction problems
| like this.
| DominikD wrote:
| Forza Street probably. Anything with microtransactions is
| bound to be bad for customers but FS is probably the most
| criticized MS product to date (and yeah, it's a re-skinned,
| acquired product but I'd still count it against Microsoft
| since they attach themselves to it).
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| This should be filed under the "Tell me in 2 years" section.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Let us hope, at least
| DominikD wrote:
| Sure thing. But this also changes the reference point. If
| the entire video game industry is THAT predatory by 2022,
| it's hard to single out Microsoft for that and hold me
| responsible for my optimism today. ;)
| ehnto wrote:
| The weird thing about F76 is that the monetization doesn't
| effect the game, it's just not very good. I have never
| supported a game through microtransactions, but I actually
| felt I wanted to for F76 as it seems like a candidate for a
| "Forever Game" fallout world that gets expanded upon. But
| they have nothing I would ever want to buy.
| zamalek wrote:
| I hope this acquisition will fix Bethesda. Skyrim was their
| last game worth talking about, everything since then has
| either been effectively a Skyrim mod or a cash grab. With
| exception to Doom.
| codezero wrote:
| Just to double down on Skyrim - I paid for it at least
| four times.
|
| Once on PC, once on Xbox, another time to get the
| remastered special edition, and finally on Nintendo
| Switch and I had zero regrets tbh. I even played switch
| and xbox in parallel when I traveled more.
| noncoml wrote:
| I loved Fallout 4
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Every game has somebody who loves it. Even that terrible
| Superman game. Fallout 4 wasn't total garbage, but it was
| huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim.
| noncoml wrote:
| > it was huge step down from Fallout 3 or Skyrim
|
| In what way?
|
| And how is _your_ opinion better metric than _my_
| opinion? You have data to back it up?
| codezero wrote:
| How about comparing metacritic scores?
|
| https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-3
|
| https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/fallout-4
|
| One might slice and dice this by platform, but I think
| there was a general consensus that 4 was not as good as 3
| both in meta score and user score.
| ck425 wrote:
| It was a huge step down if you liked RPG games, which
| given Bethesda traditionally made rpg games and that
| fallout was originally an rpg series is hugely important.
|
| Fallout 4 suffered from quest repetition/duplication, an
| emphasis on combat over other rpg driven approaches to
| play and a relatively low ability to effect the world as
| the player.
|
| It's not a bad game per say but it's a mediocre rpg. It
| was arguably more disappointing given how incredible an
| rpg New Vegas was despite not having been finished
| properly.
| zamalek wrote:
| Skyrim was a significant technical advancement of
| Gamebryo, not just in terms of visual quality or so
| forth, but also in terms of what was possible with the
| engine. Fallout 4 was a minor upgrade and could have
| easily been a total conversion mod for Skyrim - there was
| no innovation and it did nothing new. Irrespective of
| whether people enjoyed that re-skinned Skyrim, it was a
| blatant cash-grab.
|
| The argument has nothing to do with anybody enjoying the
| game, a metric that I did not mention _at all_ in my
| comment, it has to do with a growing trend where Bethesda
| has been doing the absolute bare minimum to cash in on
| their fans ' good will.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| There's no way they could trash any franchise worse than
| Bethesda has trashed Fallout.
| macspoofing wrote:
| I think that's overstating it. Fallout 4 was well received
| even if it was a little disappointing. So it really is just
| Fallout 76. They can recover from that, especially
| considering that Fallout 76 wasn't even a proper mainline
| sequel.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A lot of people think that Fallout 76 did recover with the
| last expansion pack (and cross-play and Game Pass).
| Microsoft acquiring Bethesda even further insures at the
| very least it will stay a Game Pass mainstay for some time
| now.
|
| (Also, it is interesting to note that with the Bethesda
| purchase, Microsoft will now own "all" of Fallout and the
| "Fallout diaspora" caused by Interplay's death, as
| Microsoft already owned development studios Oblivion [made
| FO:Vegas, had developers involved with FO1 and FO2] and
| inXile [had developers on FO1, FO2, and FO-predecessor
| Wasteland 1/2/3, and was in a blood feud of sorts with
| Oblivion].)
