Stray is such an amazing game. Real work of art. I love how we discover more and more of the story of this world.

I can't wait to play Expedition 33.

Mario/Rabbids is the game nobody asked for or expected anything from, and it turned out great. Instead of just a knockoff silly minions game, it was an amazing XCOM-lite with fun environments and suprisingly-deep tactical gameplay.

Real talk. Ubisoft in general have made some great games. Their current business model is to pump out repeats of things that worked, and so earn our scorn for them 'as of right now'.

Who played AC 1 and didn't want more. That we're now up to AC 76 doesn't diminish that they made something fun before they beat it to death.

Even their primary accomplishment of making every open-world game follow their formula of '1000 sidequests, item hunts and mini-puzzles' doesn't detract from the fact that those were really fun the first few times.

I wish the best to all the ex-Ubisoft developers. Go make cool shit without the $business oversight$. In an ideal world, the publisher should be there to cover the gaps when a new concept falls flat, not to force developers to keep doing the same profitable thing and otherwise stifle innovation.

What is the point of this post?

You realize that game devs tend to work at many studios over the course of their career? Don't you?

Has fanboys ≠ is a monopoly

Ubisoft has been releasing games half-assed over the last 10ish years also, they turned Rainbow 6 Siege from a $60 first-person shooter with lootboxes into a free-to-play with “Premium” membership.

Also neglect & ban Linux/SteamOS users who want to play their games.

This post shows that Ubisoft devs have real potential if they aren’t constrained by corporate greed and bureaucrats.

All in all, fuck Ubisoft.

Like thanking that dude for breaking up with Adele since her breakout album was basically a breakup album. If you're into Adele. Lol

...mmm, Riot maybe?

Many don't turn around and try making a start-up game though, most just burn out of the industry forever.

I think a big reason for this is because they need to have some kinda airtight clandestine OPSEC if they want to work on anything themselves that they plan to show anybody.

It's been common practice for AAA's to say "Anything you make while you're employed here at all is ours." Sometimes even if you're not AT the studio when you do it.

They just simply assume entitlement to your creativity.

So, quit and make that indie darling, right? But then you need a financial "runway" set up, which sets a hard time limit on production and adds a ton of stress, and you'd better hope it sells well enough to make back the lost income.

The indie successes we've seen are nothing short of extraordinary, but also a textbook example of survivorship bias in action. For every success, there's a million projects that never got off the ground, much less sold successfully.

Facing all this...I celebrate the efforts that beat the odds, and love genuinely good games that simply didn't sell enough to keep the ball rolling.

But I don't fault anybody for just going into something more stable before burnout hits, and they would be destroyed from the inside out.

Also neglect & ban Linux/SteamOS users who want to play their games.

Neglect, Thats almost every studio on the planet, linux gaming is being held up by steam through proton. Tell me more about the banning end of that comment though?

Damn right! Also, fuck those extra launchers and their buggy shit too. Crashing asses!

Did they do something bad? I don't mind them making money so long as they are ethical.

The Linux Steam client is built for Linux. Yet the clicking-through of some workshop popup-menues still happens.

Yet with Lutris and GoG, it's a seamless experience.

Read again. My issue with Steam is with the client, not with Proton.

Cool. Not for me.

It's the best game store for the paying customer on Linux by a long shot

Store: that's a strawman argument; depends on what you prioritize.

Launcher: not by a long shot. And it's ugly too and themes are mostly broken now.

You can roll back to previous versions

Sometimes. For a while. Which doesn't help, if the major modder has given up, because of weekly forced breaking updates of the game. Can't just keep the version that works, even though games are one kind of software where updates are not critical.

My problem is more with their workshop mods. If you own the game elsewhere, you can only download them with their own proprietary and shitty cli tool and sometimes not even that. Yet most mods are there. I mean, just provide a API man.

Ubi is one of them but sadly not the only one. The industry is toxic af.

I desperately want to play through it but they seem to have made some weird technical decisions with the sound system and I don't get half the sounds on any of my devices.