It's important to note these are self reported numbers and given they are not a direct statement of revenue which would be bound by discloser law, there is no way to know how accurate they are.
Sony's lifetime PS2 number was already higher then what most people in the industry estimated based on sell-though numbers before the final update in 2012. But earlier this year they updated it seemingly at random, to give it a more comfortable lead on the Switch.
Not to say it's impossible that the Sony number isn't 100% accurate and the update, 12 years later, was based on some legitimate factor, like units sold between the last update and end of production, even though waiting over a decade to update a number you were repeating to investors every week and likely had a direct impact on your Stock price at the time is ... odd. But we just don't know. We also don't know how accurate Nintendo's figure is. Is one sell-though while the other is B2B? Dose one double count refurbished units sold OEM? Dose one count courtesy and promotional units given away for free as "sales"?
We just don't know, and (for me at least) that makes it a lot less interesting to talk about the "best selling of all time" now that they are this close. Even if you take the numbers on face, by Sony's "updated" number, the PS2 sold over 10 million units after the release of the PS3. So if we count on around 10 million Switch sales between 2025 and 2032 the Switch should not only take the crown, but take it in a boring, excruciatingly slow crawl. And that's not even accounting for when, in 2044, Nintendo updates the number to say they "found" a bunch more sales.
So great that most people know it exists and if they have interest in it, already own it.
So great that it's been a highlighted product in several Humble Bundles, and has shown up as a promotional "free" game on several services.
So great, that in the 15 years (ish) years since release the idea has been copied, improved on, expanded on, refined, reinvented, and repacked by dozens of other developers.
So great, that you could argue it's one of the games that fueled the "indie game renaissance " resulting in hundreds of games that are similar in tone and feel, including several that are vastly superiour simply because they got to learn from the lessons this game taught us.
So you re-released this game that people have had countless opportunities to pick up for free or at an extremely low price, which was successful largely because of it's uniqueness and how it stood out then, but at a time when the genre and target market is completely saturated with other games, after so many years of delays that any hype is gone and people have forgetting this was even coming out ... and can't figure out why it's not selling?
There is nothing to “win” in an argument, and that’s doubly true on the internet. It’s an exchange of ideas. I post here because I respect a lot of the frequent posters. They are intelligent people who often provide me with fascinating insight, and I consider myself pretty lucky to have a small group of people who regularly read and respond to me.
If you look at my original post … it’s a question. I’m asking for insight. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, I don’t understand something and I’m hoping someone else might have a better grasp of what’s going on then I do.
To break down my original post into formal logic, it states two premise. One is that F2P games and other free entertainment are very similar, and the second is that people treat them very differently. I present no arguments. Then I ask a question; why is this? Why do people treat them differently. That's the thing I want to talk about.
The problem is that some people who DO think arguments can be won and lost often approach them by attacking the premises rather than the argument itself. That’s not how arguments work and engaging with people who want to argue a premises isn’t productive. People can only have productive discourse when they accept a shared premise. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with disagreeing with my premise, only that… a meaningless back and forth isn’t why I posted.
Let’s say someone posts “I’m a Christian, and I don’t know if letting my daughter play COD is being a bad Christian. Can anyone help me?”. I personally think religion is nonsense, and a lot of people don’t like COD. But that’s not what the post is about. Replying with “Christianity is nonsense” or “COD is a bad game” isn’t engaging with the argument, it’s questioning the premise and wasting both of your time … even though there is nothing “wrong” with either of those opinions. The only way to make a productive comment to that person is to accept they want a Christian perspective and their daughter has already decided they want to play COD. There is no point replying if you can't do that.
So in fairness, you have never interacted with me ... you've simply read my posts and attacked their premise. If you're going to refrain from doing that in the future ... ummm ... great! Thank you!
But if you ever do have a constructive argument to make under a shared premise, I really hope you'll change your mind and share it with me. That's why I'm here. To get opinions from people who think differently then me. Well, that and sometimes I also correct factual errors. But mostly that first one!
See and that kinda loops back to my original point. I had one of those, right?
Like we have no problem saying YouTube is a fantastic free service, extremely entertaining, and a net positive, even though it would be a lot better without ads or a company behind it that in the last 10 years has gone from best of the bad options to flat out Bond villain.
There are very few post about how YouTube disgusts people on a moral and spiritual level, how it's the bane of the video media, and how everyone associated with it should be publicly draw and quartered. At the same time, there are not a lot of post about how F2P games can be fun, entertaining, and often well meaning, but would be a lot better without the ads and the bad actors.
I just don't understand why we treat these two very similar things so differently.
Babylon 5 is some of the best TV ever made. Like anything from that time, you're going to have to gloss over some pretty awfulness in the first season, and the second has some arguably worse "cringe" movements. But once Straczynski gets his way, gets to kill off the character the network made him put in ... it just becomes something incredible. Momentum that never lets up. Real mysteries that actually get paid off. An openly gay couple in a TV show from 1993 that you might not even notice your first time watching it. It's just never been replicated.
But really, you should check out Onegai My Melody first! Unironically one of the best shows I've ever seen.
YouTube in a microtransaction based site. It makes $21 billion a year $0.04 cents at a time.
Cat videos are often monetized by their makers and these people use cats and cute animals as a predatory way of manipulating the human attraction to "cute" things that resemble children. The goal is to draw your attention to the video so that they make as much money as possible. Even if the poster isn't doing that, Google is doing it when it sends it to your feed.
There are both paid and free services you can use to make your thumbnail as manipulative as possible to attract views though "click bait". This practice is so widespread and profitable that Google now allows you to track analytics from multiple thumbnails so you can pick the one that preforms the best. A test program allows users to tweak the thumbnail based on user-demographics, so everyone is always seeing something they are more likely to engage with by eliciting a strong emotional response. The ultimate goal is to use science to make it almost impossible for you not to click, and they are getting close!
Each cat video begins with an ad that pops up and says "If you give us $11.99 you can watch the video RIGHT AWAY". If the video is longer then 5 minutes, it is extremely likely another ad will interrupt you and remind you that all you have to do is pay $11.99 to enjoy the video without ads! At default monetization setting, while several factors can effect this number a new ad and a new reminder that $11.99 is all it takes to stop this torture should pop up every 4 to 6 minutes. YouTube actually lets users INCREASE THIS to as high as an ad every 3 minutes. At peak times, Google will sometimes lower the quality of your video to 360p and blame it on ... you guessed it, you not giving them $11.99!
No one makes the choice between Cat videos and no video entertainment. We live in a world where Schindler's list, 5 Seasons of Babylon 5, and Onegai My Melody exist. Yet people still watch a lot of cat videos.
And, in addition to YouTube using the exact FTP, micro transition model you're hating on ... this game DOSEN'T use that. This game, like almost every Japanese FTP game, uses the coin-op model. Playing the game costs stamina, the primary thing you pay real money for is more stamina. You can also use money to overcome bosses before you should with a revive, but none of that progressed is gated. You can play in "cat video" sized doses every single day, and you'll hardly even know your playing a FTP game. You wont run out of stamina, and you'll never be reminded you can pay for more.
Now again, don't play this game. Don't play FTP games. That's your propagative. I don't care to change it. But you should realize your condemnation of FTP while you accept things like YouTube is extremely arbitrary. Cat Videos and FTP use the same monetization, and no FTP game will ever come close to the level of deliberate manipulation YouTube uses. Your perception of what FTP is like comes from Zynga and the worst examples of bad actors. Most games are not like that. Some are actually really good. Some are DOTA. And some suck. Just like paid games!
I'm just going to assume this is satire. Because as satire, this is actually gold. Not just the post itself, but the meta-commentary of taking the time to read internet forums about games you are not interested in and reply to some dude on the internet's post with a thesis about how time is too precious a commodity to waste ... honestly, amazing work. Voltaire level genius.
I will never get tired of how proud people sound when they declare "I refuse to be entertained your free entertainment because you have the audacity to try and make money from it"
Don't get me wrong, not wanting to play this game or free to play games in general is a perfectly valid opinion. I just don't get what they are so proud of. How are they "winning"?
A free game like this is like a cat video on YouTube.
When your choice is between the cat video and gazing into the void, becoming increasingly aware that you ... no, not just you ... your whole species, all life on your planet, can not possibly have meaning or purpose when viewed in the context of the infinite universe we are part of, and how nationality, culture, and religion are not "profound" or important, they are simply inventions we use to turn a blind eye to our isolation and the meaningless of our existence ... you watch the cat video!
You watch it for 10 minutes and enjoy it. Because it's there, it's free, and it's better then the alternative.
We we don't treat free games like that is completely beyond me.
Wow, This and the HAL article are likely the two best to show up on this website all year. And while I'm obviously not complaining about two insightful, entertaining, well written and informative pieces in the same weekend ... maybe pace yourself a bit?
That's your purgative! But if I can be real for a second, you should be aware your opinions are uninformed right? Like you know that you believe those things not because you've ever been involved with game development, or been educated on project management? I don't know why you have an expectation that they would be accrete, and I don't understand why the idea that someone who has PMP certification and works in the game industry explaining how it actually works would be "condescending".
You're not expressing opinions, for the most part. You are projecting facts about how games are made, like how budgets are calculated or at what point DLC is baked into a games development. I'm not arguing your opinion, I'm saying your facts are wrong.
I'm just some dude on the internet and I have no right or desire to judge you. But I would suggest that while posting opinions is great and talking about them is fun, posting unfounded statements of fact to justify those opinions while also not being interested in learning how things actually work is a pretty negative practice.
I asked if you wanted me to inform you as to how your assumptions are inaccurate and asked if you had any source or evidence that cased you to believe them and you replied with a bunch of other assumptions. You're also now talking about mobile games and bad actors instead of the topic of our conversation, which is Midway and WB games development practices, or in general, game design at large studios. I'm not sure where I lost you, and I'm sorry if my post wasn't clear.
I understand you're stating what you think is obvious, and actually agree that what you are saying makes logical sense. But a lot of things that are incorrect seem obvious or logical at first, because reality is often counter-intuitive. To be clear, I'm telling you that what you think is obvious is completely inaccurate, and asking if a large post about what development looks like is something you would be interested in, or if it would be a waste of both our time because you're invested in these unfounded views.
I really don't want to dismiss what you're saying outright, you clearly have a well thought-out opinion, but it all comes down to arbitrarily demonizing something while spinning the development process to support your argument.
I'm just going to say, in a completely non-aggressive way, that your understanding of how games are developed and how budgets are calculated and allocated is not representative of reality, at least no game I've ever worked on either from a development or project management standpoint. I would be carious as to your sources for these assumptions. They are not "stupid" or "illogical" or anything like that, it's just ... not how it actually works. Heck I think had a lot of the same misconceptions at some point, before I got to look behind the curtain.
So before I spend time actually writing a reply that's the question I'll ask you ... are you willing to accept that your core assumptions about game design might be inaccurate and allow me to inform those opinions? Because there is nowhere else for this conversation to go. I can't really address any of your arguments, because they are all based on an invalid premise.
"Naïve", like "ignorant", isn't an insult, or even a word with absolute negative connotation. It's just a description of a state. I am ignorant to the rules of completive ski jumping, because I just don't know anything about them. I am naïve about Sanrio's business practices, because I know a lot about them, but tend to ignore the parts I don't like because of how much I love Hello Kitty. I really didn't mean to offend you in any way, or even suggest there is anything wrong with being naïve.
NES games have release versions. They had limited production runs, and if sales warranted a new production run developers often took that opportunity to update the game. You might own the 1.0 release cartridge, which has bugs, spelling or translation errors, or incomplete assists compared to the 1.1 version which you don't own. In extreme cases, bugs in early versions could cut the player off from some content, which would become playable in the later releases. Additional music and sounds were often added.