| athms wrote:
| >Oblivion
|
| Obsidian, the company is called Obsidian Entertainment.
|
| That said, the folks at Obsidian (especially the creators
| of the original Fallout and New Vegas) have said they
| have no interest in doing a Fallout game. Tim Cain
| specifically mentioned during the Outer Worlds Q&A that
| the Fallout ship had sailed.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Hah, an easy typo/slipup to make when talking about
| Fallout/Bethesda (due to ES: Oblivion).
|
| I think that Obsidian is better off doing non-Fallout
| things (and personally Outer Worlds is so much "Fallout
| Alternate Space Timeline" already that I'd much rather
| see them continue with Outer Worlds as the closest thing
| they ever again do to Fallout). It's just interesting to
| point out how many of the "Fallout birds" will come home
| to roost at Microsoft.
| liability wrote:
| Isn't Minecraft a bigger game than anything Sony makes? It's
| owned by Microsoft but isn't an xbox exclusive.
| dageshi wrote:
| It was cross platform before the Microsoft acquisition. I
| think Minecraft is sort of a special case, it's essentially
| its own genre.
| actuator wrote:
| Minecraft is just a single game. Sony has a bunch of very
| good console exclusives under its name.
| liability wrote:
| Yeah but that single game has sold as much as ten _' The
| Last of Us'_es. Microsoft sells their best games on Sony's
| platform too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And that's just the game itself, on top of that there's
| millions of kids running around in Minecraft merchandise.
|
| (source: there's one in my house <_<)
| [deleted]
| basch wrote:
| >Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their
| stewardship....
|
| I'm surprised that isnt more commented on here. Everyone is
| focused on creative IP. Owning id Tech 6 is or should be a play
| against Epic, Unity, Crytek etc. 1-4 were open source, and
| ZeniMax clamped down 5-6. I can see Microsoft marketing id
| Tech's long open source history, and transforming it into an
| Amazon Lumberyard competitor.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Owning id Tech 6 is or should be a play against Epic, Unity,
| Crytek etc.
|
| Does Microsoft even want to compete against their
| customers/partners in this space? After all, MS may not want
| to alienate them to the point they won't release their games
| for the Xbox.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Microsoft is a developer company and their oldest division
| is developer tools. They've made several attempts into the
| game engine / game engine adjacent space over the years,
| though rarely saw wins outside of low level DirectX. (XNA
| will be most remembered as an indie dev play, but a key
| piece of XNA was its content pipeline and Microsoft tried
| but didn't succeed that well at trying to replace the
| mostly mish-mash of custom tools that most AAA studios use
| for content pipelines for something somewhat more
| standardized; though of course with the easy retrospect
| failure of being hobbled by focusing on Xbox
| first/primarily.) So productionizing id Tech 6 isn't an
| entirely crazy idea for Microsoft in terms of something
| that makes cultural sense for them. Game Engines can be an
| important dev tool; especially in the increasing interest
| in non-game capital-E Enterprise in game engines for
| visualization tools (including AR/MR/VR).
|
| But yes, Microsoft seems to have a good working
| relationship with Unity at this point and probably wants to
| try to keep a good relationship with Epic, so I don't envy
| whatever product strategist would have to figure out if
| that minefield would be worth disturbing.
| basch wrote:
| I honestly don't see it being the kind of competition
| that ruffles those feathers. Microsoft wants developers
| developers developers to fill Game Pass and run their
| Infrastructure on Azure, and Microsoft Hearts Open
| Source. Microsoft open sourcing id Tech 6, and then
| saying Azure/XboxStore is the best places to build your
| game and host it, regardless of which engine you want, is
| the cold war, mutually assured rising tide raises all
| boats, kind of competition.
|
| What Microsoft doesn't want is Epic or Google getting all
| the power, becoming the standard, and then being able to
| strongarm them. Competition, especially open competition,
| keeps the players more honest.
