Yeah, I don’t trust marketing to accurately talk about a game, nor even, necessarily, the actual devs, especially early on in the development process (as was happening with Cyberpunk). At that stage, we tend to talk about the game we want to make, the ideas that excite us, etc. not the game that will eventually get…

CDPR absolutely screwed themselves by hyping the game as hard as they did

Are you suggesting that Facebook and Twitter will never be replaced by superior alternatives?

You’re continuing to make arguments for reinforcing Steam’s monopolistic hegemony. Over and over. And you keep ignoring my point - that the exclusive game deals and giveaways are not themselves the additional consumer choice, but part of an effort to chip away at that hegemony and thus, ultimately, provide consumer…

Almost all of these exclusivity deals last a year.

It’s really weird to me that what is fundamentally a demand for less choice is framed like a pro-consumer choice issue... I mean, I get that people have their favorite storefronts (in large part because that’s where most of their games are), and Epic’s, well... still kind of sucks, but that seems to lead them to argue…

“spend millions on exclusivity deals for EGS, resulting in a better world for PC gamers used to having consumer choice”

Yeah, I subsequently read they were giving away the assets - though it’s maybe not quite the selling point for the engine that it might appear to be. Much of the procedural generation was done in Houdini rather than in the engine, which limits the game assets and what developers can do with them. Epic regularly…

I’ve not read anything about Unreal being used for the new Matrix movie, and the (non-Matrix specific) assets they’ve created they’re actually going to give away, which wouldn’t be the case if they were made for the movie. The “gameplay” may largely be procedural, but the cost of this kind of project is in creating…

Reading some other articles about this, apparently the city generation was a lot more procedural than I assumed, including the individual assets. (The tools for that have gotten so good, so fast, and I haven’t used most of them myself, so I keep forgetting what they can do.) Rather than things like overlaps and…

Yeah, they spent some serious money building the city (especially if the focus is ostensibly on “virtual humans”). It really does seem like far more than could be justified if all they were making was a demo tie-in for the movie.

Yeah, I rarely watch a show immediately upon release, even if I’ve been waiting for it and had it on my watch list.  But apparently if everyone doesn’t immediately binge-watch the entire series in the first week, they consider it a failure.  So many shows get canceled before I’ve even had a chance to watch a single…

When you buy something in a digital marketplace, you’ll at least get an (email) receipt. You can’t (meaningfully) sell the receipt, but that’s because everyone recognizes it’s not worth anything. We’ll all eventually come around to that realization with game NFTs, too...

That’s unfair! (This is so much worse.)

Sure, now you’ll own a receipt associated with a game item that no longer exists when the game shuts down. Huge improvement!

Huh, that’s disturbingly plausible. I always assumed the appeal to Ubisoft was simply that by attaching NFTs to their cosmetic item store, they could convince people to pay 10 times more for game items without the items actually being any different (because many people believe, delusionally, that NFTs are somehow…

Sega who haven’t gone after creations DIRECTLY using the names of their IPs (mainly Sonic).

“they didn’t market it primarily based on story, and they didn’t heavily feature quest interactions in the marketing material”

“the game was badly, badly mis-sold”

“they “pulled back the curtain” way, way too far”