With the political world focusing on the upcoming presidential battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, politicians are still finding time to single out videogames. H.R. 4204, or “Violence in Video Games Labeling Act”, is a bill that would require a mandatory warning label linking videogames to aggressive behavior on nearly all titles. As legislation that will set a dangerous precedent based on questionable research, League For Gamers (LGF) is rallying the troops at PAX East in Boston this weekend to generate the type of support that caused SOPA and PIPA to die early deaths. But there is a lot of activity going on under the radar with the U.S. government trying to circumvent the type of rallying cry that defeated SOPA and PIPA.
Bethesda's Pete Hines has taken to Twitter to comment on a recent tweet about Starfield's start screen from former WoW team lead Mark Kern.
Kern has been trying to get some attention creating controversies to stay "relevant" for some time now, especially nowadays, since no gaming company wants his a$$ around.
He was fired from his own studio fcs!
Hines calling his stance unprofessional was the best answer for a now irrelevant and jealous person.
Well... if it is the screen that you watch while servers give you access to the game... not, really.
This is from the same "dev" that's been hatin' hard on Xbox lately, he sounds more like a fanboy without a home, he's been all over twitter looking for attention, talking about "xbots", hatin on the ABK deal, and Starfield. He was kicked out ofa company, he help found, the guy is a old hack looking to gain fame off the backs of other hardworking devs, so embarrassing, a fan already exposed him, watch this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v...
In all the years I've been gaming, never seen so much hate for a game as Starfield... and the game isn't out yet.
I could give you a list of games "journos" hate and articles just from N4G so you can peruse the comments for games that have received insane amount of hate.
What gets worse for most of the games (and it will for Starfield) is the straight up lies that were published about the games.
Days Gone is one that’s been relentlessly hated on. I didn’t like it but I’ve never felt the need to hate on it
This is the natural evolution of Spiderman's puddle-gate. Complaining about stupid things can get you an awful lot of attention these days, dude only had to make one tweet about a start screen to make headlines.
Whaaaa
It's a Start screen, you won't be one it for more than 5 seconds before you select New Game
To be fair we stare at UI’s for a lot of different things so it should be clean and simple. Sometimes these companies try too hard to make it more complicated than it needs to be
Xbox should have a very similar UI like PS5. There is nothing wrong in copying what works
@Blackblades not sure if you know what a UI is.....his whole point was that you look at the starting screen for 5 seconds and you look at a UI for basically the entire game.....
You beat me to it. I would also say most Bethesda games have *lot's of bugs after launch* is pretty standard as well.
So dumb. Bethesada start screens have never had much flare. It doesn't make a huge deal. I'd take a fallout or starfield over anything this guys ever helped put out
Looks like we are already seeing the petty reasons people will come up with to dunk on this game.
Kern says that it should be okay to finish a game, but it’s avoided because it’s a “non-optimal profit outcome.”
That's also go for DLC which is obvious, I can also say its not every live service game maybe his game but not all. Looking at Diablo 4 you putting out cash for the game to even play it which is different cause you paying $70 for it. F2p is the same story but also a different story of doing things.
I know tales of games dlc. Example the good old tales of games had good outfits to unlock. Every one recieved maid/butler outfits and swimsuits from those side quest and some cool looking personal outfit. Now look at what we get nothing but color variants, off or on jacket etc and some stupid looking attachments. They get rid of all the basic stuff thats always been with tales just to sale the outfit for profit. I would understood the collab outfits and some other but giving us multiple color variant etc is lazy half baked IMO or close enough.
Ridiculous. Just think of all these gamers pouring their hearts, time, and energy in.
Mark Kern, the former team lead for World of Warcraft, and producer of Diablo 2, Starcraft says the goal is to get you in cheap and make money through in-game purchases and predatory monetization.
Funny coming form an ex-Blizzard employee. As his former employer does the same thing.
Sure about that?
**Mark Kern, the Team Lead on the original World of Warcraft, and a former producer & developer on Starcraft, Brood War, and Diablo 2, tells the story about the meeting that led him to quit his job.
Shortly after WOW had launched, the game had become a huge success, performing much better than Blizzard had anticipated. In the years leading up to launch, Blizzard had hired many new employees. Top executives now wanted to do a mass firing of these hires.
Kern was opposed to the firing, saying "we told them that we were like a family." The team spent the last 2 years in crunch time and didn't deserve to lose their jobs. He also didn't believe that the firings were necessary because WOW was a huge financial success. Instead, he proposed normal performance reviews and firing only those hires who weren't performing up to standards.