|
| It's just another entry on this page, albeit a strong
| one. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/gaming
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Though Epic being a very loud squeaky wheel right now
| (versus Apple) is exactly why Microsoft may show concerns
| of rocking the game engine boat right now. Xbox Game
| Studios is using the Unreal engine in a lot of projects
| (Rare's projects like Sea of Thieves; though divorced
| from Epic for several years now, The Coalition still
| sometimes seems to get "second party tech demo" support
| from Epic on Gears) and probably couldn't quickly switch
| everything to id Tech if Microsoft got into a showdown
| with Epic like Epic has been fighting Apple lately. Which
| partly means it is already too late for Epic getting "too
| much" power to strong arm in the engine space (and thanks
| to Fortnite increasingly having the confidence to use
| it).
|
| I want to think that Microsoft can do it, regardless of
| Epic (and even Unity), but I still think it is a
| minefield.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Microsoft doesn't care about exclusives that much, imo. Sure, a
| few here and there, but overall they just want people to use
| their software. That's why their new "exclusive" titles are
| also on Xbox One. Microsoft will make money by selling their
| Bethesda titles to PlayStation users, etc. They might make a
| few of their titles exclusive, but Fallout and Doom won't be
| among them.
| objclxt wrote:
| What? They absolutely will make them exclusive.
|
| Can you play Halo on the PlayStation? No, for the same reason
| you can't play Uncharted on the Xbox.
|
| Microsoft will happily support _Windows_ gaming, for obvious
| reasons. But the PlayStation for a franchise like Fallout or
| Elder Scrolls?
|
| I will believe it when I see it. It makes little strategic
| sense to offer those titles on Sony hardware when Microsoft
| have their own console.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Microsoft's Mojang titles are still on PlayStation and with
| the xCloud partnership with Sony, things are probably going
| to get _weird_ on what is considered an "Xbox Exclusive"
| to the point where "Xbox on PlayStation powered by xCloud"
| sounds almost a reasonable expectation to happen this
| console generation.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Isn't XBOX ONE from MS?
| zacharycohn wrote:
| I did the math - that is approximately 293,164 dump trucks full
| of $100 bills.
| dom96 wrote:
| Wow, amazing to see Microsoft really being aggressive when it
| comes to their games line up for Xbox. With the strong offering
| they are showing with the Xbox All Access I am in general really
| impressed with them.
| tosh wrote:
| Carmack on the acquisition:
|
| > Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for
| gaming IPs, and they don't have a grudge against me, so maybe I
| will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.
|
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832...
| ysleepy wrote:
| Interesting, didn't Rage pioneer the on-demand texture
| streaming approach? It fits well with the DMA SSDs in the
| coming console generation.
|
| Wow, that's now a decade ago.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Texture streaming was a thing before Rage.
|
| ID tech implemented megatextures earlier also, Quake Wars
| heavily relied on that feature.
| michannne wrote:
| I believe it did, in addition to mega-textures in video
| games.
|
| What I am hoping for, and been hoping for a while, is for
| game engines to start integrating AI into workflows. There
| are some tools out there that do leverage machine learning to
| some extent, but what I would love to see are tools for
| instance that can take a video shot of an actor and then
| infer the bone structure a decent degree and transfer that
| animation into the model. Or a tool that allows style
| transfer of an image onto a 3D model so we can have
| realistically dynamic brush tools for environments, also
| integrating Face generation GANs onto models to reduce
| sculpting effort. Not to mention tools that can dynamically
| and infinitely scale 3D models based on material information.
|
| I know some tools exist that can do some of these things at
| an okay degree, but it can be taken even further.
|
| Truly the power of AI in video game tooling has yet to be
| unlocked, but I believe video games as a medium is in the
| position of being able to push for practical applications of
| new and exciting research, second only to CGI films. It's
| exciting what's in store for the future and I'm sure Carmack
| can appreciate the kind of breakthroughs that Microsoft would
| be able to foster
| modeless wrote:
| Carmack left Zenimax because they wanted him to work on sequels
| instead of VR. They only started caring about VR once the $2B
| Oculus acquisition was dangled in their faces, and then
| scrambled to find a way to get a slice that they didn't earn.
