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Pirate Software is a such a twat.
He keeps saying he worked at Blizzard, which is factually correct, but he was a game tester and not a dev; a position he got because his dad worked there. He keeps using his time at Blizzard as some sort of support for his “authority” on the game industry.
He has had a game in dev for like 8 years and the code is written poorly or heavily relies on AI(exact notation style used by AI), sometimes both. Any criticism of his code is dismissed by saying that it is part of the ARG for the game and intentionally done.
He tried to gaslight his dad about him not calling on his dad’s birthday by saying he did.
He doesn’t support Stop Killing Games from an anti-consumer standpoint.
He does “developer streams” where he puts code on screen and doesn’t actually do any coding(IMO because he can’t actually code with real competence, based on examples of his code).
He should just put the fries in the bag or pivot his meta.
I’m no expert on the higher capabilities of multistream plugins and whatnot. I don’t think you could include twitch chat with the others if you are doing that sort of thing unless filtering chats to a given platform is an option with one instance. All the same, if you are handling the multistream locally you would want to do a dual PC setup if you are a game streamer. A lot of multistreamers use a relay service to reduce processing power while gaming.
You can multistream everything to everywhere with combined chat, but you have to sanitize the chat so it isn’t apparent that other platforms are combined or which chat is which if they are displayed separately.
As a hustle, you should stream on Kick(10x the payout of Twitch) and then edit the vods into algorithm clips for YouTube and tiktok that would funnel to the Kick. You could multistream everywhere for maximum exposure, but that can get troublesome depending on how active chat is because you need to keep up and Twitch doesn’t allow you to display other chats on screen.
These days it is really hard to get going in streaming and youtube, so you really just need to cast a wide net and really work on refining your content. It takes years to get a decent second income, unless a big streamer reacts to you and then you have to try and keep the new subs without turning away the OGs.
They are generally paid well over a living wage for a position that a citizen could occupy at a market wage that is even higher. Median tech job income is over $100k, twice the national average.
Hiring a citizen costs more, so profit chasing dictates hiring an immigrant that can be paid less than market rate. Hiring an immigrant under an H1-B not only is cheaper in wages, but also gives the company more power over the employee because they can fire that person and then they get deported for not being sponsored.
Hiring an H1-B at a cheaper rate also suppresses wages for citizens.
Unemployment in tech is like 3%, we don’t need H1-B visa for tech jobs. We don’t even need H1-Bs for the industries with the highest unemployment, they need to increase wages to attract the nearly 7 million unemployed in the US, and there are even more people that are underemployed or have given up because wages are too low across the board.
Realistically, you could experience all the game content in like 200 hours. Even faster if you know higher level players that can help you, which a lot of higher level players will help you. That is a lot of content without the limitations that purposefully slow progression down like you see in MMOs. Keep in mind that you don’t need the game subscription to play the game and don’t need to spend any money in the game to play and get the endgame content.
It isn’t until you are trying to grind out getting certain things that your playtime skyrockets, but that is true with a real MMO.
On the subject of the community and players helping players, the community is pretty great. I have dragged lower level players through the hardest part of the game and taken them from level 20(you can start the game at level 1 or 20) to over level 100(there is no max level) in an afternoon with no detriment to my enjoyment. I have given newer players thousands of scrap, hundreds of legendary mods, and hundreds of thousands of caps worth of item plans that you can on get with RNG grinds.
I am not exceptional, I am pretty typical for the high level players. Since we have “nothing left” to do in the game and understand the meta, pretty much everything has lost value. We will buy overpriced stuff for sale in player vendors just because we want to get rid of caps and it takes us minutes to go from 1k caps to the 40k cap limit due to the value of the “crap” we have in our stash. Some players can’t hit the cap limit in hundreds of hours of play. It could take you hours to get enough material to make 2k of ammo(that you can burn through in an hour) and we will give you 10k of that ammo or enough materials to make 10k and not even notice the loss because we know how to net gain ammo.
Compared to gacha games and actual MMOs, FO76 is far better in terms of cost in terms of time and money, also the community is very helpful to new players.
