Ughh. The selective enforcement is maddening, both with this and TikTok. So much of the filed complaint especially applies to Roblox, but it’s clear that we’re only interested in protecting our consumers when it really means chipping away at a foreign rival’s burgeoning soft power.

The full slideshow is a great collection of data, really interesting stuff if you’re interested in gaming biz.

That said, while I’m sure PC enthusiasts (among the larger gaming audiences here at Lemmy and Reddit) will be thrilled to see PC gaming rising while mobile is falling, the actual revenue breakdown is less exciting. PC growth is driven by a larger percentage than ever of microtransactions.

Much of the presentation is centered around “black hole games,” which make up a ton of the market and are extremely difficult to pull users away from. Sad when a lot of the strategy seems to be about cost-cutting and getting better percentages from the storefronts rather than making better games.

Way too early to speculate. Until the cards are independently benchmarked, there’s no way to assess value.

This sounds ambitious for a small studio. It doesn’t help that both Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars felt feature-light to me, maybe due to their signature genre blending.

Could be they’ve scaled up (and trust me, I’m yearning for more space games in the AA category), but too many of these projects are shooting for the moon and falling short. I’d love to see a stretch of releases with smaller scope–like Everspace 2–that the industry can build on, because space games are not where they were in 2000. Chris Roberts is off in his ivory tower doing his thing, and the big devs are either planetbound or obsessed with procgen.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop was amazing. Not for everyone and probably a little too difficult in a couple spots, but the writing and atmosphere is impeccable. Absolutely nails the vibe it’s going for.

Absolutely gorgeous game with an equally bad gameplay loop. Kinda sad.

Following up on this conversation since I just saw this PC Gamer article:

I played a whopping 23 city builders in 2024, and here are my 5 favorites

How is Stormgate innovating? Genuine question–I’ve been avoiding it largely because it looks so much like StarCraft (and Pottinger even calls it out specifically in the article as something not innovative).

I’d add They are Billions as another evolutionary branch that’s doing something different. Starting to see some clones of this formula.

That said, I don’t think Against the Storm or Manor Lords are the kind of games Pottinger is talking about. Against the Storm doesn’t even have combat. Those are more in the city builder realm.

I think there are too many JRPGs that still use their battle system in support of their narrative for it to be considered anything other than a core system in those games. That’s especially the case in lower budget games in the genre.

Larger budget projects are branching more and more into side content/worldbuilding, but I’d argue it’s still highly underdeveloped in the genre when compared with western RPGs, in quality if not also in quantity. Persona and Yakuza are exceptions, rather than the rule. Persona is doing something entirely different (and well enough that it’s being emulated now) while Yakuza, as you say, carry a lot of that over from prior development into its RPGs from the series’ action games.

This is what I was wondering. Was the genre that quiet this year? Manor Lords isn’t just early access, it’s early early access. So many outright unfinished systems.

Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.

This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.

They showed up

After the credit roll I took it as a sign I wasn’t getting much more lore or more Aunt Lori. I’d buy a DLC just for more Aunt Lori.

Looks like it was October, so I’m guessing after? The production controls did help once I figured them out but I realized once I was digging through the UI every time I was making a building or cornerstone decision I wasn’t getting into the flow state I wanted.

I had an intense love affair with this one earlier in the year that fizzled out quickly once the credits rolled. Solid game, but the only thing that keeps it from being in my collection of 1000-hour games is that it’s a little too dense for my taste. Keeping track of what builds what (and which build I had currently unlocked) was taking up a smidge more brain power than I’d like once the difficulty started demanding it. By the end I’d started layering in how to evaluate cornerstones, the best way to do trade, map modifiers, and it became too much. Ironically, I’d probably get to a level of comfort just by putting more time into the game but it’ll just feel like work.

One of those “almost there” games for me.

Since The Witcher 3 came out, my favorite video game stories have been Disco Elysium, Cyberpunk 2077, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, Alan Wake 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Metaphor: ReFantazio. I also really liked Death Stranding, but Kojima’s not for everyone.

I dunno, I might side-eye my partner a lil bit if it turned out they were really good at CK3’s schemes.

That’s the original version of the game. It’s had enhanced ports but never a remake previously. From what we know, this is a full remake, with changes to gameplay, a new localization, and some additions for continuity. The game’s 20 years old. Hard to put that anywhere near modern.

Since it’s the first in a continuous series, it’s long seemed necessary to at least bring the game into full 3D for new players to come on board. For long-term Trails fans, the value of this remake (and the inevitable second one, at least) will probably depend on some of the details, especially the localizations for players that don’t read Japanese.

I don’t know what it is with Japanese devs and arbitrary multiplayer decisions. The way Capcom handles Monster Hunter’s multiplayer continues to baffle me.

From a PC gaming perspective, it feels like Western developers decided to just give players multiple options to play together all the way back in the 1990’s. This sort of thing always feels badly regressive to me.

I wonder how well the marketing exclusivity is working for them. I’ve come across more than one person that thought Metaphor: ReFantazio wasn’t on PlayStation because of it.