|
| I didn't buy DOOM because I didn't support Zenimax's cynical
| lawsuit/cash grab. Maybe now I'll get DOOM after the Microsoft
| acquisition closes.
| fireattack wrote:
| I thought ZeniMax won in court?
| modeless wrote:
| They lost on their claims against Carmack, had their award
| against Oculus reduced and injunction denied, and
| ultimately settled out of court. I strongly disagree with
| the magnitude of the damages sought.
|
| Carmack also sued them separately for failing to pay him
| for part of their id software acquisition. They settled out
| of court again, with Carmack saying the settlement "fully
| satisfied their obligations" to him.
| ketzo wrote:
| I hope you do -- Zenimax aside, it's a damn good game.
| flipgimble wrote:
| The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec
| in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John
| Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not
| always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he
| works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him,
| his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely
| engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software
| led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding
| support in all their titles. This openness and community
| building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the
| 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that
| jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems
| like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC
| gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with
| over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console.
| They were able to make much more money, but we all came out
| intellectually impoverished in my opinion.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me
| loose so much respect for them.
|
| No kidding. You want to keep a guy like Carmack in the family
| in whatever capacity you can, because he carries such deep
| respect in the industry. It was a stupid thing for ZeniMax to
| burn that bridge.
| screye wrote:
| Carmack's pull as an individual among tech folks, is
| unrivaled in gaming.
|
| I can bet that many people would willingly taken pay cuts
| (or more-likely skipped on pay bumps) to work for a team
| led by Carmack.
|
| Almost all of the other pop-culture figures in game
| development such as Todd Howard, Kojima and the like are
| designers, producers or story writers.
|
| Carmack is the only one that is a proper coding guy.
|
| ______
|
| Maybe Carmack comes back to lead Windows mixed reality
| -\\_(tsu)_/- and PCVR ? True wishful thinking right here.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I think a few of Nintendo's star players are (and were)
| coders as well as designers going back to the assembly
| days.
| NegatioN wrote:
| Just wanted to point out a small discrepancy here: As his bio
| on Twitter says, he's currently an independent AI researcher.
| But also sometimes consults for Oculus VR, although not
| actively employed there anymore. [0]
|
| It'd be very interesting to see if his return to Id might
| spark some changes :)
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack
| dangoor wrote:
| Carmack's Facebook Connect talk last week[1] sure made him
| sound very plugged into what's happening at Oculus. I was
| surprised, given that I, too, thought he had essentially
| left for AI research.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y
| swyx wrote:
| yeah he sounded like he was tech lead for the project, i
| am surprised to learn he's "independent"
| TwoBit wrote:
| Most of the higher level Oculus engineers are very in
| tune with what is happening within Oculus and the
| industry. There is constant discussion internally about
| it, and Oculus still knows more about VR than anybody
| else. Source: I was one of them.
| one2know wrote:
| I think every non-manager employee these days should be
| "independent." Some may not have noticed, but tech
| company managers have gone insane and turned their ego up
| to 11 echoing the current political climate. Anyone who
| is a famous dev or even a grunt that shows they have
| basic competency is going to be an immediate management
| target.
| tdy_err wrote:
| What grudge is he even talking about? The lawsuits?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_v._Oculus
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/09/oculus-cto-john-carmack-
| is...
