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Or, you know... it's just not a very good game. Couldn't have anything to do with it, though, no - it's just those SJWs getting their just desserts! Of course!

No, they went out and catered to the SJW's then told people that "if they didn't like the agenda. To not buy it." So it looks like people didn't buy it. Then the guy who pushed it "left" the company. No no, it wasn't telling people to fuck off that cratered sales. It was just a bad game...or a combination of it was a bad game and telling their market to fuck off.

If it was simply "buy this skin" no RNG involved, people would not be having a shit fit. But this RNG "slot machine" type of behavior is exactly designed to bilk players out of money and hand out as few valuable items as possible. You know where like a real slot machine pays out 93-97% of the time. Loot boxes may never pay out.

Absolutely. The math has been done and the apprximate amount of money one has to spend if you wish to unlock all of the content (in the game you've already paid good money for) is 2100 $! Or, alternatively, without money, it takes over 4500 hours of gameplay to unlock everything!

The greed of EA is beyond disgusting. The SW license is one of the strongest out there, and heavily liked by kids and teens, and they purposefully use it to design a grind-marathon which is designed to incentive people at throwing money in the hopes of getting something useful. The business model is even greedier than most of the free to play models it's been copied from, and we're talking about a 60 to 80 dollars full-price release. Even more pathetic are the weak excuses the asswipes at EA tried to conjur up to defend this racket by saying it's desgined to 'give players a sense of accomplishment and pride', when the in game progression doesn't even relate to player skill in any way. It doesn't matter if you're a top player or a rookie, the rate at which you progress without microtransactions is simply tied to time in game. Skill and accomplishments have nothing to do with it. It's a 100 % pay-to-win system designed to do nothing but drive sales of the lootboxes.

This is why I prefer the game commentator/youtuber Jim Sterling's (whose made several videos about microtransaction BS this year, including this recent one about this EA/Battlefront situation) terminology for these 'triple AAA' releases with lootbox shit: 'fee-to-pay'. It's absolute BS and I do hope these shitty developers end up getting burned. Wanna include gambling mechanics to your full-price release? Fine, but can't sell it to underaged people then. And I do hope Disney ends up force chocking the license out of EAs hands if and hopefully when the sales of Battlefront II fall short of their expectations because of this.

As a longtime gamer and a SW fan I plead all here: do not buy this game. Don't buy it for yourself, don't buy it as a gift, don't even buy it at a discount. It's the only way the companies will ever learn. Don't be fooled by the decision to disable them for now, Dice admitted already that it's a temporary measure while they're 're-adjusting' the system. Meaning. they tried the waters out, now they're waiting for the holiday sales to pass and the dust to settle before introducing a watered down version of the same bullshit.

Compare this to proper publishers like CD Projekt Red: like I just recently picked up Wicher 3 with both of its expansions from a steam sale at 20 euros, and I do have to say CD Projekt Red are doing it right: you buy the game, you get all the content straight out of the box. And before someone points out that it's somehow 'different' for single-player games I remind you all that in this Year of the Lootbox WB included a shitton of mictrotransactions and grinding in Shadow of War's single player campaign.

This behavior is destructive and antithetical to the whole point of quality games, because introducing intentional grind-fests that are meant to bog the player down with menial repetitive tasks is sending a message of 'yeah, we know the base gameplay sucks, we intentionally designed it to suck, but hey, you can skip it by paying us more money and get to the good stuff'.

Fuck. These. Publishers. They need to fall and be replaced by companies that actual develop stuff gameplay first.

“On Xbox, the ad is part of the actual experience, it’s not something that is outside. The only difference is that the advertisement we have is quite small and not disruptive so people are not aware of clicking on the banners because they know this is a part of the whole experience on the dash.

“So the users know that this is something that when they click on it, they won’t be hit by something crazy or something dangerous like on the web. Everything that lands there, we create.”

One source called the development of adverts for Xbox One “exciting”, because, “the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console, whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind.

“So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”

http://hothardware.com/news/mi...

The Xbox is developing native advertising, where ad content is displayed alongside relevant material, either embedded in search results, promoted on a network like Facebook, or a "Liked X? You'll Love Y!" style of marketing. Not to worry, though -- the company plans to use Kinect to make these advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as its playing to change the final outcome.

The other way the company wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft claims that the demographic data the ad team can access is very limited, but it's hard not to see shadows of the same patent for movie licensing that the company applied for last year.

