Vordus

@jesse_dylan Ironically, their board game division? Excellent work. Some of the most aesthetically pleasing board games in the business. Prospero Hall does great work.

Everything else Funko is involved with? Garbage.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner The current PureXbox mantra seems to be 'if you can shoehorn the word 'Xbox' into the headline, it's Xbox news'.

@NeoRatt We are very much due a new Double Fine IP, yeah. It's been a good while and they used to rattle off a couple of weird concepts a year.

@abe_hikura The documentary already exists, so it's unlikely to be that. It's called 'Pretending I'm a Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story' and it came out back in 2020.

So dynamic Xbox background it is

I'd far prefer Psychonauts remade in the Psychonauts II engine over a Double Fine take on Banjo or Conker.

@themightyant "But quoting how much a previous game made is a red-herring and shouldn't really change the amount. Else should a game that failed and made a loss have got the licensing for free?"

Well no, but if the previous game had made a loss, offering a $7500 royalty buyout would have been more than fair, because it would mean a guaranteed return whilst royalties would not.

GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make a LOT of money. A $7500 buyout represents less than 0.00009% of the previous game's revenue, which makes that $7500 a considerably more insulting figure.

The mere economics of the thing suggests that it's unlikely that these games would be Sony exclusives forever (Sony would basically have to pay the full development costs to justify it), so really it's far more a matter of 'can Square Enix justify the porting costs'.

Oh god, the goat puzzle.

Parcel Corps has been delayed, so not September 3 for that one.

@Gabrielmpf Depends on which kind of dissing COD. The folks who diss COD whilst playing COD are stuck with COD because of a mix of sunk costs and the fact that the community isn't going to leave with them. The folks who diss COD and don't play COD probably aren't in the market for a military shooter that plays along the same lines as COD.

The way to usurp the market for a genre is to do it either whilst the genre is rapidly expanding (as Fortnite did to PUBG), or to strike when the titan of the genre is absolutely falling apart (as Cities: Skylines did to SimCity). COD is well past it's glory days, but it's still chugging along just fine.

@GuyinPA75 Peter Jackson attempted to up the framerate of movies to 60fps, and the result was that everything looked wrong. We're so used to 24fps in movies that 60fps looks too much like cheap daytime TV footage. Sort of like a reversed echo of when George A. Romero shot Night of The Living Dead in black and white because it was cheap, and it made everything creepier because audiences at the time associated black and white with news footage.

On the other hand, in video games 60fps is a nice thing to have. In some genres it is essential. At some point it will doubtlessly be the standard, but right now folks are just as interested in justifying their purchase of a massive 4K screen as they are in playing things with a smoother framerate, and our current hardware can only do one of those two things at a time.

It's a shame that the skateboard content is DLC, but this is basically the equivalent of Forza Horizon for extreme sports. Haven't played it since the beta, but it was fun as heck.

I give it a 2.529032258/5, apparently. Or at least, that's what my big spreadsheet says.

I'm willing to bet that internal metrics shows that this is one of those non-issues that only the die-hard core userbase actually get angry about, and that the average user tends to choose quality over performance, but I doubt that's something we'll ever actually know for sure.

@Titntin Honestly, as much as I joke about the man, I very much miss having the old Molyneux around, outlandish claims and all.

You know the 'Fast, good, cheap: pick two' triangle? Well for every game this generation the choice is 'Framerate, resolution, detail: pick two'.

It's set in Albion, definitely. I mean, sure, we can't use any of the existing geography, the characters, the organisational structure, half of the bestiary, the iconography or anything trademarked, but it's definitely the same place! And if you say it isn't, I'll get a bunch a games journalists to sign a whiteboard saying it is!

Sometimes 60fps is important and necessary. Sometimes it just makes you lose a lot of visual fidelity only to make things look like your dad hasn't turned off the uncanny Motion Smoothing on big fancy new TV.

@Doomcrow Structurally more similar to Outer Worlds, iirc. It's reasonably open, but across multiple smaller maps rather than one big one, and with a focus on a central plot rather than a sandbox.

Have fun folks, I'm going to bed.

@Ricky-Spanish $16 million out of $115 million seems like a good start, but it's not even half of the story. That $16 million first is subject to regional sales taxes (for the sake of simplicity let's average those out to around 10%), and then the theaters will likely be taking at least 45% of the first weekend sales. Meanwhile, the marketing budget for this kind of movie is astronomical. A rule of thumb is that they will spend the budget of the movie again on marketing.

So that makes it more like $7.9 million out of the $225 million it needs to break even.

