Had the same thought. Plus, according to some of these reviews, there’s no information age units, so that gives them a possible fourth era to work with in upcoming DLC.

Civ7 does indeed use Denuvo. Concerning for a game like this with far more CPU usage than your typical game.

For me, Civ6 at launch felt like a couple steps forward and a couple steps back. I really appreciated the increased transparency with diplomacy, but the AI was aggressively bad in mid and late-game, something they never ended up getting right.

Just like they wouldn’t the last time…and the time before that…and the time before that…

It’s not a thing at outlets like these. Paid promo from influencers and independent reviews are not the same thing.

FC 24 did well even after they lost the FIFA license. Something else going on here.

Like a lot of PC reviewers now, they’ve separated out their technical coverage; here’s PC Gamer’s tech review. But yes, even a couple sentences on it would have been nice.

In short, expect better performance from Nvidia GPUs, possibly until third parties get XeSS/FSR up and running; don’t expect full support for hardware enthusiasts, and don’t try it on the Deck unless you’re okay with the absolute lowest settings.

The only reason I’ve been commenting at all the past couple years, lol.

We still have a ways to go before reaching the inflation-adjusted, $150-per-game peak of mass market games in the 1990’s. A key difference is games back then had way higher marginal cost (it’s near zero now).

The interesting thing is that the market is becoming a lot more like it was back then, full of people that only buy one or two games a year and only play those. Of course now, the model is retaining players with DLC and MTX, whereas in 1995 it was more because people could only afford one or two games a year.

Ughh. The selective enforcement is maddening, both with this and TikTok. So much of the filed complaint especially applies to Roblox, but it’s clear that we’re only interested in protecting our consumers when it really means chipping away at a foreign rival’s burgeoning soft power.

The full slideshow is a great collection of data, really interesting stuff if you’re interested in gaming biz.

That said, while I’m sure PC enthusiasts (among the larger gaming audiences here at Lemmy and Reddit) will be thrilled to see PC gaming rising while mobile is falling, the actual revenue breakdown is less exciting. PC growth is driven by a larger percentage than ever of microtransactions.

Much of the presentation is centered around “black hole games,” which make up a ton of the market and are extremely difficult to pull users away from. Sad when a lot of the strategy seems to be about cost-cutting and getting better percentages from the storefronts rather than making better games.

Way too early to speculate. Until the cards are independently benchmarked, there’s no way to assess value.

This even being on a Nintendo system–subject to Nintendo’s review–was a major change. Nintendo of America was as puritanical as it came up through the 16-bit era. Something like this releasing on a Nintendo system was unconscionable as late as 1995.

This sounds ambitious for a small studio. It doesn’t help that both Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars felt feature-light to me, maybe due to their signature genre blending.

Could be they’ve scaled up (and trust me, I’m yearning for more space games in the AA category), but too many of these projects are shooting for the moon and falling short. I’d love to see a stretch of releases with smaller scope–like Everspace 2–that the industry can build on, because space games are not where they were in 2000. Chris Roberts is off in his ivory tower doing his thing, and the big devs are either planetbound or obsessed with procgen.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop was amazing. Not for everyone and probably a little too difficult in a couple spots, but the writing and atmosphere is impeccable. Absolutely nails the vibe it’s going for.

Absolutely gorgeous game with an equally bad gameplay loop. Kinda sad.

How is Stormgate innovating? Genuine question–I’ve been avoiding it largely because it looks so much like StarCraft (and Pottinger even calls it out specifically in the article as something not innovative).

I’d add They are Billions as another evolutionary branch that’s doing something different. Starting to see some clones of this formula.

That said, I don’t think Against the Storm or Manor Lords are the kind of games Pottinger is talking about. Against the Storm doesn’t even have combat. Those are more in the city builder realm.

I think there are too many JRPGs that still use their battle system in support of their narrative for it to be considered anything other than a core system in those games. That’s especially the case in lower budget games in the genre.

Larger budget projects are branching more and more into side content/worldbuilding, but I’d argue it’s still highly underdeveloped in the genre when compared with western RPGs, in quality if not also in quantity. Persona and Yakuza are exceptions, rather than the rule. Persona is doing something entirely different (and well enough that it’s being emulated now) while Yakuza, as you say, carry a lot of that over from prior development into its RPGs from the series’ action games.

For sure. Kinda surprised one never got made, really.

Some of my favorites in a variety of genre:

• TIE Fighter and/or Freespace
• Planescape: Torment
• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
• Pharaoh

Also one of Sierra’s adventure games. A popular one is King’s Quest VI.

Unfortunately, Cyberpunk is exactly the kind of product that is going to keep driving the realistic approach. It’s four years later now and the game’s visuals are still state-of-the-art in many areas. Even after earning as much backlash on release as any game in recent memory, it was a massively profitable project in the end.

This is why Sony, Microsoft, and the big third parties like Ubisoft keep taking shots in this realm.