Manuals often had mistakes that were fixed in later production runs. Sometimes maps and other physical items were added to later production runs based off player feedback. Heck, box art occasionally changed.
If you look at the cartridge based systems, version updates between production runs were the norm, not the exception.
So I'm choosing to describe this idealistic situation you are describing, where you bought a game and that game was the "complete" and fully working version all the time as "naïve". It was never actually like that. It only exist because at the time, or even now, you might not have been aware that a better, more complete version of the game you own was released as a later production run.
If you buy Mortal Kombat One, but then never learn that any updates or DLC exists, you would also think the copy you owned was complete and worked as well as possible from day one. But you would have that opinion only because you didn't know about the exitance of updates, not because Mortal Kombat was produced in some golden ear where updates didn't happen.
Back in the day you bought a game. Sometimes it was so buggy and completely broken out of the box and you had to go back to Toy's R Us to return it. Sometimes it was a compete rip off and incomplete. Sometimes they fixed the bugs in later versions. Sometimes they didn't. It is no different then how it is today. Some games are still 100% working and compete day one. Some are not.
The only difference now is that fixing the broken ones is easier, it's much easier to know when a game is updated, and you don't have to rebuy the game completely to get the updated version. So I would say we're better off today.
It's also important to note that NES games in the 80s cost around $120 in today's dollars. You generally get all the DLC, as well as some pretty awesome physical items, in the $120 version of today's games.
I hear this argument a lot and I get how it sounds logical at a point, but this idea that it's include in "part of the development cycle" or not is completely arbitrary, and I think it comes from not fully considering how budgets work.
Your development cycle is determined by your projected revenue. If you are going to sell a game once for $60, your production budget is based on that. Let's say that means your going to have time and money to make 10 fighters.
If you are going to sell your game once for $60, then have a $20 DLC, you now have higher projected revenue. You have more money. With more money, you can increase your production cycle, and now you can include 12 fighters. Add another $10 DLC, your projected revenue goes up again. And so on.
Those are the two worlds you get to choose from. One where the game has a lower budget due to lower projected sales, a shorted development cycle, and less content, or one where it has a higher budget because it's charging for DLC and has higher projected sales, a longer development cycle, and more content. Either way, you know that going into the project. From day one, you have a budget of X based on Y projected sales. If you're going to release paid DLC, that's included in your projected sales and increases your budget.
Ignoring bad actors, you're looking for a world where despite having lower projected sales because there are no plans for DLC, the developer still allocates the increased budget that includes the extra money from the sale of DLC. That obviously can't happen. The money needs to come from somewhere. Even if this was a valid argument, the argument is actually just "developers should spend more money developing their games". It has nothing to do with DLC at this point.
I think the worst part of this argument comes to light if you look at a single developer planning a game and DLC and "judge" them based on this argument.
If you are going to sell a game with no DLC and project that will make you a million dollars, so you plan a million dollars of content, you're "good".
If you are going to sell a game with DLC and project the base game will make a millions dollars, so you spend a million dollars on content for the base game, and you project the DLC will make $200,000 so you spend $200,000 on content for the DLC, you are bad, evil, greedy and bad. Even though you put out the exact same base game at the exact same price.
And if you follow the most common REAL WORLD scenario, which is that you expect to make a million off the base game and $200,000 off the DLC so you spend $1.1 million on content for the base game and $100,000 on content for the DLC ... you are still evil, even though you gave people buying just the base game $100,000 more content then they would have got without DLC.
I think that's ... a bit naïve. So is the argument against "games in chunks". If "The Xenoblades Saga" was a $60 game (Xenoblades 1) with two $60 paid DLC (Xenoblades 2 and 3) ... how is that a worse value for the player then releasing 3 games at $60 each? There is also WAY more game play verity and engine upgrades in something like Xenoblades 2 and Torna the Golden Country, a paid DLC, then their is in something like Mario Kart Wii to 7. Saying one is bad because it's DLC but the other is fine because it's a new game is, again, pretty arbitrary.
While I get what you're saying and totally respect that opinion, that was also an era when Torna - The Golden Country, Future Connected, and Future redeemed would have each, by necessity, cost $60 and when (as others have pointed out) if you wanted balance updates and new characters for a fighting game, you shelled out full price for a new edition.
I think the two things at play here are a bit of nostalgia for an age that never existed, where we tend to look at the past, especially a past we didn't experience first hand or experienced as children, with rose colored glasses that filter out most of the reality of what it was actually like, and ... if you're forgive me saying so, a bit of a naïve interpretation of the word "complete".
At some point you have to release your game and start making money. You generally know this before you start development; you have a budget, and based on that budget, you can pay your staff until a given day. If the game isn't out by that day, you need to fire everyone, your game never comes out, and everyone is sad. Today, developers often contuse development past that point by using the funds generated by the games initial sales. Which is great! It means a lot of people get paid for a lot longer and the developer has a chance to react to feedback.
But eventually you need to make more money, or you're back to firing everyone (or getting a new budget for a new project) and stopping development. You can extend the time you are working on a project by charging for some of this post game work you've done in the form or DLC.
There is simply no world where Smash Ultimate launches with 89 fighters. There is a world where it is releases with 76 and never updates that roster, and one where it launches with 76 and charges for 12 additional fighters, while giving away 1 for free.
And that second world, the one we live in, is WAY BETTER. The people who only want to pay once get the game that would have existed in a world without DLC, while other people have the OPTION of spending more to add additional content. It literally the best of both worlds. No one is worse off, and we have more options. Heck, even the guy who hates DLC got a free fighter out of the deal because OTHER PEOPLE were willing to pay for the DLC. How awesome is that?
That isn't to say some bad actors don't misuse the system. That absolutely happens. But, back to the "age that never existed" thing, it's always been that way. There is no world where bad actors don't release broken, incomplete games and trick people into paying for them. There is a world where bad actors release broken, incomplete games and never fix them, and one world where they sometimes fix them with DLC. And again ... that second world is (marginally) better. In one, you wasted $60 on something that will always be trash. In the other, someone sold you an unstable product for $60 and then scammed you out of an additional $20 to make it playable. Both worlds suck, but we have to pick one. Even if we could eliminate bad actors, the world where we have nothing but "good" paid DLC and no bad actors is better then the world were we have neither.
And besides, in a world without paid DLC, I don't get to see Ryza in a swimsuit. Who would want to live in that world?
Call me a lightweight or a spoiled non-purist, but while I'm actually enjoying the story and style of this game, I'm finding it almost impossible to play without the ability to speed up combat and movement.
That's a great question. The thing is we don't have full specs, and we don't know what Nintendo is going to do with it's next console. I personally do not think it will be a "Switch 2". I think it will be a new product, maybe another dual screen system, that is backwards compatible, offers a new type of game play experience, but is not necessarily any more "powerful" on a raw graphical level.
But let's assume it's just a more powerful Switch, using the T239, like most of the industry is banking on.
The FDE (File Decompression Engine) is obviously a game changer for load times. Assuming Nintendo has a new high-speed storage format to pair it with, this could all but eliminate load times from moving assists into RAM. You can look online and find some possible hardware approximations applied to current Switch titles and load times are generally in the millisecond range.
The big question with frame rate is if the deep learning accelerator from the T234 is going to be part of the T239, or if they even add tensor cores to the space on the dye that used to be taken up by the T234's redundant features. If so, then games will have access to DLSS and frame generation at a fraction of the frame time cost that would normally be associated with these technologies. The thing is ... that's not really a solation suited to 120fps. It's more suited to offering much higher resolutions at 60fps and a full range of rasterization options at 30fps. I don't actually see the hardware pushing framerates higher, I just think we are going to get much better looking 30/60FPS games. If you want higher frame rates, you basically need a higher clock or more pipes for your existing clock. The T239 is unlikely to offer either in significant numbers, so I can't imagine increased frame rates were a priority in the system's design.
If I had to guess at the performance targets for the next Nintendo console, I would say they want to put out a unit that can play direct ports of Xbox S games and have them look as good or better. That way them and Microsoft can continue to pressure 3rd parties into making this 4Tflopish graphical range the low end target for releases for the foreseeable future.
Agreed. I think it's silly that we spend so much time talking about how important graphics are when clearly they don't really matter to the majority of gamers. It's not even that the game sold well, but if you talk to most of the people playing it on Switch, the vast majority that never read a review or go to a website, they will give literally no complaints about how it looks or it's performance.
I'm not here to argue with you if you think a google search is a substitute for a complete understanding of a topic. I'm here to offer people the chance to learn more then you would with a google search on the few topics I have a deeper understanding of, or to have others educate me in the immeasurable topics they have a deeper understanding then me in.
If you're not interested, that's fine. Thank you for taking the time to tell me what Google says.
I think the confusing is coming from the fact that at some point Capcom internal started calling MT framework 3.0 "RE" (about the same time they realized it was a nightmare and they would keep using 2.0 for future games).
But thanks for the correction! The "Modern RE" that Wilds is running on is not the same. I changed my post to reflect this.
The PS4 is a 1.8 Tflop system. The Switch delivers around 1Tflop. There is also a lot of confusion around this number because it's higher then the base performance of the Tigra X1, but the custom chip on the Switch offers this level of performance,
So closer to twice as power, although the 4x assumption is very understandable given that the chip in the PS4 is about 4 times as powerful as the chip in the Switch. There are just other factors in place that increase the Switch's performance.
I mean ... it's coming out on series S, which is a 4TFlop system, and it's running on the RE engine, which is built of the engine that Monster Hunter World runs on.
The Switch is a 1TFlop system, and while a 1/4th of the power seems like an insurmountable difference, it's important to remember that squares and rectangles have 4 sides! This makes the math a lot more favorable, given you can run something at half the resolution and (at a grossly over simplified level) it only takes 1/4th the processing power.
It's also important to note that Capcom didn't bring World to switch, even though they ported it to the 1.3TB Xbox One, and we've seen that with a decent port, Switch and Xbox One performance can be comparable.
They have also said the reason they are not porting World to Switch is that they are more focused on bringing a Monster Hunter experience to Nintendo portable system that takes advantage of it's portable nature, and that they want to have a separate Monster Hunter product for younger and older players.
So power probably isn't the only concern here. Capcom might be worried about cannibalism of the "Stories" series by making main world titles available on Switch. Heck, Nintendo was the world-wide publisher of the original DS Monster Hunter Stories (Capcom published it in Japan) and their might even be a existing deal to keep main-line titles off Nintendo hardware that's a hold-over from that.
Bottom line ... to be clear, I know absolutely nothing for sure. I have no insider information. I'm just talking here. But I'm pretty sure they could make this run on Switch if they really wanted to, and I think the idea that this is for sure going to make it onto Nintendo's next console isn't a sure thing.
Consumer reaction is also important to consider. The Hogwarts Legacy port is a great example of a game that took huge hits to graphics to allow a port to Switch, and even though it likely had zero impact on sales and was only happening because people who would never buy a Switch game in the first place were very loud, there was a very vocal negative reaction.
Maybe Capcom just doesn't want a news cycle to spend a week talking about how awful the new monster hunter game looks on Swatch.
Bah, don't' be so hard on yourself. You did your due diligence, which is better then most people. There was just a lot of confusing and contradicting information to work though before getting to the actual organizational structure.
They are not. They are doing fantastic and are wildly successful. Given their size and the number of products they have put out that hit exceptional ratings and above average sales, they are likely one of the most profitable independent publishers ever.
