Steam didn’t do that. Even Super Nintendo cartridges tried to claim in the Terms and Conditions that you legally didn’t own the copy you paid for. It was never contested, and thus we have the current software ownership debacle.

Because Valve has more money that someone winning a lawsuit can take from.

Well according to Frank O’connor, a non-zero number of them hate Halo. Its why they were hired. If I had to guess, from the way they have mistreated the franchise, its more than 60% of them at the least.

Investors are not required to form an indie studio. They are not required to build a fun game that makes a lot of money. Indie studios do not require massive injections of cash. Most indie studios are formed on what is available to the team collectively. It isn’t something that is easy, it takes effort, but it is not impossible. Most indie studios are initially formed with like, less than $20k USD in total investment. Many are just one guy with a budget of $0.

It is more likely that the amount of money that an investor would realistically need to give is considered too small to be worth the PR, but too big to just give away in a whim. Enough that one or multiple studio members could easily take out a personal load to invest into the studio without needing a private investor.

Now, if those people are demanding multiple big six+ figure investments, then they aren’t trying to form an indie studio, they’re trying to form a AAA studio that is publisher independant. Which is an unreasonable ask.

343 has been ruining Halo ever since they were formed, it goes beyond Infinite.

Sounds like a massive opportunity to form a lot of new indie studios that isn’t happening. Or people aren’t announcing it.

I mean, they haven’t released any console exclusives, making all their games available on the competition console, AND they increased prices.

I would never believe if they didn’t say they were doing it on purpose to manipulate market data. Probably to try to push the idea of a cloud subscription-only, disk driveless, hard diskless plastic box.

What advertising though? They didn’t have to pay for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising than Highguard, with Concord getting multiple devlogs and previews across a few Sony hosted events, IIRC.

Even still, its got more legs to stand on than Concord had, which was zero.

I think its serviceable unlike Concord, which required too many changes.

I guess we just have to wait and see if the server is shut down in two weeks. In reality, I don’t think we will ever see as monumental a train wreck as Concord was. Probably ever.

Well its not Concord 2.0. Already has WAY more players than Concord ever did, almost 100k peak players on Steam alone, currently 67k in-game as of the time I am posting this.

I can’t say that 3v3 is the right fit for the game, the maps are rather large for it. But I think with a bit more work in a few updates, it has far more staying power than Concord ever had.

Do you say the same for Epic Games Store exclusives?

The game was delisted from Steam right before GOG dropped this. I am not giving Ubisoft more money for Cold Fear. Since nobody can buy it on Steam anymore, there is no pro-consumer reason that the GOG fixes could not have been given to everyone that already owned the game on Steam as a free update.

Ubisoft wants me to buy the game I already own again. I am not doing that. I don’t care if 2% or whatever goes to GOG for their fixes. I know that more than 50% is going to Ubisoft.

Wish us Steam owners could get the updates. Game was delisted from Steam for this.

Now this is a classic. Its too bad Star Wars doesnt make more squad-based shooters. Battlefront from EA was pretty trash but also much more arcadey that I had hoped, especially coming from DICE. I wish they had just literally re-skinned Battlefield 4 as Star Wars.

A particularly hard game with more reliance on squad mechanics and teamwork that I have enjoyed playing is Ready or Not.

Its not a game for everyone, due to the developers trying to portray realistic to life crime situations that a SWAT team might be sent in on. Some missions include taking down robbers, child exploiters, terrorists, active shooters, etc. However, it is very satisfying to fully clear a mission with zero deaths, full evidence collection, and see that juicy S ranking at the end of the mission. Its really hard to do it on some missions, though. You can’t take a lot of damage before you die, most times I get hit one time and its either an immediate death or I need to stop the character from bleeding out, which happens pretty fast. You can wear armor but it makes you really slow and doesn’t do much in the tougher missions when the perps stop using the little guns and knives.

You get some cool tools, like being able to see your squadmate’s helmet camera live feed, a camera wand, a battering ram, explosive charges, shields, and door wedges.

Maybe its something you and your friends might want to try after Halo? Though maybe you wouldn’t want another shooter.

Need for Speed Underground 2.

Yeah, I thought they were boasting about how successful AC Shadows and Star Wars Outlaws were?

And ten tiers of UPlay subscriptions!!

Framerate does not look good. Hopefully that is because of YouTube, and not the game.

Looks like they conveniently chose nearly all shots that do not show character faces. Except Richard Ayoade, who looks I think better than the first trailer. Background NPC faces at 0:17, 0:19, 0:20, and 0:27 all look decent, but one of the kid’s faces and one of the background NPCs on the left at 0:27 look off. Can’t tell if that’s just high motion and upscaler/YouTube artifacting, bad lighting, actual bad model, not enough pixels, or some combination thereof though.

I did see what I think was the original main character face that seems to be unaltered/unchanged from the first trailer, which is a bit of a shame. (Looks like they tried to hide it/obscure it because they put a ridiculous chicken hat/helmet on that model during the character creation part that the face was at (0:09) which wasn’t present on the other face models. Double oof because of the male face model they switched to immediately after being literal Gaston/Prince Charming/Hercules face model.) They really did that model dirty especially considering how good Richard’s face model looks here. Hopefully they can make it look more like the actual model its supposed to be based on, or perhaps they can release another trailer showing the main character face choices under more optimal viewing conditions.

I know its kinda crazy for me to.suggest this, but hear me out:

Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition runs nearly perfectly in emulators on pretty modest hardware. Its not very difficult, but has a Games Journalist level Easy mode as well if thats needed. Its a Musou/Warriors game, so its basically mindless button mashing with the flavor of Zelda.

Its a splitscreen game, so you only have to have it set up on one machine. The game has a story mode and a bunch of challenge modes as well to keep things interesting. Wide range of upgradeable charaacters with different weapons that change up their playstyles. And a lot of unlockable costumes.

Downsides:

• Nintendo
• Have to use a controller (not a downside to me, but for sosme it is)
• Getting the game can be a little challenging if you don’t know where to look
• Setting up the emulator can also be challenging if you don’t know where to get the important parts
• Can get stale after really long sessions of play

Upsides:

• No account or extra launcher required, boot the emulator and play the game
• Most emulators have decent to great Linux compatibility
• Fully offline - no randos joining or server outages when internet drops
• Only two players can play, meaning nobody else can join after your partner, and Player 1 controls when Player 2 joins

The only issue could be if you aren’t using a Nintendo controller, the buttons won’t match up, but there might be a mod for that. I know there are input mods for other games.

Being a backer for the original GPD WIN, it is pretty disappointing to see they have ditched the clamshell design. I thought it was a decent design that could be refined down to a pocketable size, but I guess that will never happen now that its just copying the Steam Deck’s PSP form factor.

Treat the barrel of a gun like it has an infinite length death laser pointing out of it at all times.

No, it doesn’t matter if you just unloaded it, or saw someone else unload it. The barrel stays pointing down range and away from people.