November 2023 PCG Article Links and Discussion

[ZedClampet]

That's a strange chart, not a mention that I can see of…
Ireland is the largest exporter of software in the world
…looks like trade categorizers haven't caught up with this century yet

Well, that's what you get for undercutting American taxes, a bunch of shell companies selling American made software like Microsoft. I'm just razzing you. They aren't really shell companies. Most US companies that set up offices there at least hired some people.

Microsoft has 1.5 percent of its workforce there, so at least they do a little bit of good for the Irish people. Google is the best, they have about 5 percent of their workforce there, which is a sizable amount. I think Oracle has to be close to the worst of the big American companies there, at far less than one percent of their workforce in Ireland. But it's free tax money for Ireland, anyway, so it was a smart move by them, at least until someone else undercuts them.

 

[ZedClampet]

After earning $544 million in its most recent quarter, Unity says even more layoffs are 'likely'

The new CEO says the company needs to be "leaner [and] more agile," and you know what that means.

www.pcgamer.com

Just for a little perspective, they hired 2500 people in 2022 and 4200 people since the end of 2019. That they have to take a small step back and reassess in 2023 is not exactly surprising since they had just more than doubled their workforce.

In other news, what the heck are they doing? They have a game engine, a webstore and Unity Services. What are they doing with 7100 employees? Their defense contract must be huge.

 

[Pifanjr]

Hundreds of Norwegian World of Warcraft players are furious after a bizarre new bug causes their game to freeze repeatedly

Diablo 4, WoW Classic and Hearthstone are also possibly affected.

www.pcgamer.com

A bug that only affects Norway sounds like an instance of The Norway Problem.

 

[Brian Boru]

an instance of The Norway Problem

Yeah, NO.

Gotta feel sorry for poor ol' Christopher Null.

 

[neogunhero]

Zen 3 is the gift that keeps on giving as it looks like two more X3D CPUs are heading our way

AMD's first experiment with 3D V-Cache resulted in a lot of leftovers.

www.pcgamer.com

Maybe not buying a 5700X this past summer was smart. I really want a new CPU, but I don’t really need it. My games run just fine for the most part, though stuttering is still an issue on more intensive games. It would be nice to run games even smoother but at least I am still hitting 60FPS in almost every game I play, and FPS is more important than graphics to me.

 

[Pifanjr]

505 Games' parent company lays off 30% of its workforce, says gamers really only want sequels so that's what it's going to make

Digital Bros joins the chorus of game companies putting people out of work in the name of "operational efficiency."

www.pcgamer.com

I recently read that the Celestial Steed mount from World of Warcraft made more money than Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, so even sequels aren't as good as cosmetic microtransactions.

 

[ZedClampet]

505 Games' parent company lays off 30% of its workforce, says gamers really only want sequels so that's what it's going to make

Digital Bros joins the chorus of game companies putting people out of work in the name of "operational efficiency."

www.pcgamer.com

I recently read that the Celestial Steed mount from World of Warcraft made more money than Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty, so even sequels aren't as good as cosmetic microtransactions.

This is the fantasy of every major studio. You create a game and then just take care of it and sell skins until the death of the universe. That's why there have been a million failed attempts at live-service games over the last few years, because you have to create something like WoW first. You can't just toss a few missions together and assure people more are on the way like Fatshark did with Darktide or Bioware did with Anthem. You actually have to do a lot of work before settling into retirement.

Of course, Fortnite is the exception and why everyone thinks they can get away with giving a little to get a lot.

This is not to say successful companies don't put in a lot of work to maintain these successful games. Epic certainly has. But it's not the same sort of work/expense that goes with a major AAA game.

 

[Zloth]

There were a lot of articles along those lines today! I presume they are looking at financial calendars of some sort?? Because these next 6-10 weeks are the biggest weeks in the video game world. Especially for a place like Humble!

 

[Mateen786]

Wait, what? The Witcher 3 is getting its own official mod editor after eight long years
By Harvey Randall published 15 November 2023



In one of this month's more unexpected reveals, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt will be getting its own fully-fledged modding tools. They'll arrive sometime in 2024, according to the game's official Twitter account.