But someone figured the stock price of the parent company might go up if the fired everyone, so they did that.
it's a huge misconception that lay-offs in publicly traded companies are generally tied to underperformance. While this obviously happens, most of the time it's just a company firing everyone right before an earnings report so that operating cost looks lower on their balance sheet, hoping that will up the share price and encourage investment. Then they rehire for the positions at lower pay or distribute the work load to other employees who earn less.
That's capitalism, baby. This is just a company being good at capitalism.
That's actually a really good analogy and I wish more people were talking about things like that rather then blaming AI, given this was clearly human translated (AI dosn't make spelling mistakes)
Zero Wing, as well as a lot of games back then, was translated by "the guy on staff who paid the most attention in high school English classes". I'm guessing that's what happened here too. It's a free game, so they just had that dude on staff who listens to US pop music do the translation in a day, thinking it would be "good enough" and people would find it funny.
Like I said, it's complicated. This is from Forbes, who are generally very up to date on how the money is flowing and vigorous fact check.
"Humble Games, the indie publisher operating under the Humble Bundle marque owned by Ziff Davis–and OPERATED under its IGN Entertainment subsidiary–has reportedly laid off all 36 employees, just days after its most recent release"
But at the end of the day, we only know what the company tells us. Maybe their was resent change and it was the catalyst to this announcement, which is leading to the confusion. Maybe their was a change as part of this announcement, but that wasn't made public. Maybe Forbes just got it wrong. Maybe IGN just got it wrong. Who knows.
You and me both did our due diligence! It's not our fault sources disagree.
Organizational structure is hard. You can basically cut off the who owns who chain at either point. I chose IGN because based on the disclosers I've seen, they are responsible for day to day operations and are the ones making decision, even though they themselves have a parent.
The same way most of us would say Adsense is owned by Google, even though it's technically owned by Alphabet. The money to pay for that product comes from Google's coffers and Google would be the one to decide to shut it down. Alphabet's ownership is largely irrelevant.
I mean, it's a bad localization for sure, but falling back on buzz words and fearmongering never makes your argument stronger, especially when it's obvious that it's not the case. This is human translated. It's just human translated poorly.
I'll be shocked and disappointed if it turns out that my suspicion of how this is the result of misguided lazafair capitalism turns out to be incorrect and it's actually the result of a slightly different misguided lazafair capitalism.
Humble only had 36 employees that all worked remotely. They are owned and bankrolled by IGN, so it's unlikely IGN will simple shutter the publisher.
What's more likely is they are going to simply rehire for every position at lower starting pay, and end remote working. Unfortunately you can use a "back to office" mandate to get around what little protections exist to prevent this behavior, and some excusive probably figured everyone was just slacking off working remotely ... despite literally every one of the 1000s of studies done on the subject showing remote workers are more productive.
The question you should be asking yourself before making statements like this is "why not just become an official tournament?" It's an option open to anyone. You could run an official Smash tournament yourself if you wanted to. And yet these organizers are choosing not to do that, then complaining about big evil Nintendo not letting them run the tournament ... when big evil Nintendo would have let them run it as an official tournament if they just asked. Why?
Well it's simple. To run an official tournament you need to show Nintendo that
1) If food is being sold, you are following all food safety guidelines
2) If alcohol is being sold, you have measures in place to prevent under aged drinking
3) If minors are competing, there are safeguards in place to prevent any unsupervised contact between minors and adults.
4) Specific to Splatoon, you will use the word "Splat" instead of "killed" in all commentary, and no match can be "called" until Judd gives the official score.
You must agree to limited liability if these conditions are breached, or if you don't end up enforcing the policies you told Nintendo you would be.
Turns out a lot of organizers didn't really like that 3rd one very much because they or their associated talent and players were pedophiles using Nintendo's status as a kid friendly brand to lure and groom minors. This resulted in unprecedented sexual abuse in the Smash community.
See that's the thing about allowing people to use someone's IP willy nilly. Nintendo is fanatic about protecting minors at official events. At the Pokémon worlds, Children have escorts at all times and their is a huge police presence for the 10 and under events. No one but competitors and officials are allowed anywhere near the event. Parents start to associate Nintendo with this level of safety and security. So when they see an event being advertised with official Nintendo characters, they assume it's safe to let their children attend, because Nintendo is spending millions to protect children and project this image at official events.
So before Nintendo can shut down an event, it has to be unofficial, and the reason it's unofficial is that it's not willing to prove it has safeguards to protect children in place. So by making the argument "Nintendo shouldn't stop these events" you (unknowingly, I would both hope and assume) are suggesting that Nintendo should abandon the safeguards they put in place to prevent the sexual abuse of minors and allow known bad actors to continue to use Nintendo's IP to lure children.
Maybe ... don't make that argument? Nothing is ever as simple aa black and white, and if you're going to form a strong opinion on a subject, make sure it's an informed opinion. Nintendo might strong arm organizers, but they have good reason to do so.
I hate all these articles that treat this like some kind of moral choice.
Companies exist to make money. They will sell physical media as long as it's profitable. They will stop selling physical media when it stops being profitable. There is literally no other factor being considered.
In the US, the "trickle down" structure of retail makes it so the overwhelming majority of all the profits (1) go to shareholders and the people who own the location (NOT the stores leasing the space, the people who own the land or malls and are leasing the space to them), so it's largely not viable to be a supplier unless you have a high margin product. US companies and developers who primarily aim for that market are pulling out of retail because it's not a great deal for them. It's not like they woke up one day and decided they were morally opposed to physical media, it just stopped making them money.
Retail is pretty healthy in SEA, so physical media is still pretty heathy over there. Not because anyone decided to put on white hats and be the savor of game preservation, but because it's still profitable, with distribution and storefronts operating completely differently to how they do in the West, and a larger share of the profits ending up with the people who make the product being sold.
If it stops being profitable, they will stop selling physical media. If some massive changes make retail viable in the UK and US again, physical media will have a resurgence there as well. That's all there is to it.
(1) For perspective, while it varies greatly from state to state and store to store, if you sell a $50 game at a US retail location, $3-5 will go to the developer, $5-7 will go to the publisher, and the store will keep around $1. The rest goes to distribution and rent. When you sell the game game on the E-shop, Nintendo takes anywhere from $5 to $15, depending on volume sold, and the rest goes to the publisher who will split it with the developer based on the terms of their publisher agreement. This can be as favorable as 70% going to the developer. So put yourself in that situation ... you can get $25 a unit with no risk, or you can get $3 a unit while taking the huge risk of having to buy back unsold units. Not really a hard choice. You might think "why give up that $3, go for every possible sale", but that dosen't work in the real world. You only make $3 a sale, and you're going to be out $20+ for every unsold unit (you have to pay production, shipping, retail insurance, and disposal ), so you're taking on potentially company destroying risk just to get a few more sales with almost no margin.
It's true you can find a house that cheap, but only in "Haikyo" towns ... areas that are facing heavy gentrification towards large cities. The remaining population is generally very old and unable to relocate because they are poor and uneducated. How do I say this politely ... they are ... generally unwelcoming to foreigners. When I spend time in rural areas like that I get "carded" (asked for ID and residency papers) by police at least daily. Given these areas are not patrolled, that means people are seeing me ... every day, sometimes for months at a time .. and calling the police to come deal with the strange white dude hanging around looking all shady. I would not recommend it as a starter home for someone who isn't already fluent in the language and customs.
You'll also want to keep in mind that as a non-citizen, you will be limited in you ability to buy a house. It varies from prefecture to prefecture, but you generally need special permission, so start that process long (at least a year) before you intend to move.
But not to be a total downer, there are a lot of opportunities for work visas right now among a labor shortage. So best of luck to you if you decide to go that way.
No, that's in English, so you got it from Nintendo of America's website. Click on "careers" and you'll be brought to a page that clearly indicates this with the title "NINTENDO OF AMERICA CAREERS".
That's exactly what I was saying. This comes from misunderstandings about when you are dealing with Nintendo, the Japanese game DEVELOPER and Nintendo of America or UK, the English speaking game PUBLISHERS. If you go the the DEVELOPERS web site, you'll find several ways to give feedback, as well as a detailed "ask the developer" section where developer answer fan questions, but you'll also encounter this ... the only English text on the site.
"We accept inquiries only in Japanese language."
There is a link for people looking to work with Nintendo on projects, but it's just a e-mail address and it clearly states you should not expect a reply.
You want to keep in mind that millions of people want to pitch ideas to Nintendo. It's a heavily curated process and most ideas never get past the phase where you send a comment to an account that doesn't reply unless they are interested in moving forward. I've actually pitched a project to Nintendo. It took 20 people 3 and a half years to get the meeting, which only came after showing a detailed alpha build and a full business plan that showed we could produce more funding then we would be asking Nintendo to contribute (generally called a "skin in the game" requirement", this is pretty standard before ANY company will consider your pitch). The meeting was less then 10 minutes long, it took place in a common area of the Kyoto headquarters (not even an office!) and the intern I was pitching to said "Thank you so much for your time. We have your contact information". That was the last I head from them. 3 and a half years of work for that ... and honestly, I'm thrilled with that result. Way better then what I expected!
This is not an insult to you, and I really hope we've been talking enough that you can see I respect you and your opinion, but I have to get real for a second. If you ran a $64 billion company, would you want to give time to hearing a "pitch" from someone who didn't even take the time to inform themselves on your corporates organizational structure and your relationship with your overseas subsidiaries?
That's just self selection.
Want to work with Nintendo? Steps 1 and 2 are learn Japanese and move to Japan. A bit much? Maybe. But 10s of 1000s of people are willing to do that just for the chance, and you can't blame Nintendo for taking them more seriously.
I get what you are saying and understand why a lot of people think this, but this is categorically false, and comes down to a misunderstanding about how Nintendo of America, Nintendo UK and Nintendo are related.
Nintendo asks for player feedback all the time, and incorporates it into games in meaningful and obvious ways. Most the changes to Splatoon 3 tri-color battels and Splatfest score are the direct results of polls Nintendo put out in gaming magazines. Miyamoto-san even changed the official Zelda lore because he liked a fan theory better then his own work.
The problem is you need to learn Japanese and move to Japan. Nintendo of America and Nintendo UK are both just publishers. Nintendo owns them, but they are self run and have a specific roll. They have no direct say in most game development. They are not solicited for an opinion. They are not kept in the loop. They put games in boxes and sell them. Period.
So as an English speaker, you have no real way of contacting Nintendo THE GAME DESIGNER, and providing your feedback, and Nintendo doesn't have an easy way of soliciting that feedback. And people in Japan who do not speak English have no meaningful way to get feedback to Microsoft Game Studios, and Microsoft doesn't ask anyone in Japan what the next Halo game should be like. That's just how globalization works.
More importantly, Nintendo builds games based on Japanese sensibilities, given the games are made by Japanese people in Japan! We don't even have this argument in Japan. The reason Splatfest and Turf War don't' have match making is because in Japan, they haven't dealt with 300 years of ultra capitalist telling you that you are WORTHLESS if you're not the best and that winning is the only thing that matter. Most people would rather be on a awful team, try their best, and lose ... because the crippling social pressure you are constantly under in Japan puts higher value on people who do that then it places on people who win all the time. In fact, most people REALLY don't like people who win all the time, unless they are super humble about it and deflect their success to others around them.
The reasons you could only play Salmon run 50% of the time in Splatoon 1 was that Japan's culture puts a huge value on time limited experiences. No one thought it would be a problem, in fact they figured people would like it BETTER that way. I HATE THAT. You go to a restaurant and order something you really like? Their is like a 90% chance the next time you go it's not on the menu any more. I swear one day I'm going to go to Starbucks and they are going to tell me coffee was a limited time offer and they don't sell it any more. But hey, it's not my place to judge, and it's not my place to try to get them to do things "my" way. All I can do is learn to appreciate our differences. I'm really glad Nintendo and Japanese studios don't take much feedback from the West, and I'm glad Western studios don't take feedback from Japan. It results in a much more diverse gaming landscape.
