Well, Squadron 42 has a Steam page and a release date for 2027. Take that as you will. I bought a Star Citizen key for $35 in like 2013 and checked in on it occasionally. It’s a technical mess held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but that mostly applies to the MMO portion of the game, and it’s totally possible that the single player campaign scratches this itch for you. When I got into a multiplayer game for dog fights or boots on the ground FPS, it was a good time, and the bones of that game are good.

Sony’s games were on GOG when they started, but they stopped once they started integrating PSN. I can’t say EA, Activision-Blizzard, or Ubisoft games have even been a going concern for me for over a decade. I played Hazelight’s last two games and that new Prince of Persia metroidvania, and that was it; even PoP made me regret it because the DRM was such a pain in the ass.

Sure, but at a bare minimum, I’d appreciate a “coming soon to GOG” like they do for Switch 2. Or hell, they can leave the GOG logo off of the trailers and just put up a store page on GOG to let me know rather than shadow dropping it down the line. It’s not just Remedy and AAAs doing this either, as this same thing happens with Sea of Stars, Mouse: P.I. for Hire, and Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Right now, I can reasonably expect every new Silent Hill game to come to GOG within its release year, but they don’t signpost that. Square Enix games of many sizes and shapes are coming to GOG in batches, and not even batches that make any sense to me. Surely the pixel remasters would be easy to do, right? But now I know that if I want to play Final Fantasy VI for the first time, I’d be crazy to buy it on Steam if I can reasonably expect a GOG release now.

For me, that something was identifiably a frustrating telekinesis power that seemed to always get my projectile stuck on a wall or some other object in front of me when I most needed it to dispatch an enemy. If I wasn’t so close to the end of the game by the time I decided I disliked it, I wouldn’t have finished it. At least Poets of the Fall doing their fake metal band is always a good time.

The question is rarely asked outright, but often times it’s something along the lines of “Supporting more platforms is hard,” to which I would like to push back with, “Do you want to break Steam’s stranglehold on the market, or not?”

I didn’t like Control, so this one in particular doesn’t hurt, but there are so many games that come to GOG months later, and it’s hard to predict which ones are going to make the jump. At this point, I have purged my Steam wishlist, and there are only certain types of games I’m classifying as “must play” and “definitely not coming to GOG”.

Because of their poor marketing efforts, like putting out PC ports at random years-long delays after the fact and still at full price, they actually made very little from most of their PC ports, so there’s not much money left on the table relative to what they were making before. I think this was going to happen to this studio regardless. Everyone is tightening their belts.

The part that everyone knows is being said between the lines with a return to office mandate is that they want their employees to quit so that they don’t have to pay severance. With this voluntary buyout thing to go along with it, they’re quite loudly saying that they want their employees to quit.

I really don’t think it did. By any back of the napkin math anyone can come up with, this game made plenty of money on PlayStation. To me, it looks like Sony covering losses (or even just diminished profits) elsewhere by spreading the bad news around to studios that did well in their own right.

If I’m the manager of BioWare, and my EA bosses put an incentive in front of me to make a live service, then I’d probably make that decision “myself”, too.

There was an article at the time of Baldur’s Gate 3’s release (so 2023) that one of the original writers of BG1 had been laid off, so post-doctors, they still retained writers from whatever you consider to be the good old days.

Personally, I just never played it. Plenty of folks liked it eventually.

But it can all easily be related. Planned beats or dialogue that didn’t work in the engine the way they wanted and had to be rewritten, or worked better in a multiplayer context.

Let Mass Effect rest. We had a great trilogy, and you can still play it. There’s an Expanse game and that game Exodus coming in the next year that will scratch that itch.

They were dealt the live service and Frostbyte cards and had to play them.

I mean…I’m on both of those, but I know I can use Bluesky as a linear feed like Mastodon, and as long as that still works with no algorithm, it solves my Twitter problem. I think the cycle of software innovation is that you have the first proprietary tool that solves a problem, like MS Office or 3DSMax, and then the most important parts of those programs are solved in open source software after a lag, like LibreOffice or Blender. Discord would always be replaced in time.

It’s been years, and there’s only now a handful of programs that offer some of Discord’s best features. If we had open source alternatives back then, I certainly would have entertained them.

Fortunately they already confirmed in an AMA that it’s gone for the new Divinity, but that was far from my only gripe with D:OS2. We’ll see in that new Divinity how much of the improvement in BG3 was them getting better at their craft and how much of it was the D&D rule set doing the heavy lifting.

The Saudis and Jared Kushner, but mostly the Saudis. It’s a private equity fund, and they used a leverage buyout for the sale, which means they basically took out a loan against the thing they’re buying in order to fund it. There’s a lot of debt to pay interest on, and cost cutting was inevitable.

Anthem is so funny next to those other titles.