That makes zero business sense. Bethesda would never make money on throwing away thousands or tens of thousands of man-hours on that. They would spend more on a remaster, but they would make money in the end.
The Oblivion remaster sold more in two weeks than Oblivion made in a year. It sold more copies in April alone than the original did in 15 months.
With the release of the TV show, the daily player logins are around 400k with 30k-50k concurrent across all platforms. I suspect a decent number of those are logging in for a half hour or less just to do daily or weekly challenges.
I have put about 2,700 hours into FO76, a decent amount was AFK to farm events. I have all the best gear and all of the items available in the game that you don’t buy from the shop with an abstraction of real money. I have fully beaten the game until the brahmin was pulp and has become one with the wasteland again, and then I began to dig a deep hole.
Last paragraph is the TL;DR.
It is now a Fallout game with a weak story and other people that may or may not be annoying, and the optional PvP is basically first attacker wins unless you are specifically built for PvP. You don’t need to interact with other players and can still put a few hundred hours into the game just playing story stuff. On release, it was a glitchy shit show filled with griefers and no NPCs.
It has bugs and glitches that aren’t a problem most of the time unless you really want to grind one activity. Sometimes random glitches, crashes, etc. happen more frequently than is understandable, especially after a content release. I swear they don’t actually play test updates and depend on the players to report things.
The building is kneecapped by a budget constraint that keeps you from taking advantage of the build area. In personal cells called “vaults”, the budget may be exceeded without the budget bar being filled. Most of the build items are in the store shop or are only obtainable during limited time events that you need to RNG grind to get or buy from another player that likely doesn’t know the fair market value. Items available in the store shop cycle randomly, so you may not see an item you want for a year or more. Holiday themed items often show up in the store after the holiday has passed.
More on the subject of arbitrary budgets, you only have storage for 1200 units of weight off your character. That is, unless you have a FO76 subscription which gives you 2 unlimited storage boxes for scrap materials and ammo, soon another one will be added for chems and healing stuff. That isn’t a problem if you don’t collect weapons, plans, and armor. It is a problem if you do because you won’t be able to keep tons of ammo or stims in storage. I traded uncommon and rare plans for caps because that is the fastest and easiest way to get caps, I had around 700 weight units of plans between two characters(each plan has a weight of 0.25). If you want to keep legendary weapon effects just to have or for selling, they each weight 1 unit. The player joke is that FO76 is an inventory management game with an open world action RPG mini-game, which is true for experienced players.
Some of it is a tedious grind to get some of the best armor, like hundreds of runs of a 5 minute activity to get enough of a specific currency or dozens to hundreds of runs of a Raid that requires you have a team of 4 and good gear+build that takes about a half hour but can take over an hour(or be impossible to complete) with inexperienced players at lower levels.
There are 8 different in-game currencies that you can’t buy, not including the game store currency. There is no way to exchange currencies except for 3 that are one-way and one of those currencies can only be used to buy another currency. Treasury Notes > Gold Bullion, Caps > Gold Bullion.
One of the currencies is only for seasonal content(4 seasons a year) that requires you to do daily and weekly challenges, that currency does not roll over into the next season and some seasonal rewards require a FO76 subscription. The seasonal currency you can technically buy through buying season ranks, a full season cost about $120 if you don’t want to bother with challenges. The daily challenges take a experienced player 10-15 mins to complete, the weeklies take 30-45 mins. The FO76 subscription is really nice for QOL, but I put around 500 hours into the game without one.
The events are mostly under 5 minutes long and aren’t fun after like the 6th time.
The big content updates are once a year with smaller content additions between. For instance, they just added fishing and before that they added the ability to become a ghoul. The last big update was in December when they added a 5 stage Raid and the next big one is at the end of the year which is going to be a big map expansion.
If you are a Fallout fan, Fallout 76 is a Fallout game that is fun enough to play for the quests(60% of Fallout humor compared to FO4) and free content, but it is not a Fallout live service game that will be enjoyable for most Fallout fans for as many hours that you can put into the singleplayer games and you will “miss out” on a lot of items if you aren’t down for the grind or have cash to burn.