I mean, there is no official mod support for Splatoon, so you would need illegally modified hardware, but assuming you're okay with that ... yeah it's pretty easy build. Just locate the hex value for player health and up it to a value over 800 (the higher single target attack does 800 dmg) and then locate the hex for regen time set it to zero. Or you could set every weapon to do zero damage, but I would think that would be much more time consuming.
But I can't stress enough how misguided the mode is. How much turf you can ink is a function of your weapon and has almost no room for human optimization. Think of your weapon as having a turf "cap". If you simply move and shoot, you'll be at the cap. Come up with a more optimized way to move? Find a way to reduce overlap? Find a way to shot faster? It wouldn't matter. Your actually converge would be artificially reduced to the cap. This is by design, Nintendo doesn't want the game to be about finding the best way to "exploit" your weapon or movement, so they made it impossible to improve over "default". It's built into the basic code, so it's not something that you could realistically change without official mod support or completely reverse engineering the code. Even if you could change the value of the cap (which I don't think you can because of how the values are stored) you could never change the fact that it's not variable.
So everyone grabs a Reef-lux. It might as well be your only weapon option, given it has the highest turf cap by far. Use a different weapon, you lose, simply based on math.
Then you all go around painting at cap with no opposition. The winner would come down to which team had the best gear, optimized to primary ink saving and ink recovery. It would have basically nothing to do with human agency. You could lose the game for your team by deliberately playing bad, but you couldn't do anything to have a positive impact on the outcome other then just ... not trolling.
Given they ink less turf then your primary, If you ever use your secondary, you lose. You would use your special to refill your ink, but with then cancel it immediately without firing.
I can defiantly understand that frustration. I LOVE Counter Strike. I watch it all the time, go to majors when I can. I've been a fan for 2 decades. And I'm comically bad at it! I can't walk down a hallway or turn a corner without losing my head. Can really take the fun out of playing.
Keep in mind that in Splatoon, Turf War has no matchmaking logic attached to it whatsoever. It creates a pool of 8 players and tries to keep them together, swapping them between teams, for as long as possible. The idea is that even if the player skill is varied, the fact that you will be against the best (or worst) players as often as you are on the same team as them will smooth out the matches. You could be playing your first game and end up in a pool with a pro player.
I would say the results are ... mixed at best. Honestly it's not any worse then, say, DOTA or LOL, but one sided matches are perhaps a little too common.
You might want to try ranked instead. Not only wont you face players that are way outside your skill level, but if your not very skilled your rank will decrease, and that will give you an opportunity to practice against players on the same level. That's how I deal with Counter Strike ... I just accept that I'm bad, and join FaceIt games with other bad players. Nothing wrong with being bad! We all have to start somewhere.
The ranked game modes are also much less chaotic (except Clam blitz. Clam blitz is like a nightmare fever dream), and spawn camping if more or less impossible given you have to be where the objective is.
Splatoon also has a co-op mode in Salmon Run, although "casual" and "laid-back" are NOT words I would use to describe it ... at least not at "base" rank. But the good news is, if you're okay with losing at first, the lower ranked matches are MUCH easier and can be a lot of fun.
Looking at Splatzone (the other modes very, but less then you would think. Tower control is the largest outlier, as it favors long range weapons)
The most used weapon in X is the 52 Gal, followed by the 3 variations of the Splattershot, followed by 17 other weapons until the first roller shows up. Rollers are basically unused in X. And while one roller has a very high win rate (Foil Flingza Roller, 60%) it is one of the least picked weapons, appearing in less then 2.5% of games. This indicates that the high win rate is because it's very good in given situations, rather then overall a powerful weapon.
It's also has a pretty average kill rate of 5.3 a game. By contrast, the blaster has a 7.3 kill rate. The only roller with a decent kill rate is the Carbon Roller and it's variants, but they all have negative win rates. So the best roller isn't winning because it gets a lot of splats, and the roller that gets a lot of splats isn't winning games.
When you look only at the top 2000 players, it gets even more dramatically un-roller. The top winning roller is in only 1% of games and has a lower win rate then 20 other weapons.
I guess I should also point out that in X, of the top 50 weapons, only one has Kraken as a special, and based on overall usage, it appears in less then 1% of games.
My point is that you FEEL rollers are OP, and that makes it true for you. You'll notice more when rollers win, you notice more when a roller splats you. This is literally true of every person playing every online game. I hate Pudge in DOTA2. I always notice when a Pudge goes off and wins a game. I think it's a very OP hero .. despite knowing for a fact that it's complete dog crap and has been for 10 years. At times, he's has a win rate lower then 35% and I was still raging to my team about how broken he was!
However, based solely on factual information, win rates, and others statistics, rollers are awful, and skilled players do not use them. Nintendo is always going to balance based on this telemetry. It's also important to note that Nintendo is far more likely to make changes that result in a better play experience for the 65% of the player base that is C- to B+ rank, rather then the less then 5% that are X.
Here is one public site that collects telemetry. If you speak Japanize and have a credit card that can be used in Japan, you can get even better info though paid sites that track both user data and pro teams. I tried to use this public data instead of the paywalled data for this post.
Look I don't want to toss too much shade on a great game that a lot of people are enjoying, but my personal experience with every bit of DLC has been the same.
Oh wow! Look at all this new stuff! Let me boot this thing up again and check out all the new details!
(Load game)
Wait ... is there like ... anything ... TO DO?
(Crickets)
(Quit game)
There has never been a game with more content and less to actually do. Some people just love the sandbox and power to ya, but man, a bit of direction would go a long way.
It only works like that if the game doesn't use match making. For example, if you play a game like Diablo and allow anyone to join your perosnal session, blocked players are excluded.
However, for any game that uses match matching internally, blocked players are still part of the match making pool and you may be matched with them at any time.
It's really a rock and a hard place type thing. It sucks not being able to block people, but at the same time, no game can give players that level of control over the match making pool. People would simply block everyone from every game they ever lost, and even if no one abused the system it would mess up your internal number too much. You're spending millions a year to pay people to optimize search parameters and match making priorities to hit a given average wait time ... you can't let a few people with large block lists toss that all out the window.
This is pretty consistent over all games that have match making. People who you block on PSN/Xbox Live can be matched with you in COD, people you block on Steam can be matched with you in DOTA or CS2.
I'm not really sure how that would work. Without the opponents ability's to hinder your progress, you're not actually playing a completive game. Their would be zero strategy in what you are describing. It might work as a time trail mode when you try to paint as quickly as possible, but given that how much turf you can ink is 100% just a function of what weapon you have and has almost no room for human optimization, I don't see that being any fun or interesting.
Objective based game doesn't mean no opposition, it just means it's not a death match and you don't win based on kill score. The game is a completive 3rd person shooter, without that aspect their is no game. It's like saying you wish there was a version of DOTA or LOL where the teams couldn't fight each other and just hit the objectives uncontested until someone's ancient exploded.. Sure, you win by destroying the objectives and you can theoretically win a game without a single kill on your team, but destroying objectives isn't the GAME. The GAME is how the other team is trying to stop you, and how you are dealing with that.
But the important thing to remember in an objective based game is that splatting is not always good, and being splatted is not always bad. If you get splatted, but in doing so you ink enough turf and take enough time away from the other team's inking, that was a net positive. You did "good", enough that you got splatted. And if you splat someone, but in doing so you were distracted from inking to the point where turf was lost, that's a net negative. You got the splat, but you did "bad", and you didn't help your team win.
DOTA 2 even has a concept of the "Maelk award". Maelk, a pro player for Evil Geniuses, went 0 and 20 in a game (zero kills, 20 deaths), and not only did his team win, but many felt he was the MVP due to the space he created for his team, which allowed them to focus on objects. He didn't just win in SPIT of dying 20 times, he won the game because he forced the other team to spend so much time killing him. The "Maelk award" is something casters talk about whenever a player is having a huge positive impact on the game but dying a lot. "Looks like he's trying for the Maelk award" is a way to pointing out to viewers that sometimes dying is good.
This is likely just math. The roller category is really popular, especially in C- to B+ ranked or unranked games. They are bad though. Like, REAL bad. Only one roller has a positive (over 50%) win rate, and some of the most popular are the lowest winning weapons in the game, like the Splat Roller. It's always in the top 20 weapons by usage, but has a sub 43% win rate. Only the E-liter 4K has a lower win rate among weapons that get any real usage.
Also keep in mind that getting splatted is fine! It's an objective based game! Chargers have an awful win rate in low rank games specifically because the people who use them get a lot of splats ... but don't paint any turf!
While I enjoyed both this and the first one, I don't think either was that great.
Gameplay got slow and repetitive in a way that most "run" based games avoid simply because it's not actually a difficult game. You can beat almost any encounter with pretty basic skill rotations that's are not difficult to figure out.
It's just unforgiving. It punishes even slight misplays, which might sound good in theory and/or work well for action RPGS, but in a turn based system it just results in you always spending 15 turns to do what should be possible in 5, just to make sure you min/max every possible benefit and opportunity to heal stress. I really dislike when a game's design encourages you to keep a single monster alive as long as possible while you spam healing and mitigation spells you don't have access to out of combat. It can really eliminate any emersion as it takes you completely out of the games setting.
I was hoping the 2nd would fix that, but it didn't.
Comments 2,060
Re: Japanese Charts: Baseball Takes The Crown In Another Switch-Filled Bonanza
@BanjoPickles
It's important to note these are self reported numbers and given they are not a direct statement of revenue which would be bound by discloser law, there is no way to know how accurate they are.
Sony's lifetime PS2 number was already higher then what most people in the industry estimated based on sell-though numbers before the final update in 2012. But earlier this year they updated it seemingly at random, to give it a more comfortable lead on the Switch.
Not to say it's impossible that the Sony number isn't 100% accurate and the update, 12 years later, was based on some legitimate factor, like units sold between the last update and end of production, even though waiting over a decade to update a number you were repeating to investors every week and likely had a direct impact on your Stock price at the time is ... odd. But we just don't know. We also don't know how accurate Nintendo's figure is. Is one sell-though while the other is B2B? Dose one double count refurbished units sold OEM? Dose one count courtesy and promotional units given away for free as "sales"?
We just don't know, and (for me at least) that makes it a lot less interesting to talk about the "best selling of all time" now that they are this close. Even if you take the numbers on face, by Sony's "updated" number, the PS2 sold over 10 million units after the release of the PS3. So if we count on around 10 million Switch sales between 2025 and 2032 the Switch should not only take the crown, but take it in a boring, excruciatingly slow crawl. And that's not even accounting for when, in 2044, Nintendo updates the number to say they "found" a bunch more sales.
Re: Braid: Anniversary Edition Sales Have Been "Utterly Terrible", Says Creator
I mean the game is great.
So great that most people know it exists and if they have interest in it, already own it.
So great that it's been a highlighted product in several Humble Bundles, and has shown up as a promotional "free" game on several services.
So great, that in the 15 years (ish) years since release the idea has been copied, improved on, expanded on, refined, reinvented, and repacked by dozens of other developers.
So great, that you could argue it's one of the games that fueled the "indie game renaissance " resulting in hundreds of games that are similar in tone and feel, including several that are vastly superiour simply because they got to learn from the lessons this game taught us.
So you re-released this game that people have had countless opportunities to pick up for free or at an extremely low price, which was successful largely because of it's uniqueness and how it stood out then, but at a time when the genre and target market is completely saturated with other games, after so many years of delays that any hype is gone and people have forgetting this was even coming out ... and can't figure out why it's not selling?
