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Comment by soderfoo | Hacker News Reader

> (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.

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> 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.

Not "in their mind". It does and they have the data to show it. Very frustrating situation.

It's GTA, if they want to get to Mars... release six there. Just shoot the gold copy out there. People will show up.

Not sure if, at this point, it costs SpaceX more money to get to Mars, or Rockstar Games to develop GTA 6. AAA budgets are insane (with IMO meagre results - I don't like most of them).

Tough call. Everything is bloated

A lot of time and money goes into AAA games and I think there’s an inverse relationship at play where the higher the budget is, the more risk averse the studio is. So you end up with a whole suite of AAA releases that all play it safe and just copy small innovations from each other, nobody really daring to push the envelope too far.

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.

Yeah, it's just me being an idealist and projecting.

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.

I'm disagreeing with everything you're saying here.

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.

You’re in denial now; you’ll work your way to acceptance soon enough (as someone who’s done the same thing).

Thanks for the chuckle, brightened up my day.

Yet we are the people who started gaming on PCs -- we made consumer 3D accelerators profitable and spent the time writing about them on forums in the 90s and 2000s. We certainly have the power to move markets.

People who can't be monetized sometimes are valued in their opinions. If someone principled really likes a thing, it can gain more popularity by others who trust that person adopting it. Maybe not loners. But there's still reason to make users happy because viral marketing impact cannot be measured well.

> I'm a boomer millenial, or whatever we're called now, and never took to online gaming, so I'm part of this segment.

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.

Part of it is reflexes too. I used to love fast paced FPS games as a teen and was actually pretty good at them until my early 30's. As time went on, I started noticing I was doing consistently worse in 1v1 firefights. I started gravitating towards games that had a 'slower' way to contribute like playing vehicles in the battlefield series.

As time goes on I've gotten more and more into single player games, especially games that let me build stuff.

REAL-TIME multiplayer is worse for that use case. There's no reason a game that is asynchronous, like an old school play by mail game, couldn't be fun for twenty minutes when you have time, and maybe there's a limit or a turn involved so you don't get too ahead, and your partner does their thing when they get time

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.

it's a little old but check frozen synapse - top down tactics games like that have done asynchronous multiplayer a decent bit

This is because the multiplayer games we played at 16 are 10-15 years old. You literally can’t go back to those happy memories again. You play halo 3 today you get wrecked by the people who haven’t stopped regularly playing in over a decade. And when you try and play the latest fps game you go this sucks, its not halo 3.

Government regulation of toxic waste dumping negatively impacts profit margins. We have the data to prove this, very frustrating situation.

To be fair, the societal harm from deciding to play multiplayer instead of single player is probably a few orders of magnitude less than toxic waste in the water.

Granted, but how about the societal harm from an exploitable bug in one or more of these rootkits? Millions of gaming computers could wreck some havoc in the hands of an even slightly creative attacker not restrained by moral or economic considerations…

But that's why the government had to regulate it. If companies have financial incentive to do something they're going to do it, to make them stop that incentive must be removed. I don't think that comment was intending to justify the situation.

That would not be a frustrating situation, that would be a great situation (the harm is being blocked).

People cannot say no if you never ask for informed consent. If the PC is personal then a root kit is a violation.

read the TOS

If the decision came from an external party, it's likely from publishers

> 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.

Were you being sarcastic with these lines?

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