What do you mean “dont turn it into a weapon,” i have a dedicated spot on my action wheel specifically for turning things into weapons. My barbarian buddy can do it as a bonus action

Kotaku out here dutifully defending the status quo. Maybe these complex, top-heavy, primarily commercially motivated hierarchies aren’t a good environment for the development of decent games. If those top people have a vision and a passion for their art, it’ll show. If they don’t and all they care about is money while throwing figurative scraps of creative freedom and control to their actual development and art teams, that’ll show too.

What Larian did right, more than anything else, is retain artistic integrity. They didn’t hold back to stuff anything behind a paywall or try to figure out how to design their game to appeal to whales. They had something they wanted to make, a franchise they wanted to do proper justice, and they knocked the ball out of the park.

Not because it’s perfect, because it isn’t, but because it is incredibly clear that they didn’t sell out their artistic integrity. It couldn’t have been made if they had.

That, I think, is what some development studios are worried about. Ultimately though, that’s a good thing. It offers the potential of changing the nature of the business to one that’s less about Skinner boxes and more about creating an enjoyable and maybe even profound experience.

Please do use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a weapon to cut money grubbing corporate filth out of the industry.

If fewer players would buy the shitty games, and stop buying the battle passes and mtx, they would stop selling them. It’s all about profit.

What do you think would have happened if Overwatch 2 launched and had a consistent player count of zero?

But it seems that a lot of people don’t care as much as I want them to, and a lot of people have less self control than a toddler. Little will change.

Use it like a BFG, we need to focus on quality games… not hamster wheels with micro transactions and battle passes.

Oh nooo! Anyway, make the best game you can.

AAA studios, you can stop crying, you’re like a master car mechanic crying because you can’t bolt down a single goddamn nut with pre-existing tooling.

Maybe AAA games just don’t need to be as large or sprawling. Release one full campaign with everything you need included in the price. Then if it does well offer dlc.

As the article points out, balder’s gate was early access for 3 years, sold at full price, and still has bugs. It’s not an exception to the rule, larian just delivered a good product that had good source material behind it.

I mean one studio makes a great game and a bunch of other studios make shitty games… then gamers like the game which is better and want more games to be like that. Traditionally that’s called market forces, not a weapon.

The people in charge of these companies, meanwhile, get to quietly count their millions. After all, they aren’t the ones who have to go on a livestream and defend the latest patch notes.

There are, however, a lot of opportunities during development for everyone down the chain to voice concerns about making an online-only game that doesn’t need to be and requires them to go on a livestream to defend their patch notes.