I guess we'll never know.
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
@RygelXVIII
There is nothing to “win” in an argument, and that’s doubly true on the internet. It’s an exchange of ideas. I post here because I respect a lot of the frequent posters. They are intelligent people who often provide me with fascinating insight, and I consider myself pretty lucky to have a small group of people who regularly read and respond to me.
If you look at my original post … it’s a question. I’m asking for insight. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, I don’t understand something and I’m hoping someone else might have a better grasp of what’s going on then I do.
To break down my original post into formal logic, it states two premise. One is that F2P games and other free entertainment are very similar, and the second is that people treat them very differently. I present no arguments. Then I ask a question; why is this? Why do people treat them differently. That's the thing I want to talk about.
The problem is that some people who DO think arguments can be won and lost often approach them by attacking the premises rather than the argument itself. That’s not how arguments work and engaging with people who want to argue a premises isn’t productive. People can only have productive discourse when they accept a shared premise. That’s not to say there is anything wrong with disagreeing with my premise, only that… a meaningless back and forth isn’t why I posted.
Let’s say someone posts “I’m a Christian, and I don’t know if letting my daughter play COD is being a bad Christian. Can anyone help me?”. I personally think religion is nonsense, and a lot of people don’t like COD. But that’s not what the post is about. Replying with “Christianity is nonsense” or “COD is a bad game” isn’t engaging with the argument, it’s questioning the premise and wasting both of your time … even though there is nothing “wrong” with either of those opinions. The only way to make a productive comment to that person is to accept they want a Christian perspective and their daughter has already decided they want to play COD. There is no point replying if you can't do that.
So in fairness, you have never interacted with me ... you've simply read my posts and attacked their premise. If you're going to refrain from doing that in the future ... ummm ... great! Thank you!
But if you ever do have a constructive argument to make under a shared premise, I really hope you'll change your mind and share it with me. That's why I'm here. To get opinions from people who think differently then me. Well, that and sometimes I also correct factual errors. But mostly that first one!
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
@N64-ROX
See and that kinda loops back to my original point. I had one of those, right?
Like we have no problem saying YouTube is a fantastic free service, extremely entertaining, and a net positive, even though it would be a lot better without ads or a company behind it that in the last 10 years has gone from best of the bad options to flat out Bond villain.
There are very few post about how YouTube disgusts people on a moral and spiritual level, how it's the bane of the video media, and how everyone associated with it should be publicly draw and quartered. At the same time, there are not a lot of post about how F2P games can be fun, entertaining, and often well meaning, but would be a lot better without the ads and the bad actors.
I just don't understand why we treat these two very similar things so differently.
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
@Ace-Lucario
Babylon 5 is some of the best TV ever made. Like anything from that time, you're going to have to gloss over some pretty awfulness in the first season, and the second has some arguably worse "cringe" movements. But once Straczynski gets his way, gets to kill off the character the network made him put in ... it just becomes something incredible. Momentum that never lets up. Real mysteries that actually get paid off. An openly gay couple in a TV show from 1993 that you might not even notice your first time watching it. It's just never been replicated.
But really, you should check out Onegai My Melody first! Unironically one of the best shows I've ever seen.
Re: Review: Thank Goodness You're Here! (Switch) - A Face-Achingly Funny British Romp
@AlexOlney
This is the most polite way I've ever heard someone say "Thanks for the engagement, that's how I get paid (derogative agitative)".
I love it, and I commend you! Keep up the good work.
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
@N64-ROX
YouTube in a microtransaction based site. It makes $21 billion a year $0.04 cents at a time.
Cat videos are often monetized by their makers and these people use cats and cute animals as a predatory way of manipulating the human attraction to "cute" things that resemble children. The goal is to draw your attention to the video so that they make as much money as possible. Even if the poster isn't doing that, Google is doing it when it sends it to your feed.
There are both paid and free services you can use to make your thumbnail as manipulative as possible to attract views though "click bait". This practice is so widespread and profitable that Google now allows you to track analytics from multiple thumbnails so you can pick the one that preforms the best. A test program allows users to tweak the thumbnail based on user-demographics, so everyone is always seeing something they are more likely to engage with by eliciting a strong emotional response. The ultimate goal is to use science to make it almost impossible for you not to click, and they are getting close!
Each cat video begins with an ad that pops up and says "If you give us $11.99 you can watch the video RIGHT AWAY". If the video is longer then 5 minutes, it is extremely likely another ad will interrupt you and remind you that all you have to do is pay $11.99 to enjoy the video without ads! At default monetization setting, while several factors can effect this number a new ad and a new reminder that $11.99 is all it takes to stop this torture should pop up every 4 to 6 minutes. YouTube actually lets users INCREASE THIS to as high as an ad every 3 minutes. At peak times, Google will sometimes lower the quality of your video to 360p and blame it on ... you guessed it, you not giving them $11.99!
No one makes the choice between Cat videos and no video entertainment. We live in a world where Schindler's list, 5 Seasons of Babylon 5, and Onegai My Melody exist. Yet people still watch a lot of cat videos.
And, in addition to YouTube using the exact FTP, micro transition model you're hating on ... this game DOSEN'T use that. This game, like almost every Japanese FTP game, uses the coin-op model. Playing the game costs stamina, the primary thing you pay real money for is more stamina. You can also use money to overcome bosses before you should with a revive, but none of that progressed is gated. You can play in "cat video" sized doses every single day, and you'll hardly even know your playing a FTP game. You wont run out of stamina, and you'll never be reminded you can pay for more.
Now again, don't play this game. Don't play FTP games. That's your propagative. I don't care to change it. But you should realize your condemnation of FTP while you accept things like YouTube is extremely arbitrary. Cat Videos and FTP use the same monetization, and no FTP game will ever come close to the level of deliberate manipulation YouTube uses. Your perception of what FTP is like comes from Zynga and the worst examples of bad actors. Most games are not like that. Some are actually really good. Some are DOTA. And some suck. Just like paid games!
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
@RygelXVIII
I'm just going to assume this is satire. Because as satire, this is actually gold. Not just the post itself, but the meta-commentary of taking the time to read internet forums about games you are not interested in and reply to some dude on the internet's post with a thesis about how time is too precious a commodity to waste ... honestly, amazing work. Voltaire level genius.
Re: Review: Thank Goodness You're Here! (Switch) - A Face-Achingly Funny British Romp
TIL: Price Shaggers is the UK equivent of Sofa King's Sofa King Low prices.
Re: Review: The New Denpa Men (Switch) - A Simple, Goofy RPG With The Usual F2P Irritations
I will never get tired of how proud people sound when they declare "I refuse to be entertained your free entertainment because you have the audacity to try and make money from it"
Don't get me wrong, not wanting to play this game or free to play games in general is a perfectly valid opinion. I just don't get what they are so proud of. How are they "winning"?
A free game like this is like a cat video on YouTube.
When your choice is between the cat video and gazing into the void, becoming increasingly aware that you ... no, not just you ... your whole species, all life on your planet, can not possibly have meaning or purpose when viewed in the context of the infinite universe we are part of, and how nationality, culture, and religion are not "profound" or important, they are simply inventions we use to turn a blind eye to our isolation and the meaningless of our existence ... you watch the cat video!
You watch it for 10 minutes and enjoy it. Because it's there, it's free, and it's better then the alternative.
We we don't treat free games like that is completely beyond me.
Re: Soapbox: Why I Love A Good Map, And That Time I Mapped Yoshi's Melons For Nintendo Power
Wow, This and the HAL article are likely the two best to show up on this website all year. And while I'm obviously not complaining about two insightful, entertaining, well written and informative pieces in the same weekend ... maybe pace yourself a bit?
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@littlegreenbob
That's your purgative! But if I can be real for a second, you should be aware your opinions are uninformed right? Like you know that you believe those things not because you've ever been involved with game development, or been educated on project management? I don't know why you have an expectation that they would be accrete, and I don't understand why the idea that someone who has PMP certification and works in the game industry explaining how it actually works would be "condescending".
You're not expressing opinions, for the most part. You are projecting facts about how games are made, like how budgets are calculated or at what point DLC is baked into a games development. I'm not arguing your opinion, I'm saying your facts are wrong.
I'm just some dude on the internet and I have no right or desire to judge you. But I would suggest that while posting opinions is great and talking about them is fun, posting unfounded statements of fact to justify those opinions while also not being interested in learning how things actually work is a pretty negative practice.
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@littlegreenbob
I'm very confused.
I asked if you wanted me to inform you as to how your assumptions are inaccurate and asked if you had any source or evidence that cased you to believe them and you replied with a bunch of other assumptions. You're also now talking about mobile games and bad actors instead of the topic of our conversation, which is Midway and WB games development practices, or in general, game design at large studios. I'm not sure where I lost you, and I'm sorry if my post wasn't clear.
I understand you're stating what you think is obvious, and actually agree that what you are saying makes logical sense. But a lot of things that are incorrect seem obvious or logical at first, because reality is often counter-intuitive. To be clear, I'm telling you that what you think is obvious is completely inaccurate, and asking if a large post about what development looks like is something you would be interested in, or if it would be a waste of both our time because you're invested in these unfounded views.
No judgement! Just an honest question!
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@littlegreenbob
I really don't want to dismiss what you're saying outright, you clearly have a well thought-out opinion, but it all comes down to arbitrarily demonizing something while spinning the development process to support your argument.
I'm just going to say, in a completely non-aggressive way, that your understanding of how games are developed and how budgets are calculated and allocated is not representative of reality, at least no game I've ever worked on either from a development or project management standpoint. I would be carious as to your sources for these assumptions. They are not "stupid" or "illogical" or anything like that, it's just ... not how it actually works. Heck I think had a lot of the same misconceptions at some point, before I got to look behind the curtain.
So before I spend time actually writing a reply that's the question I'll ask you ... are you willing to accept that your core assumptions about game design might be inaccurate and allow me to inform those opinions? Because there is nowhere else for this conversation to go. I can't really address any of your arguments, because they are all based on an invalid premise.
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@Blast16
"Naïve", like "ignorant", isn't an insult, or even a word with absolute negative connotation. It's just a description of a state. I am ignorant to the rules of completive ski jumping, because I just don't know anything about them. I am naïve about Sanrio's business practices, because I know a lot about them, but tend to ignore the parts I don't like because of how much I love Hello Kitty. I really didn't mean to offend you in any way, or even suggest there is anything wrong with being naïve.
NES games have release versions. They had limited production runs, and if sales warranted a new production run developers often took that opportunity to update the game. You might own the 1.0 release cartridge, which has bugs, spelling or translation errors, or incomplete assists compared to the 1.1 version which you don't own. In extreme cases, bugs in early versions could cut the player off from some content, which would become playable in the later releases. Additional music and sounds were often added.
Manuals often had mistakes that were fixed in later production runs. Sometimes maps and other physical items were added to later production runs based off player feedback. Heck, box art occasionally changed.
If you look at the cartridge based systems, version updates between production runs were the norm, not the exception.
So I'm choosing to describe this idealistic situation you are describing, where you bought a game and that game was the "complete" and fully working version all the time as "naïve". It was never actually like that. It only exist because at the time, or even now, you might not have been aware that a better, more complete version of the game you own was released as a later production run.
If you buy Mortal Kombat One, but then never learn that any updates or DLC exists, you would also think the copy you owned was complete and worked as well as possible from day one. But you would have that opinion only because you didn't know about the exitance of updates, not because Mortal Kombat was produced in some golden ear where updates didn't happen.
