Games Realist

@thicc_stick_boi The thing is, if there’s anyone who could legitimately sue them with minimal risk of PR impact to his broader company, it’s @TimSweeneyEpic. But there’s something bigger here in that, he has an opportunity to take action to discourage the politicization of games media.

holy fuck PC game might legit get sued for this. Don't normally stick up for tim but the article is such a gross misrepresentation

@EleganceSBL It’s amazing how companies attempting to run live services fail to properly resource and estimate the costs needed to actually run the service. Security, moderation, customer support, live ops, community management are all not optional things.

This isn’t an attack. It’s the consequence of neglect. Cheaters have owned Siege for years. Reports ignored. Anti-cheat broken. Community dismissed. Today wasn’t a breach, it was inevitability. The direction team failed this game.

@DaveOshry Brilliant work

Thank you for your patronage 🫡

@feydemon I can tell you who cares- the finance people at Sony who see what the burn rate is of a giant studio located in one of the most expensive parts of the US that hasn’t released a new original game in 5 years.

do they not realize that they can take their time since nobody cares about this game

@NextGenPlayer You love to see it.

Clair Obscur sales blew up after The Game Awards with 200K units sold % of sales by platform: ⚫️ Steam - 76% 🔵 PS5 - 21% 🟢 Xbox - 3% E33 has now surpassed 6 million copies sold See more: alineaanalytics.substack.com/p/the-game-awa…

@Dansgaming @larianstudios Legends.

So @larianstudios has changed their header to be the legal document that spoiled their Divinity announcement!😂

@Grummz It is baffling how certain companies have not read the room and understood that gameplay is the thing you can’t afford to have fall down; not graphics or art.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, made for under $10M, shows just how broken AAA Gaming budgets are. I've lead and produced many AAA projects, and adjusting for today's salaries, it breaks down like this: Art is HUGE. It can easily be much more than this, 50% of dev budget for cinematic and movie style narrative games. But art doesn't actually guarantee a hit. It's more like the cost of entry to be visually competitive to be considered AAA. You'll easily drop 100M on the art, even outsourced to Asia. Clair Obscur kept art costs very low, using Metahumans as a base and iPhones for motion capture. They put the money into refining the gameplay over 5 years and innovating there instead. The result, much more bang for the buck. But the marketing in AAA? Complete dinosaur thinking in the age of social media. TV spots, Superbowl spots, etc. just don't make sense anymore. Riot Games CEO called me when they were just starting out. They were very worried about marketing and standing out against DOTA and HoN. They didn't have any money for marketing. I told them not to worry about it, backing up Riot's intuition that marketing spend is the worst place to put your investment. He let me know that they had spent less than 1000 dollars so far and was glad to hear that I agreed with their strategy: reach out to players directly. This was the smart play. The biggest factor in making a hit game is not the marketing (mobile is different, you have to pay for user acquisition or you never get traction). The biggest factor is GAMEPLAY. Some studios are ART driven by culture. Others are PROGRAMMER driven (OG Id Software and tech), and OG Blizzard was DESIGN driven. We also spent nearly nothing on WoW marketing for launch (5M or so, way less than War 3). Later on they spent much more because they were very worried about user churn in a sub based game (but putting marketing money into a proven success is valid to keep the machine growing). I think the results speak for themselves. AAA is struggling because design took a back seat to art. If I had to rank the payoff strategies it would be: Design first Programming second Art last AAA should ditch their antique marketing budgets and pour the money into being Design first.

If someone was going to try and make a YouTube competitor, now would be a great time.

@selectwario There is truly no better answer.

shareholders

@Rotaryhead8 @projectmracing You aren’t wrong, but this kind of accountability will never happen until gamers demand it with their wallets.

@projectmracing Ian bell must be who must be out of the dev team. He is the liar, he is who make you arrive to this point.

Straight4 Statement on Project Motor Racing

@The_CrapGamer @JBishie Original tweet should have replaced “next-generation hardware” with “AI, outside of gaming”.

@JBishie So they gave up in the middle of a generation and people think they'll stick with hardware next gen? If they don't care about their hardware now, what makes anyone think they'll care later? Do ya'll not understand that if they exit hardware our library is dead?

I haven’t commented on Black Friday until now, but Microsoft’s supply chain behaviour suggests that Xbox Series X|S sales are not their priority. Instead, they seem to be relying on Game Pass to sustain revenue while quietly diverting resources toward next-generation hardware.

@nib95_ That must be humiliating.

This games console most of us had never even heard of, called Nex Playground, is currently outselling the #Xbox Series X/S in its strongest territory, the US. 💀 #NexPlayground

@longislandviper It’s sad, but also kind of a situation of their own making. 😕

Poor Xbox.

@EndymionYT It’s deeply unethical to have a YouTube video removed because it expresses an opinion counter to the one desired by those in power. All YouTubers should be worried about this because, if it’s allowed to stand without material backlash, it will be used as precedent.

They're trying to hide this story from you because it paints SUPERCELL, the company behind Clash of Clans & more as actual real life supervillains. They’re censoring & have deleted a man’s entire channel for speaking out against them. This cannot stand youtu.be/NE70JNyZaAg

@SpiritMacardi @ShitpostRock Microsoft likely wouldn’t have them remove it during that time because they would rather prioritize something that will help close the revenue gap. Then after the release, they shut down the studio 2 months later once the PS launch window was done.

@SpiritMacardi @ShitpostRock The PlayStation version of this game was published about a year after it originally released, while it was still owned by Microsoft. Likely, Microsoft had the team prioritize the PS version for the revenue and then when that didn’t sell to expectations, sold it.

@Acerola__t They don’t care about making good games anymore- just about playing their corporate games and pulling in enough for their 2 rental homes and 6 vacations a year until they retire.

@Cromwelp I feel bad for that studio, having to now compromise the very soul of that game to appeal the internal political wasteland.

Expression in video games is cooked because the puppet master still holds the strings

@thomasbrushdev This is the way. It’ll be like non-GMO is today for food.

This is why I’ve been calling for “human made” labels instead… because it will be rare, and valuable