Vordus

@Decimateh Alas, the data is extremely specific, so this will work for just this one sale x_x

I may have gotten carried away making a Google sheets spreadsheet to calculate whether or not any combination of three games is a good deal. GBP only, I'm afraid.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aNWeNM8sxtnKoaLLC27966bNp0sfJHFkm9hn5RYfjxI/copy?usp=drivesdk

@GamingFan4Lyf Windows for Games LIVE

I literally only just twigged that this is precisely one week. No wonder there's even less than usual.

So, nothing, then.

Sure would be nice if the damn thing worked at all. But MS are still flagging my very UK-based ISP as a VPN and blocking me from seeing quests at all.

(Ironically, I can access it through my PC. Because that one actually is behind a VPN. Go figure)

@Markatron84 Oh absolutely, and there are so many reasons past the outrage economy as to why they underperformed. Outlaws seems perfectly amicable but is a title from a fatigued franchise presented in the house style of a fatigued publisher, so it basically struggled to garner any kind of enthusiasm at the time. Veilguard definitely felt more like EA just wanted to get a finished product out of the door without killing the franchise or the studio than it did a triple-A launch of old. Honestly, from what I gather it turned out far better than 10 years of development hell would suggest, but it certainly didn't generate the kind of buzz you'd normally associate with a big franchise release.

The fact that neither of us has played either game (though I bet we're both holding out for Veilguard on EA Play) feels kind of appropriate in this case. But hey, still got a bigger audience than all but 7 games on the system, if the polling sample is to be believed.

Surprisingly strong showings for Veilguard and Outlaws, which probably mostly just shows how few games got any kind of serious traction this year.

Slim pickings. Almost as if it's Christmas and everyone's out of office or something...

You're missing too many of the games I played for me to be able to press the 'vote' button again.

5 points: Neon White
4 points: Flock
3 points: Little Kitty Big City
2 points: Brotato
1 point: Botany Manor

I'm not allowed to vote because answers all need to be unique, but I need to use the 'something not on this list' option four times over.

@BIG3 That's not entirely true. She looks a little more haggard and gaunt, and she's got the slit pupils. Seems like she's something more akin to a proper Witcher now, with all the mutations that come with that bargain.

@Evilinsane Stardew is literally based on the gameplay loop from Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons from the 90s, so it goes back a heck of a lot longer than that.

Little Rocket lab seems to be cozy Factorio, so that's at least a reasonable shakeup from the usual 'here's a farm, here's your watering can, produce goes in the box' formula.

@FraserG Not quite. It's the mildly enhanced next-gen version from 2015 rather than the original 360 version from 2013.

There's two really important things I need to know about the game.

Is there a plant called Chuck, and does Indy at any point claim to be 'selling these fine leather jackets'?

Folks, if Ben didn't like the game, Ben didn't like the game. That's how reviews work.

1. Fallout 4,
2. Vampire Survivors
3. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes
4. Galacticare
5. Saint's Row
6. Brotato
7. Dead Island 2
8. Control Ultimate Edition
9. Final Fantasy XIV Online
10. Neon White
11. Superhot Mind Control Delete
12. Dungeons of Hinterberg
13. Inscryption
14. Fallout: New Vegas
15. Powerwash Simulator
16. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
17. Starfield
18. The Rise of the Golden Idol
19. Steamworld Dig 2
20. Chants of Sennaar

Time played: Top 5%, Gamerscore: Top 1%, Achievements: Top 1%

So that's mostly just indies and Bethesda RPGs, then. That makes sense.

Utterly awful month for me. Ended up playing one game that was broken at launch, and nothing else.

@kihaennem USB keyboards are all pretty much the same connections wise, so my suspicion is that it'll work fine with Xbox consoles, but that some of the functions (like the super buttons, the Game Bar button, the volume turner and anything that requires software to program it) won't. Of course, it's suddenly become a lot harder to find out whether the basic functions work because it's impossible to search for whether folks have tried the existing versions of the 8bitdo retro keyboard on Xbox without just bringing up articles about the Xbox-themed one.

