Huh? Wasn’t that literally one of the original goals of Stadia. You’d watch someone play a game and you’d be able to launch the same game at the place where you paused the video.
The price of this game makes it one you should definitely be a patient gamer on. Not only will you save a ton of money but it’ll probably be Denuvo free eventually too.
All the NFT stuff has gone above and beyond to be as dumb as possible. There was one possible use case, the proof of uniqueness, showing that you genuinely own the one and only, and all others are copies.
So people used this technology to mass produce copies of the least unique things, because of course the actual use case is a pyramid scheme to scam people for money, and all the value of a blockchain item is the promise that it will make the buyer more money.
To be fair, there are good mobile games. But like PC games you have to actually be willing to pay for them (with some rare exceptions). It's also likely that those games are multi-platform and you've probably already seen them on PC.
It’s more like a piece of art than a game, meant to be looked at but not played
I have played the game maybe 10-20h and the content variety is not great, there is however an insane attention to detail in terms of ship design which you can get lost in.
there is however an insane attention to detail in terms of ship design which you can get lost in
Those details do not change, however. The secret “smuggling” compartment on one of the ships, for example, is found in the exact same place with the exact same chess piece every time, rendering its novelty for “smuggling” actually worthless for actual gameplay if such gameplay ever happened.
For detailed ships all you need to do is hire a 3D artist, you don’t need a game for that.
The rest is a mess. Free fly weekend? I load in and all the NPCs are T-Posing and standing around. Or sitting half in the ground. The surroundings are lifeless, there is absolutely nothing to interact with besides some doors/elevators. And don’t even get me started on the bugs and performance (I have a 3080 and 5800X3D at 1440p, so it should run fine…).
So no matter how much content they might add in the future, it doesn’t feel like they have the technical side down at all. And the technical part is the entire make or break it topic as they are trying to build something on a scale no one has done before (and a MMO on top…).
For years now my personal bet is that the game will never come out. And if it ever does it will get negative reviews for being an unplayable mess.
Likewise, there is a subscription model that allows you to maintain access to the title and is divided into two types: Centurion (€12.22 per month or €134 per year) and Imperator (€24.44 per month or €268 per year). The Imperator offers, unlike the Centurion, exclusive events and an allocation of in-game money per month to rent ships and weapons.
Some pretty sloppy work here. The subscription options have nothing to do with playing the game; it’s a buy once product with no subscription system at all. The Centurion and Imperator subscriptions are better thought of as a kind of “backstage pass”, they mostly just give you patreon style content and extra in game flair items. Are they worth the money? Unless you’re a die hard fan, absolutely not. But it’s not like you have to pay up “maintain access” as the article puts it.
I could be misremembering and I’m not going to look it up right now, but I believe Payday 2 lost to corpo greed long ago when they added a bunch of microtransactions. There was also something about the original devs being screwed over if memory serves.
Personally, I’m fine with mtx if it supports continual development of a game i paid for and enjoyed prior to them being added. As long as the actual meaningful game additions are free or 1-time transactions.
What i don’t like is constant FOMO based p2w mechanics that are a requirement to play in any meaningful way, like most mobile time walled games. I also don’t like when corpos make decisions like adding DRM to an always online game, that is known to impact users, just points to a devs inability or a monetary kick back of said 3rd party drm to the devs shareholders.
It’ll be on game pass so I’ll probably still test it out, but I really don’t get why a Payday game would need anti-piracy measures since the whole point is to play co-op
Oh it’s dumber than that. We’ve had tons of games with Jedi before. 11 years before the Star Wars Jedi series we had it’s predecessor, The Force Unleashed. That game, and it’s sequel, were freaking dope action-adventure games.
And before that, we had the Knights Of The Old Republic RPGs. There were a bunch of tie-in games for the prequel trilogy. And in the 90s we had the Jedi Knight series on old school windows and Macintosh.
So what happened in that 11 year gap between the action adventure series?
Battlefront.
“Why make games when we can make virtual crack instead?”
Wasnt Jeff directing while Overwatch was experiencing 3 years of drought?
