William

Honestly, free-2-play economics are so baffling that nothing they do surprises me.

There’s a Genshin Impact McDonalds collab where you have to buy a very specific happy meal to get some in game wings (which I very much want) and some other garbage. I actually considered just buying the meal and giving the food to someone else (homeless?) because I can’t eat that crap on my diet. But instead, I settled for telling everyone around me that I want the code if they get one, and I’ll just hope.

How does that help Genshin Impact? I imagine it helps in the same way as this nonsense physical copy. People get excited about physical copies, even in normal boxes, and they get excited about exclusive items that can’t be obtained any other way. That pulls in a little money directly from the sales of the plastic, but it also creates a ton of buzz around the game like this whole thread.

I think. As I said, it’s pretty baffling. I have to file it under “there’s no such thing as bad PR” most of the time.

The disc is 100% trash. People that buy this want the cards, keychains, and (especially) the exclusive in-game items.

I am surprised that it doesn’t also come with some in-game premium currency, though.

As for $40 in-game… That alone is going to net you some trash. You’ll pull a lot more on the free gems you get just for exploring and playing. Sure, you could get a great character, but the odds are back-loaded so that you generally won’t pull a 5-star in the first 70 pulls. $40 is like 40 pulls, maybe?

To add to that last point, I worked for a company (at retail) that claimed to know that keeping customers was cheaper than getting new ones, and corporate even implemented a policy where the clerks on the floor had up to $100 to keep a customer happy. I never once saw that $100 used, and the one time I tried to keep a customer (who had just spent $3000) happy, management refused to let him return a crap $100 printer because he didn’t have the manual in the box. He had left it at home, and was glad to bring it in next time he was in. Nope. And that incident was within a week of implementing that system.

So even when a company understands that point, it’s still really hard to make good on it at the levels that it can matter.

Well, I’ll give it a shot.

Part of it is that they can’t know the point that someone is willing to stay vs leave, and they’re always optimizing for that point. Saving money is always the goal for expenses in a company.

Part of it is that they have a budget that they can’t exceed. Sometimes a person is overqualified for the job, and the job simply can’t afford them. Sometimes that person will stay far longer than they should, when they could get paid much better elsewhere, and sometimes they choose to move when they’re only slightly underpaid for their skills.

Part of it is that there is more to a job than money. Being comfortable, un-stressed, and generally happy is more important at some point than more money. The company tries to balance these things, as it’s often cheaper to relieve or prevent stress than pay someone to put up with it.

In the end, it’s super complicated, but all about money, on both sides.

Besides the other games mentioned here, there’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What’s_Inside_the_Cube%3F . Read the completion section to see just how bad it was.

Back then, I think he has someone telling him “no” and filling out the rest of the game with sensible stuff.

Now, he just throws ideas at the wall (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What’s_Inside_the_Cube%3F ) and sees what sticks. Since he went on his own, he hasn’t fully delivered a single game, and the ideas are wacky at best and horrible at worst.

And unlike Hello Games, when Molyneux overpromises, he doesn’t spend years implementing every promised feature.

BTW, the exaggeration goes all the way back to Fable, the launch of which was plagued by lies that Molyneux and his team told about the state of the game and the features it would have. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great game, just that it wasn’t what he promised.

Many, many restaurants now have mandatory tips right on the bill. They’ve already destroyed the concept, and this will just make it worse.

It sounds ridiculous, but non-free forums have existed for a long time. expertsexchange.com ran pretty successfully for a long time.

I don’t think Reddit knows how to make that work, and I think it’ll backfire fantastically for their user base, but it’s not impossible.

That does look good. Thanks!

I looked on the Steam page and didn’t see that, but I thought I remembered it from launch. Perhaps I was just tired and missed it, but I think they didn’t do a good enough job calling it out.

I liked Braid, but I liked his other games since then a lot more. Put out Witness 2 and I’m all over it.

OTOH, put out a graphical upgrade and a couple new puzzles for Witness and try to charge full price again, and I wouldn’t bother.

Edit: Wait, Braid Anniversary didn’t even include new levels? No wonder it didn’t sell! All it has is a documentary track and some visuals.

Right, which is why it’s put to a vote so that the members themselves can make that call. And that’s why I think the vote was a year ago with a contract that was probably quite a bit different.

I clearly don’t know the details and they do, but from the outside, it looks weird.

It seems weird that the union can put up a vote for a strike against an agreement and then almost a year later actually call that strike into play. So many things have changed, and I’m sure that contract has changed a lot since then.

I’d love to know what the final piece says that they just can’t come to an agreement. It’s clearly about AI voice acting, but the detail matter.

Intent does matter.

But the vast majority of complaints about a game being “woke” are just the inclusion of a character this a minority in some way. The complaint isn’t about how they’re included, just that they are, usually as a main or highly visible character.

A torrent link won’t either? In either situation, the site needs to seed their own data, at a minimum.

And incentivize them to raise it? No thanks!

Perhaps. Or perhaps they’re a giant behemoth where 1 hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, and the person with the authority for this hasn’t bothered.

They delisted them before they announced that they wouldn’t require accounts after all.

Gamesir T4 Kaleid. I love the hall effect joysticks, and it feels like it’s the right size. The one negative is that it’s wired-only.

OTOH, the GameSir Nova (not lite) is hot garbage. I hate almost everything about it, and its wireless PC connection (without the dongle that it does not come with) is trash. It’s basically only good as a Switch controller… And I haven’t even actually tried it for that.

The GameSir Nova Lite is much better, but still too small and you need to use the slightly-older 4200 firmware (from the official app) instead of the latest, because they got stupid about things.

I somewhat like the Xbox Elite V2 controller, but you have to get a good one. A bad one will have really crappy triggers that sometimes won’t work. I think I’ve even heard that the sticks are sometimes wonky. And it’s not hall effect.

I don’t think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a “karen” move.