They are wanting to raise new game prices to $90-100 because prices haven’t kept up with inflation and dev costs, which will push more people to game streaming or subscription services.
Avowed could have been $30 and still sold the same because a $30 game is priced like a mediocre or shit game when you are talking open world ARPGs not made in Asia or offered as early access. I don’t even think the nothingburger controversy did anything to the sales of meaning, it just doesn’t seem like an interesting game from the announcement trailer to the launch trailer. The coolest thing in the trailers was the magic and that is a pretty disappointing aspect of the game.
Gamepass numbers are unknown, but steam had a peak of like 19k players. Estimates on ownership is around 200k units.
Monster Hunter Wilds had 1.3m peak, unknown sales estimate because it is too new. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, 256k peak, over 2m sales estimate.
Understand that is all PC Steam stats.
Avowed may only be a financial success thanks to gamepass because nobody is buying it.
Nearly beat it, not a great game 5/10.
The environments are nice and fun to explore.
Story is mediocre. Dialog is tiresome, I started button spamming to get through a lot of the conversations that didn’t matter. Combat is nothing remarkable, no matter the weapon combos, and the enemies are just damage sponges with no real tactics necessary to defeat a given enemy. Magic is kind of cool but you have to really spec into mage to get there. The immersion is about as deep as a puddle on flat concrete.
It is one of the games of all time, a game you could not play and miss out on nothing.
Edit: Just beat it, terrible ending that feels like it was tacked on last minute to provide some sort of conclusion.
AI will eventually be given the task of creating a game based on prompts and it will be able to do that with minimal curation with considerations of other similar games and the consensus about them. It will be able to accomplish the entire dev in a fraction of the time of a conventional dev team of humans. This is probably 10-15 years away and will be the death of innovative risk taking games that come to be held in high regard.
What is emerging is AI upscaling that will eventually allow a game made 10 years ago to look new. Soon there will be extrapolative AI that can remaster something like Super Mario Bros or Goldeneye and make it into a modern gen graphics game regardless of what “modern” means.
AI can be a fantastic tool to ease the burdens of the game development process to decrease costs and time so smaller studios can focus on the core of what makes a game good. Unfortunately studios will integrate AI into the development process as they remove humans to decrease costs to an overall detrimental degree and the market will be flooded with mediocre derivative games that offer nothing of value in terms of experience.
I guess it would depend on the live service.
If God of War live service was you being a custom demi-god in that Universe with 1000hrs of reasonable grind MPARPG gameplay, good story, and a skill tree you couldn’t re-spec easily, I might be onboard.
If we are talking a GoW MOBA with loot box reskins, die in a fire the hard way.
I don’t know if they make one for the pixel series but I have had Rokform for multiple generations of phones and they have been stellar protection. They also have magnets in them so you can just stick your phone to stuff, which comes in handy. They also have a twist lock for mounting it to things like a dash mount or handlebar mounts.
They want so hard to remove false competition, that is a glorious frustration.
Pokemon is Pokemon, Palworld is Palworld. One trying to claim the other steps on their toes is hilarious. If they have merit, Doom could sue every FPS with monsters.
Stay mad Nintendo/GameFreak, you are a joke and should make better games.
Absolutely. The ROI on most DLC is more than enough incentive to keep doing it. The problem is when they have lost the plot and horse armor had no script, so the goalpost is over the horizon.
Tod looked at the backlash and the revenue gained, he gave lip service because horse armor disillusioned his understanding of a delusional market demand.
That would work if they had a stable business model and produced something everybody needed or wanted, like diapers or alcohol. Their entire business model requires they keep users engaged and user count growing.
People will leave Meta the more Meta tries to make more off of a stagnant userbase, which will death spiral.
It is more that they are not growing, and that means dying in their business model. By not reporting an accurate metric of user engagement, they are hiding the stagnation or loss. Background logins from apps are likely also hiding the real picture of user engagement. Without active user engagement they lose their revenue, data harvesting and advertising.
So there are signs that they are in a downturn, which will lead to irrelevance and failure.
Mr. Chippy, feet first on PPV… If it were my call.