These 8bitdo keyboards always look cool, but I'm not sure I could do without a numpad.

I'd like them to reverse the trend of the number of game pass games each month dropping.

The industry in general is struggling right now. Surely that makes it a buyer's market?

Yeah, no, not for me, ta. I'd probably have some interest in Judas, but 2K's treatment of Roll7 angered me so much that it'll probably be a few years before I'm willing to give 2K money.

@FraserG Honestly, it's refreshing to see journos straight up admit to the SEO tricks.

The other one here that always amuses me is the fact that every single article has to have 'Xbox' shoehorned into the headline. I completely understand why, but it's so weird going down the feed and just seeing the word 'Xbox' repeated constantly.

@Fishticon Oh, they did that long ago. I tried to get some support not long ago, you can only access human support through a phone call. And they have to decide whether you're worthy of a phone call. So because my issue was reasonably unique, that's not on the 'worthy of a phone call' list.

They also love telling you that you're going to connect to Microsoft support, but connecting you up with folks from the MS support forums (who aren't actually support folks and therefore can't deal with anything outside of the most general issues) instead.

If everyone was being honest with themselves, this would be Balatro's.

But if the Chinese audience finds the page, Wukong is going to walk away with it.

@Bartig Two. FS2024 is a full sequel rather than an update. Goat Simulator is definitely arguably a game that's already on the service, though.

@InterceptorAlpha But you don't need the project to come out to get tax breaks from losses. They could have said that the project wouldn't recoup the marketing and distribution costs and just cancelled it, which would have been a far more effective tax write-off.

@InterceptorAlpha
"They just needed it out the door for a tax break."

Not how tax breaks work (unless you're Ubisoft doing a weird deal with the Singapore government, but that's another development hell entirely).

@themightyant honestly, dialling down the RPG elements was probably a good move in the current gaming market. If they'd gone for something more traditional they'd have had to deal with endless unfavorable comparisons to Baldur's Gate 3. It has, at the very least, been allowed to be it's own thing for better and for worse.

@Major_Player They're talking about relisting existing licenced games, not making new ones. Which presumably comes down to balancing the cost of the new licence fees against the value they would bring to game pass and/or the money that could be recouped through new sales.

Ultimately if they're going to do this, it's going to involve a lot of very careful negotiations with Disney and Hasbro. Although Hasbro has already indicated that they're game, and MS already has deals with Disney including for the LucasArts SCUMM remasters that DoubleFine produced. It's all very possible, but not necessarily likely. And it's certainly not something they'd rush into as that would weaken their negotiating position.

@Jenkinss I said Concord struggled to get anything higher than a seven. It averages out to about a 6.

Regardless, Concord didn't fail because it was bad. Concord failed because it was a middle of the road, me-too overwatch clone in an already crowded genre, offered at a price much more expensive than it's competitors, and marketed extremely poorly. Much worse games have done much better. Not that it's difficult to do better than Concord.

@Doomcrow @Jenkinss SM2 got mostly 8/10s from the major sites, and Concord struggled for anything higher than a 7, so I've no clue what you pair are on about.

@freddones hard disagree on trusting Steam reviews or charts. Why would I trust the collected opinions of one of the most toxic communities on the net?

@PhileasFragg Ubisoft doesn't have a cloud service. What they have is the right to sell the games to other cloud services, including Xbox. The question ultimately comes down to whether other cloud services are willing to pay, and whether Ubisoft is competent enough to properly ship it around.

@FuzzieGinge88 Probably, yes. But they'll likely want more precise numbers on how it works out for new AAA releases before investing in porting other new titles. Jumping in full force without any kind of evidence is a great way to scupper things when something turns out not to be as profitable as everybody imagined. Once they've got more data, they can use it to build a coherent strategy.

Although it would be the first coherent strategy they've had in years fnaw fnaw fnaw.

Got to see how the experiment rolls out before expanding it much further.

