“Our Board”:

Epic Games, Take Two, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, etc.

Do you ever hunt around Facebook Marketplace? When electronics drop in value enough, often times, people will just give them away. I have. It’s (sometimes) less hassle than trying to haggle with people over a few dollars for severely outdated hardware, and my goal at that point is to get it into someone’s hands who will use it rather than have the stuff go to a landfill. Even a very outdated PC will still play tons and tons of great games for cheap or free. They frequently won’t be the latest and greatest, but there’s less and less correlation these days with high game quality and high system requirements.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the classes.

Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part.

They absolutely do. And again, I probably wouldn’t mind if all of the sites they shut down were hosting games that could be legally purchased in a consumer friendly way, but they can’t. Shutting down the Switch emulator built on ill-gotten code is one thing; buying out the legitimate Switch emulator is a super dick move.

Sony already does this too

Thanks for reminding me. I don’t think of Sony much at all, honestly, but they do tend to lock their retro games behind a subscription, some of which can only be played that way. I think they tend to be time-limited and eventually return to sale in most cases? So not quite as bad as what Nintendo does, but still not admirable. I know you went in a different direction with this, but their subscription incentives are theirs to decide; I just hate it when something is only available via subscription when it doesn’t have to be.

In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.

Boycott is a strong word. All of the other reasons I don’t buy their stuff is because of what they do with the revenue that I would give them, but in this case in particular, it’s because I don’t buy bad products when I can instead buy good products. I’m certainly not about to spend $530 plus sales tax to play Tears of the Kingdom at acceptable frame rates on a machine that’s going to sit under my TV collecting dust when I’m done with the game. I already have a PC that could run it if they made it available there, and it would still run it better than Switch 2. Of course they’re doing what they’re doing because it’s more lucrative for them, but if that’s not aligned with what matters to me, then I’m not inclined to give them my money. There are so many other games out there worth playing instead that respect me more as a customer.

About my lowest threshold for success is that this at least makes disclosures about what you’re buying more prominent and restricts the ability for software licenses to just alter the deal and pray that they don’t alter them further. Even better disclosures would make the raw deal you’re getting become more poisonous before the point of sale. Especially as an American, I’m going to have wait a few years after any legislation goes through before I can trust online multiplayer games again.

• They put their money towards suing the shit out of emulation projects and removing ROM sites.
• This is compounded by the fact that they won’t even sell you those ROMs anymore. They only make them available to rent in perpetuity. People are rightly skeptical of a future where Microsoft only makes their games available via Game Pass rather than it just being an economical option, but Nintendo is already doing the thing that people are afraid of.
• They’re the last holdout that won’t put their games on PC in an era where console exclusivity doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no reason to play Zelda at 20 FPS and 360p when, at the time of release, my PC was already quite capable of running the game at acceptable resolutions and frame rates. This is just willfully selling people an inferior product when they have the ability to deliver a better one. Then they have the gall to charge their customers, who already paid $70, even more for an upgrade to finally run those games at acceptable performance on their next console. And in case you think this is me justifying piracy, I didn’t pirate the game; I didn’t play it at all.
• I’m a competitive fighting game player, and the way they fight against their own fans for trying to compete in Smash Bros. is atrocious.

I’m not parroting anything. I’ve looked. Sure, sometimes you get a port of XCOM or Slay the Spire, but then it’s not going to carry over progress back to my PC, where I’m more comfortable playing at home, and my reluctance to buy a version of the game like that explains why there isn’t enough money in trying to port the kinds of games that I like to mobile. Sometimes a game has a port, but it fell out of compatibility with modern Android and never got updated; and let me tell you, that’s a great way to convince me to stop looking. Even crazier is when something like Fire Emblem Heroes happens, because it’s adapting a traditional handheld/console game into an interface that makes way more sense for controlling the game, but it’s not a proper version of that series; it’s a gacha game. If I have any kind of extended anticipated desire to game on the go, my Steam Deck is just a better answer than trying to find the few games I would like that also got Android versions, because I’m going to spend more time playing them at home anyway.

I’m not sure why you’re on a crusade to convince people to like mobile games. I’ve always got my phone on me, and I frequently find myself on a subway ride that’s too short to bother with a Steam Deck. Mobile games would fit in great there. My options are pretty terrible. For the kinds of games I like to play, the only ones that actually have mobile versions are basically digital versions of board games and a small handful of roguelikes. I tend to just read on the subway instead. It’s not for lack of trying. The library just sucks, and it offers less value than other places I can buy games. Your daughter is playing games designed to keep you “engaged” and addicted with all of the greatest tricks of the gambling industry; you can find the GDC talks with a quick search on your favorite search engine.

Nintendo gives us so many legitimate reasons to not want to give them money. Who do you think would be behind astroturfing? To my knowledge, it doesn’t usually come in the form of being against one company but in being against a piece of legislation or regulation. People on Lemmy are probably just predisposed to being willing to go against the mainstream when it starts turning shit, or else we’d still be on reddit.

Fresh off the Borderlands movie, they sold tons of their Pandora collection, and concurrent players shot up. It may not have been the movie they wanted it to be, but it mostly achieved the same goal.

When has this series ever been that?

Tiny Tina is a spin-off, and I doubt the EULA changes will result in much more than the Modern Warfare 2 boycott. Borderlands 3 still sold multiple millions of copies before it even had its first discount, and over 15 million copies total. It was still in high enough demand after an Epic exclusivity period to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players when it eventually launched on Steam. It’s one of very few multi-billion dollar franchises in video games.

They’re objectively extremely popular.

Warner Bros. and Bastion was a bit different. Microsoft used to have a set number of “slots” per publisher to put up a certain number of games on Xbox Live Arcade per year. WB didn’t have anything to fill the slot, so Supergiant basically negotiated with them to use that slot themselves, is how I understand the situation.

Other than GOTY edition of the first game, this entire series has LAN (so far), which is commendable and stupidly rare! I hope the GOTY edition doesn’t show that they’re nixing this for BL4 as well.

Customers already told them this by not buying on Epic and waiting 6 months to a year to buy on Steam.

It’s a weird dynamic, but it also makes sense that a success like that isn’t as correlated to future work as TV or movies. You got <insert big actor here…I don’t know…Tom Cruise> in all sorts of movies because they put asses in seats. The performance is comparatively much more of the appeal in a movie than it is in a game, even a story-driven one. So even if you give an award-winning performance, how important to a game’s success is an award-winning performer? For plenty of games, probably not very. And even if it is important for a particular game’s success, maybe the award winner is more expensive, and you can get a good performance out of someone who’s a great actor but hasn’t had that exposure and is willing to do it for less money.

You can download Game Pass games and play them on SteamOS? News to me, even after a quick web search to verify it. Streaming is a poor substitute.

The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.

What about GOG concerns you?