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Perhaps, but also perhaps that recent thing where Nine Inch
| Nails released an LP with the Quake 1 soundtrack [0], had
| some notes from John Carmack and American McGee to be
| included with the record and Zenimax forced NIN to remove
| the notes [1]. Though of course people saved it [2].
|
| [0] https://store.nin.com/products/quake-vinyl
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/13062799814593
| 08546
|
| [2] http://handscandance.com/quake/NINQuakeBooklet.pdf
| abluecloud wrote:
| microsoft are seeing that the money is going to be made in a
| subscription model for games. by purchasing the studios it makes
| it much easier for them to bundle games (possibly with
| exclusivity) with their gamepass.
|
| i know i'm more likely to subscribe to gamepass (and keep it
| running for years) vs. the 1/2 games i buy a year.
| staticman2 wrote:
| I wonder if they are moving to a subscription model because
| players hate the Windows store and basically refuse to use it
| instead of Steam when purchasing games. Having failed at
| running a store I wonder if they've decided plan b is running a
| rental service.
| 013a wrote:
| Well if nothing else, it makes people use their new React
| Native Xbox app, which is quite possibly the worst windows
| application Microsoft has ever produced (and they've produced
| a lot of very bad ones).
| iruoy wrote:
| I think the Microsoft store is pretty good actually. I got 6
| months of game pass for PC and didn't encounter any problems.
| staticman2 wrote:
| When it works it's fine but sometimes the window store
| breaks and you basically have to reinstall Windows- in
| whole or in part- to get it running again. It also is
| designed to prevent modding and doesn't work with Steam
| Link for remote play even though normal non-steam games
| work with Steam Link just fine.
| mikewhy wrote:
| GloSC[1] will get you steam controller mapping /
| streaming for UWP apps (and more, but I've never had an
| issue ie adding UPlay games as non-steam games). Here's
| Minecraft Dungeons running on iOS via Steam Remote Play
| that I just recorded[2].
|
| Also, Windows Store / GamePass doesn't stop modding, as
| Crusader King 3 proves.
|
| [1]: https://alia5.github.io/GloSC/
|
| [2]: https://imgur.com/a/Zwz9yvV
| MaximumMadness wrote:
| I still have some trouble around the idea that hardcore
| consumers will want a bundle that has maybe 2-5 games they
| would have bought otherwise + 95 more they dont really care
| about.
|
| Aren't consumers just going to buy what they want anyway? Plus
| the Sony world just has so many more games worth playing
| manojlds wrote:
| If you look at the games shown for the next gen, it's MS is
| not far away. They have acquired some serious studios and
| reviving Fable, Halo Infinite hopefully lands, Hellblade 2
| looks truly next gen and there's Obsidian, The Initiative and
| rumoured unannounced "AAAA" game
| sequence7 wrote:
| Doesn't the success of Netflix help convince you?
|
| That's the model Microsoft are going for with Game Pass, just
| pay us a fixed monthly fee and play any of the hundreds of
| games we have available on Android/PC/XBox.
| ck425 wrote:
| Not really. The alternative before Netflix was more
| expensive cable/satellite tv. Netflix was both better and
| cheaper.
|
| As a gamer I probably only spend ~PS150 a year on a few
| really good big games and the odd cheap sale game. And I
| prefer not to spend so much because it feels wasteful,
| moreso than Netflix for reasons I can't figure.
|
| Paying PS15-20 a month is more money for something I feel I
| should be spending less on.
| Pandabob wrote:
| Honestly, their investment into game pass and cloud streaming
| is currently making me choose an Android phone over the new
| iPhone.
|
| I feel like actual AAA gaming has never been more accessible
| than it is now.
| sbarre wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. My current phone is a work-supplied
| iPhone, but next time I have to buy my own cell phone it will
| be an Android device for this reason.
|
| I've only ever owned iPhone smartphones, but unless Apple
| changes their approach to game streaming services like xCloud
| or Stadia, I won't continue to be a customer.
| CyanLite2 wrote:
| Can they fix Fallout76 now plz?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Ye. You get Fallout 760 but with more spyware.
| johnwayne117 wrote:
| More games to gamepass, I see it as an absolute win...
| foxdev wrote:
| Today I learned:
|
| Microsoft is buying Bethesda
|
| Bethesda is owned by a company called ZeniMax Media
|
| It's actually Bethesda Softworks
|
| Bethesda is a place in Maryland
| sitkack wrote:
| Microsoft now "owns" Quake? That is ironic.