 

[Colif]

that seems familiar

Wait, what? The Witcher 3 is getting its own official mod editor after eight long years

Now we're modding with gas.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[ZedClampet]

Remnant 2 dev tells players moaning about Apocalypse difficulty OK, fine, you can have your 3 orange slices and medal for participation

"I may have been too harsh."

www.pcgamer.com

Kind of funny story about a developer responding obnoxiously to players. I need that new participation medal they made in response to players saying Apocalypse was too difficult. The only problem is that you can only get it by dying to a boss on Apocalypse difficulty. I could definitely die to a boss. I'm just not sure I could actually make it to one. The mobs would kill me instead. I definitely couldn't do it solo. Maybe I could get Guido to revive me at a checkpoint right at the door to a boss.

Now if this were the first Remnant game that didn't have level scaling, I could upgrade my gear and probably make it to the first boss. But in Remnant 2, everything scales to your level, so the starter area would just murder me on that difficulty.

 

[Brian Boru]

players saying Apocalypse was too difficult

That was funny, I can totally feel the dev's eyerolls over here

Maybe if they'd named it the "You will die in 10 seconds' difficulty level, it might have been clearer

 

[Zloth]

that seems familiar

Wait, what? The Witcher 3 is getting its own official mod editor after eight long years

Now we're modding with gas.

www.pcgamer.com

The Witcher 3 came out in 2015. Only two years (2016 and 2020) have been long years, the rest were all normal length. The game would had to have come out in, like, 1990 to have 8 leap years between then and now.

 

[Iriiiiinaaaa]

The Witcher 3 came out in 2015. Only two years (2016 and 2020) have been long years, the rest were all normal length. The game would had to have come out in, like, 1990 to have 8 leap years between then and now.

We would have met the next part of The Witcher in old age.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Mail trucks and millions of dollars: how shareware transformed PC gaming forever

We can thank floppy disks in Ziploc bags for the FPS genre as we know it.

www.pcgamer.com

Thought this was a really good article. A lot here probably lived through shareware times, I vaguely remember Doom act 1 being free but I wasnt really that concious of the rest of it, so an interesting read.

 

[DXCHASE]

Can’t find a November PCG article thread, but I have a few things to say about this:

There's a cursed way to get a free Game Pass subscription or grind Diablo 4 battle pass tiers: Bing searches

You may already have a stash of Microsoft Rewards points that you're not aware of.

www.pcgamer.com

The Bing rewards program is great if you’re the right type of person. I got sick of redownloaded Firefox each time I reinstalled Windows (at least once a year, sometimes twice), so a few years back I took the plunge and made Edge my default browser. It wasn’t a bad transition at all, especially since I use Edge as my main browser at work. I already had a Microsoft account I used for Xbox and Game Pass, so I thought why not and went all in on Edge. Then I started to use Bing more and now it’s my main search engine. I got tired of the Google ecosystem, so I traded that for the Microsoft ecosystem and it’s about the exact same performance and function wise. I have no gripes about Bing or Edge.

So, if you’re like me and use Edge and Bing primarily, the rewards program is pretty neat. You can knock out all points available within 15-20 minutes a day. You get a ton of things on the Rewards page where they basically just ask you to click a link to Bing, and once a day there is a poll and a quiz, all of which gives you points. Then you can do 30 searches on Bing browser for an extra 150 points daily, and again on Mobile. You can exploit it by just typing 1, hitting enter, and repeating until you have thirty 1’s in the search bar. That works for me. Then there is the Xbox app on your phone, which you can get a few points from and play a bejeweled clone built into the Xbox mobile app for even more points.

It all sounds tedious, but I’ve been doing it for a year and it’s second nature to me to take a little bit of time out to collect these points. So far I’ve bought PC Game Pass twice for 7500 points and currently have enough to get GP Ultimate for 12000. Not many people will be dedicated to so all of this because it is a lot and a bit annoying when you lose your daily streak, but I can usually get PC game pass once a month if I stick to it. You can also redeem for other rewards like gift cards or donate to charity, but truthfully I only care about Game Pass.