Back in the day you bought a game. Sometimes it was so buggy and completely broken out of the box and you had to go back to Toy's R Us to return it. Sometimes it was a compete rip off and incomplete. Sometimes they fixed the bugs in later versions. Sometimes they didn't. It is no different then how it is today. Some games are still 100% working and compete day one. Some are not.
The only difference now is that fixing the broken ones is easier, it's much easier to know when a game is updated, and you don't have to rebuy the game completely to get the updated version. So I would say we're better off today.
It's also important to note that NES games in the 80s cost around $120 in today's dollars. You generally get all the DLC, as well as some pretty awesome physical items, in the $120 version of today's games.
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@littlegreenbob
I hear this argument a lot and I get how it sounds logical at a point, but this idea that it's include in "part of the development cycle" or not is completely arbitrary, and I think it comes from not fully considering how budgets work.
Your development cycle is determined by your projected revenue. If you are going to sell a game once for $60, your production budget is based on that. Let's say that means your going to have time and money to make 10 fighters.
If you are going to sell your game once for $60, then have a $20 DLC, you now have higher projected revenue. You have more money. With more money, you can increase your production cycle, and now you can include 12 fighters. Add another $10 DLC, your projected revenue goes up again. And so on.
Those are the two worlds you get to choose from. One where the game has a lower budget due to lower projected sales, a shorted development cycle, and less content, or one where it has a higher budget because it's charging for DLC and has higher projected sales, a longer development cycle, and more content. Either way, you know that going into the project. From day one, you have a budget of X based on Y projected sales. If you're going to release paid DLC, that's included in your projected sales and increases your budget.
Ignoring bad actors, you're looking for a world where despite having lower projected sales because there are no plans for DLC, the developer still allocates the increased budget that includes the extra money from the sale of DLC. That obviously can't happen. The money needs to come from somewhere. Even if this was a valid argument, the argument is actually just "developers should spend more money developing their games". It has nothing to do with DLC at this point.
I think the worst part of this argument comes to light if you look at a single developer planning a game and DLC and "judge" them based on this argument.
If you are going to sell a game with no DLC and project that will make you a million dollars, so you plan a million dollars of content, you're "good".
If you are going to sell a game with DLC and project the base game will make a millions dollars, so you spend a million dollars on content for the base game, and you project the DLC will make $200,000 so you spend $200,000 on content for the DLC, you are bad, evil, greedy and bad. Even though you put out the exact same base game at the exact same price.
And if you follow the most common REAL WORLD scenario, which is that you expect to make a million off the base game and $200,000 off the DLC so you spend $1.1 million on content for the base game and $100,000 on content for the DLC ... you are still evil, even though you gave people buying just the base game $100,000 more content then they would have got without DLC.
I think that's ... a bit naïve. So is the argument against "games in chunks". If "The Xenoblades Saga" was a $60 game (Xenoblades 1) with two $60 paid DLC (Xenoblades 2 and 3) ... how is that a worse value for the player then releasing 3 games at $60 each? There is also WAY more game play verity and engine upgrades in something like Xenoblades 2 and Torna the Golden Country, a paid DLC, then their is in something like Mario Kart Wii to 7. Saying one is bad because it's DLC but the other is fine because it's a new game is, again, pretty arbitrary.
Re: Mortal Kombat 1: Khaos Reigns Announced - Story Expansion, New Fighters And "Big Surprises"
@Blast16
While I get what you're saying and totally respect that opinion, that was also an era when Torna - The Golden Country, Future Connected, and Future redeemed would have each, by necessity, cost $60 and when (as others have pointed out) if you wanted balance updates and new characters for a fighting game, you shelled out full price for a new edition.
I think the two things at play here are a bit of nostalgia for an age that never existed, where we tend to look at the past, especially a past we didn't experience first hand or experienced as children, with rose colored glasses that filter out most of the reality of what it was actually like, and ... if you're forgive me saying so, a bit of a naïve interpretation of the word "complete".
At some point you have to release your game and start making money. You generally know this before you start development; you have a budget, and based on that budget, you can pay your staff until a given day. If the game isn't out by that day, you need to fire everyone, your game never comes out, and everyone is sad. Today, developers often contuse development past that point by using the funds generated by the games initial sales. Which is great! It means a lot of people get paid for a lot longer and the developer has a chance to react to feedback.
But eventually you need to make more money, or you're back to firing everyone (or getting a new budget for a new project) and stopping development. You can extend the time you are working on a project by charging for some of this post game work you've done in the form or DLC.
There is simply no world where Smash Ultimate launches with 89 fighters. There is a world where it is releases with 76 and never updates that roster, and one where it launches with 76 and charges for 12 additional fighters, while giving away 1 for free.
And that second world, the one we live in, is WAY BETTER. The people who only want to pay once get the game that would have existed in a world without DLC, while other people have the OPTION of spending more to add additional content. It literally the best of both worlds. No one is worse off, and we have more options. Heck, even the guy who hates DLC got a free fighter out of the deal because OTHER PEOPLE were willing to pay for the DLC. How awesome is that?
That isn't to say some bad actors don't misuse the system. That absolutely happens. But, back to the "age that never existed" thing, it's always been that way. There is no world where bad actors don't release broken, incomplete games and trick people into paying for them. There is a world where bad actors release broken, incomplete games and never fix them, and one world where they sometimes fix them with DLC. And again ... that second world is (marginally) better. In one, you wasted $60 on something that will always be trash. In the other, someone sold you an unstable product for $60 and then scammed you out of an additional $20 to make it playable. Both worlds suck, but we have to pick one. Even if we could eliminate bad actors, the world where we have nothing but "good" paid DLC and no bad actors is better then the world were we have neither.
And besides, in a world without paid DLC, I don't get to see Ryza in a swimsuit. Who would want to live in that world?
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Lightsiyd
Glad I could help!
Re: Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Outlines Upcoming Story Expansion DLC
Call me a lightweight or a spoiled non-purist, but while I'm actually enjoying the story and style of this game, I'm finding it almost impossible to play without the ability to speed up combat and movement.
I really hope some DLC or update adds that.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Lightsiyd
That's a great question. The thing is we don't have full specs, and we don't know what Nintendo is going to do with it's next console. I personally do not think it will be a "Switch 2". I think it will be a new product, maybe another dual screen system, that is backwards compatible, offers a new type of game play experience, but is not necessarily any more "powerful" on a raw graphical level.
But let's assume it's just a more powerful Switch, using the T239, like most of the industry is banking on.
The FDE (File Decompression Engine) is obviously a game changer for load times. Assuming Nintendo has a new high-speed storage format to pair it with, this could all but eliminate load times from moving assists into RAM. You can look online and find some possible hardware approximations applied to current Switch titles and load times are generally in the millisecond range.
The big question with frame rate is if the deep learning accelerator from the T234 is going to be part of the T239, or if they even add tensor cores to the space on the dye that used to be taken up by the T234's redundant features. If so, then games will have access to DLSS and frame generation at a fraction of the frame time cost that would normally be associated with these technologies. The thing is ... that's not really a solation suited to 120fps. It's more suited to offering much higher resolutions at 60fps and a full range of rasterization options at 30fps. I don't actually see the hardware pushing framerates higher, I just think we are going to get much better looking 30/60FPS games. If you want higher frame rates, you basically need a higher clock or more pipes for your existing clock. The T239 is unlikely to offer either in significant numbers, so I can't imagine increased frame rates were a priority in the system's design.
If I had to guess at the performance targets for the next Nintendo console, I would say they want to put out a unit that can play direct ports of Xbox S games and have them look as good or better. That way them and Microsoft can continue to pressure 3rd parties into making this 4Tflopish graphical range the low end target for releases for the foreseeable future.
I hope that answered your question!
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Jeff2sayshi
Agreed. I think it's silly that we spend so much time talking about how important graphics are when clearly they don't really matter to the majority of gamers. It's not even that the game sold well, but if you talk to most of the people playing it on Switch, the vast majority that never read a review or go to a website, they will give literally no complaints about how it looks or it's performance.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@N8tiveT3ch
That's crazy, no one would do that in the modern day ...
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/final-fantasy-xv-pocket-edition-hd-switch/
Oh. Hummm. Maybe you're onto something!
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Savage_Joe
I'm not here to argue with you if you think a google search is a substitute for a complete understanding of a topic. I'm here to offer people the chance to learn more then you would with a google search on the few topics I have a deeper understanding of, or to have others educate me in the immeasurable topics they have a deeper understanding then me in.
If you're not interested, that's fine. Thank you for taking the time to tell me what Google says.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Savage_Joe
That's the Gflops of the single stream processer running in FT32. It is not indicative of the total graphical output of the Switch, which uses FT16.
If you would like to dive into these aspect of computer science with me, I would be happy to break it down for you.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Dom_31
I think the confusing is coming from the fact that at some point Capcom internal started calling MT framework 3.0 "RE" (about the same time they realized it was a nightmare and they would keep using 2.0 for future games).
But thanks for the correction! The "Modern RE" that Wilds is running on is not the same. I changed my post to reflect this.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
@Savage_Joe @speedracer216
The PS4 is a 1.8 Tflop system. The Switch delivers around 1Tflop. There is also a lot of confusion around this number because it's higher then the base performance of the Tigra X1, but the custom chip on the Switch offers this level of performance,
So closer to twice as power, although the 4x assumption is very understandable given that the chip in the PS4 is about 4 times as powerful as the chip in the Switch. There are just other factors in place that increase the Switch's performance.
Re: Capcom's Investors Want Monster Hunter Wilds On Switch, Because Of Course
I mean ... it's coming out on series S, which is a 4TFlop system, and it's running on the RE engine, which is built of the engine that Monster Hunter World runs on.
The Switch is a 1TFlop system, and while a 1/4th of the power seems like an insurmountable difference, it's important to remember that squares and rectangles have 4 sides! This makes the math a lot more favorable, given you can run something at half the resolution and (at a grossly over simplified level) it only takes 1/4th the processing power.
It's also important to note that Capcom didn't bring World to switch, even though they ported it to the 1.3TB Xbox One, and we've seen that with a decent port, Switch and Xbox One performance can be comparable.
They have also said the reason they are not porting World to Switch is that they are more focused on bringing a Monster Hunter experience to Nintendo portable system that takes advantage of it's portable nature, and that they want to have a separate Monster Hunter product for younger and older players.
So power probably isn't the only concern here. Capcom might be worried about cannibalism of the "Stories" series by making main world titles available on Switch. Heck, Nintendo was the world-wide publisher of the original DS Monster Hunter Stories (Capcom published it in Japan) and their might even be a existing deal to keep main-line titles off Nintendo hardware that's a hold-over from that.
Bottom line ... to be clear, I know absolutely nothing for sure. I have no insider information. I'm just talking here. But I'm pretty sure they could make this run on Switch if they really wanted to, and I think the idea that this is for sure going to make it onto Nintendo's next console isn't a sure thing.
Consumer reaction is also important to consider. The Hogwarts Legacy port is a great example of a game that took huge hits to graphics to allow a port to Switch, and even though it likely had zero impact on sales and was only happening because people who would never buy a Switch game in the first place were very loud, there was a very vocal negative reaction.
Maybe Capcom just doesn't want a news cycle to spend a week talking about how awful the new monster hunter game looks on Swatch.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
@AJWolfTill
Bah, don't' be so hard on yourself. You did your due diligence, which is better then most people. There was just a lot of confusing and contradicting information to work though before getting to the actual organizational structure.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
@Fiskern
They are not. They are doing fantastic and are wildly successful. Given their size and the number of products they have put out that hit exceptional ratings and above average sales, they are likely one of the most profitable independent publishers ever.
