Even holding inventory costs money. They know where their bread is buttered, and it’s on software after they’ve already sold the hardware. If they could charge less and get an Xbox in your home, a pathway to you becoming a Game Pass subscriber, they’d do it. I think this is just trying not to bleed any money at all as they slowly exit the business of selling a traditional console, paving the way for making pre-built PCs with the Xbox branding at a price and scale that matches the market’s appetite.

They’re not trying to make as much bank as possible; they’re trying to lose as little money possible on each unit sold.

The things that used to allow for them to do that aren’t happening this time around. We’re getting diminishing returns on processor architecture improvements compared to a few decades ago. Also, this one in particular is only in the US, so…this one is tariffs.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 4 with a friend. It might not be the best comparison to compare late game BL3 with early game BL4, but some of the things they changed may have been a step back. For instance, now that the game is open world and surprisingly denser with enemy mobs than the old games, it can be harder to tell when you’ve finished off a group of enemies. My opinion on it might change by the end of the game though.

I started Citizen Sleeper at the recommendation of a friend. It’s a pretty simple management game loop with only a few RPG trappings thus far, and I wonder if or when they will start to put the squeeze on my resources.

I also got back into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I think I’m about halfway through. The combat is excellent when you nail it and land your parries, but it lacks the equivalent of a Souls game where you spend the beginning of the fight hanging back and learning an enemy’s patterns, and that can sometimes be frustrating.

I don’t consider it so much as the combat should be better or the writing should be good, but the fact that it’s just a very different style of game altogether. There will be nothing like the character sheet from the first game in this new one, I’ll wager, nor the RPG mechanics that go along with that. Making that kind of game is even further outside the wheelhouse of the developer making this new one, so it would be an even taller order. It’s not often that a sequel to a game changes genre or subgenre, but it’s not usually a welcome change. There was only one game in the Zelda series like Zelda II, after all.

It’s not just stutters but also just general poor performance in the open world, such that I get about half the frame rate I would expect to see on high settings without frame gen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the optimizations here are like what happened with Assassin’s Creed: Unity where there was a bunch of detail that got sanded off of the world map in places that a player should never actually see it anyway.

If you’ve played the first game, watch their video demo of some gameplay. They’re just not even similar. It’s bold to call this a sequel for how little they have in common.

You called it something it wasn’t, either because you misunderstood the definition or willfully misrepresented it. That was the argument. The game can be criticized in all sorts of ways, but “grift” makes no sense here, assuming they’re doing what GTA V did and didn’t come up with some crazy new scheme that hasn’t been detailed yet. And even if the online mode was a deterrent to you, there’s a whole other part of the game above and beyond the online mode where you never have to even see that stuff that could make the game worth playing, meaning it wouldn’t be “just” a grift.

From the gameplay footage, it looks like a studio that’s only ever made walking simulators before is making their take on Dishonored. Maybe that’ll be pretty good, but I’d be surprised. What it certainly isn’t is an RPG that’s anything like Bloodlines 1, lol.

Realistically, this game’s got bigger problems than what its DLC strategy is.

Honestly, I’m not. Rockstar has changed their formula very little since 2008. But I don’t exactly have a lot of options for crime stories anymore, and they’ve been telling good stories for just as long as they’ve had this format.

I just think that if you’re going to call something a grift, it should actually be one, because words have meaning. We can call it all sorts of other things. “Predatory” is a good one. I myself called it “shitty”. That’s not arguing in favor of a giant corporation. You can’t just pick your favorite negative descriptor when it doesn’t apply.

Are you unaware that there’s a component of GTA 6 besides GTA online? Even in the online mode, they’re milking gamers for weak content using regular gambling. A grift would be like a carnival game that appears winnable but actually never is. For your gambling money, you do get “stuff” in GTA 6, even if you or I would consider it a poor value. I don’t know why a shitty online mode would make me want to play a good crime story single player mode less, but the mere existence of the single player mode easily makes it more than “just” that.

GTA is a crime story video game. “Dishonest gambling” doesn’t mean “gambling I don’t like”. A science-based dragon MMO Kickstarter is a grift. GTA 6 is a video game.

I don’t think you know what grift means.

Nah, that game’s great. The writing’s not good, especially for the villains, but people like that game because it’s good.

It’s hard to consider an 81 on OpenCritic to be a trainwreck. People tend to buy games that review well, especially when it’s a co-op shooter with basically no competition.

That would be hard to believe, because the game already conservatively made tens of millions of dollars in a few days.

Is this not the third tabloid style headline here about essentially the same thing?

Ubisoft didn’t do this. It’s a community project.