So... It's a USB powered shot dispenser awkwardly clipped to a console?

Edit: hold on, hold on. If you're having to collect the shot, What's the point in having a remote? This is a shot dispenser that's been placed next to an object that, quite paradoxically, the user of the object barely ever touches. Surely that's the worst location for a shot dispenser?

@shoeses I've never seen a single person defend Dustborn. Or promote Dustborn. I've never seen anyone give one jot of a care about Dustborn, a weird niche small-studio Norwegian game that absolutely anyone could have looked at and said 'yeah, that's not actually getting bought by anyone' anywhere along the process. To include it in the list alongside big AAA failures like the utterly disastrously mispromoted me-too hero shooter Concord is intellectually dishonest.

Your grifter-led movement claims credit for massive sweeping market forces. It ignores the actual market conditions and blames everything on 'Woke'. You ignore elements like Wukong's focus on the massive protectionist Chinese market because it doesn't suit your narrative. You ignore the fact that both Star Wars and Ubisoft have produced the same formula over and over to the point where neither have the same cultural cache. You ignore the massive success of titles like Baldur's Gate 3, the Verhoven-styled cultural satire in Helldivers 2, or indie juggernauts with diverse characters like Hades 2 so that you don't have to deal with trying to explain why they succeeded (spoilers, it's because they're great games that stuck out in an overcrowded market).

Weirdly you both claim that 'woke' games are causing the industry to fail, but also that your 'boycotts' (which is mostly a lot of screaming in comments about games that you weren't going to buy anyway) work. If people aren't buying the games, then the boycott is redundant.

The problem in the industry isn't 'woke'. The problem is that development costs and time are ballooning, and after two decades where the AAA industry has obsessed over putting more and more eggs into fewer and fewer baskets it has no idea how to with the idea that those baskets might fall apart. It tries to make bland games that appeal to everyone, and end up appealing to nobody.

Meanwhile, the massive investment that came into the industry during the pandemic has resulted in an absolute abundance of games. Far too many games. The industry straight up cannot support the amount of games currently on the market. Over the summer I watched trailers for over 12,000 games. Most of those games will fail. Some of them will be high-profile failures, most will be forgotten.

@jesse_dylan It's Incredible how they are still falling into the trap of 'smaller, cheaper games are not worth making because the labour would be more efficiently applied to AAA projects' whilst also losing money hand over fist on underperforming AAA projects and development hell megaprojects.

Well, Rare's studio lead just got promoted to head of XGS, so there's always time for the new Rare studio lead to reboot the whole thing again.

Okay, maybe THIS time I'll get past the bit where it does the whole inevitable Daniel Mullins twist in the middle.

Hopefully the new one can power up the bluetooth connection without switching on the Xbox!

@Medic_alert "(Edit - forgot they were on Switch but I'll still leave them here)"

Considering that one of the listed examples is FIFA World Cup 2010, I suspect absolutely anything that runs on Xbox is fair game, so I don't think anyone's going to hold the Ori games against you.

@InheritNegative If that's the case then they don't know what's cool, or what critics and snobs are interested in because all they've managed to make is bland corporate art.

@Tasuki well, theoretically unhooking the company from the stock market would give them the opportunity to spend some time consolidating and repairing the company instead of chasing the myth of infinite growth and eternal profits, but let's face it, for that to happen they'd need new management, and this is just the existing regime locking down control.

@OldGamer999 It's not just that; it's the fact that their processes have basically left every Ubisoft looking, sounding, feeling the same. They've very much sanded down each and every game they make to a formula of what sold a decade ago, and are now panicking because that's literally the only tactic they have for games production.

All of them. Including the awful ones. Stop killing games.

@jesse_dylan Open Roads is on GPU, and is expanding out to the cheaper tier. We really need a better way of displaying this sort of information, because it's confusing.

@CutchuSlow I have to assume they'll be moving that feature to the main app.

And yet, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the absolute mess of energy waste that MS's pivot to LLM-based everything elsewhere is causing.