Whipping out my Oregon

Elon take the wheel

This. I’ll be the last one to defend any of these megacorps but folks calling it greed are being reductive. These are publicly traded companies which means their loyalty is to their shareholders and their #1 goal is to make them more money than they made them last quarter. So it’s more than greed, it’s their job within this capitalist system. They have to do that every quarter for as long as they exist. The only ways to do it are to increase revenue or decrease costs. If they can’t make enough money they have to fire people. That’s the world we’ve built.

But it’s not only about making more profit than last quarter, but also the amount the profits increased by has to be higher than the amount they increased by the quarter before last. That’s how you end up with companies seeing record profits and still laying people off. They made more than last quarter, but only 2% more. The quarter before they made 3% more so now people have to go. It’s insane.

The FTC Bukkakes Microsoft Over Activision Blizzard layoffs

CoD is the shoveled GaaS nonsense, and “everything we publish day one” has basically been their promise to subscribers from the start.

That’s the part that gets me with CoD. They make so much money on the backend from MTX and season passes that making it F2P via gamepass doesn’t seem like a financially risky move. And it could net them more over time than what they get from asking people to pay $70 up front on top of everything else.

But I’m guessing that with gamepass falling short of expectations they need to hedge their bets to help make the ABK acquisition worthwhile. It also explains them opening up more games to up front purchasers on PS and Switch. This is MS getting defensive after missing the jackpot on some pretty big bets.

Yep. Gog is probably where we should all be getting our games tbf. Being mad that a game is available on one drm store instead of another drm store is kind of silly. In either case we’re only buying the license and not actually owning anything.

For the lazy:

“That class has to be the Spiritborn. Blizzard hasn’t acknowledged the mistake it made in early October when an internal testing version of the game was updated and made briefly available to former beta testers for Diablo 4’s launch. The few who managed to download it found text in the files that points to the Spiritborn class and its abilities, along with other hints at upcoming features coming to the game.

The leaked build doesn’t paint a full picture of the Spiritborn class, but here’s what we can assume from the text:

Spiritborn will use glaives as weapons Instead of mana or fury, they will use a dual resource system to cast skills The Spiritborn class mechanic will have something to do with “deities” Spiritborn skill names suggest they’ll have a pet or minions of some kind”

It was what now?

I don’t think it’s so much that they’re out of ideas but that they’re too scared to risk new ideas. These games are so expensive to make now so they squeeze out as much as they can with MTX and season passes to stuff their pockets as much as possible. The longer they can keep you playing, the more money they can make off of you with minimal additional effort. Wrapping up that plan with a nice widely-recognized Call of Duty logo makes them a lot of guaranteed upfront cash.

Doing the same thing for a new unknown property won’t have that guaranteed audience, will require a lot more marketing effort, and possibly years of underperforming results before it starts becoming worthwhile. And even then it’ll be impossible to catch up to the behemoth of the biggest shooter franchise in gaming history. So it just makes financial sense to keep remaking and rebooting the tried and true. Their CEOs and shareholders demand it and their audience (for now) is happy enough to keep it that way with their wallet votes.

tl;dr With development costs growing exponentially, publishers looking for the easiest path to the most profit, and gamers already primed to keep buying the next installment no matter what, sticking to old ideas is what makes the most sense. Goes for movies too.

? GOG is a drm free storefront. Doesn’t have anything to do with the age of the game. Plenty of new releases launch on gog alongside steam/egs/Ms