I’m sorry to pop your bubble but while Denuvo sucks for consumers, it actually works at least on the PC front. Many cracks you would see require emulators since the pc ports are pretty solidly protected. Like Total war warhammer 3 is still uncracked after 2 years.

Not early access games but more AAA “Early access games”, which means you preorder advanced edition you get to play like a week early. The biggest examples being Starfield and that new Star wars game by ubisoft (with the insane price of 130 for its super special edition). So this is just a logical loophole getting closed. We can have disagreements with the 2 hour refund window on steam but I don’t think it was ever intentional for you to play 48 hours of a game then being able to refund the thing since its not official out.

And those are fundamental problems with the 2 hour refund system but the loophole they closed just makes sense. You shouldn’t be able to play a game for 48 hours while its in AAA “early access” Ie you preorder the game’s special edition (Starfield and that new ubisoft star wars game are doing this) and you can play the game a few days before launch but since the game isn’t released you can get a no questions refund. To be honest, I assume those kind of games already followed the 2 hour restriction but I guess it was very uncommon until very recently but now this is a new way for Publishers to screw consumers because it means consumers can start playing before embargoes for game reviews come out.

I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I’m glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.

Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I’m really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn’t, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I’m not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.

Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.

Vr is very price prohibitive and Oculus/Facebook sell headsets at a loss to make their marketshare. Its not great but if you want to “try vr” especially something you hear will make you physically sick to use and you might not even like. Its just logical to spend the least amount of money on it for a “proper headset”. Like if you value your privacy that is fine and completely understandable but lets be honest here, most people don’t. Especially with the popularization of social media and smart phones like we can even apply the same logic with your argument with phones like why would you buy a device that has so many cameras and microphones and wave it around your home and toilet. Hell I think the phone is actually worse since most people bring them everywhere while a headset is a bit more constrained on where you can take it.

I mean not really. Again the index is a great headset but look at how long people actually use their headsets for. Is it better to throw your money into a pit that is $400 or $1000. VR is a weird since you either love it or hate it. Most people are going to hate it and many people aren’t really into the idea of reselling their stuff. This isn’t to say facebook good or some nonsense like that but from a prospective customer’s standpoint why spend so much money on something you might not even like. You don’t have to drill any holes in your walls to put up base stations while inside out tracking isn’t great it gets the job done and again its far more convenient. I like the option to have base stations but again realistically putting in so much work for something you might only spend a week or month on is not a great investment of your money or time. If you like VR, I would highly suggest getting a better headset than a quest or oculus headset but a newcomer I will 100% suggest a quest over anything else especially a used model to save them extra cash.

Are we going to ignore that VR adoption is basically held up by Oculus/facebook. I hate facebook and their support for their titles on the VR space are dreadful for instance it is unacceptable what they did with Echo Arena but you can literally look at the steam hardware survey and see that Oculus/facebook makeup nearly 70% (67.4% to be more accurate) of VR headsets in the market today for PCVR. Who the fuck is funding many VR game devs right now? I can tell you it ain’t many publishers and the biggest one right now is Facebook as much as I hate to say it. Facebook absolutely is a crutch VR needs to survive in this market but we gamers should make use of them for as long as possible then ditch them whenever its convenient for us.

Hell the PSVR2 looking very juicy if that has great PCVR support and it doesn’t require any ps5 nonsense to work but PSVR2 is a perfect example of how VR is not in a great place and a big part of it is price related. Like VR nuts (like I) would gladly pay higher tier prices for a good headset but to some average joe, they see a headset that costs as much as a fucking console that only works with a limited number of games. Hell the thing can even make you sick trying to use it. Most people aren’t going to pay 1000+ dollars to try VR to see if they “like it”, hell they aren’t even paying $550.

Again I’m not here to advocate for Facebook but I will sure as hell make use of their investments in VR because they are sort of throwing that money in a fire pit with how the market is. Facebook plans on trying to fill that fire pit with so much money it becomes a bridge that is profitable and it might be in the future but right now if you want someone to try VR, a oculus headset is probably the best bang for your buck headset especially if you buy it used since realistically most people are going to play with it for a month then be done with it and try to hock the thing.

Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand “new” copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many “new” copies around. Also I can’t fault publishers from just “deleting” a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven’t sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren’t even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.

You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.

With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn’t mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn’t be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.

In some ways I agree, people love to tear each other down but one of their examples is around “Genshin Impact players”, Like cool you can enjoy those games but god damn them getting popular is fucking scary to me as a gamer since it means Gatcha gaming is coming to the west and I’m sorry to all you Genshin impact player but those mechanics are some of the most cancerous things in modern gaming. The huge gambling aspects, paying for power, just the constant daily grinds, etc. The same is said for sports titles and other things. So people use it as a “Har har I feel I’m better than you” but I think there is a fear of such monetization catching on. We as gamers should be fighting against these things because we are becoming nothing but a god damn piggy bank for these large gaming corporations, who are trying to make us gamblers. Its honestly the reason why I try to stick with the PC market and indie games since the biggest problem area is the AAA scene since they are trying to extract the most amount of wealth. I want a developer to succeed and I think there is a fair place for monetization in the gaming scene but right now a ton of devs (realistically publishers) don’t respect players and their money.

