I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.

When a game cost that much to make and didn’t launch with big numbers, there was no prayer of it ever making money.

It was early morning at jury selection, and I did not bring headphones with me.

Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.

Keeping it running has ongoing costs involved. It would just be setting money on fire.

Concord likely wasn’t shit but also was just thoroughly not something that anyone was asking for.

Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.

It had worth to me, as someone who was stuck in a place where it was unacceptable to watch a video but was acceptable instead to read a summary quietly.

I would not put it past Nintendo to charge you $70 for Tears of the Kingdom again so that you can run it at reasonable resolutions and frame rates this time.

The old games were beaten by a Twitch chat sending little more than random inputs to the game. Maybe the newer ones are worse, but let’s be real.

There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.

Are you prepared to have to buy the game again to do that? I don’t know it for sure, but it’s how I expect Nintendo to operate.

As it stands now, it’s difficult for the consumer to make the informed choice that you can make with any of those. And the comparison is that you’d prefer cigarettes that didn’t cause cancer, because they absolutely have the ability to make cigarettes that don’t cause cancer in this metaphor, but they choose not to because they believe they stand to make more money the way things are.

That too would have costs associated with it. Nothing is free when you do it at work, but it’s reasonable to impose those kinds of costs to ensure the products they make meet a base standard.

Depends on the territory. The argument is that the practice as it stands now is against current consumer laws in places like the UK. Functionally, even if they were forced to provide this disclaimer, it would still lead to the current state of things being less lucrative and would discourage the practice anyway, which I would still call some kind of a win.

Sure would, but I’m going to set my hopes very low for that one. The best way to make this happen would be to only buy and play their competitors that are more future proofed.

Nope, but there are surely deals that are locked up in this thing’s launch, and I’ve got an unannounced 3D Mario game on my Fantasy Critic roster.

Plans can change in the course of a year. At the time, that probably was their plan, and that it didn’t happen doesn’t make it a guess. We’re hearing this same reveal on the 16th from multiple corroborating sources at this point.

There was an interview with Vincke right around award season 2023 where he said they already knew their next project and were expecting to beat the development time on BG3 in a world without a new eastern European war or a new pandemic. It was something like, “We think it’ll take us 3 years, so it’ll probably take 4.” I’m looking forward to hearing more in 2027.

This holiday season for that one then, with Mario Kart allegedly coming at launch.