I’d go to bat less for Hellblade at this point, and so would the market, but as a point in Hellblade’s favor, it was using the medium to its advantage to tell a story and evoke a feeling in a way that people hadn’t seen before, and I think The Order was known for just looking good and doing what other cover shooters had done. Now that Hellblade’s been done before, the sequel doesn’t seem to be garnering similar success either.

Until Dawn has branches on branches on branches based on your decisions and how well you react, so I wouldn’t say that supports that argument.

Nah, a revision would be nice, and rumor has it we’ll get just that, but that controller kicks ass.

By modern standards, Halo 1-3 are short games, but there’s a lot of freedom and reason to improvise in any given combat encounter, and the reputation of The Order was that it didn’t offer anything like that.

The Steam Controller has its defenders, but it went from launch to discontinued with no successor in just four years, which isn’t a great sign of success.

No, that was due to a patent lawsuit over the rear buttons, as I understand it.

In our 6/10 review, IGN said: “Though a stylish adventure, The Order: 1886 emphasizes its cinematic polish at the crippling cost of gameplay freedom.”

I think this is the crux of it. It doesn’t mean you can’t make single player games or short games. It still has to be a fun video game. I’d actually love more short games, but if there’s only one prescribed way it can be played, it loses a lot of appeal.

I picked up The Thaumaturge based off of an Angry Centaur Gaming review, and for as much as I enjoyed that game, I basically never hear anyone else talk about it. They likely built the game on a modest and reasonable budget, but I’m still concerned that they didn’t break even.

Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age was one of the best games I played last year, but it’s just about guaranteed that they did not make their money back, once again on a lean budget.

Cloak and Dasher is a game akin to N++ that my brother and I played at PAX East some years ago, and we were immediately impressed and bought early access copies. It probably hasn’t even cracked 1000 copies sold and will likely never leave early access. (They should patch it up and finish it regardless, but what’s there now is already great.)

Keep in mind that none of these games are $100M flops. They’re great games with reasonable scope that are still struggling to survive. Mimimi closed down because they were just barely breaking even and struggled to find funding even with critical acclaim and a core audience that liked their games.

Microsoft is no longer even trying for a PS3 comeback. They’ve fully accepted that the market realities are different now, and they’ve pivoted. Every one of their games going forward will be multi platform.

The thing I’m criticizing is that they make this other kind of server impossible, even though it would be exactly the kind of backup plan you’d want for a situation like this one.

It would help people who wanted to have a functioning video game. Then you could ask your friend (or someone on Discord) what their IP address is and play with them.

I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.

Mouse and keyboard hasn’t been so much a requirement for the better part of 20 years on PC, but the rest tracks.

consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in

Less and less as time goes on, is my point, for the reasons we’ve discussed. Maybe any one or two of those reasons aren’t doing it on their own, but in the aggregate, it appears consumers are slowly deciding not to put up with the downsides anymore.

Cloud saves that are free on PC, and they don’t block your access to transfer saves without it like consoles do. Playing online on PC is free, and we know exactly how to make it free on consoles, but they’re not interested in doing so. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, which is why it’s a bad deal to make the subscription for that stuff mandatory instead of allowing things like direct IP connections.

I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can’t guarantee uptime.

You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.

Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.

I’ll bet that number is significantly higher than zero, but as per reporting some months ago, much like with Redfall, Rocksteady saw a significant exodus during Suicide Squad, since the studio was tasked with building a game they did not want to make.

Not anymore. So many games have dropped it. It happens every console generation, but support for last gen went on longer this time around, so new consoles got higher frame rates for longer.