Thats a neat little plan you got there! I wouldnt personally spend the time and i just dont like bing/edge so ill just pay for the subscriptions but if im ever inclined to try this, its good to know this plan works lol.

An ARPG I love from 2016 just had a massive update that gives players a Diablo 4-style dodge, among a huge list of other goodies

The Grim Dawn rises once more.

www.pcgamer.com

Loved Grim Dawn when it first came out (2016ish) and the developers (Crate Entertainment) have been making it even better since then. They announced a new expansion a little over a month ago and, out of nowhere, dropped this patch which made me hop back in yesterday. The dashing and relocation of health/mana is awesome. So ill be dipping my feet in this when i want to take a break from Diablo. Great job Crate!

If you are an ARPG fan of any kind and havent played this, you are doing yourself a disservice. Yes the graphics might look kinda dated but its an amazing ARPG nonetheless. Highly recommend this along with Sacred 2, these are my favorites.

 

[Brian Boru]

Thought this was a really good article

It is, excellent, well done Jeremy and PCG.

I got a lot of my early shareware from PCG and PC Mag, and also from UK advertisers in PCG—the stack of floppies in the mail. As I recall, mainly platformers and adventure games—“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”

 

[Pifanjr]

Mail trucks and millions of dollars: how shareware transformed PC gaming forever

We can thank floppy disks in Ziploc bags for the FPS genre as we know it.

www.pcgamer.com

Thought this was a really good article. A lot here probably lived through shareware times, I vaguely remember Doom act 1 being free but I wasnt really that concious of the rest of it, so an interesting read.

I agree, interesting article. I do think that demos fulfill exactly the same function nowadays, at least compared to the shareware games where only the first episode or the first levels were free. There's also games like Starcraft 2, where the Wings of Liberty campaign is available for free, and Deltarune, for which the first two episodes are free.

 

[Pifanjr]

Should facts or vibes determine whether an 'indie game' is really indie?

Dave the Diver's controversial Game Awards nomination sparked a debate about the meaning of "indie" this week.

www.pcgamer.com

Philosophers have spent a lot of time debating on how to properly define things and put them into categories. Like Plato's definition of humans as "featherless bipeds" and philosophers trying to define what makes a chair a chair. I'm pretty sure game genres are some of the worst defined categories in use today and have been the topic of quite a few papers.

 

[Zloth]

I think a big source of the problem with "indie" is why people want to have the word around.

Back in the day, big publishers like Electronic Artists and Activision would only publish a developer's game if they did such & such. So, the developer would do such & such, it would suck, and the developer (or individuals that left the developer for another job) would leak out that the publisher forced them to put it in. A game being "indie" meant that it was free from corporate interference because the publisher was the developer.

I don't know that publishers are doing that very much these days. That leaves the original need beached. The folks that want to support small/struggling developers (or just hate the rich ones) would like to appropriate the term, though. And what if you don't particularly care about how much was spent or which company did which part of getting the game to you? You just want a quick way to find or ignore that style of game. That's the "vibe" camp pulling the term another way.

 

[ZedClampet]

I think a big source of the problem with "indie" is why people want to have the word around.

Back in the day, big publishers like Electronic Artists and Activision would only publish a developer's game if they did such & such. So, the developer would do such & such, it would suck, and the developer (or individuals that left the developer for another job) would leak out that the publisher forced them to put it in. A game being "indie" meant that it was free from corporate interference because the publisher was the developer.

I don't know that publishers are doing that very much these days. That leaves the original need beached. The folks that want to support small/struggling developers (or just hate the rich ones) would like to appropriate the term, though. And what if you don't particularly care about how much was spent or which company did which part of getting the game to you? You just want a quick way to find or ignore that style of game. That's the "vibe" camp pulling the term another way.