Conventional PC hardware? Citation *very badly* needed.
How about this one:
https://www.vg247.com/2016/01/...

>> I'm just going to assume you're full of bullshit.
How very scientific and unbiassed of you. NOT. Not really just another sheeplike windows fanboi at all I see.

>> For PC hardware, that's far more likely to be true under Windows than Linux.

Citation "VERY BADLY" needed. Pot meet kettle.

I never understood the furor around the XBox One launch. Who in their right mind still wants to haul physical disks around? Is this some console peasant fetish that we PC Gaming Overlords don't understand? Making everything effectively a download, like Steam or GOG, seemed like an improvement to me.

There are still use cases for carrying around physical media. Let's say you have an Xbox One. I bought a game that I want to show you. So I come over, log in to my Xbox live account on your Xbox One and then start downloading the game.

Then we sit on your couch for four hours downloading 40GB worth of data before we can do anything. Or I can bring the disk over, we can install the version on the disk (which might be out of date, but patches auto-download in the background), and be up and running in a few minutes.

Also, I have never used Steam -- do they have a contingency for when they go out of business?

Don't hold you're breath.

http://www.vg247.com/2011/02/1...

And yes, Steam has a contingency for how you can play your games if they go out of business. It's called, "offline mode". And if you're worried about online-only games being unavailable in offline mode, why aren't you asking if Blizzard has a contingency for WoW players if Blizzard goes out of business, or if CCP has a contingency for Eve Online players in case CCP goes out of business?

Until there's an app on both of these platforms, this is going to be an also-ran.

The PS4's next firmware release (which is in beta right now) will have Youtube Streaming support

http://www.vg247.com/2015/08/1...

I, the GP, never said nor suggested "they keep pouring money into a failing TV business."

Learn to read. (It might help with your spelling at the very least.)

If Sony was smart they would *exit* the TV business after *failing* for 10. Straight. Years.

Sony is perfectly capable of fucking up the company all by themselves. Let's see, Mobile had a loss of -1578, more then 3.5 times what the Financial Services makes.

From 2006 until 2009 the PlayStation division lost 4.6 Billion

In 2012 they lost 2.8 Billion

In 2014 they lost 78 million

/sarcasm, Oh I'm sorry, I forgot Sony already has an economic genius right there! How else could they continue to constantly lose money on the PlayStation! *snicker*

Maybe they should take lessons from Nintendo on how to be profitable.

But keep drinking the Sony Kool-Aid there buddy.

"invented crimes".

Perhaps if you actually looked through her twitter and saw the shit she has tweeted at people, especially during The Fine Young Capitalists, you would know what you were actually talking about. Christ, even the person that ran it was doxxed by them, all of that which was posted on twitter BY ZOE herself, then suddenly deleted after someone called her on it. She is covering shit up all the time.
You are familiar with basically nothing from that small laughable list.

Anita didn't criticize SHIT. She cherry-picked out the ass.
Every single issue she came up with has been beaten to death by others so many times it isn't even funny now.
NONE of her arguments have any logical foundations, they are all made up.
She got all that money to say a blatantly obvious thing, "derrr females are sexy in video games".
NOOOoo, really, just like how guys are totally immune to that.
I could easily go on. There are FAR more overly-sexual masculine characters than there are females.
There are PLENTY of regular females in games that aren't overly sexual, are main characters, are strong, fit, unfit and weak.
Literally no argument. At all.

Gawker have played a HUGE part in all of this as well, since they are the ones pushing it so hard, especially through the journalists circlejerk mailing list that was exposed. (and even got several people fired)
Many of their staff have FACTUALLY SUPPORTED Zoe on her Patreon. So much for integrity and neutrality.
Not only that, after some advertisers dropped, they started LOSING THEIR SHIT so hard on their site, their twitters and facebook profiles.
And not even making up coherent arguments, flat-out insulting advertisers for dropping them. Yeah, good luck ever getting those advertisers back, idiots.
Then they resorted to saying all kinds of messed up things about bullying others, people should be killed and so on.
TOTALLY SANE PEOPLE HERE.

Let's not forget that this whole thing exploded back when Anita held a conference at XOXO where a whole host of websites ALL PUBLISHED THE SAME(ish) ATTACK ON GAMERS AT THE SAME TIME(ish).
Totally not a huge collusion in the industry.

