Yeah, they’ve got competition just like Steam does. If you don’t buy from Sony’s store, you can buy from…er…okay, I see the problem.

I would argue that DRM-free has always been what we really need rather than the physical media, particularly in the era of patching.

I played Original Sin 2 after BG3, and at first it leaves a huge positive impression, but then more and more problems present themselves as time goes on. The armor systems create stunlocking issues; the XP system encourages genocide; the skill system feels freeing at first but ends up landing on dominant strategies very quickly. It’s still a good game, and they’ve said in an AMA that some of my biggest criticisms won’t be in this new Divinity, but their track record thus far is that their own RPG systems are not as good as 5e.

Divinity might also be closer than you think. If they go early access, which they haven’t committed to, we might be playing it next year.

Rockstar open worlds are more like chapter selection screens, where you choose between about 3 different action missions at any given time. Familiarity with the open world not only grounds it in a sense of place but also helps with navigation when you’re plotting a getaway. The checklist of chores is more of a Ubisoft thing.

There is approximately zero chance of this game flopping and putting Rockstar out of business.

I probably had fewer “can I…?” questions in BG3 than any other CRPG, if for no other reason than that all of the enemy attributes are exposed at all times, and your spells tell you which attributes they interact with. It’s that same quality that allows the technical design of Larian’s engine to shine, and it made large swaths of the genre feel dated immediately. Either in the video game or the tabletop, my combats don’t have many questions to bog them down.

Given how much more likely one is to have played 5e than any other system, it’s probably not all that controversial.

It’s among my favorites, and I’m nervous for whatever Divinity’s got in its place.

There are more objective measurements we can use than that. Consider any modern port that shows up on a Switch 2, like FF7 Rebirth, to be a substantial effort and not a given. Even when you do get ports like those, they’re often severely compromised in fidelity and performance.

Do not expect PS5 performance from a Switch 2. It is not close to that. PS4 Pro is much closer to accurate. It’s cheaper than a PS5 because it’s weaker.

And in my experience, having gotten into fighting games in a serious way for the first time at age 30 (I’m now 37), people tend to attribute atypical “good reaction times” to what are actually smart input buffering techniques. In a crowd populated by mostly 20-somethings, I still routinely end up in the top 15% in a given game, and those opponents that beat me never feel like the difference was reaction time. Going from memory from a link I’ll surely never be able to find again, so take this with a grain of salt, the US Air Force had a vested interest in studying how reaction times change as we age and found that it didn’t really start to decay in any meaningful way until long after 40.

I’d argue it didn’t have an RTS component. It was an RTS that had a hack and slash component.

It’s unlikely your reaction time has changed much in your 40s. You probably have well over a decade before that starts to happen. On your first couple of tries, reacting to something is going to seem impossible. After you’ve seen the same stimuli and practiced what you should do in response, you’ll be right around where teens and 20-somethings are. If you don’t want to put the time in to make that happen, that’s fine, but don’t think it’s unattainable to get good at a given multiplayer if you were otherwise interested in doing so. E-sports are now old enough that we’ve seen enough folks age into their 40s and remain top talent, as long as that remained an ideal career choice for them when so few are going to be able to support themselves in that career.

Yes, those are not conflicting pieces of information. The poor allocation of resources is not having a Project B ready for people to move to when their job on Project A is done.

Eh, there are enough news reports of record profit game sales followed by massive layoffs to say otherwise.

That doesn’t dispute what I said in the slightest.

None of those things can happen indefinitely. Loss leaders make up their profits on the back end; the classic example in this industry is selling a console at a loss while selling software at higher margins.

AI is still in the investment phase. By anyone’s account, this is a bubble about to burst, investing in something that doesn’t generate enough money to justify the investment. It won’t do that forever. I’d be surprised if it continues without a major correction in a few years. No one can predict how or when it will happen, but we’ve seen so many bubbles throughout history. They all need sustainable profit eventually, or they become a disaster. Gaming already had its own bubble in the wake of the pandemic, and that’s where these layoffs are coming from.

Are you willfully misunderstanding at this point? Those wages come from averages and projections based on past results of how much money previous games make. If they continually don’t make money, their jobs disappear, because the work they’re doing no longer justifies how much it costs to pay them to do it.

Not forever. The profits need to outweigh the losses, and the rest comes down to averages. That’s how all of this works.

You are mixing units and data at this point. Acquisitions cost money. Blizzard and Call of Duty come in the same purchase. Call of Duty had a bad release this past year. And none of those things are a measure of how profitable Blizzard games are.