Yeah, I’m aware. This is a problem that the movie and TV industry don’t appear to be interested in solving. And they seemingly operate as a massive cartel, so one studio isn’t about to break out on its own and innovate with a DRM free movie store.
My watch parties already basically dried up. The movie industry is crumbling in front of us for not being able to adapt to what their audience actually wants, and I end up just spending my time in other ways, because they’re offering me poor value and too much friction (VPNs and torrents) to get what I want, and that’s what my rant is. They’ll adapt or die. Right now, it’s looking like the movie industry will die. You’re making a lot of assumptions there about offloading my decision making to AI though…
Oh, I forgot the other part of my rant when it comes to acquiring the content. Brick and mortar doesn’t carry Blu Rays anymore. Maybe Walmart does, but I don’t have one near me. Target and Best Buy stopped. I have a functional mall near me, but not one store in it sells movies, and when I asked, they looked at me like I had two heads.
I’m all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There’s no GOG for movies and TV; there’s not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn’t even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a “digital copy”, which is just rental streaming by another name. I’m not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn’t going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn’t even something I’m interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can’t be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that’s not a great experience when it’s supposed to be a gift anyway.
Unlike the video author, I’m not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don’t watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I’m not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?
There’s Heroic Games Launcher. If you buy GOG games through it, Heroic even gets a cut to support development, so you can simultaneously make an open source launcher better and show GOG what it takes to earn your sale.
We have to be able to learn from the garbage and why it was garbage.
Marketing cycles have gotten a lot shorter for these reasons. We used to have 2 year long marketing campaigns that are now often as short as 3 months. You do need people to know about your game, and you need them to be ready to buy it as soon as it comes out before the spotlight can be taken by something else. And in order to have reviews drop at the same time, review outlets need lead time ahead of release. Shadow dropping probably isn’t the best answer for most games.
I wasn’t rushing and info dumps weren’t my only criticism. There were some things that I could chalk up to just personal preference like my distaste for almost every character I encountered in the first 5 hours, but when it did decide to start filling me in on how its world works, I found that to be well below the standards of the praise the game gets for its writing. That’s not to say that it’s easy to do it better, but I can point to a number of other works of fiction that show how it can be done. The inner dialogue could have been a great vehicle to do it more elegantly.
It frequently gave too much info all at once about how its world works, yes.
With the praise this game regularly gets, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the story was inelegantly delivered by info dump.
Fortnite, and it’s not. The store loses them hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
People are sick and tired of expensive garbage games and that shows in the drastic changes in revenue from 2023-2024.
Be careful not to make the data fit your conclusion. Anecdotally, I’ve observed a similar sentiment, but for one thing, AAA releases have slowed down due to long development times, so there just aren’t that many of them in a given year. For another, we know that, by a wide margin, most time spent gaming is only on a handful of mainstay games that first debuted years ago, like Counter-Strike 2, Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite, Minecraft, etc. Plenty of those aren’t on Steam, but the same concept applies to the games that top the Steam charts.
the vast majority of the money that valve makes comes from indie games, not big studios
This is definitely not the case. Big studios price their games higher and sell more copies. There are only a handful of indie games like Stardew Valley and Terraria that come close to being in the same spot of the bell curve. Most of Valve’s money comes from microtransactions in the longest-running live services and the biggest games of the year.
It was a Titanfall extraction shooter, so not the Titanfall you were looking for.
People wrote in to the Giant Bombcast before to say that they were ordered to destroy code and materials at studios that were going out of business, and they instead hid drives with the files in the drop ceiling on their way out.
Genre wide? I wouldn’t say so.
I haven’t heard of addictive design in the business model of avocado toast.
Yes, they do. I plan on playing some Persona games at some point.
Yes, I have. It was very good, but at times, it was too long for its own good. Keep in mind I haven’t played a Persona game before, but there’s the loop of the calendar system combined with going into a longer dungeon. I know that it being an endurance test and a stress on your resources is a key part of the design, but each of those sections of the game were probably about 10% too long, and then you get to the ending, where the game probably should have ended about 20 hours earlier than it did. There’s something to be said about leaving 'em wanting more, and at the end of the game, it felt like they had long stretched my tolerance for reaching the story’s proper climax, as they kept trying to escalate it in ways that didn’t feel earned.
I don’t even mind that there are so many different streaming services. It’s still a far better version of cable, where I can opt into ad-free for a few more dollars and sign up for or cancel a given service at will without having to have all of them. What sucks is when it’s the only legal distribution channel and I can’t make the choice that’s right for me based on my consumption, like buying just the movies and shows I want and playing them how I want. Demonstrated in the video, we still need what can most accurately be categorized as a workaround or a hack to even rip our own Blu Rays. All that plus the streaming services have raised their prices beyond the point where it’s an attractive deal.