That’s what killed it for me. I really enjoyed the Lawbreakers beta, but paying $30 for a game that would either die at a fixed price or quickly shift to F2P made no sense.

Not the best clip summarizing this episode, but South Park has a great take on this.

https://youtu.be/C3WsfViEwxQ?si=D3dVt0vcfiZ3vdWU

My understanding is AAA is literally just a buzzword in the vein of AAAA. It doesn’t relate to budget, team size, publisher/no publisher, kind of same as indie at this point.

It maybe made a little more sense when it was a publisher descriptor? EA, Activision, Ubisoft were publishing games at a different scale than Midway, Acclaim, THQ, etc. But still, as far as I understand is more of a marketing term as opposed to designating anything specific.

When I dug into this for myself I landed on Ghost!

https://ghost.org/

I tested it for a bit and am very excited to play the whole thing. My only full playthrough of the game was on a bad laptop on Project64 as a kid, and playing with full M/KB support now feels amazing.

I also got it working with Special K’s HDR feature and it looks great too.

Valve being a private company is probably the thing that allows them to focus on putting out good products w/o dealing with shareholders demanding more.

And they make a ton of money doing right by their core consumer base, I would be very surprised if we see any of that change.

If Valve were any other company they would have laid off half their staff and coasted on that 30% from Steam. They’re not perfect, but maybe the only company I feel good about giving money to, consistently.

I’ve been using Nobara after messing with Manjaro, and it’s been my go-to distro across multiple computers now.

Handles games incredibly well, built in fixes for Resolve, rock solid otherwise. It’s based on Fedora so very well supported on that front as well.

I know right! Every time I come back to a game and they’ve changed every thing about it again I wonder why I bother. I think that’s part of the reason Melee has survived for so long, the community establishes the meta more than someone whose incentive is to keep selling you things.

Yeah totally. I’ve noticed everyone’s bandwidth dropping as capitalism worsens. It’s even more apparent when every live service game wants you to treat it like a job.

Agreed with your last point. I’m at the point where I can call how much is enough for me for any given title, and it makes me a lot happier than feeling obligated to finish games I don’t enjoy.

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but I’m in the same boat.

• Most games tutotialize you like you have never played a game before
• “Cinematic storytelling” is everywhere. I turned off the dialogue in Need for Speed Unbound, and the game is wayyyy more enjoyable without it. And its…a racing game.
• There just are more games. Used to be I’d bring a physical copy of a game hope, and that’d be my game for a bit. Now I have thousands of games accessible at any moment. It’s hard to wait for a game to “get good” when I know that.

I’d also say that I feel no need to complete games or get further into them at this point. Especially seeing how people said Starfield is best in new game plus or whatever, that game barely has legs to stand on in a first playthrough. It’s not worth it for me to play a game for 60 hours for it to maybe get better, and I tend to know when I’m done with a game early now.