I believe it’s still running in the background and makes it an extra pain in the ass to play without internet. I ran into that one with Jedi: Fallen Order when trying to play on the train (I only paid $4 for it and still felt ripped off). The store page still lists that it’s there. It’s why whenever I get around to the Dragon Age games, I can play the first one on GOG and the fourth one on Steam (no EA launcher), but unless something changes, the best option appears to be pirating 2 and 3.

I only bought Split Fiction because it didn’t come with the EA launcher. It seems to be a recent decision of theirs to not include it on some games on Steam, but they’re not doing it retroactively. It Takes Two I played on Game Pass for a dollar, because I’m not willing to put up with EA’s additional DRM.

Split Fiction and It Takes Two were pretty great.

It’s not either/or. Games can be made at all levels of production value and come from teams of many different sizes. Even games made by very small teams can have trouble breaking even at $20, because hardly any game is going to sell as many copies as Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Pricing a game over $20 is hardly greed. If every game was $20, it would be extremely hard for most of them to break even.

A simultaneous retirement/resignation says to me that the two of them were asked to do something very stupid or very unethical. And they’ve stomached a lot of unethical lately.

Jedi: Fallen Survivor?

I think it has to be insane levels of incompetence. They’re not patient enough to wait around for 3 years for Bluepoint to put out something that makes money, so they probably gave them some busy work, like support work for other studios, until they could go through the bureaucracy of closing the studio.

What happened is that pivoting from a bad idea like this takes a long time and a lot of money for a company this large, and they had no plan B, which is stupid, so they’d rather just reduce their operating expenses.

Word is this live service push was Jim Ryan’s initiative, and he left the company right before it all fell apart.

I think the reason Sekiro 1 happened was that they started making a Tenchu game and then changed their minds.

He’s only got vibes to go on in the EU, but the vibes were good from the people representing the movement there. There’s an NGO that already got the ball rolling in the US, and even though it’ll still be difficult, there may actually be legislation drafted in the US before the EU, which Ross finds hilarious. The UK’s initiative hasn’t been going well, but there’s one more long shot chance they have of some movement there.

I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

I want a modern Tenchu game too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.

It happens all the time, but you need startup capital. And a lot of what they did is remaking games (at high quality) that they don’t own the rights to.

What a needlessly stupid thing it was to put them on a live service project, and what a waste to close it down.

I’m reading between the lines a bit here, but back when I regularly attended PAX East, one of my favorite panels to attend was the video game data panel hosted by EEDAR (now a part of Circana). The games like NBA 2K, GTA, Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed that can regularly break $1B in revenue are the kinds of games that may sell to people like you or me on a gaming forum, but also that they can sell to the kind of person who only plays four or fewer games per year. Since then, I imagine live service games that keep you hooked on that one game in particular have only exacerbated that figure of four or fewer games per year. That’s a huge segment of the market. And I imagine that’s the customer that the market is losing on a Friday night to TikTok or OnlyFans.

There’s plenty of great new stuff too, often times even modern iterations of the retro stuff we loved, but it doesn’t get the same level of marketing, so it’s harder to find.

Dr. Mario 64 is my family’s most played N64 game by far. It didn’t hurt that it was a game that my dad actually found a taste for. One of the things that made it so easy for everyone to play is that you could adjust difficulty individually for everyone until it felt fair.

I doubt any of us were playing at the highest level of competitive play, but the reason garbage would be a factor for us is when you start taking risks to catch up to a player in the lead. Otherwise, I always appreciated that it was sort of a race to clear your own board. Garbage does slow people down, and not just in the animations but in how much time it takes to clear the garbage from what otherwise would have been an easy clear.

I said this before when you made your Puyo Puyo video, but if you’re left wanting by the state of the competitive puzzle gaming scene, even if you’ve never made a video game before, nothing could be a better target for a first project. The barrier to entry is just about zero these days. Take your pick of Godot, Game Maker, Unity, or Unreal, and iterate on one of these.

I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.