But someone figured the stock price of the parent company might go up if the fired everyone, so they did that.
it's a huge misconception that lay-offs in publicly traded companies are generally tied to underperformance. While this obviously happens, most of the time it's just a company firing everyone right before an earnings report so that operating cost looks lower on their balance sheet, hoping that will up the share price and encourage investment. Then they rehire for the positions at lower pay or distribute the work load to other employees who earn less.
That's capitalism, baby. This is just a company being good at capitalism.
Re: Random: The New Denpa Men Is Getting Roasted For Its Translation Issues
@MeloMan
That's actually a really good analogy and I wish more people were talking about things like that rather then blaming AI, given this was clearly human translated (AI dosn't make spelling mistakes)
Zero Wing, as well as a lot of games back then, was translated by "the guy on staff who paid the most attention in high school English classes". I'm guessing that's what happened here too. It's a free game, so they just had that dude on staff who listens to US pop music do the translation in a day, thinking it would be "good enough" and people would find it funny.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
@AJWolfTill
Like I said, it's complicated. This is from Forbes, who are generally very up to date on how the money is flowing and vigorous fact check.
"Humble Games, the indie publisher operating under the Humble Bundle marque owned by Ziff Davis–and OPERATED under its IGN Entertainment subsidiary–has reportedly laid off all 36 employees, just days after its most recent release"
But at the end of the day, we only know what the company tells us. Maybe their was resent change and it was the catalyst to this announcement, which is leading to the confusion. Maybe their was a change as part of this announcement, but that wasn't made public. Maybe Forbes just got it wrong. Maybe IGN just got it wrong. Who knows.
You and me both did our due diligence! It's not our fault sources disagree.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
@AJWolfTill
Organizational structure is hard. You can basically cut off the who owns who chain at either point. I chose IGN because based on the disclosers I've seen, they are responsible for day to day operations and are the ones making decision, even though they themselves have a parent.
The same way most of us would say Adsense is owned by Google, even though it's technically owned by Alphabet. The money to pay for that product comes from Google's coffers and Google would be the one to decide to shut it down. Alphabet's ownership is largely irrelevant.
Re: Random: The New Denpa Men Is Getting Roasted For Its Translation Issues
Google and AI don't make spelling mistakes.
I mean, it's a bad localization for sure, but falling back on buzz words and fearmongering never makes your argument stronger, especially when it's obvious that it's not the case. This is human translated. It's just human translated poorly.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
@Wool_Sheep
Thanks for that info. I appreciate it.
I'll be shocked and disappointed if it turns out that my suspicion of how this is the result of misguided lazafair capitalism turns out to be incorrect and it's actually the result of a slightly different misguided lazafair capitalism.
Re: All Humble Games Staff Reportedly Laid Off As Publisher Announces "Restructuring"
This if awful.
Humble only had 36 employees that all worked remotely. They are owned and bankrolled by IGN, so it's unlikely IGN will simple shutter the publisher.
What's more likely is they are going to simply rehire for every position at lower starting pay, and end remote working. Unfortunately you can use a "back to office" mandate to get around what little protections exist to prevent this behavior, and some excusive probably figured everyone was just slacking off working remotely ... despite literally every one of the 1000s of studies done on the subject showing remote workers are more productive.
Re: Nintendo Strips Team Jackpot Of Splatoon 3 World Championship Win
@Samalik
The question you should be asking yourself before making statements like this is "why not just become an official tournament?" It's an option open to anyone. You could run an official Smash tournament yourself if you wanted to. And yet these organizers are choosing not to do that, then complaining about big evil Nintendo not letting them run the tournament ... when big evil Nintendo would have let them run it as an official tournament if they just asked. Why?
Well it's simple. To run an official tournament you need to show Nintendo that
1) If food is being sold, you are following all food safety guidelines
2) If alcohol is being sold, you have measures in place to prevent under aged drinking
3) If minors are competing, there are safeguards in place to prevent any unsupervised contact between minors and adults.
4) Specific to Splatoon, you will use the word "Splat" instead of "killed" in all commentary, and no match can be "called" until Judd gives the official score.
You must agree to limited liability if these conditions are breached, or if you don't end up enforcing the policies you told Nintendo you would be.
Turns out a lot of organizers didn't really like that 3rd one very much because they or their associated talent and players were pedophiles using Nintendo's status as a kid friendly brand to lure and groom minors. This resulted in unprecedented sexual abuse in the Smash community.
See that's the thing about allowing people to use someone's IP willy nilly. Nintendo is fanatic about protecting minors at official events. At the Pokémon worlds, Children have escorts at all times and their is a huge police presence for the 10 and under events. No one but competitors and officials are allowed anywhere near the event. Parents start to associate Nintendo with this level of safety and security. So when they see an event being advertised with official Nintendo characters, they assume it's safe to let their children attend, because Nintendo is spending millions to protect children and project this image at official events.
So before Nintendo can shut down an event, it has to be unofficial, and the reason it's unofficial is that it's not willing to prove it has safeguards to protect children in place. So by making the argument "Nintendo shouldn't stop these events" you (unknowingly, I would both hope and assume) are suggesting that Nintendo should abandon the safeguards they put in place to prevent the sexual abuse of minors and allow known bad actors to continue to use Nintendo's IP to lure children.
Maybe ... don't make that argument? Nothing is ever as simple aa black and white, and if you're going to form a strong opinion on a subject, make sure it's an informed opinion. Nintendo might strong arm organizers, but they have good reason to do so.
https://kotaku.com/over-50-sexual-misconduct-allegations-have-the-super-sm-1844328719
Re: Capcom Currently Has No Plans To End Physical Game Support
I hate all these articles that treat this like some kind of moral choice.
Companies exist to make money. They will sell physical media as long as it's profitable. They will stop selling physical media when it stops being profitable. There is literally no other factor being considered.
In the US, the "trickle down" structure of retail makes it so the overwhelming majority of all the profits (1) go to shareholders and the people who own the location (NOT the stores leasing the space, the people who own the land or malls and are leasing the space to them), so it's largely not viable to be a supplier unless you have a high margin product. US companies and developers who primarily aim for that market are pulling out of retail because it's not a great deal for them. It's not like they woke up one day and decided they were morally opposed to physical media, it just stopped making them money.
Retail is pretty healthy in SEA, so physical media is still pretty heathy over there. Not because anyone decided to put on white hats and be the savor of game preservation, but because it's still profitable, with distribution and storefronts operating completely differently to how they do in the West, and a larger share of the profits ending up with the people who make the product being sold.
If it stops being profitable, they will stop selling physical media. If some massive changes make retail viable in the UK and US again, physical media will have a resurgence there as well. That's all there is to it.
(1) For perspective, while it varies greatly from state to state and store to store, if you sell a $50 game at a US retail location, $3-5 will go to the developer, $5-7 will go to the publisher, and the store will keep around $1. The rest goes to distribution and rent. When you sell the game game on the E-shop, Nintendo takes anywhere from $5 to $15, depending on volume sold, and the rest goes to the publisher who will split it with the developer based on the terms of their publisher agreement. This can be as favorable as 70% going to the developer. So put yourself in that situation ... you can get $25 a unit with no risk, or you can get $3 a unit while taking the huge risk of having to buy back unsold units. Not really a hard choice. You might think "why give up that $3, go for every possible sale", but that dosen't work in the real world. You only make $3 a sale, and you're going to be out $20+ for every unsold unit (you have to pay production, shipping, retail insurance, and disposal ), so you're taking on potentially company destroying risk just to get a few more sales with almost no margin.
Re: Splatoon 3 Fresh New Update Now Live (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@AstroTheGamosian
It's true you can find a house that cheap, but only in "Haikyo" towns ... areas that are facing heavy gentrification towards large cities. The remaining population is generally very old and unable to relocate because they are poor and uneducated. How do I say this politely ... they are ... generally unwelcoming to foreigners. When I spend time in rural areas like that I get "carded" (asked for ID and residency papers) by police at least daily. Given these areas are not patrolled, that means people are seeing me ... every day, sometimes for months at a time .. and calling the police to come deal with the strange white dude hanging around looking all shady. I would not recommend it as a starter home for someone who isn't already fluent in the language and customs.
You'll also want to keep in mind that as a non-citizen, you will be limited in you ability to buy a house. It varies from prefecture to prefecture, but you generally need special permission, so start that process long (at least a year) before you intend to move.
But not to be a total downer, there are a lot of opportunities for work visas right now among a labor shortage. So best of luck to you if you decide to go that way.
Re: Splatoon 3 Fresh New Update Now Live (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@AstroTheGamosian
No, that's in English, so you got it from Nintendo of America's website. Click on "careers" and you'll be brought to a page that clearly indicates this with the title "NINTENDO OF AMERICA CAREERS".
That's exactly what I was saying. This comes from misunderstandings about when you are dealing with Nintendo, the Japanese game DEVELOPER and Nintendo of America or UK, the English speaking game PUBLISHERS. If you go the the DEVELOPERS web site, you'll find several ways to give feedback, as well as a detailed "ask the developer" section where developer answer fan questions, but you'll also encounter this ... the only English text on the site.
"We accept inquiries only in Japanese language."
There is a link for people looking to work with Nintendo on projects, but it's just a e-mail address and it clearly states you should not expect a reply.
You want to keep in mind that millions of people want to pitch ideas to Nintendo. It's a heavily curated process and most ideas never get past the phase where you send a comment to an account that doesn't reply unless they are interested in moving forward. I've actually pitched a project to Nintendo. It took 20 people 3 and a half years to get the meeting, which only came after showing a detailed alpha build and a full business plan that showed we could produce more funding then we would be asking Nintendo to contribute (generally called a "skin in the game" requirement", this is pretty standard before ANY company will consider your pitch). The meeting was less then 10 minutes long, it took place in a common area of the Kyoto headquarters (not even an office!) and the intern I was pitching to said "Thank you so much for your time. We have your contact information". That was the last I head from them. 3 and a half years of work for that ... and honestly, I'm thrilled with that result. Way better then what I expected!
This is not an insult to you, and I really hope we've been talking enough that you can see I respect you and your opinion, but I have to get real for a second. If you ran a $64 billion company, would you want to give time to hearing a "pitch" from someone who didn't even take the time to inform themselves on your corporates organizational structure and your relationship with your overseas subsidiaries?
That's just self selection.
Want to work with Nintendo? Steps 1 and 2 are learn Japanese and move to Japan. A bit much? Maybe. But 10s of 1000s of people are willing to do that just for the chance, and you can't blame Nintendo for taking them more seriously.
Re: Surprise! New Splatoon 3 amiibo Are On The Way
Wow, we're picking the idol group for the next game. Neat.
Re: Splatoon 3 Fresh New Update Now Live (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@AstroTheGamosian
I get what you are saying and understand why a lot of people think this, but this is categorically false, and comes down to a misunderstanding about how Nintendo of America, Nintendo UK and Nintendo are related.
Nintendo asks for player feedback all the time, and incorporates it into games in meaningful and obvious ways. Most the changes to Splatoon 3 tri-color battels and Splatfest score are the direct results of polls Nintendo put out in gaming magazines. Miyamoto-san even changed the official Zelda lore because he liked a fan theory better then his own work.
The problem is you need to learn Japanese and move to Japan. Nintendo of America and Nintendo UK are both just publishers. Nintendo owns them, but they are self run and have a specific roll. They have no direct say in most game development. They are not solicited for an opinion. They are not kept in the loop. They put games in boxes and sell them. Period.
So as an English speaker, you have no real way of contacting Nintendo THE GAME DESIGNER, and providing your feedback, and Nintendo doesn't have an easy way of soliciting that feedback. And people in Japan who do not speak English have no meaningful way to get feedback to Microsoft Game Studios, and Microsoft doesn't ask anyone in Japan what the next Halo game should be like. That's just how globalization works.