The fact that you are supporting these mentally unstable people is awful.
Is it harassment? Sure it is. Of people that are horribly cruel, harassing and manipulative, trying to force their pathetic corrupt agendas down yet another industries throat. Is it sexist? Is it fuck, it is attacking more guys than it is girls. It only started with them because they were the ones that stupidly leaked their OBVIOUS manipulation. In fact, Zoe only ended up happening because she pissed off the wrong guy.

I'd go on, but it is obvious you are already blinded by, hilariously and ironically, damsels in distress in need of help.
They don't need your help. Stop making them out to be weaker than they are. It is actually insulting to them. (for some reason)
They picked their battles. Let them have their equality. If they don't like it, too bad, this is the real world. They can piss off back to their tumblrs to whine about it.

Attacking gamers. Gamers. The people conditioned to want to win. That want to complete their mission, that want to get somewhere, and will LITERALLY SHIT THEMSELVES AND DIE if it means they can play a little longer. (silly MMO players)
They picked the wrong battle.

No one seems to know about this doc- I saw it at ComicCon SD.. its' one of the best films I saw this year and will be on XBox live on the 20th. Wish it had wider distribution.

Zak Penn directed.

or I can realize that I got out of the third grade a long, long time ago and people who want to be foul cant actually hurt me with their words.

They can't hurt you, until they do.

And even if they don't hurt you, they can spoil your enjoyment. I don't know if you've ever noticed how relentless the bad behavior of online gamers can be, but women should not have to choose between playing a game or not being harassed.

Stop making excuses for these creeps, LordLimecat. It's not about "calling your mother fat". It's about detailed fantasies of rape and murder directed with intent at women playing online games.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/09/0...

I suspect that Intel was not "listening to gamers' complaints" but rather listening to some of the big game manufacturers' complaints, e.g., maybe this ticked off somebody at Ubisoft:

http://www.vg247.com/2014/06/11/ubisoft-attempts-to-explain-why-assassins-creed-unitys-co-op-has-no-playable-women/

There were several blog articles on this "incident" at Gamasutra.

Well, take a look at these:
https://twitter.com/LizardSquad
http://www.vg247.com/2014/08/25/psn-ddos-hacker-bomb-threats-john-smedley-soe-fbi/

I'd have a bit more sympathy for the gamer who filed this suit if he wasn't trying to use this as his personal lottery ticket. He's apparently seeking damages of 5 million dollars. I mean, people get screwed over by large companies all the time, in real ways, and for non-trivial amounts of money, or even injured because of real negligence. The legal system is meant for them. Was this gamer so traumatized over a lower resolution in a videogame that he he should never have to work again in his life?

One the one hand, I despise the false advertising and marketing double-speak. "Temporal reprojection"? Pfft, my ass. It's a home-grown interlacing solution, and they damn well knew that you can't call it true 1080p resolution. When they say it was supposed to provide "subjectively similar" results, what they meant was "we're actually not native 1080p, but we hope you don't notice".

But five million dollars? Really?

The ability to sue a large corporation for any amount of money at no cost to you, with simply the hopes of striking it rich... sounds nice, right? And it's arguably necessary to ensure the poor have access to justice. Keep in mind that we all end up paying a price for abuse of that system. Do you think a company simply eats the cost of their army of lawyers and the results of these lawsuits? Any costs are passed on to consumers, or they come out of investors dividends - you know, stocks, mutual funds, where ordinary people have their money too, not just fat cats. What about the social effect of these massive lawsuits? Nowadays, you never hear a company admit fault unless they're already in the middle of a PR disaster. To do so would be admitting liability, and that opens them up to lawsuits. Medical malpractice insurance accounts for a massive percentage of health care costs. Why would we expect it to affect other industries less?

I wish we didn't have to rely on someone using the legal system in the hopes of striking it rich to seriously effect change, but I'm not naive enough to think that filing a complaint about false advertising would go anywhere. I'm pretty damn conflicted about this one. Honestly, I'm really not rooting for anyone here.

http://www.vg247.com/2014/04/2...

It's contained within the talk linked here.

The firm wouldn’t comment on whether Windows 7 would support DirectX 12

This makes it pretty clear that MS are not planning to support Windows 7, but that they know it will be an unpopular move or that it may be possible to pressure them into supporting Windows 7. After all, why would a game developer use DX12 over DX11 (or even DX9) if it is only supported by a small subset of their market?

