...... what? Seriously, what? Co-op is not a genre. It's never been a genre, and never will be a genre. Or are we saying that Left 4 Dead, 7 Days to Die and Project Zomboid are all basically the same game since they all are co-op and all have zombies in them?
And, no, I'm not being pedantic here - you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what co-op is. Co-op is not a type of game. Co-op is an implementation. Helldivers 2, Palword, Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo 4 are all co-op games released in the past year and they are all vastly different games. Co-op games can be easy. Co-op games can be difficult. The co-op could be necessary, or optional. You even have weird pseudo-co-op stuff like the pawn system in the Dragon's Dogma games.
If you want to complain about cash-grabbing devs and MTX, feel free. But co-op has nothing to do with that. Blizzard spammed D4 with a huge number of MTX, both cosmetic and gameplay. Fatshark stuck a ton of MTX in Vermintide and Darktide, but those are mostly cosmetic and have no impact at all on the difficulty. Larian and PocketPair didn't put any MTX in BG3 or Palword. And you'll find a similar spread in any video game, single or multiplayer.
And saying having co-op means a game is inherently not challenging is just ignorant.
About 5 years ago when the Halo Master Chief Collection came out on Steam, I was in a very similar situation. MCC requires an XBOX Live account, even if you were only going to be playing single-player. while I was kinda interested in picking it up to have all the campaigns on PC (especially ODST) there was no way I was making and linking an unnecessary XBOX account. (Similarly, that's why I only use local accounts on Windows, I never link them to a Microsoft account.)
Now Helldivers does the same thing just with Sony instead of Microsoft? Screw. You. You obviously do not need it for technical reasons.
by enabling the banning of players
Steam players can get banned if they do something egregious.
It also allows those players that have been banned the right to appeal
Pretty sure you can appeal Steam bans.
So what is this? Is Sony giving you a pile of money for this, or do you want to enforce a much stricter code of conduct on people? Or both?
At least the Twitter and Steam comments are mostly roasting you. Hopefully the Steam players follow through though and we see the numbers tank dramatically (though, they are already down by 2/3 from the peak as-is)
Yeah. All I can find about this is that Iran launched a swarm of low-flying drones to cross Iraq and Lebanon/Jordan to get to Israel. And Jordan already said they'd try to shoot down any drones that cross their airspace. Given that Israel had (or has? Not sure if the drones got there yet) a bunch of advance warning on this, if the IDF doesn't swat all of them they're just incompetent.
That said, Israel will certainly use this as an excuse to try further escalation, and the cycle will continue getting worse.
Sounds perfectly fair to me.
Personally, though, I refuse to touch games with monetization schemes like they've got with a 10 ft pole as I know myself I'm stupidly vulnerable to whaling. Much easier to just avoid it entirely.
Hope the demise of the Western AAA game industry comes soon.
Looking at SteamDB, only 4 games released in the last year are in the top 25 of 24-hr player count. Those are:
Helldivers 2. #6, highest player count in the last 24 hrs is 242k
Palworld. #15, 100k
Baldur's Gate 3, #17, 87k
Football Manager 2024, #21, 67k
Taking IGN's list of biggest games of 2023 (archive here - https://archive.is/yg2fP), and listing the ones on Steam:
Forspoken: 24 hr peak of 57
Dead Space: 570
Hogwarts Legacy: 8.5k
Wild Hearts: 127
Atomic Heart: 627
Company of Heroes 3: 3k
Sons of the Forest: 12k
Kerbal Space Program 2: 601
Octopath Traveler 2: 592
Wo Long Fallen Dynasty: 704
RE4 Remake: 6k
System Shock remake: 130
Minecraft Legends: 22
Jedi Survivor: 2k
Redfall: 58
Suicide Squad: 475
Street Fighter 6: 23k
Diablo 4: 4.5k
Starfield: 6k
The Expanse: 34
The Day Before: shut down now
Armored Core 6: 2k
Forza Motorsport: 6k
Lies of P: 2.5k
Payday 3: 357
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: 878
Granted, those numbers could change drastically when you factor in other platforms, but of those 26 games "most promising" games, 14 don't even have 1k concurrent players a year (or less) after release, and only 2 have above 10k. Sure sounds like you all are on the right track.
I offer aspiring writers this advice: Never apologize to a Morlock when called upon to do so. They do not call upon the guilty to apologize, but the innocent. Never believe a word they say. The social justice warrior always lies; always retrenches his lies when caught; always accuses you of his own sins.
Yep. Never apologize, they always lie and they always project.
Makes me wonder what the Life is Strange devs did. Do we have a MeToo accusation about to drop, or was someone caught with CP? Did one of the devs happen to start noticing things, meaning they need to stomp down on them hard? Or is this just self-cannibalization?
after alleging that drug cartels were using Indigenous land to facilitate crime.
Wow, someone dared suggest that large areas of space with limited law enforcement where alcohol-related deaths are about 7x the national average may be involved in facilitating drug trade? I'm absolutely shocked as to why someone would think that!
The thing is, they're not (especially for the people they're looking to import). Oh, they have tons of land but right now 90% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the US border - and about half of Canada's population lives south of parts of the US.
While people can undoubtedly live out in northern Alberta or Manitoba, taking a huge number of low-skilled 3rd world immigrants who are dependent on government assistance and sticking them up by Hudson Bay or in the Northwest Territories or something is just going to lead to mass death of all of them as you can't sustain cities up there with a lot of work - oh, and a whole lot of fossil fuel consumption too which the same people pushing this plan keep trying to get rid of.
Yeah, Canada has a lot of land, but good luck settling it to any large degree.
And of course these vague issues are never “solved”
Why solve them? If they are solved "solved" then you can't keep using them for grifting and bludgeoning people. And then not only does a lot of the political power and income evaporate, but then you need to find a real job as well.
This. Can't even think of any remotely new AAA game I put any substantial time into over the last couple years. Maybe Age of Wonders 4, if that had a high enough budget to count as AAA, though I doubt it? But, I've been going through a Divinity: Original Sin 2 run with some friends where we're well north of a hundred hours at this point, spent a good amount of time in Palword, Death must Die and Against the Storm. And I've got a huge backlog to get through.
So let the AAA studios crash and burn. They're just obsolete at this point.
But a tranny did it, so it's STUNNING and BRAVE