Isaac

The delayed Bethesda titles were the ones that Sony had limited-time exclusivity on PS Now / PS Plus, from memory. No idea if there's existing agreements in place for old Activision titles.

108 minute queue. Maybe not!

So, riddled with issues then?

It's her upper lip that gives it away. It goes on a merry voyage half way up her face whenever she talks. It's like a Garry's mod video.

It turns out shipping modern, AAA games is really, really hard. Who knew?

It depends on the metric. Sony and Microsoft make more revenue - significantly more in Sony's case. Nintendo are just more profitable. Which sure, you could say 'profit is king', except it's not if you're continuously hunting growth, like Sony and Microsoft are. Here are the figures I'm referring to for 2021 (the most up-to-date full year available), gaming units only: Sony: Revenue: $24.87 billion Operating Income: $2.63 billion Microsoft: Revenue: $16.28 billion (Don’t report gaming segment profit) Nintendo: Revenue: $15.3 billion Operating Income: $5.4 billion So sure, Nintendo make the most profit, but that's because they have to. They cannot afford to continuously reinvest profits as their gaming division is all they have - if they don't make significant profits they are absolutely fucked. Whereas Microsoft and Sony can use profits from other divisions and business streams to prop up the gaming side of the business, and continuously pump money into chasing increasingly more revenue. It's not as simple as "Nintendo are doing much better". Nowhere near that simple.

Yes in the context of the wider gaming landscape King (and by extension, Candy Crush) is a bigger part of this deal than CoD. Sure, CoD is more lucrative today, but Candy Crush gives Microsoft a $700m+ annual revenue slice of the mobile market, and most of that is revenue coming from people who've never owned an Xbox. But most gaming forums totally ignore that part of it due to the typical blind spot most gamers have to mobile.

Nintendo are not in a healthier position financially than Microsoft, not by a long shot. I'll give you Sony.

Mobile makes more money than Nintendo, so by that token they've already lost the battle to iOS and Android. It's not even close either - Nintendo generated $13.2bn in revenue. Google Play alone generated $37.3 billion the same year. iOS made $50 billion. Those are purely their gaming revenues too. Or, you know, these are different platforms and services aimed at different market segments.

I think 2D games are innately better at not having aged as terribly, as inevitably most early 3D games have serious flaws that have been sorted out by now, but make them utterly unappealing to play without nostalgia (most often the culprit is a terrible camera, something even Super Mario 64 suffers from). The most recent personal example of a game I played without nostalgia that I loved was Shinobi 3 on the Megadrive. Admittedly it was about 8 years now, but I played it having never played it before and absolutely loved it. The arcade gameplay hasn't really aged, the sprites are still beautiful and the soundtrack is one of the best on the mega drive. I mean, where else can you play as a ninja on a surfboard inexplicably moving like a jet ski to an awesome chip tune song?

To be fair, video game journalists are an utter clownshow: "An assumption on my part"... What?!

Thought we'd moved beyond fighting game character design where a female character wears a dress and flashes her underwear every other move (as well as has her boobs on show). Guess not.

This one for me: It included a number of modes (Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Assault and Domination), and online multiplayer (on PC). Me and my friends rinsed it during one summer. It basically felt like a full game, except you only had a limited number of maps.

All of my friends in the videogame development industry are PC gamers who also love board games.

The more I watch of this the better I think Zak is, in terms of pulling all this mad shit together and getting shit done. I get that he is a controversial character, but he adds so much structure to the whole thing.

People aren't fed up of live service games but the market is saturated and you have to be extremely compelling, have a top tier marketing campaign, and get extremely lucky to even compete. See all the live service games that recently got shut down before their first anniversary. Many were from major studios and were fun to play.

ChatGPT would be integrated into Office365 and they become the most valuable company in the world.

Why do you do this to yourself? It's clearly not going to be a mea culpa.

I cannot recommend the path-traded Half Life mod enough. It feels like a total remaster: It's crazy how much the path tracing brings a 'modern' feel to the pixel graphics, whilst retaining the original art style. I'm half way through a replay and it's been brilliant.

It looks like they have built new assets, it's not just a resolution and frame rate bump. £8 seems pretty fair.

Think I'll wait for the RT update then, apparently they're working on it with Nvidia.

The raytracing isn't in there yet on PC is it? Thought I read it came in so hot they disabled it until a patch or two as it was buggy.

Also it's an absolute indictment of US labour laws, how often people just disappear within a week from episode to episode. It's such an insane culture that leaves them properly in the lurch at times, in most sensible UK/EU companies there would at least be a 1-3 month handover period. In this people just disappear with zero notice.

The thing is, I don't even think that he was a bad hire, in terms of competency (assuming we are talking about the same bit). He is clearly a pro at putting together and shipping games on time, and bringing someone external in with experience as a project lead on large multi-million selling games was a sensible idea. He was incredibly capable and was good at keeping the team on track and holding them to deadlines, it was just a terrible fit in terms of culture. And not very good at managing people. Also, Tim Schafer is a fantastic creative mind but absolutely not a great CEO. There's so many occasions where the team just needs a bit of executive steer, direction and decision-making from the top and he is just totally absent at every single one of them. No idea what he's doing instead - I imagine trying to biz dev and keep the lights on, but the project really suffers for it at quite a few points. But ultimately nobody is perfect, people are people and I thought that it was a really sensitive portrayal of a pretty stressful and intense situation. It really underlines that point of how it's a miracle any games ever get made.

For those unaware, Double Fine released a free 22-hour documentary covering the development of Psychonauts 2, and put it all on YouTube: It is utterly compelling, possibly the best documentary I've seen in ages, of any topic. I cannot recommend it enough, and think that anybody with even a passing interest in games and how games are made will also find it engrossing. There's so much to unpack in it all, it covers the seven year period from announcement to release, which encompasses the Microsoft acquisition, Covid, and numerous team changes. But the documentary ends up being about more than just Psychonauts 2. I think anybody involved in the creative industry will see so much of their own office environment in it. It's absolutely a warts-and-all portrayal of the process, and it depicts the communication issues, office politics and just general dysfunction of the team in a pretty stark and brutal way. There are so many hard truths that pop up that I recognise in my own career, and I don't even work in videogames!