#aaa gaming

[lmaverick123]

IGN's Good Take on the Baldur's Gate 3 Debate

I don’t think I would ever be saying the words that IGN had a genuinely good take about a game.  It feels alien to have those words be typed by me.  IGN is basically where game coverage goes to die.  Their takes are so notoriously bad that seeing them say something that is good and meaningful is almost shocking beyond belief.  When I saw the video I’m about to share, I was in awe that a company…

View On WordPress

[the-uncanny-dag]

Cyberpunk as a genre is officially ruined & roundly fucked to death. We should've never allowed it to catch on with rich people

[jambleese]

I guess an expansion pass is better than a third game with minor tweaks but it still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Like 200ish Pokémon are now behind a paywall, especially if they end up being top tier threats. I am still hype, because Pokémon, but I am worried this is the true decline of the franchise, becoming more like other AAA franchises that try to milk you for all you're worth.

[thatonegaydj]

Ok unless these fucking idiot game designers can figure out that adding lgbt people to video games (for reasons other than “LoOk HoW dIvErSe We ArE”) is, in fact, not difficult, im just gonna cancel the entire AAA gaming industry.

[paladinguy]

The AAA gaming industry is the microcosm of everything wrong with capitalism.

[shawnthewonder]

Been working on this vid for months and finally got it finished. In the forty years since video games have become commercial we haven’t had any hit games developed by a team of black developers? The closest we ever got was Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan which is still a pretty unknown game even if you’re deep into gaming like I am. In this video I just sit and imagine what a AAA title developed by black people would look like.

[betterbemeta]

Im kinda curious why microsoft shot itself in the foot so hard and so many times?

Context: This ask is in reference to the failure of the Xbox One and its features, and this post I reblogged on the topic. It was already so long, I didn’t want to add more length to it. But in my tags I noted that Microsoft, while it made horrible decisions that disrespected its player base, had reasons for doing so. They’re not justified but they were a ‘rational’ business strategy.

They were trying to take down the used games industry. (long post under the cut)

Video game debuts are a little like movies. Most of the revenue is made on the release and sometimes on the merch/marketing/placement that features the media. Sure, sometimes additional money can be made with a movie or a game sometimes with continued sales, but only if those sales come from the publisher or label that has the license for the media. This is why many big movies and games re-release so many times: so many new editions of old Star Wars, why Skyrim keeps getting re-re-released, etc. Because if labels don’t consistently put out content or find new sources of revenue, they don’t make money. If people continue to consume Star Wars or Skyrim, if there is still a demand or a market for buying these things over again, the publisher will try to profit from it.

But the used games/rental industry filled this demand without giving money back to the publisher. Or even the simple act of handing over your copy of the disk to your friend. Game publishers make 0 dollars off used game sales. Same way that movie rental stores paid no or only a minimal fee to media labels to be able to re-sell movies and rent them out. So a single purchase of one game (often a purchase the used games store didn't have to make, as they can get people to trade in things for nearly free!) means that potentially infinite people can buy that one copy again, and again, and again. The label only gets a portion of the original sale.

For a while, this was the primary panic in the AAA game industry. They feared that used game sales would drive them out of business. To them, it was seen as a form of non-prosecutable piracy. They wanted to control all supply of what they had released to the public and make money off of every single person to purchase their games, they didn’t want their consumers to sell their games to each other, or to a third party distributor, or even just trade them for free.

So the extremely user-unfriendly features of the Xbox One were designed to make it extremely hard to have ‘used games.’ They thought that the brand loyalty of their consumers would lend them to tolerate this; as that post said, ‘Xbox’ was nearly synonymous with console gaming for a while. And with that domination of the market came the big numbers of lost revenue as a large percentage of game sales were used games, not new games.

Microsoft underestimated how much their actions would piss off their consumers, how little brand loyalty they actually had, or the type of consumer loyalty those consumers expressed instead. For example, Many Nintendo fans are ‘loyal’ to Nintendo not because of the brand’s actions (which often are the most corrupt of the lot!) but because they like the proprietary properties that Nintendo owns, and will jump any height to reach the next Mario game or Zelda game. Nintendo does not often license their properties to any other platforms but their own, so if you want Zelda, you’ve got to sing their song. Not exactly the same as ‘brand loyalty.’

Fans of the Xbox enjoyed its large library and relative economy next to Sony’s PlayStation III at the time. There will always be die-hard console war brand ambassadors. But if you sabotage the average game consumer’s ability to enjoy those features, they’ll leave for the next company that offers those features instead.

The attempts to grab money back from the used games market resulted in Microsoft tanking all the features in the Xbox 360 that their consumers were there to enjoy. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft doesn’t have that many exclusive properties of its own that would cause people to endure that kind of nonsense.

All of this seems really silly in the modern environment where the majority of our game sales are digital or subscription-based, and by that nature cannot be traded. Or are even free-to-play subsidized by cash shops and microstransactions. The used games industry has basically collapsed. Now it’s ROMs, emulators, and ‘digital piracy’ that the AAA industry deems the most likely cut into their potential profits. It remains to be seen if Nintendo will be the next developer to catch heat-- if they don’t drop their habit of insisting that you’ve got to buy Balloon Fight half a dozen times in their eshop to play it on more than one of their currently supported platforms.

[avassavefile]