In a closed-door meeting of 4 or 5 top Blizzard executives, Kern was told that with WOW's success "we're a real business now." Kern says this was the moment when "big corporate gaming" thinking similar to Electronic Arts began to take over at Blizzard. He quit shortly thereafter. Blizzard went ahead with the firings and they were hugely unpopular and damaging to team morale.
Kern identifies this as the shift away from Blizzard being a "boutique" developer of niche games for a hardcore audience and towards its current "big corporate" approach to mass market games like Diablo Immortal.**
There's the company. And then there's the man. They became EA like and he left.
https://massivelyop.com/201...
Same dev tweeted this:
"Of course devs are happy with Xbox gamepass *right now*, as Microsoft is fully willing to lose billions today to secure content that will entrench them as the winner 10 years from now."
-So #1 he says devs are happy with Gamepass so he's only SPECULATING about "what if" in the future???= Microsoft bad.
-#2 He provides no actual real life example of a game or dev that Gamepass was "horrible" for.
#3 He has no personal experience with making any deal for a Gamepass game.
#4 This dev clearly is a former employee with an axe to grind, he's been outright biased in other tweets saying he hopes the Activision deal is blocked?
-Shadow none of that you wrote has anything to do with Gamepass.
Hence, if they had been unionized, that wouldn’t have happened. Shame how the top always takes the most and throws Pennies at the peasants….. then fire them for good measures. Shameless
I can respect a man who upholds his convictions and principles to the point of quitting a company.
Lots of ppl would have folded instead and complained for eternity.
Amen to this guy.
Basically Apple and Google approach to mobile gaming. The games are free, but everything else in the game will cost you money (an arm and a leg).
Yes. Eventually, that's what Microsoft wants by trying to go mobile by using Activision for game pass. Milk the shit out of micro transactions and DLC and every mobile thing in the book. Skins and all. Season passes. All that trash. Nickel and dime. Drip fed content.
They do now. Blizzard absolutely did not do that crap for the games he worked on. At one point Blizzard was among the most respected studios in the industry. Then Activision happened.
This is why Microsoft has to buy content because not many 3rd party publishers would put their game on GP without a giant check upfront. There is a reason this FTC case has revealed how many studios and publishers had on its list to possible acquire
We already see Xbox sales account for less than 20% on AAA games which launch on all major platforms. Gamepass is creating a mindset of sooner or later game will end up on GP
For gamers it's amazing value and same for smaller indie titles but for major AAA games GP won't benefit developers
Who by the way depend on game sales to early royalty
Yes - and this is what most people understand.
Yet, occasionally, a random developer will stick their head above the parapet and weakly defend Gamepass. When they're currently under contract, they don't want to bite the hand that feeds and risk future games going unpublished / unpromoted / unnoticed, because that also risks them losing out on microtransaction revenue.
Yep, if you make a certain type of game, GP is the only way you'll make any money on Xbox. If you criticize, you might find yourself without the offer to put your next game on GP, and you'll be stuck launching a game a la carte to an audience conditioned to expect to get your games as part of their subscription.
Yes!!
Also. Even if successful on game pass, the base will be lead to only rent your games. Because they would be conditioned to. Those developers will be stuck with all their future games expected to be on the service. Because the base won't be buying any. Just waiting for when your developed games arrives and they pay almost nothing for your games. But Microsoft wouldn't care because it's their subscriptions numbers they are worried about. Not any of the developers or their games. Just being used for their purposes.
Right - it should be clear to people that the owner of the service (MS / Sony) ends up picking the winners and the losers. It's like when the government gets involved in subsidies / tariffs / etc. The winners will sing to high heaven and the losers will complain. Ultimately a sub service dis-intermediates us from the game developers/pubs. On a small scale, no big deal - most of us still buy games based on how well they review, word of mouth, whatever. But on a very large scale, it gets to be bad because SO many people stop picking based on reviews, quality, etc. that the ONLY way for a publisher to survive is to be picked by one of these few companies... the monopsomy. That's when we all lose. Fewer game developers/publishers survive, market consolidation occurs, fewer choices, we all play the same crap even if it's not good, etc..
It's amazing that no one is asking the customers, no article brings that up. We're always criticizing developers and publishers for exploiting customers with overpriced games and microtransactions, for once something is in favor of the consumer and everyone here is against it. I paid $180 for 3 years of gamepass, that's the cost of just 3 games. It's absolutely insane value. I'm basically covered for the next 3 years, I literally get Starfield the day of, without having to worry about $70. There has never been value like this in the history of video games. If it fails in the future I'll just move on, simple. I'm sorry but I don't care what's happening on the corporate side because they don't care when we're getting screwed. I do care about developers but whatever happens is really not in our control, so there's no use arguing about it. The only people sh*tting on Gamepass are the ones who are missing out on it.
