> (Rockstar really should’ve made this a separate launch option like other games do)
This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's cherished KPIs come before UX.
In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition.
We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
I'm honestly surprised it's a command line option. My guess is that the requirement originated externally.
But that's why the government had to regulate it. If companies have financial incentive to do something they're going to do it, to make them stop that incentive must be removed. I don't think that comment was intending to justify the situation.
To be fair, the societal harm from deciding to play multiplayer instead of single player is probably a few orders of magnitude less than toxic waste in the water.
Granted, but how about the societal harm from an exploitable bug in one or more of these rootkits? Millions of gaming computers could wreck some havoc in the hands of an even slightly creative attacker not restrained by moral or economic considerations…
Not sure if, at this point, it costs SpaceX more money to get to Mars, or Rockstar Games to develop GTA 6. AAA budgets are insane (with IMO meagre results - I don't like most of them).
A lot of time and money goes into AAA games and I think there’s an inverse relationship at play where the higher the budget is, the more risk averse the studio is. So you end up with a whole suite of AAA releases that all play it safe and just copy small innovations from each other, nobody really daring to push the envelope too far.
I don’t really enjoy those games either any more. Too big, too long, and the gameplay feels more like running errands and checking off a todo list than having fun.
Release cycles in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty tight, slowly getting longer as storage and graphical firepower increased. 3D was totally new and studios were trying out all kinds of crazy ideas for games. These days you can basically expect 90% of mainstream releases to follow the same playbook.
Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting.
I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude to the hypothetical casual loner segment who we lack data on because we pushed them away or we don't measure things relevant to them.
I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.
Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in game economy people, resulting in relegation to second class status.
Until someone figures out a way to milk this segment for that juicy recurring revenue, consumable$, $kins, etc..., we must accept our fate, largely an afterthought.
Yet we are the people who started gaming on PCs -- we made consumer 3D accelerators profitable and spent the time writing about them on forums in the 90s and 2000s. We certainly have the power to move markets.
People who can't be monetized sometimes are valued in their opinions.
If someone principled really likes a thing, it can gain more popularity by others who trust that person adopting it.
Maybe not loners. But there's still reason to make users happy because viral marketing impact cannot be measured well.
I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.
Part of it is reflexes too. I used to love fast paced FPS games as a teen and was actually pretty good at them until my early 30's. As time went on, I started noticing I was doing consistently worse in 1v1 firefights. I started gravitating towards games that had a 'slower' way to contribute like playing vehicles in the battlefield series.
As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single player games, especially games that let me build stuff.
This is because the multiplayer games we played at 16 are 10-15 years old. You literally can’t go back to those happy memories again. You play halo 3 today you get wrecked by the people who haven’t stopped regularly playing in over a decade. And when you try and play the latest fps game you go this sucks, its not halo 3.
REAL-TIME multiplayer is worse for that use case. There's no reason a game that is asynchronous, like an old school play by mail game, couldn't be fun for twenty minutes when you have time, and maybe there's a limit or a turn involved so you don't get too ahead, and your partner does their thing when they get time
I have wanted to see a game like that for years and years. I think this is why chess.com is huge with the youths, as it fits my description and is fairly unique -- I just don't personally care for chess.
> We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
> Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
Call of duty 6 launches the single player campaign from the main launcher and I noticed they advertise the anti cheat stuff being enabled (I forget what it’s called). For a single player game. Smh.
I stopped getting Rockstar games for PC when the Steam store page for Max Payne 3 was lying that a rockstar club account was only required for multiplayer. Turns out it was mandatory for single player too instead.
I did get GTA V for playstation, and indeed you can play single player without the rockstar account. Probably Sony forcing them to allow that, I don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.
However, every time you start the game you get a screen pushing you towards multiplayer. And the single time I did click on some multiplayer related options, they spammed my playstation system notifications with 'there are new events in GTA online' even in weeks I didn't start their title at all.
So... good bye, rockstar. Your games are getting too big for their own good anyway.
We need to stop normalizing the idea that businesses can change the offer of a purchased product after the fact.
