Anon is worried about AAA sales
(midwest.social)
🍹Early to RISA 🧉
Greentextsorry anon but i'm with guybrush
That's $149.89 in 2026 dollars!
suggested scummvm price is fuck off money, i got three headed monkeys on my back
let AAA and AAAA fail. indie devs would have a much larger platform. current gen equipment is too expensive as it is and will get worse.
Maybe at least gaming is not a place for multi billion dollars companies where you can abuse system and monopolize market to profit from it by releasing slop.
This could literally cause the collapse of the entire western AAA gaming industry.
Wouldn't be the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
TL;DR: A much smaller gaming industry was enshitified at an alarming pace, barely after it got started. There were too many competing options, many of which were sub-par experiences, and there was no way to tell until after purchase.
Perhaps that's not directly comparable, but to my eye, the biggest similarity is not enough value for the liquidity (disposable capital) people are willing to put forward on a product. At some point, people will just spend less or spend on something else entirely.
Meanwhile, you have older gamers like myself that are more than happy to take a trip down memory lane, since a few decades can make those old games fun again. I'm in this 14%. That said, I tend to buy new indie titles, mostly due to the lower pricepoint, lower expectations, reliably better art, lower system specs, smaller time commitment, and so on. Games like Assasin's Creed Odyssey showed me that big studios aren't necessarily pushing more and interesting narrative into monster-sized titles, opting for cut/paste easter-egg hunts and aftermarket content purchases instead. Less really can be more.
older gamers like myself that are more than happy to take a trip down memory lane
Not only memory lane, but stuff like ROM hacks and randomizers can make new games from their retro roots. Hell I've gotten back into Doom in the past few years, and people just basically never stopped making new (free) levels for that since it came out 30+ years ago.
Hell I’ve gotten back into Doom in the past few year
There's also the Quake Brutalist Jam 3 that came out last month. It's playable with a modern Quake I engine, and man, some of those maps are incredible.
All for the low-low price of $0.
Looks neat! In fact I never heard much about Quake having singleplayer.
It's super neat. Map quality is all over the place, but most are real gems. I've only had one soft-lock in about 20 maps, and only a handful of those had impossible to beat final fights (I'm sorry, but failing to take down 15 shamblers at once, in a room with four central columns for cover is not a "skill issue").
In fact I never heard much about Quake having singleplayer.
It had good singleplayer for the time. IMO, it hasn't aged particularly well. ID was learning how to do a fully 3D game on the fly here, and it shows in spots. The best moments are built on experience with building Doom maps, but that's practically a different sport.
They don't make good games anymore so I keep returning to classics. Bf6 is the only AAA game I've enjoyed in years and it's still kind of shit
They don’t make good games anymore
okay you have GOT to play Sea of Stars. You ever want to play Chrono Trigger with a friend or spouse? It's 3 player Chrono Trigger and the story is good. So i guess you could play it with a polycule, i never thought of that before.
Thanks for the rec! Tons of great indies. I was referring specifically to huge budget games
I loved 2042 after they patched it but haven't been able to get into 6 really… Did you play both? If so, what stands out as notably better about the most recent iteration?
I refunded 2042 so can't really compare. But basically... It just plays really well. The guns feel very satisfying to use. Conquest mode feels like a true return to form. Great sound design and visuals.
Bf1 is my favourite in the series for reference having played all except 2042.
I doubt I'll reach more than a few hundred hours in bf6 before I uninstall forever and go back to playing bf1 and bf4. It doesn't seem like EA is interested in adding anything to the classic modes and is hyper focused on battle pass and battle royale and other stupid shit nobody wants.
Biggest gripe is maps are too small. It's really dumb taking off in a jet and immediately being able to see the enemy airstrip. It should be like way, way bigger lol
Hmm yeah I think I'd really enjoy a Planetside 2 with modern military motif minus all the "simulation" (menu clicking) and learning curve of something like Arma. A quick search says the Super Hornet's combat range is ~300mi, definitely not a "see the other side's airfield as soon as you're up" amount of distance.
They should sell products users want at prices they're willing to pay. Without abuse, deception, or other malicious acts.
