Last week Steam and other major storefronts crashed, reports the Guardian, including Nintendo’s eShop, PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store.

  • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    When will they ever understand this mysterious formula?

    Make a good fucking game, don’t pull any bullshit. Price it appropriately and people will buy it.

    JUST MAKE A GOOD FUCKING PRODUCT AND STOP TRYING TO WEASEL FUCK US.

    • Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      They won’t because the bullshit is profitable. Yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Hollow Knight: Silksong are all fantastic games and sold very well, but their numbers don’t even come close to something like Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite. The bullshit will continue as long as “gamers” keep foisting money at it.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s not that they don’t understand it. It’s that they literally can’t afford to adopt it.

      Corporate ownership, combined with being publicly traded or privately investor funded, means that you have to increase shareholder value. Stock dividends aren’t enough. So, they use the only play that they know: scale the company up.

      Problem is: you can scale art, but scaling software is very hard. Book publishers and record labels figured this out ages ago: keep adding more artists and more products. Meanwhile, AAA game studios keep stacking bodies onto existing IPs, making fewer yet bigger software products instead. Meanwhile, they keep getting bodied by small upstarts like Team Cherry, because they have a better effort:payout ratio. If everyone just ran their game companies like Penguin Random House instead of Microsoft, they’d be in better shape.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The only reason you don’t have trillions of upvotes, is because the fediverse doesn’t have trillions of users.