They had the balls to add a mandatory kernel extension into a game that I've bought 10 years ago and that I wish to play in single player only.
I find it utterly ridiculous. As usual, piracy would have been the superior experience.
(Rockstar really should’ve made this a separate launch option like other games do)
This is what happens when a producer's/product manager's cherished KPIs come before UX.
In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition.
We, the players, fail to recognize how our gaming experience can be enhanced by using social features like leader boards, guilds, or in game chat. We are not enlightened.
Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
I'm honestly surprised it's a command line option. My guess is that the requirement originated externally.
> In their mind, adding a toggle in the launcher would lead to lower engagement and player acquisition.
Not "in their mind". It does and they have the data to show it. Very frustrating situation.
I don’t really enjoy those games either any more. Too big, too long, and the gameplay feels more like running errands and checking off a todo list than having fun.
Release cycles in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty tight, slowly getting longer as storage and graphical firepower increased. 3D was totally new and studios were trying out all kinds of crazy ideas for games. These days you can basically expect 90% of mainstream releases to follow the same playbook.
I acknowledge what the analytics show, but always allude to the hypothetical casual loner segment who we lack data on because we pushed them away or we don't measure things relevant to them.
I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.
Casual loners are irrelevant to the monetization and in game economy people, resulting in relegation to second class status.
Until someone figures out a way to milk this segment for that juicy recurring revenue, consumable$, $kins, etc..., we must accept our fate, largely an afterthought.
Not because you're wrong.
But because I'm in this picture and I don't like it, and I just found out that "boomer millennial" is a fitting descriptor.
Goddamit.
And you are not alone - apparently 53% of gamers (total) prefer single-player games, [although this falls to only 30% in the 16-19 years age-group]. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single...
I wonder how much of this is familiarity (i.e. I play games in the style I did when I was sixteen) versus people in older age-groups having less sustained time for gaming (i.e. grabbing twenty minutes while the baby sleeps) and single-player being inherently better for that use-case.
As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single player games, especially games that let me build stuff.
I have wanted to see a game like that for years and years. I think this is why chess.com is huge with the youths, as it fits my description and is fairly unique -- I just don't personally care for chess.
> Think about all the fun and exciting connections you'd miss out on if all the social crap was off by default or in an easily accessible place.
Were you being sarcastic with these lines?
I did get GTA V for playstation, and indeed you can play single player without the rockstar account. Probably Sony forcing them to allow that, I don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.
However, every time you start the game you get a screen pushing you towards multiplayer. And the single time I did click on some multiplayer related options, they spammed my playstation system notifications with 'there are new events in GTA online' even in weeks I didn't start their title at all.
So... good bye, rockstar. Your games are getting too big for their own good anyway.
> These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is “I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it further.”
Option 1: subscribe to 7 streaming services which each have some unpredictable subset of games
Option 2: go to some website that has all the games
The other part of this is that MLS is significantly smaller (~$275m in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023) than other North American leagues (the NHL, the next-largest league, had ~$6.75b in non-team-sponsorship revenue in 2023), so I don't know how reasonable it is for other leagues to follow the MLS's path.
(At least while they stay indie… Not long ago I was reinstalling Minecraft after a long break and found out that Microsoft has the balls to demand that I verify a phone number to play a game I bought more than 10 years ago. Like with GTA V’s rootkit, they don’t care if you want to play single-player—once you’re locked out of the loader, you’re locked out and no human will help you.)
AFAIK, there's fewer cheaters on PlayStation current-gen than on PC, and I don't have to worry about anti-cheat kludges corrupting my "rig".
Then again, we all trust our "smart" devices even if we really don't.
I suppose a separate network would be the safe option (if you trust your router).
That said, have there been rotten meat attacks using "temporarily above temperature" fridges?
Are vegans just applying a defensive strategy against those?
When I grew up, I had one PC to do everything: Homework, gaming, learning to program, storing the single copy of treasured family photos, gaining painful experience in why to make backups before modifying the MBR to dual-boot Linux...
Especially with iPads and Chromebooks becoming more prevalent in an education context, a "gaming PC" might well be the only computer that gives the user full control over it that many children have access to these days.
Nowadays for 50€ you can have a decent second hand computer with an older gen core i5 and 8 to 16GB of memory. That is plenty enough to run qubesOS.
On the one hand, buying a console and a reasonably spec'd laptop is clearly the better value. I did this during college, and both my laptop, and my console both lasted about a decade without requiring any upgrades. I did this again with the PS4. You wind up spending far less than you otherwise would trying to keep a gaming pc reasonably up to date, and both devices are optimized for their usage.
On the other hand? At some point most of us will realize that we've been successful enough that we don't have to optimize for value, and we can choose 'all of the above'. I now have a PS5 AND a stupidly overspec'd AI / gaming desktop. I've enjoyed having both.
Super valuable stuff.
Using a pirate copy now might avoid the rootkit, but it would not send a message to the publisher as they'll not see a difference between not getting any money for this new install and not getting any money for this new install. Any difference in a numbers-playing stat, if the pirate version doesn't call home to be counted in those, is likely not significant.
Would a Windows10-11 user be able to tell there are "rootkits" embedded in installations, without looking at the (optional) disclosures made available now on steam ?
In other words, what guarantee is there that if i'm buying a game from Steam, or say GOG, that there's no quasi-malware riding along with the game install ?
if you're worried about hidden stuff I'm not sure how you could tell
Surely this is foreshadowing the future of GTA VI and will have the same problems of being unplayable.