They sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year. They're easy to play, they look nice, and they have a lot of content for the money, so you can stretch your dollar.
ampersandrew
It seems to be resonating pretty damn well for them. In fact, the competitive multiplayer has been praised for its simplicity and feeling a lot like the kind of multiplayer that we used to get so much of back in the 360 era.
Games got bigger to their own detriment. Halo and Gears of War are open world games now, and they're worse off for it. Assassin's Creed games used to be under 20 hours, and now they're over 45. Not every game is worse for being longer, as two of my favorite games in the past couple of years are over 100 hours long, clocking in at three times the length of their predecessors, but it's much easier to keep a game fun for 8-15 hours than it is for some multiple of that, and it makes the game more expensive to make, raising the threshold for success.
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No
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They sell video games. A lot of them.
The family is buying the shares as well, with Tencent having a minority ownership. Or might, rather. This is a consideration. It isn't definitely happening.
I'd second Pillars of Eternity II except that it's not actually on sale. It also doesn't have gamepad controls, which is disappointing, so Steam Deck controls can be kind of slow.
I agree that the game should have a tutorial. The problem with the temple trial is that it only caters to one play style, so it's not a good tutorial. I'd call the first game's tutorial the cave with a handful of rats.
This whole article sucks. Here were the choices for player preference:
- PVE
- Couch co-op
- Online PVP
- Single player
Is it true that most players prefer single player games? Maybe. Last year's unanimous game of the year was largely considered a "single player game", but while it's definitely not live service, it also won the award for best multiplayer. What does Halo count as? Halo 2 and 3 are single player, couch co-op, online co-op, couch PVP (not an option in this survey), and online PVP. If Halo 2 is your favorite game, it could be for any of those reasons, but they also all play off of one another to form a richer game as a whole. I wouldn't want to exclude one of those things in favor of another.
Single-player games are a safer bet for new games...Make no mistake: the costs to make AAA single-player, non-live service games have inflated to astronomic levels. Leaks from Insomniac showed that PlayStation’s AAA flagship games, like Spider-Man 2, have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But there is a growing opportunity for AAA studios to make leaner single-player games.
Look, especially when you factor in costs, like the paragraph after this does, it's correct to say that a safer bet is the one that can be made more cheaply, but even these examples of successes are cherry-picked. I could just as easily bring up Tales of Kenzera: Zau, Immortals of Aveum, or Alone in the Dark to show why offline single player games are risky.
What part of that was executive meddling?
I just played through it this year for the first time. It was overall very good, but the beginning and end of it are pretty rough. The beginning is tedious unless you're playing a strength build, and the end is some real point and click adventure game moon logic to find out how to get to the final area and, in some ways, through it, that I would have never figured out without a walkthrough.
It's also got great VOIP functionality. And it's been a hot minute since I've used IRC, but you can automate tons of things in Discord around things like user roles. I play an old fighting game that has no ranked system, and all of that functionality, including running weekly tournaments, is handled by a Discord bot that runs on a Raspberri Pi.
It was also famous for having multiplayer modes that were just fun and didn't ask you to commit your life to them. Some of those multiplayer modes were really cool.