Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
By games
Language specific
This is self explanatory; to all who do not support the idea of ownership, there shall be no more funding, regardless of their game's quality.
Advice:
buy from GOG, avoid single player games which require internet connection or 3 party launchers.
Repost from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StopKillingGames/comments/1ugzirg/stoppayinggames/
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn't sell, they won't have a job anymore. And I'll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin's Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That's 35 to 65 hours that you weren't spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you'd part with your money to play. Maybe that's Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there's some other game that also didn't get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they're recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.
What are you talking about? Game devs are constantly being laid off even after the product they create, creates profits for the corp.
That's a different story entirely. That's poor allocation of resources on large projects, when certain disciplines needed at the end of a project don't necessarily have work to do at the beginning of another. The money that hired those people in the first place still came from selling the company's previous video games.
Eh, there are enough news reports of record profit game sales followed by massive layoffs to say otherwise. The poor allocation of resources you're talking about? Bonuses to upper management :/
I will 100% pay full price for an indie-published game, or for a game published by an honorable corp. If that company is fucking over its development team, layed off the development team after a successful launch, or is doing some unscrupulous shit, the black flag is raised.
If further projects by that big corp aren't funded, oh no! That's the point. Starve the bastards enough that they change their ways or give up the game.
That doesn't dispute what I said in the slightest.
This you?
Yes, those are not conflicting pieces of information. The poor allocation of resources is not having a Project B ready for people to move to when their job on Project A is done.
That's entirely untrue. Plenty of people get paid to make games that flop.
Not for more than one or two games in a row.
Blizzard has been churning out flops for over a decade
What? They haven't been flopping either critically or commercially. Even Overwatch 2 and Diablo Immortal, with vocal dissatisfaction from players, still made tons of money.
Microsoft reported an initial $570 million operating loss from the acquisition in one quarter alone, citing acquisition-related expenses and costs associated with restructuring.
Meanwhile, Blizzard experienced a decline of up to 63 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) across various titles, suffering when releases like Call of Duty failed to meet aggressive sales expectations.
They're certainly still generating revenue but the studio hasn't been profitable in some time.
You are mixing units and data at this point. Acquisitions cost money. Blizzard and Call of Duty come in the same purchase. Call of Duty had a bad release this past year. And none of those things are a measure of how profitable Blizzard games are.
And that drives up costs, which cuts into profit.
Did the developers get paid for their labor?
Revenue - Cost = Profit
This is Business 101.
But plenty of businesses operate at a loss, when they can generate surplus cash through investment. You don't need to generate profit to pay wages. In some cases (the AI companies being a great modern example) you can pay incredibly generous salaries while running enormous losses.
Not forever. The profits need to outweigh the losses, and the rest comes down to averages. That's how all of this works.
If you're waiting forever to collect your paycheck, you've already been rooked.
Are you willfully misunderstanding at this point? Those wages come from averages and projections based on past results of how much money previous games make. If they continually don't make money, their jobs disappear, because the work they're doing no longer justifies how much it costs to pay them to do it.
Again, I'm going to point you to the AI industry, which has never posted a profit but which still pays some of the highest salaries in the industry.
You're also fully neglecting the concept of the Loss Leader which exists to onboard people to a system despite losing money on a given product.
Not even discussing the hobbyist developers (originating whole genres of gameplay purely out of personal passions), the notion that games will go away or that studios must be profitable isn't reflective of how games are developed in reality.
None of those things can happen indefinitely. Loss leaders make up their profits on the back end; the classic example in this industry is selling a console at a loss while selling software at higher margins.
AI is still in the investment phase. By anyone's account, this is a bubble about to burst, investing in something that doesn't generate enough money to justify the investment. It won't do that forever. I'd be surprised if it continues without a major correction in a few years. No one can predict how or when it will happen, but we've seen so many bubbles throughout history. They all need sustainable profit eventually, or they become a disaster. Gaming already had its own bubble in the wake of the pandemic, and that's where these layoffs are coming from.
Would you take a job that requires years to complete and forego wages until it retails?
Nobody actually works like that.
No, they typically don't. That's more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.
You’re right. It often comes from the previous game but if that game doesn’t do well then the chances of there being another are greatly reduced.
And yet there are free indie games out there that are generally better than the corp funded crap. Creators will create, no matter what happens.
You'll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don't think the games I've found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.
I've put more hours into Infiniminer, Minetest/Luanti, Industry, Dopewars, dnd, dopewars, and various Twine/Frotz games than any corporate games. When I do want an FPS (rare), I look at Doom sourceports and maybe Cube/Sauerbraten.
And there's the real time-murderer: Nethack.
Having a personal taste and preference that lets you enjoy free indie and/or old DOS games is great for your wallet, saying these games are "generally better" than paid-for games funded by corporations is wild to me.
To each their own, but I'd say none of those compare to Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Skullgirls.