Castle Magus

Full headline, because the whole thing didn't fit up there: "Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was so much larger than Valve, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'"

"That's not to say the assessment that Valve punches above its weight is inaccurate. ... It's more the naive fascination Evans has with the idea that Steam is good that baffles me."

It's not even so much that Steam is good, really. There is an awful lot about Steam that I absolutely loathe.[1] Steam was simply lucky enough to be the first (well, no, but it was the first to actually get huge, anyway). It's just that, so far, to this day, everything that came after and tried to ride on Steam's coattails has been and is absolute rancid dogshit.

At least this Evans guy is, kind of, being self-reflective about Amazon's failure in particular, sort of (even if most of it is just "inspirational LinkedIn corporate speech"). Meanwhile, we still have fetid horseshit like Origin/EA App and UPlay (or whatever it's called now) and Epic Gluttonous Shitpile and so many other flavor-of-the-month, Johnny-come-lately digital storefronts still plodding along like they're each the hottest thing since sliced bread (and, well, since Steam), when they're actually worse-than-worthless, each and every one of them.

My own personal history with Steam is that I basically avoided it like the plague, up until the point where a game I wanted to buy was only available on Steam at the time I wanted to buy it. So, I finally bit the bullet and installed Steam. And now, today, I still occasionally might buy a PC game (and PC games are all I buy these days) if it isn't available on Steam (like, say, if it's some retro/nostalgic thing on GOG, or maybe some The Sims related thing on the EA Store, maybe), but much more often than that, I take the view that if it isn't on Steam, it may as well not exist at all (e.g. all the Epic Grotesque Scuzz "exclusives," most of which end up being properly released on the personal computer six months to a year later anyway).

[1] - All you have to do is look at my "steam" tag below to see what I'm talking about (well, the posts that are actually about Steam itself, anyway, and not just about games that happen to be on Steam or whatever).

No real comment on this one. The tags below are pretty much the gist of the topics this clip was about.

(Also, this is yet another "the 'diablo iii' and 'asinine anti-singleplayer trend' tags are serving as the de facto 'blizzard sucks' and 'asinine anti-offline trend' tags, respectively" post.)

"Baldur's Gate 3 director and Larian CEO Swen Vincke reacts to the idea that we should get used to subscriptions, saying content is king."

Nice to see that at least some publishers/developers in the modern video game industry haven't gone full evil yet. I haven't played BG3 yet myself, but the Larian games I have played have all been pretty good. Granted, so far, the only one I've played all the way through has been Divine Divinity, but still. I've also touched a bit of Beyond Divinity and Divinity: Original Sin, and those were pretty good, too.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, this is the first that I heard of that Ubisoft "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" horseshit, but it doesn't sound like anything new or surprising at all. They're not the first to try to float that particular lead balloon. Yeah, I can feel really comfortable about not owning my games[1], because I'm not ever going to buyrent games from subscriptions services in the first place. I don't use Game Pass, EA Play, Humble Choice, Playstation Plus, Prime Gaming, and certainly won't ever be using Ubisoft+. And if all other platforms go the subscription route, then I will just stop buying games entirely. Subscription services won't be getting my money at all, ever. Simple as that. I haven't rented a video game since Blockbuster was a thing, and I don't intend to start doing it again any time soon. Fuck Ubisoft, and fuck anyone else (including far too many commenters under that PC Gamer article there) who thinks that subscription-based models for "buying" video games is the way to go.

[1] - I mean, as much as anyone can "own" a piece of software, given EULAs and "licensing" rather than "owning," and all that shit, which has been a thing almost since the very advent of computer software. But even that is different from this subscription dumbfuckery.

Found this video via scissorsevered, here.

It's pretty god damn spot on.

"The irony that we're automating the production of art instead of the jobs everybody hates shouldn't be lost on us."

(But then, what's funny/weird is that they actually are trying to use AI to automate the shitty jobs, too.)

As I've said before, I've been done with "AssCreed" since Brotherhood, i.e. the third game in the series. The only one I might be even a little bit interested in someday buying and playing is Black Flag, if I ever happen to see it on a good enough sale.

