Fresh off the Borderlands movie, they sold tons of their Pandora collection, and concurrent players shot up. It may not have been the movie they wanted it to be, but it mostly achieved the same goal.

When has this series ever been that?

Tiny Tina is a spin-off, and I doubt the EULA changes will result in much more than the Modern Warfare 2 boycott. Borderlands 3 still sold multiple millions of copies before it even had its first discount, and over 15 million copies total. It was still in high enough demand after an Epic exclusivity period to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players when it eventually launched on Steam. It’s one of very few multi-billion dollar franchises in video games.

They’re objectively extremely popular.

Warner Bros. and Bastion was a bit different. Microsoft used to have a set number of “slots” per publisher to put up a certain number of games on Xbox Live Arcade per year. WB didn’t have anything to fill the slot, so Supergiant basically negotiated with them to use that slot themselves, is how I understand the situation.

Other than GOTY edition of the first game, this entire series has LAN (so far), which is commendable and stupidly rare! I hope the GOTY edition doesn’t show that they’re nixing this for BL4 as well.

Customers already told them this by not buying on Epic and waiting 6 months to a year to buy on Steam.

It’s a weird dynamic, but it also makes sense that a success like that isn’t as correlated to future work as TV or movies. You got <insert big actor here…I don’t know…Tom Cruise> in all sorts of movies because they put asses in seats. The performance is comparatively much more of the appeal in a movie than it is in a game, even a story-driven one. So even if you give an award-winning performance, how important to a game’s success is an award-winning performer? For plenty of games, probably not very. And even if it is important for a particular game’s success, maybe the award winner is more expensive, and you can get a good performance out of someone who’s a great actor but hasn’t had that exposure and is willing to do it for less money.

You can download Game Pass games and play them on SteamOS? News to me, even after a quick web search to verify it. Streaming is a poor substitute.

The good thing about GOG is that you don’t have to trust them, since there’s no ecosystem lock-in like other stores have. If you continue to shop there, it’s only in your favor, and they’ve got a better shot at sticking around. They’re currently leaning into the concerns that more and more of us have about preservation, so that appears to be a market worth money, and hopefully they’re right. Microsoft is not in the business of loss leading right now, so I’m not super concerned about that kind of threat, and if they were going to try to squeeze out a competitor, they’d be going after Steam, not GOG.

What about GOG concerns you?

Streaming has plateaued, and I don’t see anyone overcoming that plateau. The console market is coming to an end, but the transition is to PC gaming, not streaming, and we can measure that.

It’s too expensive to make those kinds of exclusives anymore, which means they take longer to make, which means there are fewer of them. Sony can’t make enough PlayStation exclusives to justify me buying a PlayStation anymore, so I don’t buy one, so they put them on PC too, so there’s even less reason for me to have a PlayStation. Console exclusives are on their way out of fashion.

“There is literally no reason to buy this handheld,” Fryer opined of the ROG Xbox Ally. "

You want access to games or services that are either better or only available on Windows without having to deal with the desktop Windows interface. That is literally the reason to buy it. Game Pass and popular live services can woo plenty of people over.

Gotta say, from the few times I’ve come across her channel, she seems like a shit-stirrer, and right wing rage baiters seem to love quoting her.

But what is the long-term plan?

To transition to a world where “Xbox” is the brand slapped across Microsoft’s Windows gaming endeavors and they mostly serve as a Game Pass purveyor and the largest third party publisher by market cap.

Where are the new hits?

This one is really surprising as a question, because if you could will hits into existence, everyone would do it, but for a publisher of their size, they’re doing more in recent years to create new franchises than most, even if they then lay off the team behind Hi-Fi Rush. South of Midnight came out this year; Outer Worlds 2, Avowed, and Grounded all came out of Obsidian as well as the much smaller Pentiment; and Clockwork Revolution got a sizable demo on display just this summer.

Will [FBC: Firebreak] have the staying power for the long-run?

Maybe not! But that’s (probably) okay! It’s not a live service. (It doesn’t have LAN either, which is a personal gripe of mine, but they don’t seem to intend for you to play this one for very long.) Most games don’t last very long in the public consciousness, no matter how good they are. I just played some Hypercharged: Unboxed with a friend of mine, because there haven’t been much of any deathmatch shooters in years, and it was just what the doctor ordered. It’s been so long since the FPS genre was about this that Perfect Dark (the person on Lemmy) might not even remember an era where shooters were often very similar to Perfect Dark (the video game), and that sucks.

Speaking of things that suck, I hope your health situation improves. Best of luck. We’ll be here when you get back.

It’s the in between missions riding that I was referring to. The previous game was much more lenient about giving you opportunities to fast travel. Also, when I played the game, mods weren’t an option, and OP might be looking for Xbox games.

I would describe Red Dead Redemption II as having significant fluff, not just in how much time it wastes getting from A to B a lot of times but also in that whole island chapter, Act 4, I think.

Nor is it trash. That game rules.

They are awful people, but they’ve made videos in support of the initiative and likely drove their followers there. If you search for Stop Killing Games on YouTube and look at the recent videos, there’s a who’s who of “oh no, not him”.

Lots, on channels run by generally awful people that I wouldn’t want to link to. The kind of people who just want to get people angry about video games. The kind of people who direct hate mobs at Sweet Baby Inc (without even understanding what it is that company does) and complain about games being “woke”.