| fuball63 wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean? I recently got into developing
| on the Quake 2 engine, which I think is an amazing piece of
| software, so I'm kinda obsessed with all things Quake right
| now.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Carmack is the only reason why OpenGL is at all relevant in
| PC gaming as it was miniGL that made it popular in first
| place, against Glide.
|
| Later on he changed his mind regarding OpenGL vs DirectX, but
| there are legions of wannabe game developers that worshiped
| his opinions regarding OpenGL.
|
| See my sibling post regarding his change of opinion.
| sitkack wrote:
| Technical merits and discussions aside, without Carmack
| keeping OpenGL alive, we wouldn't have gaming, engineering
| and visualization support on GPUs to the level we do today
| on non-windows platforms.
|
| If MS kills (migrates) Bethesda off of Vulkan, I'd like the
| DOJ to censure them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Contrary to urban myths consoles don't fully support
| OpenGL, if at all, depending on the model.
|
| Good example of non-windows platforms.
|
| Which I would also add Mac OS, because the only reason it
| supports OpenGL is Copland's failure, as it was going to
| use Quickdraw 3D.
|
| And they are on the path to migrate off to Metal anyway.
|
| OpenGL portability on anger is like POSIX or Web
| development, write once, debug everywhere, rince and
| repeat.
|
| It is hardly any different than just defining an
| abstraction layer and loading the best API for the job on
| each platform.
|
| A 3D API is a tiny portion of a game engine.
|
| By the way, only DirectX works in all Windows modes and
| Microsoft is keen to contribute to Mesa/Angle instead of
| allowing ICD drivers on such contexts.
| Goronmon wrote:
| Quake is made by id Software. ZeniMax Media owns id Software.
| Microsoft just aquired ZeniMax Media.
| tehbeard wrote:
| That's stating a chain of ownership, not why it's ironic..
| 013a wrote:
| Its my understanding that, back in the day, Quake was
| "the" poster child game for OpenGL's capabilities over
| D3D. Similar to today, how Doom Eternal is "the" poster
| child for Vulkan. And now Microsoft owns id software.
| fuball63 wrote:
| This makes sense, thanks.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well, I find this even more ironic, giving how wannabe game
| developers just blindly following Carmack's advises.
|
| > Speaking to bit-tech for a forthcoming Custom PC feature
| about the future of OpenGL in PC gaming, Carmack said 'I
| actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He
| also added that 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making
| significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while
| OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D
| handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state
| better.'
|
| A few paragraphs below
|
| > 'It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this
| point,' Carmack told us. He also explained that the developer
| has no plans to move over to Direct3D, despite its advantages.
|
| https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...
|
| And for a more up to date remarks
|
| > "Lets fix OpenGL"
| http://cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/media/papers/opengl-snapl201...
| some interesting thoughts, but the shading language is the
| least broken part of OpenGL.
|
| > For everyone saying "Vulkan!", the conclusion is that there
| is an opportunity for an API between Vulkan and the game
| engines. I agree.
|
| https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/851397231320150017?...
|
| So I can definitely feel the irony.
| PHGamer wrote:
| smart move by microsoft. sony has been acquiring IP. microsofts
| failure to get exclusives is whats hurting their xbox.
| awill wrote:
| It's unfortunate that the Xbox Series X and PS5 are so, so, so
| similar. It seems stupid to have to purchase 2 nearly identical
| boxes. It's not just the console. You then need multiple
| controllers for each, and possibly other accessories (Sony has a
| PS5 specific headset, camera, charger, will have a PS5 VR etc.)
|
| I've historically preferred PS exclusives (Uncharted, Spiderman,
| God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn), and the cross platform stuff, was
| a little worse than Xbox in the PS3 days, and a little better in
| the PS4 days (at least prior to XoX). Speaking as a biased PS4
| owner, I'm happy with current layout of PS exclusives and cross
| platform stuff. Each new announcement like this sucks. I like
| DOOM and Dishonored. I liked being able to get them on PS4 and
| expected to get them on PS5. I don't think this will make me get
| an Xbox, but it sucks I'll likely be missing out on these games.