> These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is “I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further.”
Ownership is the premium version of a product.
Turns out piracy is sometimes the only ownership option. Everything else is just a subscription, license, service.
The MLS did this with their Apple deal (pay a maximum of $120 for a season and you're guaranteed to get every league match of the season through the "TV" app), and it's been reasonably successful. That said, the league used that money in part to bring in Lionel Messi, and his significant international following came along with him, so it's hard to parse out how much of that is because they made the games easy to access (with the significant asterisk that Linux and Android users are stuck with a web app) versus his singular impact.
The other part of this is that MLS is significantly smaller (~$275m in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023) than other North American leagues (the NHL, the next-largest league, had ~$6.75b in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023), so I don't know how reasonable it is for other leagues to follow the MLS's path.
Big game publishers will inevitably flex the “we can impose any restrictions we want at any time, go sue us” in your face at some point. Piracy is indeed the superior experience, unfortunately, though I would add a caveat that as a rule it does not apply to indie titles.
(At least while they stay indie… Not long ago I was reinstalling Minecraft after a long break and found out that Microsoft has the balls to demand that I verify a phone number to play a game I bought more than 10 years ago. Like with GTA V’s rootkit, they don’t care if you want to play single-player—once you’re locked out of the loader, you’re locked out and no human will help you.)
I would bet 90% of people here have at least another laptop if they have a gaming PC, if you’re concerned about being compromised by rootkits, just do your taxes on that.
Yes. It's kind of an odd situation, because it's one where it's a benefit to me if other people are running anti-cheat. A limited sort of remote attestation that the people you're playing with aren't running certain kinds of software that peeks into or alters the memory image of the game or its graphics drivers.
Not nearly every "gaming PC" is used for only that.
When I grew up, I had one PC to do everything: Homework, gaming, learning to program, storing the single copy of treasured family photos, gaining painful experience in why to make backups before modifying the MBR to dual-boot Linux...
Especially with iPads and Chromebooks becoming more prevalent in an education context, a "gaming PC" might well be the only computer that gives the user full control over it that many children have access to these days.
On the one hand, buying a console and a reasonably spec'd laptop is clearly the better value. I did this during college, and both my laptop, and my console both lasted about a decade without requiring any upgrades. I did this again with the PS4. You wind up spending far less than you otherwise would trying to keep a gaming pc reasonably up to date, and both devices are optimized for their usage.
On the other hand? At some point most of us will realize that we've been successful enough that we don't have to optimize for value, and we can choose 'all of the above'. I now have a PS5 AND a stupidly overspec'd AI / gaming desktop. I've enjoyed having both.
Or more likely, listening to background noise to spy on what family members are saying and listening for marketing/brand trigger words. It may not be very human audible but if it's machine audible it will probably be scraped.
This is the exact reason why is started with streaming services for games (Gfore/boosteroid/game pass).
Next the anti-cheat thing I also spend less waiting for updates. And this way I can still play these games with my buddies.
It had already been bought some time ago, this was stated as a reinstall.
Using a pirate copy now might avoid the rootkit, but it would not send a message to the publisher as they'll not see a difference between not getting any money for this new install and not getting any money for this new install. Any difference in a numbers-playing stat, if the pirate version doesn't call home to be counted in those, is likely not significant.
Would a Windows10-11 user be able to tell there are "rootkits" embedded in installations, without looking at the (optional) disclosures made available now on steam ?
In other words, what guarantee is there that if i'm buying a game from Steam, or say GOG, that there's no quasi-malware riding along with the game install ?
What's even worse is with this update they completely cut off Linux users. It had been performing better than on W*ndows but they had to ruin the game.
Surely this is foreshadowing the future of GTA VI and will have the same problems of being unplayable.
You mean Proton users who have been doing everything they can to shit on the developers releasing native Linux games because "it runs 0.00001% faster on Proton so why bother with a native port". It's not like there haven't been people warning you that no official support means the games can stop working at any time and you won't have any recourse.
They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only.
I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.