I’d love to find a $40 PVP FPS. That has split-screen and lets me host my own server. Tuned to work with small groups and large groups. This one is just tied to a server that I don’t control and will inevitably die a painful death.

You can still own your games without a physical copy if you buy them DRM-free.

They increased the price for the tier that gives you access to the likes of CoD, so I don’t think this is going to grow that offering by much, if at all. I think the numbers stalled out because this (admittedly substantial) number of customers is what the market is for people who would get more value out of a subscription than buying the games outright. And besides that, I think the numbers are pointing toward the very real possibility that they’d have been better off without Game Pass.

Consumers have always owned their media.

That’s not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that’s disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS “best of” tapes and whatnot, but you’d never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we’re at a spot where you can buy a “digital copy” of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your “copy” of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you’ll get through in a month. That’s just simple economics. It’s usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she’s a member of the other party and likely doesn’t care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it’s better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It’s funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there’s no competition I can go to instead.

I don’t see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they’re not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo’s online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

Traditional roguelikes may frequently pair with bad graphics, but it’s not a requirement. There are games like Tangledeep and Jupiter Hell, for instance. But thanks, these sound interesting.

What’s the hook to each one? I hear people mention Caves of Qud a lot, but the low-fi graphics aren’t grabbing my attention on their own.

I’m sure it would if I thought more highly of it.

I didn’t personally care for it, but I know I’m in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn’t care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out “the butterfly room”, because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There’s an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you’re unlikely to see them all.

They iterated on a stale formula in a way that those customers had wanted. Palworld is also far more competently designed than you’d expect from its premise, but that premise is the kind of satire that only people familiar with Pokemon would write in the first place.

Given how much PC has grown in the same time, statistically, they are moving to PC.

I think what we’re seeing is that people aren’t choosing to move up a generation.

I think we’re too far out to blame supply chain issues. PS5 is lagging behind PS4 at the same point in its life by about 20M consoles. #2 is both a symptom and a cause. Developers across the entire industry have bloated their development timelines. That means fewer games and less reacting to consumer tends. When do you think Concord started development, for instance? And do you think it still would have been made if it started after Overwatch 2 came out?

Plus, consumers seem to be gravitating toward the less restrictive open standard. If you’re in Sony land, you need to replace your old controllers, even though they still work; you have to pay for online play; backwards compatibility is a bit of a dice roll, and if you want features as similar as higher resolution textures and better frame rates, they’re going to sell you a remaster rather than just letting you turn up the settings. In ruling over their walled garden ecosystem and trying to extract more money from it, they’ve given players more and more reason to play on PC.

The magic is similar to Dark Souls 3. I don’t know that it’s any more overtuned or anything, but there’s a lot of fun in finding broken builds, and there are tons of them.

Of the ones I’ve played, Elden Ring. The biggest aid for new players being that if something’s too tough, you just go somewhere easier and come back later. The opening area has a boss roaming a field designed to teach you exactly that lesson.

But not that the multiplayer will. It’s often times impossible to discern from what’s on the store page.

I’m not in the UK, but it’s incredibly hard for me to make an informed purchase as someone who cares about this stuff. My latest strategy is to use the PC Gaming Wiki, because I can’t even rely on store pages on GOG or Steam to paint a full or accurate picture of what I’m buying. Often times I need to hope the developer responds to particular Steam forum posts.

Is their removal of these licenses a measure to somehow prevent people from taking action?

The problem is this game can’t even be pirated due to how it’s architected.

Yup, just made more sense to group it with the other high profile releases. I’m looking forward to that expansion, for sure.