And the Netherlands just became the 6th.

Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.

To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.

Chances are it wasn’t the barrier to entry that did that game in, is my point.

Free to play games have to reach a much larger audience to break even, so chances are it was just as doomed if it was free.

Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?

I thought it was killed by having stupid design around game objectives and not letting you tweak those rules yourself.

In fact I’ve played plenty of other fun games that released this year.

They’re all the same format, but The Dark Pictures is an anthology of games that are about half the size of Until Dawn. There are 5 or 6 of them at this point.

Supermassive games like Until Dawn, The Quarry, and the Dark Pictures are great for this, especially since later iterations have built-in “pass the controller” modes that are great for sharing a game with your spouse.

Maybe not. If that’s the case, I’ll live. They’ve brought their past PC releases to GOG until very recently, so if they see sales drop off, they might continue to do that or relax the PSN requirement. We’ll see.

Can’t wait to play this in two years when Sony lets me, as long as it doesn’t require some kind of DRM like a PSN login.

In 35 hours, I got 28 out of 62 achievements and left 3 or 4 of the major faction quest lines undone. 40 hours doesn’t sound right for 100%.

It definitely does not matter. You build a game that you’re capable of making. If it felt like they were making a game that needed a bigger budget to realize the design they were shooting for, that will affect my opinion of it. Games like Halo Infinite spent so much money on the game making it “big” that it actually made the game worse than if they’d spent less on it and kept it smaller. I don’t give a damn how much they spent making it. We had a whole era of RPGs in the 2010s that were made for a tiny fraction of the development cost of what was coming out of BioWare, but they were better RPGs without having to give them any sort of pity scale to arrive at that conclusion.

I brought up Superman 64 because it’s known to be one of the worst games ever made. When you know how bad a game can actually be, Starfield has no business being a 1 out of 10.

Starfield somehow built a game tailor made for NG+ and not only didn’t take advantage of it with their faction system, they also got rid of my favorite guns and all of my currency, which discouraged me from engaging with it at all.

Your opinion is your opinion, but I don’t think the scale of the company or its resources matter one iota. Games made by a single person have been better than those made by thousands of people, and that’s without putting my thumb on the scale in either direction. I don’t even agree that Starfield is linear, but even if it was, that doesn’t make a game bad. If you’re calling Starfield a 1 out of 10, there’s no room to go down from there on that scale, which is absurd to me, because that means you’d have to cram Superman 64 and Bubsy 3D on the same part of that scale.

Even if they spend $300M making it, they’ll likely still make their money back, even in a world where Game Pass exists. I think their tech stack is so ancient that it ought to be thrown straight in the garbage, and they’ll get more mileage out of an Elder Scrolls game that’s forked from what Obsidian built in Unreal for Avowed. It also sure sounds like, much like studios like Arkane, Rocksteady, and BioWare, they were so high on their previous successes that they couldn’t admit to themselves that any decision they made was a bad one. If they can learn from their mistakes and take the L on Starfield (an L that would be considered a W for most other developers), then Elder Scrolls can potentially meet fans’ expectations. If they keep making games the way they’ve always made them without trying to adapt to the times, they’ll follow the same path as Fallout 4 and Starfield.

A 1 out of 10 for Starfield is ridiculous; either hyperbole, or you haven’t played many video games before to see what a 1 out of 10 would truly be. I was very disappointed by it too, but level set a bit here.

Honestly, I’m hurting more for a PvP shooter with LAN, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see the LAN tag here. If it’s got a campaign, that’s just a bonus for me, but I’d certainly like to see one.

That’s possible, but the benefit of the doubt that I’ll give them here is that they’re testing the multiplayer portion of the game right now, so if that’s all that’s in the executable that they’re distributing in beta tests, they can’t say that it’s got it a feature that they don’t have yet.

The Steam description says “single-player and multiplayer”.

With Green Hawk Platoon, we set out to create an FPS that feels larger than life, designed for both single player enthusiasts and competitive multiplayer fans.