The other part of it being a dick move is them denying refunds based on it not being crowdsourcing when IGP's CEO was saying that it WAS a crowdsourcing profram everywhere someone would listen: http://www.vg247.com/2012/10/30/mechwarrior-online-to-be-a-lot-better-thanks-to-crowdfunding/ "Speaking to Gamasutra, Infinite Game Publishing parent company boss Nick Foster said that MechWarrior Online was traditionally funded at first, but then used crowdfunding to make up any shortfalls. “We’ve raised minimal investment funds to build a viable product for each of our games. We then launch it [in beta] and use that minimum viable product to start generating an income stream,” he said. “We keep a very close partnership with our developers and use that income to reinvest in the game, build out the features that the users want, and head into a period of ongoing development. New content, new features. “The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding. It’s allowed us to maintain a higher level of ongoing development in the product, than if we were waiting for momentum to build immediately after going live. In the next few months, we’ll be able to release a lot more features.” http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/180401/ MechWarrior Online's long-awaited open beta begins today, partially made possible by a successful crowdfunding initiative that's raised over $5 million, without the help of Kickstarter. http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/10/29/mechwarrior-online-the-story-of-how-one-mmo-got-crowd-funded-wi/ "Nick Foster, CEO of Infinite Game Publishing's parent company 7G Entertainment, explained some of the rationale behind this approach to funding. "The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding. It's allowed us to maintain a higher level of ongoing development in the product than if we were waiting for momentum to build immediately after going live. In the next few months, we'll be able to release a lot more features." http://www.crowdsourcing.org/article/mechwarrior-onlines-unconventional-crowdfunding-pays-off/20390 "The success of the Founder's Program reinforces IGP's vision to help independent developers build exceptional games with the right economic model for the global marketplace," says IGP CEO Nick Foster. http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/29/the-first-of-three-major-titles-from-igp-mechwarrior-online-moves-into-its-open-beta-test/

Sony at least claims it isn't

Sony confirms 'you can play used games on PS4'

Shuhei Yoshida confirms: no 'always-on' requirement for PS4

This was all news in February, now it should be fairly common knowledge.

I think it is funny that the Republicans demonized an activity that over 30 million Americans take part in.

http://www.vg247.com/2011/12/06/report-39-million-mmo-gamers-in-the-us-play-scifi-68-prefer-f2p/

Then again around 80 million Americans have smoked pot and they demonize that also.

I think demonizing pot is a bipartisan thing.

I think it is funny that the Republicans demonized an activity that over 30 million Americans take part in.

http://www.vg247.com/2011/12/06/report-39-million-mmo-gamers-in-the-us-play-scifi-68-prefer-f2p/

Then again around 80 million Americans have smoked pot and they demonize that also.

They've said that they don't plan for Xen to just be an "epilogue", it sounds like they want to make the rest of the game as long as the part they've released so far. Not sure what they have planned. (Source: http://www.vg247.com/2012/09/03/black-mesa-xen-sections-will-be-their-own-expanded-game-says-dev/ )

I should have looked for this article first...Michael Pachter at Wedbush Securities quoted a price of 300$ at most at launch, and ideally 250$. Maybe 400$ is including one of the new tablet things...in which case they're only way overpriced, not ridiculously overpriced.

Luckily, some companies are getting it. For example, Gearbox made a page (unfortunately apparently offline again, although there are copies) that lists how many PC-specific features Borderlands 2 has. One of them is offline LAN multiplayer. We've gotten to the point where the more customer-savvy companies are starting to use "no always-on requirement" as a selling point, just like "no DRM" has become a selling point recently.

I think this can be used as a basic gauge for how connected a company is with the gamers. Blizzard has done a full 180, treating every game like World of Warcraft (and angering everyone who doesn't want to play ladder all the time); Gearbox understands that always-on DRM is very unpopular and companies like GOG or indie developers usually eschew DRM entirely.

Origin was only required in order to “start playing the game,”
.
EA has since clarified to GameSpy Origin was only required in ordee to “start playing the game,” even if it wasn’t the service players purchased it from. Players will also not be kicked out of the game should they lose internet service..

http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/28/simcity-to-require-always-on-internet-connection-to-origin/

>

Lack of LAN IS a gameplay flaw. LANs create an immersion environment that cant be replicated any other way.