Spiritually I find it died way earlier, but I can see it being the 'official death' when he left
Need to develop a system that doesn’t serve up cancerous ads and relaxes on the rules so uploaders don’t feel the need to do dumb, unnecessary shit like censor a car crash.
A grift implies that someone is making bank off of it.
No, Chris Roberts is instead burning money by having devs do work, then redo work to add in some last minute shit that he thought of, then repeat until the feature creep completely overtakes their lives. It's the Chris Roberts way.
Work is being done on the game, but remember that treading water is also a lot of work.
He isn’t, but he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn’t anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don’t need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure. It’s probably bliss working there but they have no hope of ever making an actual finished product because there is literally noone there with the goal to push a product out the door on X date. It will be done when it’s done, and everyone who’s ever worked in such a loose environment knows that means never until someone comes in and lays down the law.
And before someone comes in and says “Y indie project bla bla” remember that there is a VAST difference between a small game with say 1000-5000 man hours behind it and a large AAA game which Star Citizen aims to be which entail at minimum 100.000s of man hours of work. You can be extremely loose and take your time with a small idea like say Vampire Survivor and scope creep it to hell and back and it still won’t take more than a year or two until there just isn’t anything more to do but release it.
There is probably some clever parallel to draw here to utopian political ideologies but my brain is mush after a grueling week so I’ll leave that to someone else.
The biggest waste is all the employees and the offices to house them. Details like decorations and conference tables are just a red herring, it’s not the real issue. Just look at their road map, and then consider that they have 1100 people on payroll working on that roadmap, not including third parties like voice actors etc. It’s fascinating.
It’s just because that irks you when there are layoffs. But office supplies are assets, they’re on the books and while they depreciate over time it’s still something that can be sold and doesn’t cost anything after you’ve bought them. The actual office building is different, since you generally rent it and the staff you need to pay monthly and you can’t sell them to recoup part of the investment. High quality chairs etc cost a fortune, but they also last a decade plus in many cases. Still earlier this year they had 1000+ employees, that isn’t sustainable for a game relying on donations basically. You need predatory microtransactions for that to workout which is of course part of the reason CIG monetizes in the way they do, they need to keep the boat afloat.
If the average salary is just $20k yearly were looking at a salary spend in excess of $20 million a year, not including offices or payroll taxes, benefits etc. And I imagine that the average salary is higher than that. If they are laying people off the reason is that someone in finance is putting his foot down saying this just can’t go on.
Haha, that’s not a yatch. That’s a motorboat, we’re talking in the $100k-$1000k range with the topend being unlikely. I agree the optics aren’t the best but it’s not at all crazy to afford something like that on a business leader salary. Sure from a pure ethics standpoint he should take a modest salary and keep at it until the game is released and his obligations to his supporters fulfilled and then get rich. But who has ever been that principled? I can’t really fault him for something everyone does. He’s also been fairly successful for a long time already so he likely had money before SC as well. Now if I’m wrong and another angle shows this is some gaudy 10 million dollar+ yatch he bought recently then I’ll absolutely reevaluate!
He isn’t, but he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn’t anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don’t need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure.
Source, your uncle works at CIG?
It's been years since I followed it closely but I remember seeing a youtube video documenting in detail the nepotism and mismanagement going on at CIG like 5 years ago with evidence from their actual videos or public info on websites. Wasn't there also a huge forbes article a while ago talking about the same thing? And if anything, the fact that all these years later we still don't have any new info about SQ42 that was supposed to be almost done in 2018, less alone a finished game, just goes to confirm that they were right about at least some things.
I am saying they’re doing a shit job at delivering a game to us backers. I just don’t think it’s nefarious, just sheer incompetence. They value making the best thing highly, they think the best thing means the most feature rich and realistic thing, and thus they allow scope creep to literally eat money via man-hours in a way that can only and will lead to CIG going bankrupt long before a game is ever released in a finished state. Unless someone high up over there wisens up. Forces a hard deadline and cuts the scope down agressively to meet it and gets the game(s) released. But I find that exceedingly unlikely.
