Some platforms offer better prices in exchange for a one-year subscription commitment, but tiered discounts based on subscriber loyalty are much less common.

It’s literally the opposite most of the time. The longer you stay the more expensive it becomes.

I absolutely love online lunatics like this (and also they have way too much time on their hands 😅). Gaming wouldn’t be the same without 'em.

Well you see, they wrote the articles with AI.

I’ve only ever played 3 and I really liked it when I did. Sad that one doesn’t get talked about much cause the art style is my favorite of the whole series I think.

It definitely had its fair share of batshit insane puzzles, but overall it’s a great game.

No no no, see, your voice is only valuable for a one time sale these days. Stop being greedy! /s

I think most do and it’s a good way to look at it. There are definitely companies out there that people don’t think of as indie that are technically independent, so I just wanted to mention it. It’s still very cool to hear they’ve surpassed triple a!

It’s worth noting that indie is a pretty wide tent. Some studios are technically indie but they’re working with practically AAA budgets.

Definitely check out the myst remake, as it has modern movement available (and it’s gorgeous). These two games are basically puzzle game masterpieces and remembered so fondly for a reason. Hope you enjoy them. 🙂

What does someone have to do to prove to youtube they own it?

Thanks for the ramble!

Would there be any interest (or does it already exist) for a community dedicated to indie shoutouts? I picture somewhere specifically for fans and devs to call attention to good games without marketing budgets or their own work in the case of devs.

American here: your cops are above the law, too? 😑

Shitty corporate backed agency supports corpos. More news at 11.

This game literally gave me a mind altering experience. The point at the end as you walk towards the light, I started to be unsure if I was controlling the character anymore or not, and it was actually quite dissociating like a psychedelic experience (I was sober at the time for the record). Truly incredible moment that no other game has pulled off.

Not saying you’re wrong, but there’s a lot of peace of mind in knowing everything on the platform is drm free, rather than having to do some research. So it is marketing, but it’s also a promise of curation so to speak.

Oh that’s good to know! That’s another one I still haven’t played, but this is a strong recommendation.

For me personally I’ve never liked combining hard challenges with infrequent saves. I don’t mind things to be hard if I’m allowed to get right back to the same spot after, but I don’t like having to get back to the hard thing from far away just to try again.

I do like this genre but I had the same experience with hollow knight. I wanted to like it, but something about the way it controlled felt really off to me, and I didn’t enjoy the punishing death mechanics.

I finally tried the first one not long ago and went in super excited. I had the same experience, though… I think for me what caught me off guard the most was how hard it was. I’ve played a lot of platformers and metroidvanias, and I found Ori to be punishingly difficult. The “escape the area” sections were the killers ultimately. The first one in the tree took me dozens of tries, and it turned a very cool and cinematic moment into a frustrating slog that I couldn’t wait to put behind me. I got as far as the next one of these in the ice area and it was even more intense, and finally I just threw in the towel. It’s a shame because there was a lot to like, but the difficulty was a bit too much for my enjoyment.

Server checks aren’t always just an arbitrary gate at the start so this makes sense. For example, if the game has unlockable things (paid or not) and those things sync across multiple devices, then server checks to make sure your progress get saved and merged together properly can be woven through the whole game.

To give you some background on the term, it refers to rich land owners in England who had a lot of inherited wealth through the estates they owned (landed, meaning they own land). These “gentry” generally led lives of leisure and wealth, but they didn’t actually do anything, they just inherited it all through their family wealth and land ownership.

I’m sure I have details of that a little off, but that’s my best explanation of it.

In what world is it a financial failure? Didn’t they just make an asset flip and potentially made millions of dollars based on player figures? Hard to imagine 100% of people refunded…

I think by market share percentages alone there will be a significant number of people that have no idea ad block is going away, and who knows, some of them may make the switch if they look into it.

Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.

I can’t speak for FFXIV, but if you want pvp in an MMO you might give guild wars 2 a try. It’s got 5v5 pvp matches where everyone is on an even playing field. It’s available in the free to play version, and you can go into it right after the tutorial if you want, don’t even have to do leveling.

There’s also a large scale pvp mode called world vs world where you have three teams of hundreds of players fighting over territory. That one uses non-equalized stats so it’s an end game thing, but it’s a lot of fun!

Ah I see. Sorry to hear that! Thanks for explaining.

Like it or not it does have an effect, which is to raise the stakes. If everything is instant gratification there are less lows, but also less highs. You may prefer games that are less punishing, and that’s fine, most people do. It does have an impact on the experience that creates value for people who like a more punishing experience, though. It doesn’t create that value in the moment you’re waiting, it creates it when you’re debating whether a risk is worth it somewhere else in the game. If there was no punishment for a mistake, there’s no reason to debate the risks, and that removes the high of taking a risk and having it pay off.

Forgive my ignorance, but what does it do to your experience practically speaking? Are the prices going up? Is it difficult to purchase things in USD because of having to convert currency?