You can all sit in the same room, on the same network, and play Starcraft 2.

You can just play with each other, you can play lan games.

The only real complaint I'm seeing here is "It's not easy to download copies for all our friends and play together without buying the game"

[...]

Other than that, you can 100% recreate the experience, as long as you have internet access.

And that's where the trouble starts.

Some of my favourite LAN parties in the last decade or so were done in places without direct internet access.
- My parent's garage: Adjacent to the house, but no cabling there, 15-20m to the DSL modem and my parents would've killed me if I had to prop open a door for a LAN cable letting flies and mosquitoes into the house all night.
- My cousin's garage: 10-20m away from the house and on the opposite side to the location of their DSL modem inside the house.
- A mate's backyard party hut (complete with wet bar and pool table): 50+m from the house and any internet access.
- A mate's deceased grandmother's vacant house: No phone or internet at all.
A WiFi bridge can be dodgy (access points behind multiple walls) and cell phone reception is spotty at best at either of those places which rules out phone tethering and I don't know how well it would work either way, setting up NAT behind a tethered phone that is already behind the service provider's NAT or god forbid, the game wanting to download a patch over a volume limited phone contract with probably mediocre speed.

Lastly, even if you have a place where you have no problems accessing your ordinary internet connection, ISP outages can happen, especially if you live in a rural area where phone cables aren't run underground (takes only one tree falling over during a storm or one drunk driver hitting a phone pole) or one construction worker to accidentally the whole cable if it is underground.

If you don't think this is an issue, you've probably never been on the receiving end of an internet outage during your recreational time, as an internet outage is exactly when I tend to fire up a good singleplayer game.

I'll take my classic LAN mode and offline single player every day and games that are not MMO but force you to be logged in/online even for single player or LAN play can fuck right off again and will not see a dime from me.

I guess they figured that their standing with their customer-base is so low it simply cannot get any worse, might as well make some more money off the id... sorry, consumers, who are still using sony products.

Second hand games may not bring any income to Sony but the person selling the game then using the money to buy a new game does bring in new money to the company, so I really cannot follow their thinking here.
... but then again, I would never have closed down Lik-Sang, installed rootkits on CDs, ignored all security best-practices in everything I did and then proceeded by crapping all over the people who still payed for my products, I guess me and sony have different ways of looking at things.

I hate sony, there are other companies I dislike and would be reluctant to buy products from, but I hate sony. I do not buy anything that has the sony name on it, and this includes sonyericsson phones. I realize companies are in the business of making money, but most have realized that crapping on customers isn't the best way.

... and, if any of you think Sony is better at running a business then I am, you should consider the fact that I have made 4.7billion USD more then Sony PS Division between 2007 - 2010. http://www.vg247.com/2009/10/30/sony-ps-division-has-lost-4-7-billion-since-launching-ps3/

Specs came out in January and have been on Wikipedia for over 7 months now

1. Quoting Wikipedia instead of the ACTUAL SOURCE makes you look like a fucking idiot.
2. If you bothered to read your precious Wiki article, it does not support your comment in the first fucking place.

Specs came out in January and have been on Wikipedia for over 7 months now

It would probably help his attitude if MS and Sony didn't take such an openly hostile attitude towards MMO's on their consoles. A lot of developers have just given up in disgust trying to develop modern MMO's for those consoles (most notably with Champions Online). Both the 360 and PS3 have the power to support MMO's, but MS and Sony make it almost impossible with all their restrictions.

Perhaps it has something to do with this attitude:

'TV Judge Greg Mathis and filmmaker Matty Rich are teaming up to create game for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 called Mathis âoeDetroitâ Street Judge.'

'The game is expected to be reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto - but with prison rape.'

'Huh?'

'Mathis says his goal as a judge, and as a gamer, is to introduce consequences todayâ(TM)s youth and the best way to do that is through videogames.'

'âoeThe main difference between our game and Grand Theft Auto is that players will have to deal with the justice system and consequences for their actions,â said Mathis.'

'âoeWhen you go to prison, you gain credibility when you come back on the streets. On the other hand, when you go to prison you can also be raped. So take your chances. We may see young people who make the wrong choice and go to prison and are assaulted repeatedly (in this game).â'

I wonder how long before some "geek" responds with a video game where the judges, bureaucrats, politicians and fortune 1000 executives are being killed en masse by the "sophisticated technologists" who got prison raped?