I just “upgraded” my gaming PC to the latest big Windows patch, and wouldn’t you know it? They turned this infernal setting back on.
Because of this, I have to get up, and remove a USB device, and plug it back in to wake up my Bluetooth mouse. WHILE I’M SITTING HERE USING IT! On what planet does this make any sense!?
Before I figured it out, this is the same problem that almost made me return the computer a week after I bought it.
What moron at Microsoft is responsible for this? Wait. Don’t tell me. Because I think I’d drive to Seattle, and kick them in the balls.
It’s simple: The PC gaming market is “scavenging” Microsoft’s own console market. Why buy a console when another $100 can get a PC that would play games about as well, and still be a general purpose computer? Don’t get me wrong, I love my Playstation for not being a general purpose PC. I love the ability to just put it to sleep and then fire it up again and continue from where I was. I love never having to deal with flaky drivers, constant updates, or cheaters. But I “get” that most people in the market for a single “computing device” that can play AAA games would opt for a PC.
Additionally, I think it’s another subtle data point that proves my hypothesis that more and more people are choosing Apple hardware when it’s their money, and therefore not spending in the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft loves to tout how, decade after decade, Windows accounts for a crazy-high percentage of the market, but personal experience proves that this doesn’t hold up with people. For years, I’ve argued that if you could subtract corporate purchases from the equation, the situation would look very, very different. Finally, from Extremetech, which draws from this archived article from the Seattle Times, I’ve stumbled on a report that proves my theory.
Share of “Personal” Compute
This chart says it all: From 2004 to 2012, Microsoft’s share of the consumer computing market has plummeted from 95% to 20%. For 20 years, Microsoft enjoyed an almost complete monopoly of consumer computing — and yet today, it is a minority stake holder, languishing behind Google’s 42% and Apple’s 24%. This report at CNET says gaming PC’s are selling at about parity with consoles, and we know that Xbox sales are 1/5th of Playstation, so the bottom line is that the AAA-gaming world is coming down to gaming PC’s and… Playstation.
I have an M3-based MacBook Pro. Before that I had a MBP with an nVidia GPU. Before that I had a MBP with an AMD GPU. All 3 have been bad at running any games not 1) specifically written for a Mac or 2) not ancient PC games that a Raspberry Pi could run. I fired up Steam on my Mac, and was asked to do a survey. Yes! By all means, I would love my Mac to be counted as a computer running Steam. Here is the marketshare of the results by operating system.
Even Linux is only at 2%, and that includes the supposedly wildly-successful Steam Deck! After all of these years, and the alleged advances in Proton over various implementations of Wine, I would have thought there would be better penetration after 25-30 years.
The Mac fares even worse. I have a few actual Mac games, and they play great. I even have a couple of Steel Series game controllers that work well with them. But visually and conceptually, they’re no more advanced than a Nintendo Switch game, and the Switch is a glorified tablet. When you click through to games in the App Store, there are some AAA titles there, but 1) they’re really old now, and 2) I already have them on other platforms, and I don’t want to buy them again.
This is just sad to me. Various reports are painting a picture that Microsoft is letting Xbox be scavenged by PC, and people are worried they’re going to get out of the hardware game. So gaming is boiling down to PC’s running Windows, Playstation, and Switch. And phones, I guess, if you want to count mobile. I wish there was increasing competition in the space after all this time. I like my Playstation just great, but I don’t want Sony thinking they can just do whatever they want because they have no competition in the “real” gaming segment.
And what would a Summer be without grabbing a fishing pole and heading down to your favorite radioactive watering hole? No need to worry about finding out because fishing is coming to the wasteland this Summer and is angling to reel-in our esteemed adventurers, collectors and traveling trawlers alike.
It all starts at a mysterious location where players encounter a fisherman who has decided to set up camp and share their love for fishing to one and all… or so it seems. This strange merchant will sell our players everything they need to catch any of the slimy, scaled swimmers found in all bodies of water across Appalachia. Sharpen those hooks! We’ll be eating well!
ZeniMax Online Studios’ Studio Director Matt Firor talks about another big year for The Elder Scrolls Online and some of the even bigger changes coming to the game in 2025 and beyond.
