You think prices will fall now that there are giant new capable data centers everywhere? AAA Gaming will become synonymous with cloud gaming and the hardware to run games at home won‘t be produced anymore. They’ll build even more data centers instead. It‘s a much more useful business model to establish tech feudalism for the overly rich.

The problem is if nobody sells affordable hardware or hardware at all anymore, the only path they can go is cloud gaming. That means from here on onward ownership is dead.

Execs genuinely couldn‘t care less about what people want. They are the architects of this trend away from physical media.

I’m making the prediction that any hardware that isn‘t essentially just a screen that connects to the internet will become more and more expensive to the point no one can afford them. Major brands that we all know and use today will withdraw from manufacturing end consumer products.

I‘m guessing 10 years from now virtually everyone will be forced into cloud service subscriptions for gaming because the hardware to run these games won‘t be sold to us anymore. For a while Chinese companies might try fill the void the likes of Nvidia and AMD left but that will be short lived too.

You will go retro and learn to take care of your soon old timer hardware that will become ever more pricey to fix as spare parts get more rare and ridiculously expensive expensive or you will own nothing and be happy with that.

Yes this is all speculative but it‘s a vision of the future that becomes more and more obvious to me by the day.

I loved the idea but it had too much of an impact on how a battle plays out. I hope it‘s kept but toned down considerably.

That‘s nice but I‘ll wait until reviews flock in to confirm this. There is a point when a studio is too big to pre-order. I‘ve seen this pattern before and know better than to ride the hype wave from one super success all the way to the next „more ambitious than ever“ title.

Why is one thing okay for you but not the other? A generated artwork is an artists not paid and theft. Generated dialogue is a writer not paid and also theft. All the popular models are fed on stolen content.

I don‘t like to admit it but you‘re likely right. And there are very cool use cases for machine learning if done right. And some of these concepts are already in successful games.

Of course there absolutely is slop that I‘m refusing to buy and companies do face backlash over it. No doubt about it, but that really doesn‘t mean every single use case for AI is bad or makes for a terrible product at all.

But it is interesting to see how much pushback you‘re facing for this comment while most people seem cool with it when Larian does it for some reason. Consumers are hypocrites sometimes.

I‘m in the same boat. OS2 had a very good balance for me. BG3 already took it a little too far for my liking BUT you could often choose not to, so it was okay. Playing BG3 and hearing the announcement about a new Divinity game got me giga hyped but I will temper my expectations after this cinematic trailer. I don‘t like the tone of it at all, unfortunately.

I would normally make an exception for indie games when it comes to never pre-ordering games but not here. The development of this was so shaky (if not flat out shady) that I recommend to wait until it‘s actually there and user reviews are flocking in.

I think the bad reputation for asset flips is somewhat overblown. Like, of course some slop game is going to use assets but a lot of decent indie games do too. Using assets doesn‘t make a game bad. But yes a lot of games are just low effort bootlegs of whatever is popular right now.

But whats worse are games containing legit malware on Steam. Apparently that is becoming a growing problem.

Not really. The games started out rather tame in terms of parental guidance labels. Only the last two got much grittier but still it didn‘t bathe in flesh and vomit. Baldur‘s Gate 3 was already much more hardcore than Original Sin 2 and it looks like they still try to top that for whatever reason.

It‘s not even remotely as gory as that cinematic trailer and the humor only has gotten darker with the Original Sin games later. Even then they didn‘t have remotely as much gore at any point. I‘m honestly a little baffled. It looks too me they‘re trying to replicate Diablo more than making another faithful Divinity game.

Divinity Original Sin 2 is one of my favorite games of all times but this looks too gory for me. Actually it doesn‘t feel like Divinity at all.

It‘s definitely clever to wrap the Award show into a Superbowl type of event for the gaming industry. It ensures there will be a lot of eyes on award winners. But they still have to share the attention with the new shiny things that are being advertised so it‘s always a little awkward. It‘s bizarre but part of the experience and let‘s be honest, most of don‘t care about popularity contests. We tune in for the trailers.

I’m not really excited about anything because I don’t care much for AAA but it‘s funny to me that a show like the Game Awards was never about the awards but just an excuse to show some world premier trailers.

They keep telling us how this is a celebration of this year while trailers for games in the coming years take center stage. It feels more like the most cynical funeral of old games while the new ones get coronated with their announcements.

