Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
I just might. Some fights were infuriating but so was Hollow Knight and I love that game. As long as the conclusion makes it worth it.
An amateurish mistake. I bet their programmers don't even have thigh high socks.
With the means that we have, that anywhere in the world a dozen people can figure out how to get very niche things adapted in one way or another into different systems, and countless people can keep media on thumb drives rather than needing entire climate controlled libraries, something has to be very, very, extremely obscure for it to be completely lost, and even then there are people for which the obscurity of something is the very thing that makes it appealing.
I don't think you are technically incorrect to some extent that some things will inevitably disappear, but I would still scratch it far more to imposed legal and technical restrictions than to the futility of fighting time.
Say, every single online or mobile game that closes and is completely lost? It's 100% on the erosion of customer rights, exclusively. We have today the technology to keep them running and people willing to do it. It's just that business and contracts defined that, no matter how much people have spend on them, they don't get access to essential server files necessary to keep it running. This is not "time coming for us all", it's selfish businesses enabled by a law with no regards for cultural preservation.
Meanwhile the MAME project year after year figures out how to run incredibly niche arcade titles from decades ago. Even with all the challenges and obstructions.
Really, take a moment to really admire, that with all the struggles and limitations that we have, you as an individual human being, can with a handheld device, access and personally store thousands of Public Domain books from the Gutemberg Project, the entirety of Wikipedia, several full collections of every single game released for multiple consoles, including prototypes, hacks and homebrew. A single person can do that much. Ozymandias' statue may crumble to dust but his history lives on, in someone's pocket.
Maybe to you all that effort is pointless. Maybe it's be easier to just let it go. But there's a whole world of other people who might be interested in it. Maybe you just care about one single game. But a different person cares about a different single game. In a world of billions, how many different things might people care about?
If you talk to me about the inexorable advance of time, I'll still be on the side of the indomitable human spirit.
Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.
Absolutely
To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don't blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,
But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.
When people say it's shallow, I wonder if they didn't even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn't even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.
Because of that I'm also really looking forward for their new game.
Tunic has such an unique vision and it executes it expertly. On the surface it's a zelda-like but it's so much more than that, and it's best experienced blind. In fact, that's the whole idea. The developer wanted to replicate the experience of being a kid picking up a game in a different language that you had to figure out little by little.
Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story's rise. But back then there weren't so many indie fans.
It can go however far you want. Even if you say you'll play these games for the rest of your life, at $2/mo buying it only becomes more economically worthwhile if you entirely quit getting games entirely. I emphasize, economically. Now, if we take Game Pass, depending on where you live buying might be more worthwhile if you get 2 or less full-priced games a year. In my country Game Pass is cheaper than 2 games
That said there are no guarantees they won't raise prices.
Yup. You just want to argue and decided you'll be doing it at me for whatever reason. This is literally on my first comment that you replied to.
You convinced yourself I'm advocating for subscription as The Future, rather than just conceding one point on economic grounds. Meanwhile in this thread you could find me arguing that DRM-free backups is the only true guaranteed way to own digital media.
You really seem to want to argue with me but I don't think you understood what I was saying to begin with. I'm not saying subscriptions are better, I'm saying they are more economical but unreliable, and I am saying that you, who listed 10+ great games you played a lot, didn't get only a single one. It also doesn't mean there won't ever be any new game you like.
You know, 10 games × $60 > $2 × 12mo × 3y
Though Ubisoft is $18/mo and games are $70 now. Ubisoft Club is a bad deal but Game Pass is still ends up cheaper at $10/mo. But I digress,
That's why "to some extent". Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I'm not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.
But you can't deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.