I don't think anyone is for raising taxes per se, just who gets taxed. If you're persistent about taxing the powerful at least efficiency becomes a priority of the powerful.
I'm all for smart legislation that makes things more efficient, but where are all the proposals with efficiency gains and not blanket cuts?
Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.
Not my experience. You are right that it's less of an issue. But I very definitely stressed about individual matches and how it affects the ranking and stats. You hold it in until the match finishes and just don't join the next one right away but you still change your behavior. Or in something like WoW PvP servers you go somewhere safe before logging out etc.
What I dislike is how much more uncommon random matchups are. I find ranked stressful because it incentivizes making the number go up, so I prefer to be an eternal Quick Play player. But a lot of QP systems still use shadow rankings that influence who you get paired with, and they tend to give me very ping-pong results.
One game I'm dominating against the other team, but then the ball hits the other side and get paired with people above my level for the next several. It kinda makes me feel like the agency on how well I can perform is taken away from me, and I just have to hope the matchmaking system takes pity.
At least when matches were more random, sometimes I'd get paired with people above my level, but it was rare that it felt completely rigged against me.
Does what the article is arguing make any sense? AAA studios cancelled some live service games and that means fewer single player games made.
But it doesn't follow that the live service aspect is what killed the games. Games are cancelled all the time.
And then saying there's an industry trend but what's brought up is how those games were cancelled, not brought down by the user sentiment of live services.
And their data point is a 53% preference? It just seems poorly argued to me.
The headline is a bit of a dogwhistle, capitalizing on deep held sentiment among gamers, that unfortunately doesn't bear out in the market. I think many have pointed out that there are excellent smaller single player indies, but the risk to create an expensive single-player only game has become too great for most developers. It is very similar to the current state of cinema -- where people say they prefer different kinds of or better movies, but they only reliably turn out for sequels and superhero movies.
I think the mistake being made is instead of opting to build a cheaper, higher quality single player games they opt to created an expensive, AAA live service (for a minute they were calling them Destiny killers) -- which is a tough landing to stick. You'll notice that the success stories took long investments Fortnite's pivot from a grindy co-op game to a genre defining battle royale or maybe even Apex's stealth development and launch.
Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim. So the question these studios have to ask is "can I make a game that will get people to put down Skyrim or Civ V." That's a big ask.
>Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games. So the toughest competition for new single player games are classics like Skyrim
you don't even need a study, just check out Steam's most played games as of this posting:
- DOTA 2 is #3, PUBG is right under it.
- Rust is 5.5 years old and #9. Apex is a bit newer but still #10.
- Baldur's Gate 3 is a single player game over a year old (and AFAIK, it's major updates are finished), and today is still top 15.
- and of course GTA V is still #11, a game that has now spanned 3 generations.
When you make a big game, it captures people for a very long time. That's what companies are trying to do when they chase Fortnite.
"Not long ago the consultancy GameDiscoverCo released a study that most people were playing OLD games."
I've long tried not to buy every console, because it gets expensive for no good reason. So as our Switch is aging, I metaphorically poked my head up and put my finger to the wind... and decided our "next console" is the Steam Deck I already owned. And a big part of that decision is new games are frankly not any better than old games. They look better, and that's it, and that often comes at the cost of the real interactivity of the game anyhow.
I wouldn't put a specific date on it, but game tech basically plateaued 10-15 years ago, even if the numbers keep going up. The graphics were good enough, especially if strong art direction knew how to use them. The tech for creating great games was basically all in place, and we got to where having 10 times the polygons just wasn't important anymore. Games are a lot more like movies to me now... I don't sit there looking at "was this movie 2021 or 2023?" as if that's going to indicate an important difference in quality, and games are getting to be that way for me.
It's consultant bullshit research, not even doing proper science. For example it talks about the popularity of PvP--the actual argument it wants to say is, companies should develop single-player games because existing PvP games are locked in to an audience already. Which makes the title completely misleading and a clever/unscrupulous consultant might say such a sweeping statement to get access to companies' interest.
The fully organic push might just be a bargaining tactic. There's other big wins like ensuring your likeness won't be replicated, your work used to train AI without compensation, or your work replaced with an AI sound-alike when it's cheaper.
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