And I know this is comment isn‘t deep or profound to anybody who ever watched the Game Awards but I just find it comical every year.

Consumers have already decided mobile gambling slop is the most successful investment in the gaming industry. I don‘t trust consumers to know what‘s best for them.

Steam always chose the path of least resistance when it comes to dealing with law maker demands even when there were more consumer friendly ways available. This is not surprising at all.

How and why do they even access Steam? The Internet and Computers aren‘t „traditional ways“ of communicating and video games are not „traditional ways“ of entertainment. Do they reject modern medicine too for being „non-traditional“? Seriously out of all the anti progress bullshit, this is the dumbest aspect.

If there is something better than opensnitch for this on Linux someone tell me. It‘s so annoying to block applications from accessing the internet on it. I‘ve tried like 4 different methods.

Nothing epic about the guy or his company.

25 bucks? That‘s cute. AAA studios are charging $80 for remakes or $250 for DLC packages. They‘re out of their minds.

That‘s interesting because I remember our home computer ran on it for a while. I guess that was only because my father was friends with a PC shop owner who knew about it.

So what made 2007 even better for you? I feel like that‘s important to know since these games didn‘t come out in 2025. You could‘ve played anything in 2007 that came out before that year.

Just play Vintage story at this point. The development of this has been such a dumpster fire in terms of how the project has been handled from a top level from the very beginning that I don‘t have any hopes it will release in a decent state under its new old owner.

Indeed. I would say the Gabecube is essentially just another PC and a little overhyped already. It‘s SteamOS that deserves a lot of praise. Especially with the upcoming desktop version.

I‘m looking forward to next year when AAA studios will continue to disappoint even harder while indie games flourish and gain market share. Maybe the AI bubble pops too. One can only hope.

It‘s also an industry full of enthusiasts with a passion for what they do. Well mostly. I don‘t have to tell you how much that gets exploited. The workers who got the boot over joining a union actually seemed interested in returning to office again in interviews, though not without joining a union first.

What are you implying? I just saw an interview of the fired workers striking outside the Rockstar buildings and the comments show nothing but support for them and call for a boycott of GTA 6. You can see similar recent comments under the official GTA 6 trailer on Youtube by the way. Drop in the bucket or not, but some people are actually pissed how the developers behind one of their favorite franchises get treated like dirt.

I mean they can do that and quality assurance will struggle even more, making indie games look even better in comparison. Let publishers keep shooting themselves in the foot in their endless greed. It will only speed up the destructive cycle.

That was really clumsy on the side of the workers. Discord is the last App I would use to organize a union. What were they even thinking?

On the other hand that probably means they use discord for literally everything including communication within Rockstar, albeit unofficially. So yeah if their employer had any consistency in firing people over NDAs they would probably have to fire most of the staff.

Creative freedom over how they fire people and sell IPs to pay off the mountain of debt they loaded the company with.

I think both sides make sense here. If you shoot at everything that moves and refuse to cooperate it can be a hell of a ride. But if you focus on looting and are willing to socialize it can be almost a cozy experience. It reminds me of Team Fortress 2 where players would sometimes just make up their own rules mid game and turn everything on it‘s head.

Wait, you say it‘s not $39.99 good but still worth the price? That‘s as much of a direct contradiction as possible.

So basically you have not tried it but complain about things you expect because…? Are you an EA or IGN employee or something?

I was fairly young at the time and wondered how they would try to pull this off. To the surprise of no one who was a little older than me they simply didn‘t. The only thing that was pulled was the project itself.

Wow! Over 200.000 words spoken by over 130 actors does sound very ambitious. No wonder it takes that long.

I can see your point, though I belief it would probably be as superficial and soulless as an idol game as it is now. But I completely agree it‘s not a hill worth dying on. Inzoi in it‘s current form is a bit of a disaster and it will probably stay that way.

Someone introduce this person to indie games. It will shatter their world.

I don‘t think a K-Pop simulator would‘ve sold very well. Especially not in the west because a lot of it seemingly revolved around romantic relationships and keeping them secret at all cost. Even as little as being seen with the opposite sex in public is career suicide for an idol. That seems like a tough pitch for a game tbh.

They are a company run by individuals who haven‘t booted a game in this millennia and are only in it for the money.