cikame

It hasn't been mentioned yet so i figure i should, the PO'ed remaster was announced on April Fools day.

Maybe they've got a list of IP they've got the go ahead on and PO'ed somehow found its way on there, maybe as a package deal for something else, it's not the most in depth remaster they've done but it's a good quality, maybe their dev pipeline for KEX engine remasters is refined to the point where this didn't take much time, maybe the interns worked on it, whatever the case the budget was low enough for a "why not it'll be funny" decision and here it is, John at Digital Foundry finds the game culturally significant so it's worth it in my eyes :P. Whatever the reason i assume it didn't take much time away from whatever their next project is.

The price should be lower though alarmingly £16.75 in todays market could be considered a low price, their prices have been steadily increasing with every release and the acquisition by Atari probably hasn't helped.

Hey, at least it's not Kingpin Reloaded.

@ll_exile_ll: I don't know much about pay in Poland or whether there's tax incentives in game development, but i do know they have world leading employee protections, so at the very least the people working their should be treated better than the US studios.

"Let's fire and hire people"

@laughingman: I was just reporting what i've seen and that is harassment on twitter which is the source of the reported harassment in the op, i was just confirming it, i don't feel that suggesting it's a wider problem counts as "minimising" it, unless you take into account other issues on social media including sexism against men (man vs bear) but that's venturing off topic.

If you want to label my post as unimportant that's fine it's just a single person's experience but i can't help but be influenced by my own experiences, the only other thing i have to add is that i'm always on European servers so if there's a difference there i won't know about it.

I guess what i'd say is maybe that twitter thread you were on attracted replies from a lot of horrible people, because i've never witnessed harassment or mistreatment of women specifically in multiplayer games in the 24 years i've been playing them.

That's not to say it doesn't happen i just haven't seen it myself, twitter on the other hand is a message board for every single type of person on the planet including incels and sexists, so if the question becomes "How do we deal with sexism in general?" the answer is i don't know... hope they are 9 year olds and that some day they will grow up.

I was hoping a thread like this would come around again so i could post the debut song from my favourite guitarist's new band.

On the subject of Game Pass i've seen that Shawn Layden quote bouncing around again suggesting in order to cover costs for a $120 million game on a subscription service you'd need 500 million subscribers, at the time in 2021 Sony had 34 million subs and there's only 250 million console owners in the world so it's actually impossible.

That was 3 years ago and it feels like an even worse idea now, budgets are higher requiring an even higher number of subs, maybe the sharp rise of mtx offsets it, but there's also free to play games that people are playing for years instead of paying for subscriptions, if what Layden said is true it couldn't ever be a feasible idea.

On the consumer side it works as a "cheaper" option for people who need it but on the business side it relies entirely on MS and Sony throwing money at companies to put their games on the services and that's not smart. It reminds me of Epic throwing money at studios for store exclusives which after 5 years translated to over $300 million in losses, people still prefer Steam and on the consoles not enough people exist who want subscription services.

Their approach... if there really is a plan anywhere in all of this, does not promote art, it's purely a money making industry that demands more and more.

The expected AAA games are too big and expensive so the logical thing to do would be to aim lower, make cheaper less ambitious games not that lowering graphical fidelity makes them any less ambitious, but you can't tell investors "we're taking a new approach, we're putting less budget in so our games will be smaller and look worse than the competition, we might also be able to hire more people to make even more games!!", that's a hard banner to rally behind.

The easy money option is to copy trends, make a Fortnite clone with simple graphics so it runs on every device, no single player so it's cheaper, save the budget for live service bs if it's popular enough, if not shut it down and try again because investors are only interested in explosive returns on investment. That option was more popular before we got live service oversaturation and every new release started failing, so AAA doesn't know what the f*** to do now and is just kind of doing a bit of everything, merging live service into places where it doesn't belong, taking the occasional stab at a gold generator, and pretending to care in between by giving a studio a chance at an honest game before shutting them down.

I have no idea what the new plan is, the honest games are fewer and fewer, whoever's got their gold generator is just sitting on it unwilling to take a chance on anything else, the trends that were chased are many years old now... everything's a bit of a dry fart really.

Edit: I had a video in my watch later list that covers some of what i said, but also brings up the intriguing practice of delivering millions of dollars of bonuses to executives based on how much mtx they sell, so if making lots of money for the company wasn't incentive enough to make garbage games they also benefit personally over the rest of the studio, i wonder if someone like Phil Spencer has a similar contract.

I remember when making good games was how studios were able to keep going for a long time, now it doesn't seem to matter if you make a good game or not you'll be fired and shut down anyway, what is this industry.

I've forgotten pretty much everything about that Disney Hercules game on PS1 except the satisfying sack slicing animation.