While that sounds good on paper, I get the impression that would be an administrative nightmare. For one, having enough staff to handle all the extra DMV traffic; two, handling all the court cases of people trying to skirt rules because they feel hassled by the 5 year limit.

I could agree with you if your response to them is “Too bad” but it would still be a mess.

There’s such a stupid mentality around “Everyone must <X>”.

Lacrosse exists. I don’t care for it. I’m not going to dictate no one else play it. I imagine if the government mandated everyone play Lacrosse it would become hard to find the equipment for it because it would be in such high demand.

And yet, whether it’s meat, cars, guns, as soon as we suggest “I know this stuff has a place but we should use it a little less” they process it as an effort to completely ban the item in question.

There is a collectible game sealed in a box together with a cat, and a radioactive isotope that will release a poisonous gas.

Please measure the amount of time before a choice-based visual novel nabs the box to use in extensive decisionmaking analogies.

When all the decisions have to come rapid-pace, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything notable. It feels like mashing out light or strong attacks and maybe some block/dodges.

I’ll admit that there have been some action JRPGs where I just didn’t understand how the mechanics worked together, even after some explanations, because I had to play it out so quickly in combat. Those games ended up having low difficulty so that people that “weren’t getting it” could still see the story.

I’m still okay at Soulslike games where there’s not quite as many meters and illogical systems. And of course I’m okay with turn-based games having those weird systems because I can process things slowly until I get it, and am taking my turns at full speed.

They could pull a Spec Ops: The Line, and use the franchise flag to pull a masterful writing twist that analyzes the original gluttony in a confrontational way.

Has the potential to be very cool! What might be sad is that many horror games now evoke the trope of “They move when you’re not looking”. Game development takes a long time, so I can guess this was not an obvious trend when you started on it. But there should still be ways to differentiate your work.

Every screenshot posted of this game is peak content.

I couldn’t stand Near A Tomato but have tons of hours in SB. I grant it has nothing amazing in terms of story, but it has enough intricacies of combat to keep it fun, even if none of those mechanics were invented here.

Nier seemed to operate off a single attack button a lot of time, and working off RPG mechanics gave so many opportunities for level disparity that didn’t serve the game at all.

I think the only thing that might get me to go over the $60 line is if a publisher takes a chance on a franchise/concept I’d like to see more of, which these days is rare.

While it is fraud, it’s murky waters when you realize this is what every Kickstarter does. Gamers don’t easily fathom the full sum of what it costs to pay qualified artists for a full development cycle. Kickstarters have only existed to prove to investors that there’s monetary interest in a concept.

It is my fervent hope that in a decade or less, the next Wolfenstein-style game is about killing ICE agents.

And then, for ultimate poetry, the big rig driver gets another slap on the wrist fine.

Downvoted for censoring “Gamers”. Go back to TikTok.

I know “worst” is an adjective that triggers a lot of content farms, but I still feel bad about these situations. Even the worst games, when they manage to be completed, are mountains of effort from the people involved; and as I understand it this was coming from one of IOI’s first publishing efforts.

This happened for me with Back 4 Blood.

Turtle Rock said “Okay, we’re done developing content. We’ll move on to new things now.” And people took that to mean it was a failed, dead, and worthless game. Whereas the active state where they left it was pretty solid, still runs, and I have a lot of fun with it. It just wasn’t built to be endlessly live-service.

I feel like, though it doesn’t come up much, we should conceptually separate “owning the game” from “having a physical edition”. Some games give you a disc, but barely offer ownership (remember CD keys?) while other games are only sold digitally, but are ultra-permissive with what you do with them.

I get the sense many indie companies would like to give people as much control as possible, but also can’t afford printing box sets.

King’s Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity. Even as a kid, I felt like it was a very strange gore-and-action focus shift for the King’s Quest series. Only as an adult did I hear the story of executive meddling that lead to the complete tone and gameplay shift.

The video game market is extremely hard to “corner”. It can happen for professional software like document processing, image editing, etc, but far too many startups are interested in making games, and there’s multiple digital stores to sell them. Minecraft and Factorio even sold off their own websites. Clair Obscur recently outsold a lot of big publisher efforts, and definitely didn’t need Game Pass’s visibility.

They can corner one particular audience like Call of Duty, but can only push so many expectations on them before those gamers consider other games. They tried it with Fallout, complete with subscription, and it was massively unpopular.

I still haven’t seen the “no other option” scenario as so many claim. You could say $80 price tags do that, but if all prices are going up, that doesn’t track so much.

They also discount games if you buy them while you have game pass. So there’s some encouragement to try a game, find you want to keep it, and pay for a permanent copy should it be removed from GP (or the player decides to stop the GP subscription).

Still, I’m done with them because they’re done with talented studios, and are active participants in the Palestinian genocide.

I mean, I enjoy PS+, it’s just a matter of whether you’re okay playing a bunch of games on a known rental basis for the price point.

I enjoyed playing Texas Chainsaw while it was on there. Now the game’s dead. To me, not much lost as I move on to other games (and I do buy games too)