But won't somebody please think of the shareholders? /s
Funnily enough it would probably be better for the majority of shareholders.
It would take longer than a quarter to realize, so they're not interested. Myopia is emblematic of capitalism.
Micro transactions weren't addictive enough. Games should sell bump of heroin
It's easy problem to fix they just have {YOU MUST OWN THE PREMIUM BATTLE PACK FOR $9.99/MONTH* TO VIEW THIS CONTENT}
I don't mind passes honestly, but also they should not expire. I paid for that shit, let me finish it, if it takes a week or a month or a decade, let me finish it at my own pace.
But then they'd have to make sure you have access to the game for that long [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]
* paid annually
* paid anally
* paid ally
But you save 5% that way!
well, the 86% playing games older than 2000 will keep the market and developers going. Stop making woke games.
Looked at your profile, is the woke comment genuine or are you being satirical? I find it hard to believe you understand and have the mental capacity to see the Jeffrey Epstein situation for what it is, but would still believe in the MAGA "woke" hoax.
I mean ive thought of this. I mostly do play pre 2002 games. And I'm always thinking wow, they put so much work into this, no vibe coded bullshit, no endless updates, working with difficult hardware , mad respect for those devs. And I feel a little bad I can enjoy their creations 20 years later and they're not getting anything for it.
However we know what's coming. Corporations aren't dumb, they see this, and in a couple years there will be a huge crackdown on retro gaming (they already shut down a huge archive). So enjoy while you can, they're coming for you.
I gave my wife my LCD steam deck that she's been eyeing up since the switch went and died. I loaded animal crossing from GameCube on it and she loves it, she played new horizons on the switch and liked it too but she said she enjoys the GameCube one more
If I were to come up with my top 10 favorite games list, I believe more then half would be indie.
I am not sure I have even played ten of the biggest "AAA Titles".
Especially not while they were the current hot shit game. I don't buy anything that isn't in a bundle or 75% off.
It's the enshitification of triple AAA titles fucking slapping surcharges on EVERYTHING; day one dlc, microtransactions, always online DRM, the ability to revoke access to the shit we pay for, it's death by 1000 cuts. EVERY anti-consumer action, every attempt to squeeze more of us while delivering the same rehashed shit over and over. Yup I will keep playing my old consoles and the games I own. The intent of us withholding our money and refusing to purchase your shit is to provide publishers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for retaining their customer base.
Ya know what was an awesome game that just fucking worked? Granted I think it had hats or some shit. But pico park. Great game that worked awesome and didnt need any bullshit. Idk just came to mind.
I'm going to school right now for game design. I'm an international student hoping to work here after too. I've put all my eggs in this basket, I barely even have enough estimated money for a plane ticket home if I don't get work right out of school
Let AAA burn. I want to see it collapse, I want to see all the big game companies shutter. Now is such a great time to see indie studios going wild making pieces of art and I want people working there instead
I hope you go far friend and I hope to play something you've had a part in making one day
I'd say now if you are an honest Dev youll get way more respect from the community than ever before. I can't stand these liars.
May each of those big ass studios perish and may their market share become a financial whale fall for you and your peers' wonderful, impossible indie game passion projects.
This is /v/, which means this post is behind over 9000 layers of sarcasm.
All of which this platform will be oblivious to, because Lemmy just doesn't do satire.
Lemmy hates the shit out of satire lol
Oh thank god its not just me.
And 4 years on, I still can’t figure out whether it’s because of neurospiciness or divergent interests. Linux? 471 communities. Writing? 2 and the mods of the second one abandoned their accounts years ago
I've gotten considerably more replies here than on Reddit from people who don't understand sarcasm.
Maybe it's because even within the fediverse, there are too many people who agree to satirized positions unironically. i.e. Lemmy is just a little too diverse for most satire.
In certain ways, maybe. I can’t see eye to eye with some people on what constitutes a genocide, for instance. But there comes a point where it’s apparently either satire or a an objectively crazy user. It’s equally apparent who this split Is apparent to, on this open source communist Linux forum.
