They probably ought to start then. It makes sense to build a small successful project and then build up that team to make a larger version of it, like Larian going from Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 to Baldur’s Gate 3. It makes far less sense to just start with the big team and make something outside of your wheelhouse like Suicide Squad. If the thing they used to make is not trending toward a place where it allows them to scale up, or if the team is just tired of making it and needs a new creative outlet, maybe what the industry needs is an off ramp that will change a large team into multiple small teams.

Let me spoil it for you: Sony’s is a non factor. Their games play on PC, and there’s nothing they can offer over an open platform like a handheld PC.

All I can see is a controller who looks really surprised by whatever it sees in the lower right corner of the screen.

Seriously though, my gut reaction is that this looks worse than the old Steam controller for track pads. I hope it’s more comfortable than the Steam Deck.

They are doing that.

Well, if there’s one release no one wants to be near, it’s GTA6, so February looks far better by comparison. And for me personally, I couldn’t care less about Assassin’s Creed or Monster Hunter. Kingdom Come, Rift of the NecroDancer, and Civilization are more likely to be competing for my time.

Only if you play as Sauron.

It’s not a new IP. It’s based in the Pillars of Eternity universe.

They were the first to settle it (from a Western perspective). That’s what they were pioneers of.

There are tons of online games that don’t require you to be online. We know exactly how to do that, whether it’s providing LAN or private servers, but the industry is happy to let you forget that. The difference with MMOs is that they charged a subscription that people were willing to pay and, for a long while at least, it was impossible to pirate, which was a goal of the industry for a long time. By no coincidence, Steam was the first big digital distribution platform right as broadband became mainstream.

And sorry, it was a third person shooter called Tex Atomic’s Big Bot Battles, not a real time strategy. I confused my acronyms in my head while typing.

Ah, I never knew that. But even that was a callback to them using a very similar trick in the old MSX games as anti-piracy. (Meryl, btw.)

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To be a pioneer is to be the first to do something. In the context of American pioneers, they were Western settlers, who intended to actually live in the place rather than just chart it. If you put enough qualifiers in front of it that I don’t think are necessary to the argument, like “single player”, then sure, they were probably pioneers. I can find an old RTS from a failed digital distribution platform a few years earlier that also seems to qualify, but fine. Even still, there’s no world where we didn’t have Steam and then online DRM didn’t become standard, because you’d have to ignore the world we lived in post-Napster that led to iTunes, which had online DRM at the time. The lack of it in video games was likely due to middleware partners having not invented the solution for it yet, but I guarantee you they were working on it (SecuROM was only a few years later), as both piracy and used copies were the enemy of the video game industry for decades, and aggressive DRM measures at the time would even negatively interface with and end up breaking some users’ disc drives. Combine that with how lucrative MMOs were turning out to be for their recurring revenue, and there was no way we weren’t rapidly converging on exactly what Steam and live service games ended up being.

The Steam hate back then was as prevalent as you say, and it earned it, particularly back then.

One of the most famous moments of Metal Gear Solid is an anti-piracy measure.

That’s what pioneered means.

This is revisionist history. Steam was not the origination of DRM or even online DRM.

Perhaps, but 10x as many? I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.

My wife and I are playing Golden Idol together as well. Are you playing with controller? If so, how are you finding it? Sometimes I scroll too far to one side of a window, and it just starts cycling them for reasons I can’t explain.

Exactly. The peak number of people trying to download it simultaneously was about 24k. They didn’t all stick around because it wasn’t working, even though that’s about 1/10th of what the devs expected and prepared for the demand to be. They didn’t get anywhere close to 200k people all hitting that server at once.

It is, because everyone trying to download assets from the game servers were doing so from the executable that Steam tracks as running.

No, that’s what I’m saying. That peak is well under what they claimed they simulated.

The peak concurrent users for the game thus far has been less than 1/10th of that (EDIT: slightly more than 1/10th of that). They were well within the bounds of what they simulated. They just screwed up.