@bestuardo Harry Potter is something they licence rather than own, which raises the question of who pays JK Rowling if a third party makes a Harry Potter game. Same for Game of Thrones and George RR Martin. Monsterverse they co-own with Legendary, using monsters they licence from Toho. Considering Kong is public domain, it would probably be cheaper to deal with Toho directly there.

Looney Tunes is a good call though, although whether they'd really sell in large quantities these days is questionable. Hanna Barbera is in the same category; lots of IP but not very culturally relevant right now.

Mortal Kombat, well. NetherRealm pretty much has that handled. But I'm sure Zaslav can always make some terrible decision to outsource their most reliable series.

Even with the coat of paint, Crash 1 has aged poorly. I can forgive the unforgiving difficulty, but the weird clunky physics, the most awkward camera angles, and racist stereotype side characters are some of the worst things that late 90s gaming had to offer.

Other than DC Comics, what do they own outright that people would buy video games based on?

@OldGamer999 We're reaching a point where development times for AAA games rival the length of entire console generations, so I'm not sure it's going to get better any time soon.

Neon White occupied a big chunk of my time. Utterly excellent game.

@PhileasFragg The trademarks have expired, but the copyrights will last to the latter part of this century.

22 years? That can't be right; Jango was a character from... oh. oh god. I'm so old.

@fizban3332 I suspect spacing games out is exactly what this is about; now that day-one games are a specifically stated premium feature of GPU they actually have to be able to provide them on a regular basis. Can't just lump them together in the last three months of the year as per gaming industry tradition, else folks won't subscribe for other months.

@NEStalgia It's sort of the gaming equivalent of one of those adult colouring books that were a big thing a few years back.

This is, I suspect, less down to 'breathing room', and more down to pacing major Game Pass releases. If MS are going to charge a monthly premium for major day one releases, they need to actually be able to provide said releases across the year instead of lumping them all in the months before Christmas.

THQ Nordic has a showcase on Friday, which I'm guessing is why stuff like Saints Row and Dead Island 2 is here.

Who's got two thumbs and forgot to check the DLC requirements back when the summer sale was on?

@Dan1283 I would take any one of these over a million Call of Duty games.

It would have been fine if they'd gone for a less generic word than 'Series'.

Ack. I've been so busy lately that I haven't even managed to start this one yet.

I'm selling these fine leather jackets...

@themightyant As far as I understand it, the deal means they have to negotiate with Ubisoft for the streaming rights to ABK games. Presumably if they appear too desperate, it'll push the price up.

Barely bothering my wishlist, as per usual.

@Gabrielmpf The really interesting thing is that not only do they actually have a new game in the works, but that the new world generation tech was built primarily for the new game, then backported into NMS.

I suspect that it might be getting easier to sell folks in those regions on the immediate access of cloud gaming, and then upsell them on the console rather than vice versa, so it's potentially more of a cart/horse dichotomy than a retreat.

Games have long been the least profitable aspect of GAME, so it's not really much of a surprise that they'd want to get rid of the damn things.

It's just ironic, because, well gestures at big purple sign proclaiming 'GAME'

Back in the 360 era there was a period where if you knew how to shop around you could often get up to around 40% off on a preorder. Those days are long gone.

I preordered the DLCs for Forza Horizon 5 and Starfield because I fell into the early access rabbit hole for those (and honestly, being able to play Starfield for a week before the internet's collective ****-ing on it was a much more pleasant way to play Starfield) and knew they were both games I would put hundreds of hours into, but they're about the only things I remember preordering this decade.

Edit: made the autocensor made more sense.

Presumably they'll wait until sales figures start to flatline. So the quickest way to get games on Game Pass will be to avoid buying them.

@dskatter As Ultimate is staying as-is, they have to honour the amount of time that's stated on the card.

@johnK Absolutely brilliant puzzler, though. I suspect the intentionally jarring ugly Amiga style was inspired by Return of The Obra Dinn's 2-bit Macintosh inspired look, what with that being the game's biggest influence.

@UltraGuy If you're in a country that supports rewards but it isn't playing nice with your ISP, you can claim the points using the Xbox phone app, but only when connected via mobile data.

@RIghteousNixon Absolutely. They're some of the best in the business.

"New Zealand developer Wētā Workshop"

New Zealand movie special effects, prop house, and first-time indie developer, Wētā Workshop, surely? They're the guys that designed a whole bunch of the practical effects, costumes and models for Pete Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For the record, the Summer Showcases are still going, there's been around 1150 games, and I'm not sure I can keep my semblance of sanity for much longer.