Content need not apply. What we'll get is the same formula as usual.
A bunch of maps so formulaic that they could be computer generated, and probably are. A handful of weapons, one sucking worse than the next.
At release, the first weapon DLC for only another 20ish bucks with the actual guns that are pretty much a requirement if you don't just want to be a target drone with a slightly improved AI.
And in bimonthly cycle more 20ish bucks DLCs that make anything that came before fully redundant and obsolete, forcing you to continue paying the EA rent if you want to continue playing.
"We noticed with Mass Effect that people get too pissed when we charge 60 for a game and another 60 so they can actually finish it, well, ok, we don't give a fuck whether they're pissed, but they went and didn't even pay those other 60, and we do care about that! They might have paid if the story was better, but for that, we'd actually have to hire good story writers.
So we looked and noticed that people are dumb enough to keep buying new weapons for the FPS titles we sell, at least when they have online content and they get left in the dust if they don't keep buying new guns. Sure, it also pisses them off, but like we said before, we don't care, what matters is that they DO keep paying here. And there's not even a need to create any content, just reskin the weapon (i.e. take the old skin and give it a new color scheme), give it better stats and sell it for 5 bucks".
Dude, most of that bullshit is coming from across the pond, and they are already being hit routinely by hurricanes and floods. Especially in the areas that are adamant about there being no AGW.
If that is any indicator, getting hit by hurricanes might turn the Euros into deniers.
Yes. Yes it was. The GOE was one of the most horrible and disastrous events in the history of our planet. Mass extinction. Think the time when the dinos went the way of the dodo was horrible? Peanuts. This was the big one. It's a miracle that life somehow made it out alive.
Well, maybe, when the next sentient being evolves on this planet, they'll look back to our little experiment with temperature here, stretch out in the boiling hot tub (ya know, perfectly adjusted to room temperature) and wonder how anyone could see an average planet temperature of 70C as "pollution" or even anything but the fundamental requirement for advanced life.
Old thermometers were less accurate than modern ones. This is true. But even they were not off by 2-5 degrees Celsius. We're not talking about differences of 0.x degrees here...
Not to mention that we actually CAN measure temperatures from years and even centuries back. At least in some areas where geological or biological records enable us to look at them today and measure what happened. Wood from a tree that's a few 100 years old can tell you a lot about the climate in which it grew.
You have no options. You have the illusion of having options. In fact, you have to do what your sidekick wants you to do. Why? Because you need their "loyalty". Because they fight better if they're loyal. And they are only loyal if they like the answers you give. So you better tell them what they want to hear, or be prepared to cough up a metric fuckton of credits for gifts.
Unless they changed something since I quit, as a sub the only thing you "had to" buy for real money were cosmetic shit, nothing that influenced gameplay in any way.
If you really need that scooter in purple that you got in white from some quest, well, that's your problem...
You, in your vandalized home after someone broke into it and went through your stuff, and the police officer saying "Hey, ain't that bad, after all, didn't you have someone break in before? You should be used to it by now!"
What do you get for making an officer eat his badge?
"PC-purist" gamers tend to be an older bunch who are probably more resilient to the "oohhh, shiny!" factor of $sportsgame $year and $FPS_franchise [$lastversion+1|$lastversion $silly_tagalong_name]. I'm old. I play my games on a PC. And today I guess I'll dust off Roller Coaster Tycoon, haven't played that one in a while. In other words, of course we do play "new" games, but when I look back the past 3 years of me buying "new" games, it's mostly from HBs, a few EA (that's supposed to mean "early access", not the scourge of gaming) titles or stuff that's been in the bargain bin.
That runs on Win7. And it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, provided the early access titles don't insist in using DirectX features that MS refuses to backport.
OSs stopped bloating, games started. Especially with early access games that have zero optimization and leak more than a puppy, 16 Gigs are quickly filled.
They do gain, compared to CPUs at least, but what for? Unless you're mining Bitcoins, do you need the additional horse power? What resolution at what Hz do you really need? Where is the limit of "good enough"?
Sure, you can get more out of a 10xx than a 9xx. Does it warrant the price difference, that is the question. Does it warrant upgrading?
And, lo and behold, since we don't upgrade our OS anymore because everyone's hoping and waiting for something to finally replace Windows 7, the urge to upgrade your hardware stopped. At worst, you have to reinstall Win7 to get the performance back on par.
20 years ago, a 2 year old computer was basically something you toss at your poor friend so he can play some old games while you bought the bleedin' edge computer that allowed you to at least run the new stuff at decent framerates.
