I find myself wondering how much of this problem ends up resting on Valve’s famously “flat” organizational structure? Because no one’s really in charge there, there’s no one to really take responsibility. Nobody wants to deal with the headache that would be cleaning up Steam or policing it to keep it functioning…

He definitely has to spend money to defend himself. But he does also have the option to counter-sue them, and given their behavior he likely is doing just that. If they lose their suit and he wins his, they end up having to, at minimum, pay his legal fees back to him, and possibly more besides.

Jim Sterling is self-employed now - he earns a living through Patreon, so he’s got no one shielding him anymore. That said, he’s doing well enough for himself that he is apparently able to fend off trolls like Digital Homicide, at least. If a truly large company, like a major publisher, took it into their heads to…

Yeah...no. While that might serve to explain why they chose to enter a state of radio silence for more than a month, it remains a terrible excuse.

But you don’t understand! Platforming means jumping! There’s never been jumping in Mass Effect before! This is revolutionary new technology!

...will support 4K...

It’s an interesting idea. The part that would be hard to incorporate well into a game is that Rogue doesn’t just steal powers - memories and personality traits come along for the ride (and with unpowered people, that’s all she gets). It’s part of the reason why she abandoned Mystique after getting those Ms. Marvel…

I feel like both sides are handling this kind of badly.

I think you’re overselling the downside of TPS. Most TPS games these days have the camera situated fairly close behind the PC - only 3-6 feet behind, so the amount of “eyes in the back of your head” you typically have is pretty sharply limited. By the time an enemy is close enough to be visible to you from behind,…

Yeah, true enough. Though I suspect the attendance was at least a moderately representative sample. Enthusiasm within the industry for VR is really high, so those that can attend such a gathering probably would. And those that couldn’t afford to go probably lack the resources to make good VR entertainment, given the…

I was headed down here to say almost exactly this. Whoever wrote that survey question, and then set it to be a radio button instead of checkboxes, should have their nose rubbed in those pointless numbers, to teach them what they did wrong.

Now, apparently, it’s your turn to put a lot of words in my mouth. I’m not sure where you got the notion that I’m some sort of entitled fanboy, demanding my personal tastes be catered to at all times as though they were universal, but I’m really not.

They aren’t short shrifting these ports because they just don’t understand how big the PC market is. They are in fact short shrifting these ports because they know precisely how big the PC market is and putting more money into making competent ports doesn’t make good business sense.

Even if the systems are achitecturally more similar, that still does not mean that porting is trivial or free. There’s always a cost involved, and that means guessing at how well it’ll sell on a given platform, to determine whether the cost is justified. Publishers clearly think the market is bigger than it used to be…

We may never know for sure, but I suspect the reason the devs were so vague about what the game would be like is because they weren’t sure themselves. I think all they were really certain of was the math behind the universe generation itself - what they would build on top of that was probably up for debate until…

You’re mostly right, but it’s worth noting that the PC gaming demographic is nowhere near as irrelevant as it used to be. It’s been growing steadily for most of the last 10 years, as Steam grew and consolidated, and while not every Steam user has the sort of machine that can or does run brand new AAA games, there’s a…

I guess? I was kind of thinking of that demographic, though. I feel like people develop loyalty to franchises - Call of Duty, like you say, or The Elder Scrolls, or Warcraft. People that care enough to pay attention to who makes the stuff they like when looking at getting something new, I tend to think, know enough to…

The thing is, though, I wonder how valuable a publisher brand really is in this industry. I feel like people care a lot more about the brands of specific IPs than the company’s that own them. People will get excited about the next Darksiders or (dare I hope) Summoner installment, but I doubt very much they’ll give two…

I do not do this every time, but I do often enough, now that you mention it.

Is it possible to see a PC’s model in reflective surfaces? If not, my guess is that part of the hangup is they have not actually created a character model of any kind for the PC - or if they have, it isn’t ready to actually implement. Perhaps because the various upgrades you can purchase for your suit aren’t fully…