More importantly, Nintendo builds games based on Japanese sensibilities, given the games are made by Japanese people in Japan! We don't even have this argument in Japan. The reason Splatfest and Turf War don't' have match making is because in Japan, they haven't dealt with 300 years of ultra capitalist telling you that you are WORTHLESS if you're not the best and that winning is the only thing that matter. Most people would rather be on a awful team, try their best, and lose ... because the crippling social pressure you are constantly under in Japan puts higher value on people who do that then it places on people who win all the time. In fact, most people REALLY don't like people who win all the time, unless they are super humble about it and deflect their success to others around them.
The reasons you could only play Salmon run 50% of the time in Splatoon 1 was that Japan's culture puts a huge value on time limited experiences. No one thought it would be a problem, in fact they figured people would like it BETTER that way. I HATE THAT. You go to a restaurant and order something you really like? Their is like a 90% chance the next time you go it's not on the menu any more. I swear one day I'm going to go to Starbucks and they are going to tell me coffee was a limited time offer and they don't sell it any more. But hey, it's not my place to judge, and it's not my place to try to get them to do things "my" way. All I can do is learn to appreciate our differences. I'm really glad Nintendo and Japanese studios don't take much feedback from the West, and I'm glad Western studios don't take feedback from Japan. It results in a much more diverse gaming landscape.
Re: Splatoon 3 Fresh New Update Now Live (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@CaleBoi25
I mean, there is no official mod support for Splatoon, so you would need illegally modified hardware, but assuming you're okay with that ... yeah it's pretty easy build. Just locate the hex value for player health and up it to a value over 800 (the higher single target attack does 800 dmg) and then locate the hex for regen time set it to zero. Or you could set every weapon to do zero damage, but I would think that would be much more time consuming.
But I can't stress enough how misguided the mode is. How much turf you can ink is a function of your weapon and has almost no room for human optimization. Think of your weapon as having a turf "cap". If you simply move and shoot, you'll be at the cap. Come up with a more optimized way to move? Find a way to reduce overlap? Find a way to shot faster? It wouldn't matter. Your actually converge would be artificially reduced to the cap. This is by design, Nintendo doesn't want the game to be about finding the best way to "exploit" your weapon or movement, so they made it impossible to improve over "default". It's built into the basic code, so it's not something that you could realistically change without official mod support or completely reverse engineering the code. Even if you could change the value of the cap (which I don't think you can because of how the values are stored) you could never change the fact that it's not variable.
So everyone grabs a Reef-lux. It might as well be your only weapon option, given it has the highest turf cap by far. Use a different weapon, you lose, simply based on math.
Then you all go around painting at cap with no opposition. The winner would come down to which team had the best gear, optimized to primary ink saving and ink recovery. It would have basically nothing to do with human agency. You could lose the game for your team by deliberately playing bad, but you couldn't do anything to have a positive impact on the outcome other then just ... not trolling.
Given they ink less turf then your primary, If you ever use your secondary, you lose. You would use your special to refill your ink, but with then cancel it immediately without firing.
Fun?
Re: Splatoon 3 Fresh New Update Now Live (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@AstroTheGamosian
I can defiantly understand that frustration. I LOVE Counter Strike. I watch it all the time, go to majors when I can. I've been a fan for 2 decades. And I'm comically bad at it! I can't walk down a hallway or turn a corner without losing my head. Can really take the fun out of playing.
Keep in mind that in Splatoon, Turf War has no matchmaking logic attached to it whatsoever. It creates a pool of 8 players and tries to keep them together, swapping them between teams, for as long as possible. The idea is that even if the player skill is varied, the fact that you will be against the best (or worst) players as often as you are on the same team as them will smooth out the matches. You could be playing your first game and end up in a pool with a pro player.
I would say the results are ... mixed at best. Honestly it's not any worse then, say, DOTA or LOL, but one sided matches are perhaps a little too common.
You might want to try ranked instead. Not only wont you face players that are way outside your skill level, but if your not very skilled your rank will decrease, and that will give you an opportunity to practice against players on the same level. That's how I deal with Counter Strike ... I just accept that I'm bad, and join FaceIt games with other bad players. Nothing wrong with being bad! We all have to start somewhere.
The ranked game modes are also much less chaotic (except Clam blitz. Clam blitz is like a nightmare fever dream), and spawn camping if more or less impossible given you have to be where the objective is.
Splatoon also has a co-op mode in Salmon Run, although "casual" and "laid-back" are NOT words I would use to describe it ... at least not at "base" rank. But the good news is, if you're okay with losing at first, the lower ranked matches are MUCH easier and can be a lot of fun.
Re: Splatoon 3 Announces Fresh New Update (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@graviton
That's simply not accurate.
Looking at Splatzone (the other modes very, but less then you would think. Tower control is the largest outlier, as it favors long range weapons)
The most used weapon in X is the 52 Gal, followed by the 3 variations of the Splattershot, followed by 17 other weapons until the first roller shows up. Rollers are basically unused in X. And while one roller has a very high win rate (Foil Flingza Roller, 60%) it is one of the least picked weapons, appearing in less then 2.5% of games. This indicates that the high win rate is because it's very good in given situations, rather then overall a powerful weapon.
It's also has a pretty average kill rate of 5.3 a game. By contrast, the blaster has a 7.3 kill rate. The only roller with a decent kill rate is the Carbon Roller and it's variants, but they all have negative win rates. So the best roller isn't winning because it gets a lot of splats, and the roller that gets a lot of splats isn't winning games.
When you look only at the top 2000 players, it gets even more dramatically un-roller. The top winning roller is in only 1% of games and has a lower win rate then 20 other weapons.
I guess I should also point out that in X, of the top 50 weapons, only one has Kraken as a special, and based on overall usage, it appears in less then 1% of games.
My point is that you FEEL rollers are OP, and that makes it true for you. You'll notice more when rollers win, you notice more when a roller splats you. This is literally true of every person playing every online game. I hate Pudge in DOTA2. I always notice when a Pudge goes off and wins a game. I think it's a very OP hero .. despite knowing for a fact that it's complete dog crap and has been for 10 years. At times, he's has a win rate lower then 35% and I was still raging to my team about how broken he was!
However, based solely on factual information, win rates, and others statistics, rollers are awful, and skilled players do not use them. Nintendo is always going to balance based on this telemetry. It's also important to note that Nintendo is far more likely to make changes that result in a better play experience for the 65% of the player base that is C- to B+ rank, rather then the less then 5% that are X.
Here is one public site that collects telemetry. If you speak Japanize and have a credit card that can be used in Japan, you can get even better info though paid sites that track both user data and pro teams. I tried to use this public data instead of the paywalled data for this post.
https://stat.ink/entire/weapons3/regular/nawabari?season=8
Re: No Man's Sky's 'Worlds Part I' Update Brings A New Level Of Detail To The Universe
Look I don't want to toss too much shade on a great game that a lot of people are enjoying, but my personal experience with every bit of DLC has been the same.
Oh wow! Look at all this new stuff! Let me boot this thing up again and check out all the new details!
(Load game)
Wait ... is there like ... anything ... TO DO?
(Crickets)
(Quit game)
There has never been a game with more content and less to actually do. Some people just love the sandbox and power to ya, but man, a bit of direction would go a long way.
Re: Splatoon 3 Announces Fresh New Update (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@sunspotty @swoose
It only works like that if the game doesn't use match making. For example, if you play a game like Diablo and allow anyone to join your perosnal session, blocked players are excluded.
However, for any game that uses match matching internally, blocked players are still part of the match making pool and you may be matched with them at any time.
It's really a rock and a hard place type thing. It sucks not being able to block people, but at the same time, no game can give players that level of control over the match making pool. People would simply block everyone from every game they ever lost, and even if no one abused the system it would mess up your internal number too much. You're spending millions a year to pay people to optimize search parameters and match making priorities to hit a given average wait time ... you can't let a few people with large block lists toss that all out the window.
This is pretty consistent over all games that have match making. People who you block on PSN/Xbox Live can be matched with you in COD, people you block on Steam can be matched with you in DOTA or CS2.
Re: Splatoon 3 Announces Fresh New Update (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@swoose @sunspotty
Blocking a player doesn't prevent you from matchmaking with them.
it blocks friend requests and literally nothing else.
Re: Splatoon 3 Announces Fresh New Update (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@AstroTheGamosian
I'm not really sure how that would work. Without the opponents ability's to hinder your progress, you're not actually playing a completive game. Their would be zero strategy in what you are describing. It might work as a time trail mode when you try to paint as quickly as possible, but given that how much turf you can ink is 100% just a function of what weapon you have and has almost no room for human optimization, I don't see that being any fun or interesting.
Objective based game doesn't mean no opposition, it just means it's not a death match and you don't win based on kill score. The game is a completive 3rd person shooter, without that aspect their is no game. It's like saying you wish there was a version of DOTA or LOL where the teams couldn't fight each other and just hit the objectives uncontested until someone's ancient exploded.. Sure, you win by destroying the objectives and you can theoretically win a game without a single kill on your team, but destroying objectives isn't the GAME. The GAME is how the other team is trying to stop you, and how you are dealing with that.
But the important thing to remember in an objective based game is that splatting is not always good, and being splatted is not always bad. If you get splatted, but in doing so you ink enough turf and take enough time away from the other team's inking, that was a net positive. You did "good", enough that you got splatted. And if you splat someone, but in doing so you were distracted from inking to the point where turf was lost, that's a net negative. You got the splat, but you did "bad", and you didn't help your team win.
DOTA 2 even has a concept of the "Maelk award". Maelk, a pro player for Evil Geniuses, went 0 and 20 in a game (zero kills, 20 deaths), and not only did his team win, but many felt he was the MVP due to the space he created for his team, which allowed them to focus on objects. He didn't just win in SPIT of dying 20 times, he won the game because he forced the other team to spend so much time killing him. The "Maelk award" is something casters talk about whenever a player is having a huge positive impact on the game but dying a lot. "Looks like he's trying for the Maelk award" is a way to pointing out to viewers that sometimes dying is good.
Re: Splatoon 3 Announces Fresh New Update (Version 8.1.0), Here Are The Full Patch Notes
@Nontendo_4DS
This is likely just math. The roller category is really popular, especially in C- to B+ ranked or unranked games. They are bad though. Like, REAL bad. Only one roller has a positive (over 50%) win rate, and some of the most popular are the lowest winning weapons in the game, like the Splat Roller. It's always in the top 20 weapons by usage, but has a sub 43% win rate. Only the E-liter 4K has a lower win rate among weapons that get any real usage.
Also keep in mind that getting splatted is fine! It's an objective based game! Chargers have an awful win rate in low rank games specifically because the people who use them get a lot of splats ... but don't paint any turf!
Re: Review: Darkest Dungeon II (Switch) - An Uncompromising Sequel That Isn't Afraid To Try New Things
While I enjoyed both this and the first one, I don't think either was that great.
Gameplay got slow and repetitive in a way that most "run" based games avoid simply because it's not actually a difficult game. You can beat almost any encounter with pretty basic skill rotations that's are not difficult to figure out.
It's just unforgiving. It punishes even slight misplays, which might sound good in theory and/or work well for action RPGS, but in a turn based system it just results in you always spending 15 turns to do what should be possible in 5, just to make sure you min/max every possible benefit and opportunity to heal stress. I really dislike when a game's design encourages you to keep a single monster alive as long as possible while you spam healing and mitigation spells you don't have access to out of combat. It can really eliminate any emersion as it takes you completely out of the games setting.
I was hoping the 2nd would fix that, but it didn't.
Still, worth playing.