I play games on a machine built in 2014. Still way, way more than "good enough". The only time I actually do notice a slight performance hit is with VR.
I think people are keeping their machines for longer and longer as time goes on.
And why replace them?
Even gamers don't really have a compelling urge anymore to upgrade every other year. The "leaps" in hardware performance get smaller and the gaps between those leaps bigger. The difference between GForce 9xx and 10xx is measurable, but hardly an argument to toss a working 9xx for a 10xx. Likewise, CPUs from 2 generations ago are still quite capable of running modern games, especially since the bottleneck is less and less the CPU power. With "bottleneck" already being rather silly a term, for we have arrived at a point where there is very little left to be desired when it comes to realism.
And it's even less relevant with office computers that were essentially "good enough" 5 or even 10 years ago. The bottleneck there is the user, not any component residing in the computer. Anything but the most complex operations that you do once every blue moon (as an ordinary office user) happens instantaneous with zero delay. Why buy a faster computer, so it spends even more time idle?
In my experience (since I'm the one who gets to assemble them...), most people would rather buy components and assemble them or have them assembled. Maybe they got burned by "value" components in pre-made desktops a few too many times...
Pretty much this. Everyone today can build a computer, or at least knows someone who can, and nobody has those extra 50 or 100 to spend on assembly. Not to mention that people noticed that it's easy to mix and match to their liking and needn't buy off the shelf, paying for what they don't need.
Offices prefer laptops for their smaller footprint and the ability to move them around more easily. Docking stations make it possible to exist in an office where you don't have "your" desk anymore but rather your trolley, where your laptop and other material resides, you take it to a free office desk, dock in and work. Since laptops aren't really that much more expensive anymore than desktops, at least in the office price range where the few bucks difference is easily offset by the increased flexibility, and since offices tend to buy cookie-cutter solutions anyway to ensure their ability to replace broken machines easily and quickly, laptops win out.
So who'd buy the ready-made desktop sitting on the shelf anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
My first guess was that we'd probably start talking to each other again.
Silly, old me.
Content need not apply. What we'll get is the same formula as usual.
A bunch of maps so formulaic that they could be computer generated, and probably are.
A handful of weapons, one sucking worse than the next.
At release, the first weapon DLC for only another 20ish bucks with the actual guns that are pretty much a requirement if you don't just want to be a target drone with a slightly improved AI.
And in bimonthly cycle more 20ish bucks DLCs that make anything that came before fully redundant and obsolete, forcing you to continue paying the EA rent if you want to continue playing.
They added bondage now?
So that's what that "new plan to increase employee retention" was about.
Sorry, to me it sounds more like
"We noticed with Mass Effect that people get too pissed when we charge 60 for a game and another 60 so they can actually finish it, well, ok, we don't give a fuck whether they're pissed, but they went and didn't even pay those other 60, and we do care about that! They might have paid if the story was better, but for that, we'd actually have to hire good story writers.
So we looked and noticed that people are dumb enough to keep buying new weapons for the FPS titles we sell, at least when they have online content and they get left in the dust if they don't keep buying new guns. Sure, it also pisses them off, but like we said before, we don't care, what matters is that they DO keep paying here. And there's not even a need to create any content, just reskin the weapon (i.e. take the old skin and give it a new color scheme), give it better stats and sell it for 5 bucks".
You want Disney's game division to take over? Have you seen what they do to games?
The most played metagame on Disney online games is the speedrun to permaban for using a bad word.
What exactly is the difference for a CEO?
Dude, most of that bullshit is coming from across the pond, and they are already being hit routinely by hurricanes and floods. Especially in the areas that are adamant about there being no AGW.
If that is any indicator, getting hit by hurricanes might turn the Euros into deniers.
Yes. Yes it was. The GOE was one of the most horrible and disastrous events in the history of our planet. Mass extinction. Think the time when the dinos went the way of the dodo was horrible? Peanuts. This was the big one. It's a miracle that life somehow made it out alive.
Well, maybe, when the next sentient being evolves on this planet, they'll look back to our little experiment with temperature here, stretch out in the boiling hot tub (ya know, perfectly adjusted to room temperature) and wonder how anyone could see an average planet temperature of 70C as "pollution" or even anything but the fundamental requirement for advanced life.
And I'm sure you can provide us with that data so once and for all the fearmongers get shut up, right?
Old thermometers were less accurate than modern ones. This is true. But even they were not off by 2-5 degrees Celsius. We're not talking about differences of 0.x degrees here...