I sort of disagree here. There are a lot of current examples of publishers interfering. Bioware, for one, has nearly gone under because of EA's meddling.

But the second definition of indie is also terrible, adding in dumb things like 2D graphics. Most of the indie developers I like all develop in 3D.

I find that a lot of people are living in the past where solo and small dev teams were locked into a certain type of graphics and complexity. This simply isn't the case anymore.

 

[Zloth]

I sort of disagree here. There are a lot of current examples of publishers interfering. Bioware, for one, has nearly gone under because of EA's meddling.

Yeah, that's a good counter-example. EA is still being EA.

But the second definition of indie is also terrible, adding in dumb things like 2D graphics. Most of the indie developers I like all develop in 3D.

I find that a lot of people are living in the past where solo and small dev teams were locked into a certain type of graphics and complexity. This simply isn't the case anymore.

Yep. The tools keep getting better and better, making it possible for very tiny teams to make graphically impressive games. But, if you want indie to mean a certain kind of look & feel, that's what you have to key on. Personally, I think "retro" works fine for those types of games, but I've only got one vote.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

The term Indie game has gone the way of the RPG.

I've been trying to remember to say small budget or small dev games, seems more accurate. It does come a bit of a problem if youre handing out awards, maybe it would be better in those cases to stipulate a budget or team size limit? Smaller devs can still have big publishers.

Then again if you define it by the independent spirit, as in a studio having total creative freedom to make what they want, that probably makes Death Stranding an indie game.

 

[Brian Boru]

What Indie means in entertainment industries

I keep an eye on some of gaming's sister industries, and the descriptions of their indie practitioners all seem to have a common theme, eg:

not affiliated with any network
independent of government or conglomerate interference
not part of a chain
not associated with a major

In no case does it preclude working with big companies along the supply chain—eg I've worked with some tiny/small companies [ie devs if they'd been in gaming] which had biz arrangements with large distributors or retailers or both.

Anyway, the common theme seems clear to me:

Indie = in charge of your own destiny

I know Indie is cool and everyone loves the scrappy underdog, but of course there are pros and cons—if Indie was all roses, then every company would stay Indie. It's not like we don't know how to do that—human industry has been indie for thousands of years, up until recent centuries.

 

[ZedClampet]

What Indie means in entertainment industries

I keep an eye on some of gaming's sister industries, and the descriptions of their indie practitioners all seem to have a common theme, eg:

not affiliated with any network
independent of government or conglomerate interference
not part of a chain
not associated with a major

In no case does it preclude working with big companies along the supply chain—eg I've worked with some tiny/small companies [ie devs if they'd been in gaming] which had biz arrangements with large distributors or retailers or both.

Anyway, the common theme seems clear to me:

Indie = in charge of your own destiny

I know Indie is cool and everyone loves the scrappy underdog, but of course there are pros and cons—if Indie was all roses, then every company would stay Indie. It's not like we don't know how to do that—human industry has been indie for thousands of years, up until recent centuries.

That's the correct definition of indie.

Whether you should stay independent or not is pretty simple. Can you afford to make, market and localize your game without financial help? If yes, then you stay indie. Publishers also can help with porting your game to consoles, but that's apparently a pretty easy process these days. The era when you needed a publisher to make a million DVDs, ship them all over the world and negotiate shelf space at retailers is over. Everything that's left is fairly manageable. Actually, there's a pretty big scene of gamers who help, for free, to translate indie games for different languages, so even localization doesn't have to be a huge deal.

Half-Life's 25th anniversary celebrations have caused a resonance cascade in its Steam player-count, surging to a new all-time high over the weekend

Foreseen Consequences.

www.pcgamer.com

It's amazing to think that Half-Life came only a few short years after Doom. Game technology was advancing at light speed, for sure, during the 90s. Pretty up the Half-Life graphics and put it in an engine that doesn't have to load every 60 seconds and you have a fully modern game. If you made a tribute game to Doom, they would call it retro. They wouldn't say that about your tribute game to Half-Life.