No. You're seeing with emotion and thinking you're being attacked for enjoying cheap gaming - you're not.
The subject here stems from a developer's comments, about how they're impacted by subscription services, which is why that's the angle being discussed. The benefit to the gamer is a well-trodden subject and has been touted across the industry for years.
Remember when (if you were old enough) there was competition on the videogame sports market and you had multiple basketball, baseball, boxing, football games, etc on the market?
Then, EA went on a buying spree to kill competition or buy up their rivals. They purchased player licenses, ESPN license, logos, boxers, etc leading to everyone else being forced out of the market. Making deals with the NFL that lead to only Madden being the only licensed football game. Pushing Take Two to buy the baseball license to keep EA from locking that up and let anyone develop a baseball game. Resulting in Sony competing which lead their baseball game to be the winner with the Show. Visual Concepts not being able to make football, lead them to concentrate on basketball as the NBA told EA "No." from trying to buy up that license. They became the winner over NBA Live with NBA 2K.
EA also used their marketing and buying power to kill racing competition. You don't see them making Burnout anymore after purchasing their rival Criterion. They made it just long enough to kill the game and push Need for Speed. Bought out Code Masters who were once their rival. That's what EA does. Just as Microsoft will do with game pass. Trying to make it the defacto standard for gaming.
Instead of having multiple options, choices, it lead to a reduction. It lead to higher prices. Because NFL 2K sold at a lower price t $19.99 and was the better game. EA didn't like that. They reduced their price on Madden to $29.99. But as soon as they locked up football and became a monopoly, prices went back up. And Madden now is way higher than $49.99. Gamers lost. As EA sat on their ass yearly making an average football game.
You think game pass is great now. But it's going to cost you and the industry and the rest of us in the future and your support of it would have paid for the game industry's demise. Just like gamers supported EA and Madden over the years, look at the end result of gamers buying decisions. I know saving money is great. But the end result will have you paying threw the nose. When we all get screwed, make sure you take a look in the mirror on who was responsible for it.
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MS pays devs/publishers for every game added to gamepass to make up for the loss of sales since Gamepass leads to less game sales on Xbox consoles (MS themselves have confirmed this in court documents/E-mails).
Heck even i have stopped buying games (around 4 years ago) on Xbox now that MS pays to have games added to the service. Why would anyone buy games on Xbox when MS is footing the bill for us gamers.
But the amount of money that MS pays to have all these games is starting to be not enough to cover for the loss of game sales because of increasing budgets which is why more and more devs/publishers are starting to talk negatively about gamepass.
That is why MS is raising the price of gamepass and it will continue raise the price again and again in the future to try and pay devs/publishers more money that they are asking for and also to try and start making a profit as they are not making a profit according to the court documents at the moment.
Would you rather pay 30$ for an Indie game or 15$ for one Month GPU with hundreds of games?
At some point Developers will be forced to launch their games in a subscription service because else no one is gonna play their games.
Just like music artists are forced to release their songs on a subscription service.
Eventually you will get what you pay for. MS is dangling carrots 🥕 to sucker you in and give you less for more will happen when they feel like they got enough of you stuck in their ecosystem.
@jznrpg orrrrr this will force other companies to compete and offer better content in their streaming space.
@giovonni what is more likely to happen is Sony and Nintendo continuing like they are now and developers will just go with PS and Nintendo and skip Xbox because they won't make money on Xbox since the fanboys there are now too cheap to buy games.
I think it's less about if they force people to (obviously they don't) but whether they pay the top execs of the publishers a lot of money to do so and then those execs fire the people who made the game to save money. Basically giving them lots of money in case the game fails while making the actual developers unemployed.
Speculation ^
Replies(1)Could have told you that. Wait. I did. It's Microsoft on top of the pyramid.
Its MS having an idea and implementing it before thinking it through. Betting on the "potential" of its success, investing too much into it till they either kill it, force it, or put it aside to be forgotten. Never admitting to the mistake.
Godmars
I don't believe they can kill gamepass. If they went that route it's game over in the console business. I think they've broken their fanbase far to much to turn back now. I'm just generalizing I know some of you xbox dudes buy games it's not all of you
"I'm just generalizing I know some of you xbox dudes buy games it's not all of you"
Sorry, closest I ever got to COD was a PS2 demo...
Just saying, you might be generalizing a bit too much.
It's important to keep tabs on the stuff gov'ts try to pull when it comes to Internet regulations.