They have outright lied about state of development and progress being done. I remember when CR himself said on citizencon stage that SQ42 demo had to be delayed for a few weeks due to some last minute animation issues that would ruin the first impression, but that other than that it was practically done. Then few weeks later they released a crying video about how much work it is and why it takes so long and asking for understanding.
That was like in 2018 or 2019, and now 4 years later we still don't have anything to show for it, even regarding sq42 alone. At one point it stops being incompetence, they are just full of shit most of the time.
That might very well be. My take on everything I’ve seen so far is that it likely was ready. Just that CR or someone else said “wouldn’t it be cool if we also had X in there?” And then they just said fuck releasing, we need X in there! Then X lead to Y and along the way someone proposed A and that would be so cool but if we have A why not B and…
If we had access to their Jira or whatever they use I can all but guarantee that the backlog grows faster than they can close issues.
And it’s also undeniable that they are developing stuff. Just very questionable stuff at times and they decide to redo stuff all the time.
GTA 6 is really set up for failure. There’s so many expectations from gamers after all these years with no new installment. Nevertheless, I hope to be wrong about this. GTA games are always a fun sandbox to me, and hopefully GTA 6 manages to get that part right once again.
I think everyone will be fine with a slightly improved GTA V set in Florida / Miama. One of the protagonists is also a thirst trap latina and the gameplay mechanics in the leak seemed nice. Like with read dead but improved.
It will be the most expensive game in history, with a reputed development budget of around $2 billion. Anyone can do the math and realize that it would have to sell in ridiculous numbers to make that up. If it doesn't capture the magic of past GTA releases, it will be a massive money loser.
I’m expecting they will introduce some online service like GTA Online along with a slew of micro transactions to make up the budget. I can’t really say why but I’m getting the feeling this will be a always-online game
That's grossing $2 billion. But they'll still lose money at that point. They will have to net $2 billion, which won't happen until they sell like $4 billion or more.
Assuming that their revenue only came from boxed sales and not the behemoth that is GTA Online, they gross $2B with under 30M copies sold. GTA V has, to date, sold a little shy of 200M copies. GTA VI will be fine. In fact, GTA V made so much money that if they pissed away $2B on GTA VI and it sold zero copies, the company would still be fine. They've been making half a billion in profit per year for a long time now.
No, it actually doesn't, and I outlined why in the comment you replied to. In fact, I just checked what GTA V did sales-wise, and that 30M copies sold was passed in its first six weeks. It brought in $2B in its first six months. Of course GTA VI is going to do that again, regardless of what it does in subsequent years. And this is still not factoring in the revenue that GTA Online brings in. It doesn't have to be anywhere close to being as successful as GTA V in order to make back the $2B they spent making it.
Not everything sold at full price. By six month, it was probably closer to 50M. GTA Online has a much higher cost basis. It is not a magic trick to generate free cash. Again, they need to NET $2 billion, not gross $2 billion.
Again, GTA6 really has to match the success of GTA5 or else it will lose money. You don't know if it can.
The first evidence I can find of a sale for GTA V was in 2015, over a year after launch, and the first price cut appears to be in mid-2018, five years after launch, meaning that they could continue to sell copies at that $60 for five straight years without much extra motivation for consumers. Whatever you think you the cost basis is for GTA Online, it is still a pittance compared to what they'll bring in.
You don't know if it can.
Funny then that you seem to know that this is some enormous risk instead of probably the safest investment a video game company has ever made.
Hey, feel free to put some money on the line and call me a fortune teller when this game comes out profitable. Nothing is guaranteed, but a new GTA game, especially after GTA V, is about the closest thing to guaranteed success you'll see in this industry.
I mean, personally I don’t care about the story or anything. If I can just mess around in a big fancy sandbox like all the other GTA games then it’d good for me. But GTA 6 has big expectations to contend with, so they’re gonna aim high. There’s the chance that they mess that up, either with scummy monetization or DRM, or by releasing a trainwreck of a game. Or they fck it up by releasing a soulless game like Saints Row did
It doesn't even really have to go anywhere except having new characters in a new city. There aren't a ton of crime story settings in video games these days, let alone GTA's brand of it.
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