I don’t know why anyone would work at one of these studios. Obviously people are staying because the jobs are still lucrative but who is it that’s walking into these super unstable jobs under a company that’s been doing nothing but layoffs and shutdowns for the last few years?
At this point I don’t know what Microsoft has been doing lately that isn’t about laying off thousands of people, but at least I’m very happy that all these companies have been spun out of Xbox. Double Fine might not be a 10/10 studio, but it’s great that they’re indie again and not part of a bipolar company that keeps threatening every company they own with layoffs due to management’s bad decisions.
In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.
I appreciate how direct this post is compared to your average corpo-speak, but wow that sounds threatening as hell LOL.
Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. […] We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3.
14 layers of management is insane. Isn’t that like a month of going up and down the chain for simple decisions? No wonder they take forever making one game that turns out to be mediocre.
There’s a lot of talk about focusing on their bigger projects and being more hands-on with studios, which is worrying. Usually management messing with development makes the game worse.
Audio is another big one. If you want good quality music and your game is voice acted you would be surprised how much space all those audio files take. Add in tons of other gigabytes if you offer voice acting for other languages.
There will definitely be a niche market for physical games, but yeah I was thinking about the average person and their experience. Especially since PC has shifted very early, I think most people would prefer to download a game in half an hour than having to go to a store and buy a physical disk and have to constantly put it in/take it out every time you want to play something else.
For Nintendo, I have genuinely despised their game key card approach. From a preservationists perspective, it’s a waste of money. However, getting a code in a box is a massive joke. Sony actually succeeded in making the concept of a GCK looking like a solid alternative. I really don’t know how to feel about that lol.
That’s funny, I had the same exact thought when writing this. The game key card thing sounds so stupid that my first thought was “damn, I hope they don’t get away with this”. My second thought was “wait, this might be the better option on consoles now. Damn.”
Surely it’s for Valve’s upcoming VR headset which will run on ARM.
This is less unpopular opinion and more of just a fact that a lot of people don’t know yet. Native linux builds are often buggier than the Proton versions, especially if the game is older than a few years because Linux packages move fast and break old versions every now and then.
When Baldur’s Gate 3 made a native Linux version (mostly for Steam deck) everyone started reporting that the game is a buggy mess.
Terraria had a number of bugs on the Linux version back when I played, to the point where everyone on ProtonDB just said use the Windows version.
Hollow Knight Silksong on release had an issue where controllers on the Linux version wouldn’t work. I forced it to use Proton and get the windows version and it just worked.
So I can’t help but roll my eyes when somebody from the Linux community asks a developer with a perfectly working game to make a native version for Linux. For what? They’ll put a lot of time and effort making a more unstable version of their game where, at the end of the day, the performance will probably be exactly the same? You’d be surprised how many people still parrot the idea that native builds are magically better.
Relatively niche distro, relatively barebones installation, and it’s mostly aimed at low end PCs. There’s no point in someone new using that instead of any other popular distro.
CachyOS. Hands down the best for you.
Gets updates as soon as they come out which is important for gaming and software development
Really good performance, has access to a huge amount of software
Beginner friendly, automatically creates snapshots (backups) in case you mess up
Has a simple to follow wiki with lots of useful info. Also it lets you install all the gaming packages you need with one button click.
No offense to people on this site but every time this thread pops up there are a lot of terrible recommendations being thrown around. Don’t bother using base Arch linux if you’re new to Linux. Don’t use random niche distros like MX Linux. Debian is very barebones and requires you to manually set up a lot of things that come by default in other modern distros. And finally IMO don’t use an immutable OS unless you know what you’re getting into, as many people get burned by how hard it is to install applications on them.
Recommending MX Linux to a beginner is insane
Telling people to buy a Steam Deck used to make sense, but it doesn’t anymore when it’s twice the price of a Switch 2 (I say this as a Steam Deck fan).
I’m with you, this is an insanely ballsy move. One of the biggest pros of a console is that you could still buy physical games and trade it with friends or sell it used to someone else. If everything is going digital, what’s the point?
Here we even have a local chain that rents you physical games for a week at a time…
Then you have Solo Leveling, a franchise entirely about one guy grinding dungeons alone, making a multiplayer co-op game.
The jokes really do write themselves.