I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).

You know ignoring your comment that the war has been going on for 3 years. Its only been a year and halfish maybe closing into 2 years. Its laughable that a country like Ukraine whom’s military budget before this was several fractions of Russia’s is able to hold them back in open fucking warfare. I know you are gonna say whatabout Vietnam or “War on Terror” but those were insurgencies (ignoring the ethics of the US being in those wars since really we shouldn’t have been) the US and Nato trying to capture territory typically goes smoothly as we seen in the Gulf War and Desert Storm basically being called the 100 hour land war

Isn’t that the sad part about gaming media/journalism. They are all for banking on the drama about “no appreciation for the devs from the vgas” but chances are their front pages are filled to the brim with things announced during the VGAs. While they do nothing to really highlight the actual meaningful award shows for game developers.

You don’t want the “3 day special operation” brought to you by raid shadow legends?

But we already have award shows that are like that, we have DICE awards, BAFTA Games Awards, GDC awards. This event is clearly just a commercial for many publishers. Noone is forcing devs to appear here. Hell I think it would be fucking great some devs just don’t appear just to snub this award show. If the audience actually cared about recognizing developers they would watch the other 3 awards, this event is just about the hype machine and game trailers.

I mean it isn’t but sort of is at the same time. It firstly depends on what kind of kickstarter it is. There are many ways where its just a system for a publisher to gauge interest in the project. Those are typically just preorders however many others are just throwing money into a well and hoping something comes of it. I get people’s hatred of crowdfunding and it can easily be a trap. Where a ton of people are just there to get the money and leg it or who are simply too incompetent to use the funds properly. Hell even experienced developer can be too incompetent, double fine studios/Tim Schafer is a poster child for this. While I love their work, they had a horrid run with crowdfunding and I guess it should have been expected since they are always late and overspend on their budget when they were working with publishers.

Now with all the negatives said, I think crowdfunding in all its forms can lead to wonderful project that simply couldn’t have existed due to a lack of interest by publishers. Hell I doubt we would had Baldur’s Gate 3 without crowdfunding and this isn’t talking exclusively about BG 3 since the Divinity Original sin games really got the ball rolling for Larian Studios. Crowdfunding can lead to the rebirth of genres once thought dead.

True but you are still at the end of the day giving the host your IP still, it just can’t be seen by the other players by normal means.

You are good mate, this stuff just always happens where it gets a bit annoying. We see this in the drama cycle where news comes how X person is an awful person or did something wrong. We know about Y events that happened in the past so people try to draw Y events around this new bit of news but we don’t really live in a fictional world where all these plotlines/events all culminate into something satisfying. Life is a rather complex thing and it makes it feel so small when it all culminates into every event we the public know about a public figure have to fit into each other like a complete puzzle when huge portions of a public figure’s life is typically shrouded in mystery.

Okay Completionist started 2011 or 2012, he has a costar named Greg and it seems they met at college and were friend. Greg played the comic relief of the show at the time. Fast Forward to 2015, he leaves unexpectedly. Then fast forward another 2 years when in 2017, Greg I believe with lawyers told Jirard the completionist to unlist all the episodes Greg has appeared with. That is basically the story of Greg. It seems there were issues with extended work periods that didn’t gel well with his schedule and priorities and good for Greg understanding that since choosing loved ones over work is rather important. It seems Greg got shafted because Him and Jirard had a falling out and there was no formalized contract between them since he expected friends to look out for each other. It sucks but I consider money to be a part of the equation with the removal of those old episodes since he didn’t like the company using his image to earn a profit.

Also take this with a grain of salt but apparently he also made a post about it on reddit in the past with these lines

“It is extremely difficult to move on from a project that I helped create for so many years. Not only were we building the show as a creative outlet but, also as a source of monetary stability for the both of us. Both of these are no longer true for me. While we may have not put in precisely equal hours on the show, I believe that had Jirard and I’s mind not morphed into one for four years, TOVG would not be what you see and enjoy today.”

This could be a random poster and not be Greg, seeing as this is their one only post. I just don’t think its a huge leap that money and friends typically don’t mix well. Money breaks bonds in so many different ways and its a prime reason why I don’t like dealing with loans with friends or family. It really rarely ends well.

I think this is a bit revisionist. You even say the real answer, Greg likely wasn’t getting a cut he thought was sufficient, he had a falling out with Jirard probably due to said cut not being enough. So he requests Jirard pulls down content that has him included because he doesn’t want the man profiting off his work. Its a mixed bag and I can see both points of view but lets not include “new bad thing happens, this is the ‘true reason’ ________ left” moment. Its no secret that mixing friends and money can easily lead to a falling out, I just find it silly whenever there is drama we have to add our own conspiratorial twists when we already have a very logical reason why X happened. Unless Greg chooses to confirm this is the reason why he left its pointless to assume its this way, hell even if he does confirm it we have to keep in mind, people are willing to lie to get seen far more favorably and jumping onto a dogpile is pretty easy. Greg hasn’t really kept an online presence, so I may actually believe him far more than if it was another content maker doing this because there is far less to gain from this.