| I suppose what Microsoft hopes is that people like me get a PS5
| and a cheaper Xbox Series S with Gamepass.
|
| I love that the Nintendo Switch exists. It's completely
| different, and doesn't really compete with Playstation/Xbox. As a
| gamer, it makes sense to purchase a Nintendo Switch and one of
| either the Playstation/Xbox. I wish Xbox/Playstation
| differentiated somehow. I suppose Microsoft tried to do that with
| Kinect, but failed/gave up.
| alexc05 wrote:
| I've been a Playstation gamer since the PS2. I have multiple
| PS4s and a library of over 1000 games in my digital account.
|
| With that context laid out that I am a big-time PS user,
| looking at the XBOX game pass subscription model where you get
| the console for free is _REALLY_ tempting.
|
| In every market I've looked at, there is a deal that works out
| to about $30 a month for two years. They give you the console,
| instant access to hundreds of really good games, day one access
| to all microsoft first-party games included in the price, many
| new release games from other publishers (for example EA ACCESS
| titles). Free monthly titles on PC.
|
| AND all of that is actually _CHEAPER_ than buying the console
| with the two years of subscription.
|
| Plus the XBOX is going to have a number of new features related
| to second-screen-game-streaming that are also really exciting.
|
| I'm really torn here right now. I might move away from
| playstation for this next generation - the XBOX is looking like
| it is going to be a big deal this time round.
|
| OTOH - I really want to play the Miles Morales spider-man ...
| so there are arguments on both sides. To say nothing of the
| third option involving an Nvidia RTX3080...
|
| I honestly don't know what I'm going to do yet.
| redisman wrote:
| They're both basically a great value gaming PC at this point.
| With a handful of hardware-level optimizations making them
| cheap and powerful for the price.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| One really refreshing thing is that the Xbox Series S/X are
| compatible with Xbox One controllers.. so you won't have to buy
| a bunch of new controllers for it.
|
| That always drove me nuts. Controller design hasn't changed
| that much since the mid 2000's.. there's zero reason for
| breaking backwards compatibility other than to sell you more
| hardware.
| gregjw wrote:
| The year is 2040.
|
| Gigaconglomerates Tencent, Activision Blizzard Ubisoft (ABU),
| Microsoft and Apple gatekeep the entire gaming industry.
|
| Rebel guerilla groups of small publishers and indie developers
| rise up to take control of their encampments.
| rndgermandude wrote:
| 2040 huh? I'd have guessed Tencent (incl subsidies Facebook,
| Oracle, Microsoft, in order of acquisition) and Alphabet
| Activision share the market 75%/25%, with Apple still
| commanding a 30% sales tax in certain spaces.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I mean this is the future described in Cyberpunk novels. United
| States of Coca Cola, Republic of Microsoft. Mega Corporations
| will replace states in an era of neocorporatism (AKA something
| else...), that's inevitable.
| CivBase wrote:
| I think you severely underestimate the piles of money Nintendo
| is sitting on if you don't think they'll make it to 2040. Sony
| is also big enough, diverse enough, and well-established enough
| that I doubt they would have trouble weathering one or two bad
| console generations back-to-back.
|
| And let's not forget 2K, 505 Games, Chucklefish, Bandai Namco,
| Capcom, Deep Silver, Devolver Digital, EA, Epic Games, Focus
| Home, Gearbox, Koei Tecmo, Paradox, Sega, Stardock, Square
| Enix, Take-Two, Team17, THQ Nordic, Valve, Warner Bros, and
| hundreds of other publishers that I can't even begin to list
| here.
|
| 2040 is definitely too soon for the dystopian future you're
| talking about. Maybe 2042.
| redisman wrote:
| I'm sure Disney will be there too. After they acquired Star
| Wars it's been a looming presence ready to swallow and
| regurgitate forever any entertainment properties.
| mywittyname wrote:
| NinDisney will be a thing.
|
| I'm astonished Disney hasn't yet acquired Nintendo.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Where's Sony/Playstation in this?
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