It’s my personal belief that lemmy at large is simply too experientially limited to recognize online satire outside of incredibly specific examples. Mostly meme templates. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is a little frustrating for me, personally.
Pretty sure it's the tism.
Damn autists, taking everything literally
No, you must be thinking of kleptomaniacs
No, no, that's "literally taking everything," but now we're getting into the realm of dyslexics
Lemmy is a big guy.
For you
Lemmy is still a relatively young community. I bet it gets better with time. I like to think that I already noticed small (and healthy) community growths.
And I do not have a metric nor an example. This is super vague, I know.
I don't know. Lemmy's majority user is former reddit users and even at the size reddit is now, sarcasm would constantly go over peoples' heads
I'm pretty sure it's because most of the people here are on the spectrum.
A lot of users came here to boycott reddit. Taking this kind of action is quite hard when it comes to dopamine sources like reddit. The users that migrated have at least in common that they overcame the reddit pull and also took the time and energy to land in a lemmy instance. I'm curious what Lemmy will look like in 5 to 10 years with this kind of "user starter" on the "lemmy agar".
I took it as satire too, but what tells it's /v/ ?
The blue colorscheme indicates it's from one of the non-18+ boards, and /v/ is the one of those that it would fit the most.
Technically you can set any board to any of a bunch of color schemes, but most users just leave the defaults or pick on dark theme for all of them.
As the western AAA gaming industry dies, I shall be playing Komm süßer Tod in its funeral. Which one depends on who's the next kicking the bucket: this one if it's the pop music industry, and this one if it's Hollywood.
…now excuse me, I gotta finish Donkey Kong Country 2 again.
No love for the eisbrecher version?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hw3Kenowjk
(It's the first time I hear this band, and I'm fucking loving it.)
Let's do it differently: Eisbrecher's version when the A³ gaming industry dies, Bach's when the pop music industry dies, and Evangelion's when Hollywood does so. Deal?
AAA profits are higher than ever. Layoffs are tremendously inefficient. They do nothing to reduce costs long term, and can actually lead to increased costs. There is a good amount of economic research which demonstrates that.
Layoffs are corporatist virtue signalling.
Shareholders only want short term gains so they could sell their shares and win big.
Long term goals are for the suckers that bought the artificially inflated stocks.
Layoffs actually tend to artificially deflate stock prices as it's seen as a signal of a company in financial distress - this is actually one of the reasons why industries tend to do layoffs simultaneously across multiple corporations. Of course this can be used to turn a profit through short selling but you'd need to have some sort of prior knowledge to set up the short positions prior to the layoffs being announced.
Just FYI, "dearth" means a scarcity or very little of something.
Oh wow, you're right, why the heck did I think it was the opposite? I've been misusing that word for years. Thanks for letting me know!
The opposite would be a “plethora”
thanks for letting me know, that means a lot.
Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?
collapse of the entire western AAA gaming industry
Don't threaten me with a good time. Seriously, that might be exactly what the industry needs.
2024 survey from Consumer Reports here. Representative sample of 2022 people.
"Still playing gaming systems released before 2000" in this case means "has used at least one gaming system released before 2000 at least once in the past year."
What you probably imagined is probably very different from what the survey actually reported.
It's not a great metric since systems from before 2000 can be emulated on newer hardware, and in fact that's the most common way for people to play old games.
I actually don't know that it excludes emulation (or to what extent it excludes it). Like I wouldn't personally count emulating an NES game on a Switch, but when I pop an actual PS2 DVD into my computer, burn it to an ISO, and play it on PCSX2 – when I own two functioning PS2s, dumped the BIOS, and help work on the emulator – I would probably ultimately answer "yes" to this question.
But it also seems clear that the person writing it knew almost nothing about retro gaming to have not clarified this even a little.
It says "gaming systems released before 2000", not games. You're right about them not seeming to know much about retro gaming; focusing on the hardware rather than the games is an odd decision.
If I play Streets of Rage 2 (1992) but on an emulator running on my Steam Deck (2022), does that count?
By their metric, no.
Needs to pass Hammurabi's code for transactional ownership
All shall turn to ashes
So we'll all be playing POP Stations?
