I can’t tell if you’re kidding, but just in case: this is for the 2021 remastered version. They’re not making new paid content for a game that came out in 2000.

It’s a stupid decision but I don’t think the people in charge of this are the same people investigating blackmail by foreign powers.

Makes about as much sense as the people who say ‘why do we bother researching space when we have problems here on earth?’

If you know what curl is, you’re not the target audience.

The people this is targeting don’t even know what ‘CLI’ stands for, but they absolutely will copy/paste random commands into their computer if they’re told it’ll magically fix something.

You realise imgur is blocked in the uk, right? Anyone not using a VPN can’t see your posts.

Sure, I’ll throw you a bone.

Blatant self-promotion is generally frowned upon. That’s a rule across the internet, but especially here.

Like, you haven’t even made an attempt to engage with the community. No other posts, no other comments. It looks like you made an account solely to push your product, and in a place like Lemmy all that’s going to get you is a flurry of angry downvotes.

We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.

I kind of get where you’re coming from but your dismissive framing means it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.

The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.

The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.

That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.

I’d rather games only include a manual because they wanted to, rather than because they had no choice.

Thanks for fixing!

Please don’t post links that give no info besides telling me to download an app.

Only a problem if you outsource your reading & thinking abilities to AI

Pretty fascinating! I would’ve expected the dongle to be doing something more complex but, as the author says, it’s possible that these developers underused it.

Here’s an article detailing the methodology.

https://newzoo.com/resources/blog/global-games-market-to-hit-189-billion-in-2025

Closer than I remembered, but console is still larger and projected to grow faster.

It’s hilarious that you think game development is a ‘cushy corpo job’.

Ah yes, all those game devs famously enjoying competitive salaries and rock solid job security.

Game development is hitting your head against a brick wall because you believe in the art form. Anyone who tells you they’re in it for the money is lying to you.

Yep. PC players tend to be very outspoken, but they’re easily outnumbered by the console market, and the mobile market dwarfs them both.

‘You can’t fire me, I quit!’ but the bad version

Product placement has never been illegal in the UK, and we don’t have Walmart anyway, so the functionality would be useless outside the US.

Do you say the same for Epic Games Store exclusives?

Yes, actually. If they funded a game, like with Alan Wake 2, then whether or not they make it an EGS exclusive is their prerogative.

there is no pro-consumer reason that the GOG fixes could not have been given to everyone that already owned the game on Steam as a free update

I disagree. GOG invested time and resources into patching the game. Tacking the word ‘pro-consumer’ in there means nothing. They’re a business. They shouldn’t be expected to give away their work for free to customers of a competing platform.

I don’t care if 2% or whatever goes to GOG for their fixes

That much is clear. You seem to want something for nothing. Pirate the GOG version if you’re so desperate to play without paying for the work that went into fixing it, but don’t frame it as some kind of pro-consumer protest.

It’s as much as anyone outside of GOG can know, based on interviews like this one.

The exact contents of the deals is not public information and no doubt differs for each game, but the overall process has been reported on.

Oh, well that’s the easier part to understand.

Before they even start on any technical work, the GOG legal team contacts the owners of the game they want to sell (e.g. SEGA, in the case of Alpha Protocol) and they negotiate a deal to update and distribute the game.

Things get complicated when a game has joint owners, or when it’s not clear who owns a game, but otherwise it’s as simple as that.