…
We need to seriously address Cyrodiil performance. Our (ambitious) goal is to return it to the concurrency levels we supported in 2014. So, we will be experimenting with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign
Hmm… Well would you just look at that? Who could have identified that core problem? Oh! Me!
The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.
Combat in ESO is a mix of HUNDREDS of variables on your character, a lot of which are being intermixed with everyone you’re fighting WITH, and everything you’re fighting AGAINST. Calculated and resolved EVERY SECOND. Every set, every skill, and every mythic in the game is another thing to add into an equation that’s got to be THOUSANDS of conditions long, with scores of tiny little if-then corner-case scenarios.
Every new addition to the game has added another 3 zone sets, a couple more craftable sets, dungeon sets, trial sets, mythics, and now scribed skills with — as they brag — 8,000 different combinations of effects. It’s become a runaway problem as they try to squeeze more “monetization” out of the expansions. It’s no wonder PVP performance keeps getting worse.
It’s already bad enough in trials. You can see the game choke on everything that’s happening for 12 people at times. In Cyrodill, you might be talking about 50 people in a large battle, and it’s worse. They’ve got to make a significant separation between the two modes.
To be sure, it will make the current PVP lovers — who have mastered the dozens of things you need to stack and all the play style tricks you need to employ to make bombing or ball grouping work — insane with fury. The question is whether or not it will bring more casuals into the mix than sweats who quit.
I was “actioned” on the Elder Scrolls Online forums.
Again.
What was snipped?
The simple truth of the matter is that this is a 10-year-old game, and the architecture just won’t allow them to do things like crossplay or class changes. You have to at least “protect” for those things up front. These things will NEVER happen now. It’s not that they’re impossible. It’s that they’re not cost effective. This is a game in maintenance mode. It has a tiny community that reacts negatively to any and all changes. All we’re going to get going forward is more cookie cutter content, and set/skill tweaks that people will flock to the interwebs to complain about.
Take it or leave it, I guess.
This — this right here — has been my whole experience on the ESO forums:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve suggested something, and the immediate response is that everything is perfect the way it is, and nothing should change:
Everything is great, nothing is wrong, and yet the player counts are at 7-year lows. To support my highlighted comment in what was snipped above, I present the graph of average online player count from Steam. And while many people have argued with me on the forums about the validity of these numbers, I understand statistics just fine, and this is representative of the state of the game, regardless of Windows version (Steam vs. Epic) or platform (PC vs Xbox vs PS). The number of active players is half what it was just back in the spring.
Dismal Player Counts
And, oh!, would you look at that? ZOS had planned two big 10th-anniversary in-person events, one in Amsterdam (which happened), and one in the US, which is now canceled. Nefas (one of the top ESO streamers) thinks ZOS is broke. Given the trends in activity, how could not conclude this?
No More In-Person Celebration Event for You!
The forums are awash with people complaining about literally everything now. PVP is in utter shambles (and I’m just all broken up about that). Queue times are disastrous, and there’s only room for about 2% of the online population to play. Years-long problems are not getting fixed. The “stuck in combat” bug, the annoyance of the “flappy bird,” the fact that they won’t revert the hybridization changes — even though everyone agrees that it changed the game fundamentally for the worse — hiding mythic leads behind crappy parts of the game, terrible drop rates for literally everything… The list goes on and on. The forums have been revealed as a giant honeypot to allay complaints, let people vent, and keep them playing. And if you say something they don’t like, they can and will find a rule to accuse you of breaking, and censor you for it.
The biggest problem with the game seems to be the PVP part. PVE and PVP are completely different games, but they both use the same skills and gear, and both “halves” of the game suffer for it, despite the innumerable tweaks and hacks they try to use to help the situation. I don’t think there’s a future for this game without making a cleaner break between the two modes than currently exists.
The forums are exhausting, so I’ve decided that those jerks can enjoy their circle without me any more. I’m trying to kill my account, but of course, none of their support systems makes any sense. I created a ticket, and the link to look at it is 404. I’ve questioned the guy who actioned me twice, and sent email about the ticket twice, and got no responses. Finally, I created a new forum thread — knowing it was against TOS to talk about being actioned in any way — and someone else finally at least verified that my ticket exists and is in the right place. That’s something I guess.