Not to mention that we actually CAN measure temperatures from years and even centuries back. At least in some areas where geological or biological records enable us to look at them today and measure what happened. Wood from a tree that's a few 100 years old can tell you a lot about the climate in which it grew.
The same they always were: none.
You have no options. You have the illusion of having options. In fact, you have to do what your sidekick wants you to do. Why? Because you need their "loyalty". Because they fight better if they're loyal. And they are only loyal if they like the answers you give. So you better tell them what they want to hear, or be prepared to cough up a metric fuckton of credits for gifts.
Unless they changed something since I quit, as a sub the only thing you "had to" buy for real money were cosmetic shit, nothing that influenced gameplay in any way.
If you really need that scooter in purple that you got in white from some quest, well, that's your problem...
The SSN isn't that big a problem. The problem is that for some odd reason it's not used for identification but for authorization.
THAT is the essential problem here.
You, in your vandalized home after someone broke into it and went through your stuff, and the police officer saying "Hey, ain't that bad, after all, didn't you have someone break in before? You should be used to it by now!"
What do you get for making an officer eat his badge?
Pretty much this.
"PC-purist" gamers tend to be an older bunch who are probably more resilient to the "oohhh, shiny!" factor of $sportsgame $year and $FPS_franchise [$lastversion+1|$lastversion $silly_tagalong_name]. I'm old. I play my games on a PC. And today I guess I'll dust off Roller Coaster Tycoon, haven't played that one in a while. In other words, of course we do play "new" games, but when I look back the past 3 years of me buying "new" games, it's mostly from HBs, a few EA (that's supposed to mean "early access", not the scourge of gaming) titles or stuff that's been in the bargain bin.
That runs on Win7. And it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, provided the early access titles don't insist in using DirectX features that MS refuses to backport.
Fine, charge me a (sensible!) annual fee to continue using Win7 and we're good.
OSs stopped bloating, games started. Especially with early access games that have zero optimization and leak more than a puppy, 16 Gigs are quickly filled.
They do gain, compared to CPUs at least, but what for? Unless you're mining Bitcoins, do you need the additional horse power? What resolution at what Hz do you really need? Where is the limit of "good enough"?
Sure, you can get more out of a 10xx than a 9xx. Does it warrant the price difference, that is the question. Does it warrant upgrading?
And, lo and behold, since we don't upgrade our OS anymore because everyone's hoping and waiting for something to finally replace Windows 7, the urge to upgrade your hardware stopped. At worst, you have to reinstall Win7 to get the performance back on par.
20 years ago, a 2 year old computer was basically something you toss at your poor friend so he can play some old games while you bought the bleedin' edge computer that allowed you to at least run the new stuff at decent framerates.
I play games on a machine built in 2014. Still way, way more than "good enough". The only time I actually do notice a slight performance hit is with VR.
I think people are keeping their machines for longer and longer as time goes on.
And why replace them?
Even gamers don't really have a compelling urge anymore to upgrade every other year. The "leaps" in hardware performance get smaller and the gaps between those leaps bigger. The difference between GForce 9xx and 10xx is measurable, but hardly an argument to toss a working 9xx for a 10xx. Likewise, CPUs from 2 generations ago are still quite capable of running modern games, especially since the bottleneck is less and less the CPU power. With "bottleneck" already being rather silly a term, for we have arrived at a point where there is very little left to be desired when it comes to realism.
And it's even less relevant with office computers that were essentially "good enough" 5 or even 10 years ago. The bottleneck there is the user, not any component residing in the computer. Anything but the most complex operations that you do once every blue moon (as an ordinary office user) happens instantaneous with zero delay. Why buy a faster computer, so it spends even more time idle?
In my experience (since I'm the one who gets to assemble them...), most people would rather buy components and assemble them or have them assembled. Maybe they got burned by "value" components in pre-made desktops a few too many times...
Pretty much this. Everyone today can build a computer, or at least knows someone who can, and nobody has those extra 50 or 100 to spend on assembly. Not to mention that people noticed that it's easy to mix and match to their liking and needn't buy off the shelf, paying for what they don't need.
Offices prefer laptops for their smaller footprint and the ability to move them around more easily. Docking stations make it possible to exist in an office where you don't have "your" desk anymore but rather your trolley, where your laptop and other material resides, you take it to a free office desk, dock in and work. Since laptops aren't really that much more expensive anymore than desktops, at least in the office price range where the few bucks difference is easily offset by the increased flexibility, and since offices tend to buy cookie-cutter solutions anyway to ensure their ability to replace broken machines easily and quickly, laptops win out.
So who'd buy the ready-made desktop sitting on the shelf anymore?