(EDIT) Also, I've never had any interest in Watch Dogs, especially since the later games are infected with Denuvo. And even though I actually own Far Cry 1 through 3, I've had no interest in bothering to install and play those, either. Nor do I have any interest in the later games in that series, because, again, Denuvo infestation. (/EDIT)

"Numerous staff have taken extended leave recently, and some never returned."

Look. It has been 15 fucking years at this point. As the article itself notes, this game has already taken the title previously held by Duke Nukem Forever[1]. Just admit that the game is never coming out, or even better, officially cancel it, and be done with it, especially if it's causing employees that much stress. Honestly, as much as I adored the original Beyond Good and Evil game (though I have to admit I'm remembering less and less about it as the decades go on, given that I haven't touched it once since the first time I finished it, a decade or two [closer to two] ago), at this point I think I'd be okay if I never heard the name Beyond Good and Evil 2 ever again. Even if, miracle of miracles, the second game somehow saw the light of day, I don't know that I'd bother with getting it, especially given all the myriad ways in which Ubisoft has become a puddle of shit, generally speaking, between then and now. And this very story, right here, is just yet another example of the puddle of shit that Ubisoft has turned into.

[1] - A game so notorious for its lengthy development time that said development has its own Wikipedia page, which is bigger than the game's normal page. (And both of the pages mention how BG&E2 has beaten DNF's record now.)

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Yet another post in which it is noted how much shit Ubisoft sucks. Tangentially related to all the other shit at first, but branches off into its own thing very quickly, namely Skull and Bones and all the asininity surrounding it.

Really, with Ubisoft, Square Enix, EA, Epic, Activision Blizzard, Microsoft... at this point in time, does there exist any large video game company (or, in Microsoft's case, large company that just happens to dabble in video games) that doesn't suck shit? I can't think of a single one. Sony's done some pretty reprehensible shit in the past, so certainly not them. The only one that even comes close might be Nintendo, but even they've been starting to jump on the shitwagon along with all the other companies lately, too.

(Again, because Dreamwidth eats ass on subject line length, here's the full headline: "Assassin's Creed Liberation delisted on Steam, soon to be inaccessible even for players that have purchased it")

Glorious digital future blah blah same old same old nothing new to see here move along move along.

See also: "Blockbuster Never Died, It Just Became Every Digital Storefront You Buy Games On"

(And welcome to my new "glorious digital future" tag, which contains [or willmight contain, onceif I finish the process of back-tagging posts] every other post I've made about shit like this, aside from the posts on which I missed putting the tag.)

Once again, the "glorious" future/present of the modern video game industry, in action. That said, I feel really ambivalent about this particular instance of it.

As for me, on a specific, personal level, I don't give a flying fat fuck fart about whether or not shoehorned-in online/multiplayer elements in otherwise mostly offline/singleplayer games disappear in this manner, because I've always been actively antipathetic (as opposed to merely passively apathetic) about that shit to begin with, in most cases. I don't think that shit should have been there in the first place. And yet, I can still get pissed off about it going away, on general principle, because it's just one more example among many other increasingly egregious examples of the "glorious" modern video game industry utterly shitting the bed when it comes to, you know, continuing to exist in the future, at least from a games preservation perspective.

Again, to restate, no great loss with regard to these specific aspects of these particular Ubisoft things, at least for me, but I'm speaking in generalities here, because that shit is merely yet another symptom, not the disease itself.

(Putting in the "asinine anti-singleplayer trend" tag here, because the reason this shit was even included at all was because the developers/publishers didn't believe that otherwise offline/singleplayer games could stand alone without some kind of unnecessary online/multiplayer bullshit tacked on. And now they're getting rid of that aspect of it. And, again, I say that it shouldn't have been there at all, to start with. That's the only reason I'm not way more pissed off about this specific instance of the modern video game industry deciding that something has outlived its usefulness and thus will be removed forever. But I'm still pissed off enough over it to have made this post at all.)