ZOS is working on a new game based on a new IP now, and it really seems like they’re putting minimal effort into ESO now. All we’re getting is cookie-cutter content with new zones, new sets, new companions, new Tales of Tribute decks, new skill styles, etc. You can’t float a game like this on subscriptions alone, and the offerings in the Crown store seem more and more flashy, more and more desperate. The game seems to be on its last legs.
The big question to me is whether Microsoft would spin this IP out to someone who would want to try to breathe new life into it. There are two big problems with this. One is that every change is unpopular with a vocal portion the player base, making significant changes difficult without risking financial impact. They can’t afford to lose a big chunk of people at this point. The other is that The Elder Scrolls is a massive franchise, involving many games and platforms, which would seem to make negotiations about this particular piece of the portfolio tricky. Where would this kind of move put the long-delayed-yet-ultimately-inevitable TES VI?
“We’re cancelling our NA anniversary event. Here, have a nice coloring contest instead.”
If you follow the gaming industry, you can’t escape the ideological war that’s being fought about wokeness in modern games. It mirrors the fight about wokeness everywhere, but it’s a much more compact world, and easier to keep tabs on. The wokes have succeeded in education, government, news, and movies, and are moving to the last “safe space” for white males: video games. And, boy, have they done some damage!
Concord’s Online Player Count at Release
Most recently was Concord, a squad-based shooter from Sony, which failed so hard, they forcefully refunded everyone’s money and closed down the servers after just 2 weeks. It’s estimated that development took 8 years and $400M. Almost all of the triple-A releases of the past couple of years have been complete failures, and when you dig around in the credits of these flops, you keep finding one company in common with all of them: Sweet Baby, Inc.
So here’s a GDOC — a game developer of color — who works for Sweet Baby — giving a talk about how to “burn the games industry to the ground.” Now, I get it. Yes, those words are literally on one of his slides, but I understand the larger context. He wants to see the games industry as it has existed to be destroyed, and rebuilt in his image. Which means he wants to see any and all stories about straight, white, male protagonists eliminated in favor of anything and everything else. The forthcoming Assassins Creed Shadows is the picture-perfect example. It features a black, gay samurai in feudal Japan. I don’t think you can get any more removed from context or expectation in favor of an anti-whiteness narrative.
There are plenty of good stories that don’t center on a white male. It’s not even uncommon. Lara Croft in “Tomb Raider” and “Rise” is an amazing character. Pretty and well built, yes, but skilled and clever. Her femininity is never used against her. Her physical attributes are never a plot point. Aloy in the Horizon series is similarly amazing. You can play as Alexandria in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the story is interchangeable. I like FPS games, so these are what I’m familiar with, but there are a lot of other examples.
The difference here is that Sweet Baby have taken a concept centered around straight “white” males — laying aside that Japanese people are not “white” — and they’ve simply substituted the main character with something that’s the antithesis of the concept. For people who are strutting around trying to tell other people that they’re the experts in how to write “engaging” stories, they don’t seem to understand what they’re doing at all.
I watched some of the video, looking for the problem, and found it pretty easily.
Oops! Brooks did not write the jokes to come “at the expense of whiteness.” He didn’t write it to simply offend; he wrote the jokes to come at the expense of racists and racism. Conflating this is a massive, critical flaw in reasoning and understanding. Gene Wilder is the co-star. His character is white. He’s “us” in the movie. He’s showing white people how you can be white and not be racist. No one denigrates or humiliates or makes fun of Wilder’s “whiteness.” To say that the jokes took white people to task simply for being white is to miss the entire point of the movie. This logical fallacy presumes all white people are racist. Not only is that wrong — which I’m sure this GDOC would admit — but it’s also being racist yourself.
It’s not an incidental matter that the movie is hilarious. That’s another critically-important piece of the puzzle these “woke warriors” seem to miss. It entertained! It succeeded, not because of the message, but because it was well-written, and had talented actors and a talented director. These people think they can just “put a chick in it, and make her lame and gay,” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They forget it still has to succeed on its own merits.
