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Cake day: March 18th, 2024

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  • Oh, you’ve never seen the throwaway bonus missions on a game SKU before? Truthfully, no one knows but Rockstar how substantive that extra stuff is. But my gut and past experience tells me that if it was actually worth seeing, they wouldn’t have padded out the list with a bunch of variations on guns and cars, of which there will be many even in the base game, because it’s Grand Theft Auto. The missions that we know about, which you have to read on one or two select pages but they’re not present on others, is some kind of mission around collecting cars for some fence; I’m not losing sleep over not having that and keeping an extra $20 in my pocket.




  • It’s worth what someone is willing to pay. I have paid north of $100 USD for new video games before. For what’s different between those two versions of GTA6, I probably would have been just fine on the $80 version and felt it was worth the money, as the $20 more expensive version doesn’t seem to offer much of value to me, but that’s if it came out on PC in the same calendar year. By December, all of the cultural zeitgeist around the game will be discussed to death on end-of-year gaming podcasts, and by the time it comes to PC, it will be long past spoiler discussions and that cultural moment. So by then, I don’t know what I’ll be willing to pay, but it will be far less than $80.



  • Are 16-bit games not solved via DOSBox?

    Also, I get where you’re coming from, but it’s the economics of it that are tearing down consoles. If you’ve got a set target, Game X launches on PS4. Now the PS5 comes out. It plays PS4 games, but it can’t ever run them better than the PS4 ran them. It also asks for an upgrade to run the “PS5 version”. It also demands you use a PS5 controller and not a PS4 controller. Game X is still super popular for more than the duration of the PS5’s lifespan. Now the PS6 is coming out, and the cycle will repeat.

    Because of console cert, and all of those added costs, it’s far easier to get out the next indie hit on PC for less money. People go to play the indie hit, and it’s old news by the time it gets a port for Switch 2.

    PS2 used to have tons of exclusive games that Sony didn’t even pay for the privilege. Now architectures and capabilities are so similar that if you’re making a game on only one platform, you’re leaving money on the table. So as the customer, you’ll probably end up going for the one with the most games you want to play, which has a greater chance of being PC every time the above paragraph happens.

    Online gaming doesn’t have to come with a subscription fee, but they all choose to, and customers are savvy enough to notice their long-term costs after they’ve been gaming for some time.

    Each of these things gets people to check out of the console space as it loses the value it once offered.



  • I think the reality is that we outgrew our need for consoles the way they’ve always existed, with certification, exclusives, walled gardens, generations, etc. that no longer make sense. If you want physical to come back, it’s probably on a PC somehow, but people also don’t typically have disc drives anymore, and even offline games tend to get patches and updates that you’d have to account for in some way; the media you can store that on will have a more restrictive shelf life and cost more to purchase.












  • You’ve already moved the goalposts so far, what does it matter? If Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just last year doesn’t show that DRM-free won’t just invite piracy, or Baldur’s Gate 3 just two years before that, no answer will be good enough for you. Few AAA companies choose to release their games on GOG. More will choose to if that’s where the money is. Indiana Jones didn’t come to GOG less than a year after its initial release because they just wanted pirates to have it, finally. When Divinity, The Witcher 4, and the new Cyberpunk games come out, a few things will happen: they will sell in the tens of millions of copies and make a boatload of money; they will be available DRM-free on GOG; they will still sell most of their copies on Steam anyway; people will pirate it (but they would have even if the games were only on Steam anyway). Mina the Hollower was make or break for Yacht Club, but they put the game on GOG because they wanted to make money from those customers as well. If they were so sure that people would have just pirated it, surely they would have opted not to release it there.