Part of what’s made it difficult for me to turn vegetarian is I never feel full after a well-made salad. Even things like grain bowls feel a bit lacking sometimes.

The opposite end of “The most expensive thing is to be poor”.

It’s a common image for so many millionaires to have a Scrooge McDuck vault, but that’s the thing; so often their millions are out earning them further millions.

I’ve heard this often, but most of the games I see people consume live updates for weren’t initially planned to get such constant updates.

Ex: Dead by Daylight. Released as dumb party horror game with low shelf life. Now on its 8th plus year. Fortnite: Epic’s base building game that pivoted to follow the battle royale trend, then ten other trends. DOTA 2: First released as a Warcraft map. GTA V: First released as a singleplayer game before tons of expansion went into online. Same with Minecraft.

It just doesn’t make sense to pour $500M into something before everyone agrees it’s a fun idea. There’s obviously nothing gained in planning out the “constant content cycle” before a game’s first public release.

Reminds me of many “The reason why Call of Duty sucks” arguments I heard as a kid.

Like, my own tastes agree with you. But you don’t bring that argument into game industry discussion because fact is, the game is doing very well financially and obviously many players disagree with you. So you have to take that data, and work back to decide what the logical conclusion is.

There’s still a bit of market force, but it comes in the form of other game developers.

Imagine you went to the grocery store, and saw Hardin McCombsky’s Super-Premium Dry Seasoned Cheese was $1000 a wedge. How ridiculous! How do they expect us to pay that much for that cheese?

Only…Shaw’s Bargain Dry Cheese is $4. And it’s not the same thing - but it’s still pretty good.

Basically, this kind of thing works out in many other industries. Sometimes on rare occasion, one producer makes things MUCH better than competitors and can demand a much higher price because no one else comes close.

To give a more game-relevant example, BattleBit is $15 and compared favorably to Battlefield. In other cases where there’s no competitor and the developer hasn’t lowered their price for sales, it may be because they’re confident they did good work and made a good game. Factorio is famous for this.

As well as OP’s problems getting dud keys, I would warn that key resellers often contribute to the pickpocketing industry.

Tourist gets lost in Indonesia, kid grabs his wallet. In the time between then and when the tourist calls their bank, the kid buys as many legitimate keys of Game XYZ as he can using the tourist’s credit card, and sells them to G2A.

The bank refunds the fraudulent transactions, but even if the key retailer (eg, Greenmangaming) reports the transactions to the game dev, the dev is often pressured to not revoke the keys since it just leads to poor press off later customers that believe themselves “legitimate” for spending money on the game.

Sites like isthereanydeal.com give more legitimate tracking info and avoid key-sharing sites; the copies sold were obtained directly from publishers. They can also give price history to give you an idea of whether the game will go on sale again soon.

It also might make sense that they don’t want to give details about exactly when people are successfully prosecuted, so they don’t give a new guideline of how to skirt around the rules.

I recall Valve has effectively acted the same way about anti-cheat; they tend not to go into detail about how some new release works, and will silently collect data on who they know to be cheaters for a long time.

Right, but this only works if you have DuckDuckGo set as your search engine.

Reminds me of that time the Netflix UI accidentally merged show descriptions.

Remember, folks: Microsoft kept these people, and fired the ones who made Hi-Fi Rush.

That, alone, was my signal the entire console was going to slowly burn down.

That seems to be the most specific issue the article is citing.

Maybe their firing wave hit too many departments.

From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.

Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.

Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.

To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.

The original creator has accepted the meme treatment of his original comic, so I wouldn’t consider it beyond the pale for him to do a bit of self parody for a current political issue.

I’m always surprised Ubisoft gets so much flak when other developers are doing much the same thing.

That said, my main annoyance with Tsushima is: You’re not a hero. 99% of side quests end with the people you were helping ending up dead, and possibly some other nameless NPCs rescued. It just feels tragic.

It’s a perpetual issue where it’s easier to code in 20 more enemies than 2 or 3 more innocent, living people to have conversations with.

I feel like the anime art style can make women of any age look pretty cute - which makes it hard for me to understand why they choose to make all of their combat-experienced, leader-professionals just entering high school or even earlier.

Dana is some sort of friggin leader-priest, and hasn’t even hit puberty. Japan is so weird sometimes.

I sometimes understand the annoyance of poor content, but in Lemmy that’s a motivator to go put up better content.

Throwing a line from Hitman in the mix to make it more confusing:

“If it looks like a conspiracy, it probably isn’t.”

The Lutris launcher has helped me successfully play purchased Ubisoft games well. It sucks to rely on third party tools, but that’s much of what Linux is based around.

If you like the random irrelevant conversations of Metal Gear, you might like Tales of Berseria. It’s basically a band of pirates, lead by an edgelord but with many people that are very world-traveled, so you get a lot of encyclopedic explanations of why the world is the way it is, or what kind of pet they’d prefer. Certainly much less happy-go-lucky conversation than the rest of the Tales games.

Easy to forget both Sony and Microsoft had nothing to do with gaming previously. Even MS had terrible inroads in spite of games for PC being written in DirectX.

I felt like Amazon and Google had pretty good chances. It was only due to terrible direction both managed to screw it up.