This was my favourite demo from Steam Next Fest. It's like Hotline Miami plus Bulletstorm plus cyberpunk. Planning to stream it tomorrow and I can't wait.

A studio of mega influencers, run in partnership with BoomTV. Yeah, this is going to go great.

Wolfire is a studio that releases a mediocre title every few years (funny enough, they don't even list their latest title on their web site) but likes to think the can punch at the weight of much larger studios. They did found Humble Bundle which was cool but cashed that out to IGN. That one of their claims is that Valve should give them free keys to use to undercut their own pricing is the height of hubristic entitlement. If you want free money from platform holders, ask Epic for an exclusivity bribe.

Not saying Steam and Valve don't have plenty of issues or things they should change but this is laughable.

I'm still watching this now on my second monitor as I work. It's a very long video but it's fascinating. I could listen to John Romero tell stories of game dev all day long.

I hope this game comes to fruition and is awesome but like others have said, I'll believe it when I see it. But I also don't think they would have started that battle with Stardock over something they didn't intend to see through.

Star Control: Origins was no Star Control II but I thought Stardock did a fine job with it.

Quinn wrote on Apr 3, 2021, 16:49:
If it wasn't for Steam, that is for many devs kind of a curse in many ways, this release would've been on a Monday. Numbers would've steadily climbed toward the weekend which wouldve given them enough ability to monitor the servers and tweak where needed.

All these fucked up launches can partially be blamed on Steam's policies.

Boy, there's reaching and then there's this. It's Steam's fault that SE didn't properly scale their servers for the release date they knew they were going to have? Give me a break

Doubtful and that bums me out. When this suddenly appeared on Game Pass, a friend and I were stoked to try it out. 15 hours in and we were bored stiff because of all the reasons you mentioned. It was just the same stuff over and over again and the grind was insane. I think we'd done like 3 story missions and there were tons left but you just had to grind the samey side missions for hours and hours and hours to get anywhere. We gave up and it really bummed us out because we loved the series. Pirahna did such a weak job with it.

Cutter wrote on Mar 2, 2021, 13:01:

Crucifix wrote on Mar 2, 2021, 12:58:
Well, at least they admit to pirating/cracking the game and releasing a gimped version to recoup some quick cash.

Uh where did they say that exactly?

It's easy to play the victim, but all we seek is that Frogwares respect its commitments both in the contract and as demanded by the courts.

As I stated yesterday, if Nacon was the problem Frogwares could have easily got an injunction against them distributing and selling the game. That isn't the case, ergo it's more than likely that it's Frogwares that's in breach.

Frogwares tried to get an injunction and Nacon actually pulled out an excuse that the injunction couldn't be imposed during COVID-19 because of emergency measures in place in France. I'm not sure if the courts either bought that or haven't ruled yet.

This situation smells fishy from both sides. Frogwares is providing a lot of supposed evidence of Nacon's wrongdoing. At the same time, they're presenting it in a very one-sided way (obviously) and trying to litigate through Twitter and blogs instead of through lawyers and courts. Frogwares is also suing Focus Home Interactive, for similar reasons to why they're suing Nacon. As far as I can tell, no other developers have ever had legal beef with these two publishers. Not being a lawyer and just based on my read from the outside looking in, it looks like Frogwares is trying to gin up reasons to get out of existing contracts with publishing partners but also that Nacon is trying to exact some pretty petty revenge, instead of just letting the courts sort it out. If they're in the right, Frogwares will get their due. The whole thing's very weird.

I suspect most of them are from Game Pass.

This game is the shallowest ARPG I've ever played. I assume the Minecraft branding is why it's so popular because it's boring as sin otherwise.

Epic does make one game and it's where almost all of their money is coming from. The Epic Games Store is losing money as they continue to pay out big bucks to secure exclusives to try to buy market share. I can't remember where but I believe they stated that it's a loss leader and will be for quite a while yet.

That entire shopping mall in Cary, NC that they just bought to turn into their headquarters was probably 85% paid for with Fortnite money and the rest with Unreal Engine. They are so profitable right now, they don't need to go public, unless it's so that Tim Sweeney (or probably more to the point, Tencent), can cash out.

I never use shortcuts to launch the games because on Steam, I usually have them in lists or use their search, which is much faster than Windows. For other storefronts, I usually find and launch them from GOG Galaxy.

If Epic focused on adding any features to their store to bring it into not just this decade but the last decade, I'd consider using it. But I have a large enough backlog that I can wait a year for the game to come elsewhere (usually on deep sale) rather than being forced into an objectively inferior experience than virtually any of their competitors, plus most of their competitors aren't also 40% owned by China.

Startopia was a commercial flop back in the day and it's so sad because it was such a great game that still holds up well now. If you like Bullfrog style goofy management games (Mucky Foot was formed by ex-Bullfrog employees), I highly recommend it.

25 minutes of reading other people's Glassdoor reviews, articles and tweets, claiming it as "analysis" by stating the same things that have been discussed at length for weeks already. Riveting stuff.

Bummer this is only 30fps on the Switch. It looks like it kind of flopped there, which is probably why they took an Epic exclusivity bribe. Ahh well, I can wait a year.

Am I missing something with that article about the cards in an abandoned container? The URL indicates that but the whole article is literally just explaining what the cards are and what the launch plans are. There's nothing in the articicle about the headline.

I was a backer on this project. It is YEARS overdue (many similar documentaries have crowdfunded, produced and released in the time this has been in development) and so far, all backers got was an early screener version. This is out for the public to pay to see and backers don't have access to the final release yet. Just wow, what a mess this campaign has been.

RIP fairly monetized racing games.

Mysdrial wrote on Nov 9, 2020, 19:47:
Ironically, I think the game was called Quarantine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(video_game)), or at least that's the game this made me think of...

I loved Quarantine back in the day, despite it being janky. I've waited years for a proper remake of that. This is absolutely inspired by that but yeah, as soon as I saw Ultimate Games, I know it would be shovelware. Hope someone still makes a proper modern Quarantine some day.

Pr()ZaC wrote on Nov 9, 2020, 19:31:
Hey Taxi!
Step one please.

(guess the game)

Space Taxi for the Commodore 64! Love that game.

The game has only sold 3 million units 2 months after launch across all platforms. That may sound like a lot, except when the estimation of the costs to make and market it were $190M dollars, plus the ongoing costs of maintaining the "live service" elements. It's player base on PC has gone off a cliff, so has its streaming numbers and most people I know who were super hyped for it got bored after a couple of weeks because like every live service game, there's no end game content. This is basically Anthem, except is cost even more because a huge chunk of the costs and profits go back to Disney. The Marvel superfans who will buy anything with that name on it have already bought it and now the word is out that it's actually a mediocre game at best. I think Square Enix will have to eat some financial crow on this one. But as someone who was fed up with this after 30 minutes with the free beta, they probably should.