Nintendo drip feeds three more GBA games for a service where you can only rent them and not buy them legally.

Even if they did, those inspired games can get lost and fail to find their audience in the sea of games that are fine.

I don’t have numbers on this, but I’ll bet the percentages on mobile studios struggling financially are even worse.

Plus, there may be too many games, but I’ll put an asterisk on there that there are too many long games. When so much of it is designed to keep you coming back to this one particular game over and over again, there’s less room in your life for other games that you otherwise would have been willing to buy. I’ve got a list of 14 games that came out this year or have release dates this year that I’m interested in getting around to still, on top of the 8 games that I’ve already started or finished, plus another 8 that are expected to come out this year but don’t have release dates yet…and I’m still going to spend a few hundred hours across three different fighting games that I’ve been playing for years.

If they’re going to be successful turning this brand into a cross media property, hopefully they’re sticking to the dark humor and satire.

Maybe before an Activision acquisition and the implosion of the console business model.

Eh, this is a case of them offering a better deal than actually ever made sense, because they expected the volume of subscribers to make up for it, but that never manifested.

It’s also suspected that Yuzu was not “clean room” reversed engineered and built on code that they shouldn’t have had access to, which will allow Nintendo to pull down any fork of Yuzu but not Ryujinx.

I suspect Australia is responsible for Streets of Rogue changing “cocaine” into “sugar” as well, but I know Japan doesn’t allow things like beheadings in their games, which I thought was part of that DLC.

Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.

They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.

As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.

This has happened before, for games from other publishers, as per the article. I don’t remember all of the reasons for it, but if I’m not mistaken, this is why Shogun: Total War 2 has a blood DLC for a few dollars, so that they can make everything but the DLC available in Japan.

Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate’s sunsetting. Evo’s only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn’t getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.

There’s also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.

It’s a great game, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.

I just picked up Dread Delusion, Shadows of Doubt, and Stellar Tactics. I played demos of Dread Delusion and Shadows of Doubt a while back, and both of them blew me away; the former just launched out of early access and the latter is supposed to do so before the end of the year. Stellar Tactics is one that’s intriguing, but I haven’t played it yet. I’ve been playing Fallout 2 lately, and it made me want to find a CRPG that was more successful at what Starfield was trying to do; I typed in some tags into the Steam search, Stellar Tactics was what I found, and I think it’ll scratch that itch. Stellar Tactics is also in early access, and it’s been in early access since 2016 with no end in sight, but it’s very systems driven, so I’ll likely be okay with playing it early anyway.

That line about “only 20% stick around for the multiplayer” isn’t exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that’s the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game’s player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I’m looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there’s usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a “cursor” character such that it doesn’t matter what input device you’re on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn’t the only way to do it though; it isn’t coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can’t really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they’ve gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It’s just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can’t other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn’t feel like it’s missing something. I’m the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.

And of course, for me, it’s a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they’re going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can’t be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.

As far as I can tell, it was the original creators that they handed the franchise back to that fumbled it. I think there was a rumor that a classics collection was in development a while back, but that could be one of dozens of projects that got cut when Embracer lost that Saudi deal.

Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they’re not building a game any larger than they’ve been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn’t need to sell 10 million copies to break even.

Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they’re typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game’s actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that’s allegedly good to its employees.

Good point. I don’t know how ongoing that is or if steps have been taken to improve things.