Why not go for a bigger company first?

Apple does the same thing with ebooks. When I put my book up for sale with Apple, the terms stated that I could not list it for a lower price at another store. So no, that is not a new form of price fixing.

Also interested to hear what other digital goods stores charge less than 30%, aside from Epic who definitely wouldn’t maintain that if they had the monopoly position.

That’s where it’s good to get an SD card; and set it up so that other flatpak apps install there (might need to mess with Flatseal to configure filesystem permissions)

Look up the “Twintail Launcher”. Pretty easy entry point for several anime games. Theres even a version of proton, dwproton, that’s recommended for several of them.

Also worth pointing out how many very popular games even today have visuals on par with the N64 game. Kids are fine with that; they just don’t want to set up yellow, red, and white AV cables of an N64.

Quite often I feel like the internet is over-critical of AAA. Yes, on many occasions they put out manufactured slop, and it’s important to consider reviews from multiple sources for that reason.

Even Ubisoft games, when you ignore their little MTX menu, have some flashes of writing brilliance or interesting historical attention to detail. Other times, people manufacture their own forms of annoyance, like “Visiting every single icon on the map is boring!!” Yeah, no shit, that’s why they desperately try to stop you from doing that. FC5 even sleep-darts you to forcefully pull you into story missions, though that idea was derided.

One of the big issues MS, and many other, companies will have is that it doesn’t work out like the Goldilocks story.

“Okay. That price was too high. Let’s dial it back just a bit, and it’ll be juuust right. ……Why aren’t people coming back?”

People burned by high prices will find alternatives, and can very quickly settle with the transition issues of those alternatives. The same has been found on conveniences like potato chips.

This kinda tracks. One time someone I knew bought a series of games on Steam at once, and his bank blocked them. In calling them, he learned that (in addition to some other circumstantial clue) their pattern recognition picks up on game purchases, since that’s an excellent target for someone who just stole a credit card. Scammers can often resell the games in some way, through some anonymity.

That’s probably a big deal in Asia. I get the impression banking is not so smooth an experience out there (most specifically in Japan), and instead most people still work directly with cash; so any gacha game or online store will very much rely on convenience stores to stock their cards.

Similar issue, I have many VNs that seemed like a good deal at the time, but would take way too much time to get interesting.

Half of them it seems like you need to go through 20 requisite school scenes meeting people before anything interesting happens. While I finished Steins;Gate, it’s initially guilty of that kind of slow build.

I don’t think I know of the “treat them like shit” bit.

Part of what happens in story mode is that you, as the trainer, ask the racer if she has particular racing goals (eg, win a certain cup) and the both of you work towards that.

Annoyingly, some of them even build unrealistically stupid expectations, like competing in an event they’re not good at…

That said, I’ll admit there have been times I had unreasonable gut reactions to little things in games. I didn’t like in Nier Automata how you had to kill animals for weapon upgrades, given that Earth is a desert planet mostly devoid of organic life as it is.

Best answer I can give to that forum question: They accepted a few decades without wage increases, and now through a network of SNAP, private health insurance, and political blame idly going to racism, they maneuvered themselves back to being the slaves.

Or just like…not pour dev resources into more remakes?

It also came out 7 years ago. It also came out 5 years ago. Its spinoffs came out 6 years ago, 3 years ago, and 1 year ago.

While the imagery initially seemed like it’d be a grim, story-based game with low excitement, I found myself surprised at how much environmental gameplay and cinematic setpieces the series has.

Same feeling. I hate the “eagerness” of game hate these days.

I’m disappointed in some of the time ghost decisions, but I can still praise the overall product as being a fantastic collection of work by some great artists, even if I don’t decide to play it.

I suppose a big part of it is: People don’t often finish games. Remake is obviously a very long JRPG on its own, so when Rebirth came out, maybe a lot of people thought “Oh yeah! I should finish Remake.” and then didn’t.

That does present an interesting idea to me though. Maybe I’ll just buy Revalations without playing Remake? I played the original - I already know the broad direction the story has gone. I could maybe just watch some cutscenes on YouTube to figure out whatever the hell they twisted the Temple of the Ancients story beat into.

It’s not quite what you wanted, but as someone with a lot of FF7 nostalgia, I ended up playing Trails in the Sky, another JRPG from that era, much later in life, and felt a lot of that nostalgia sense; badass characters with sensitive moments and big sinister twists. They remade that game very well, and the sequel (a bit of a necessary follow-on/conclusion) is out later this year. While it does add some brief action-combat, it’s only meant to give you an edge going into the traditional turn-based system (and bosses give you no action-combat).

Fun story; I wrote one about Ace Attorney, in relation to its premise of “If there’s a mystery with a big reveal, we build it up and resolve it in one game before the credits roll.” Instead, it made me realize I had a lot to say about Half-Life.

The series has built up a following around mysterious figures and theories. While the games themselves are fantastic, I should’ve had the confidence as a writer years ago to say no one, even at Valve, has any idea what’s going on in their stories. They very likely have no specific, well-formed plans about answering “who is the G-man”, and a certain dramatic event late in Episode 2 was very lazily shoe-horned to try to manufacture stakes, as made evident…

It’s tricky because I still love HL2 for its good, snappy character writing, use of advanced facial tech, the way it never removes the player’s presence for the sake of cutscenes, etc. But they likely shouldn’t be used as reference for overall story direction.

(He walks in, wearing an un-flattering speedo)
“Hey, babe. You ready for a good time?”
“Oh. God. Honey…please, not now, I have a splitting headache. I’ve had this stuffed up nose and it feels like I haven’t been getting enough air all day.”
“I have good news for you, and great news for me.”

I’ve been long frustrated about the time ghost branching story effort stuff, but I’m still happy they’ve managed to put finishing touches on this trilogy. Maybe I’ll play it now.