The biggest miss, however, is that the movie shows that people can change! That’s the brilliant subtext: the moral arc of the townsfolk, wherein they throw off their racism and embrace the sheriff. The jokes that come at the expense of the townspeople attack ignorance, and ask the viewer to reflect on historical attitudes and the things they have been raised to believe that need to be abandoned. The movie doesn’t just beat people up for being white. It demonstrates growth. This is how you persuade with art, whether it’s a movie or a video game. You give people a shovel, and show them where to dig. You don’t just hit them over the head with it to make them feel bad, and make yourself feel superior.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone be so blithely ignorant while presuming to be taken seriously as an expert before.
The bottom line is that 73% of the US is still white. I know George Soros and his NGO’s are working overtime to bring as many non-whites as possible over the border in as little time as possible, but we’re still a majority-white country for now. Also, current estimates are that 90% of the population is straight. If you want to make any money in popular entertainment, you’re going to have to at least make it palatable to straight white people. That’s the majority of the market. That’s where the money is. You can’t just insult people for the sin of having been born white and straight, and then expect them to grovel in penance, and give you money. Well, I mean, you can, but then you don’t get to act surprised when your projects fail, and you and all of your friends get laid off. If you want to succeed, use your art to illuminate the future you envision. Show how it’s better. For everyone. Don’t condemn people. Give people a way out of the sins you are accusing them of; a path of redemption. That’s the lesson of Blazing Saddles.
Look no further than the past couple of years of Star Wars and Marvel programming from Disney to see how well Sweet Baby’s approach works. They’ve desecrated the canon of both of these universes, and changed the fundamental elements that made them popular to begin with. Both of these billion-dollar franchises are circling the drain thanks to these kinds of ham-fisted efforts to force all characters and story lines to come “at the expense of whiteness.” They’ve spent loads of extra money on expert advisors and a small army of the “right” writers, and they still can’t even manage to make new installments entertaining!
Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street are leading all of this charge to eliminate “whiteness.” Which is kind of funny, since the CEO of Blackrock is an old white guy! These three own controlling interest in every media company. They’re destroying the very vehicles that give them an audience in the name of trying to eliminate “whiteness.” Many customers have fled to “the long tail” for their entertainment. Soon, there will be no more worldwide franchises left to continue to preach the message with. Critics of this multi-media, multi-company scorched Earth campaign seem to always want to talk about how much money new, woke projects lose (as I admit that I did, above) But it’s alright; they have the money. They’re extracting it from the US economy, and will continue to burn it to reprogram society.
It’s not about money. It’s about sending a message.
“It’s always the quarterly profits,” he continued, “the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say ‘shit I’m out of developers’ and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it’s just broken… “You don’t have to,” Vincke went on. “You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don’t lose the institutional knowledge that’s been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off.”
This isn’t unique to the gaming industry. This is the same problem all corporations have had since the 80’s. The problem is tying executive compensation to stock options. The “number must go up,” no matter what, so that the charade of the stock price being tied to news about the company’s financial position can continue, and thus everyone in management and the Wall Street banks makes money. Until this loop is broken, this short-term thinking will continue, in every industry and every large company in the US. (And as private equity continues its death march from coast to coast, there won’t be any small companies soon, anyway.)
BulletFarm is developing a “new and ambitious AAA game, built in Unreal Engine 5 and set in an original universe with an emphasis on co-operative gameplay,” according to a news release. BulletFarm and parent company NetEase Games say the new studio’s untitled project will be a “more intimate and relatable experience while offering a fresh take on first-person gameplay.”
I knew the success of Helldivers 2 was going to change the direction of the entire industry. I ran with my first rando on HD2 the other night, and it was great. We’re going to be seeing more press releases about games with co-op at the center.
According to sources, we understand that currently Microsoft are planning a launch for Starfield on PlayStation 5 post the release of the already announced “Shattered Space” expansion for Xbox and PC, which is on target to arrive at some point later this year. We’ve also been informed that Microsoft have made additional investment into PlayStation 5 dev kits to support ongoing development efforts – adding further fuel to the fire.
During COVID, I and several friends started playing Elder Scrolls Online together on PC. It’s a long story, but we all eventually drifted away from it. Eventually, I literally threw away the 12-year-old potato that I used to play it, and had moved all my gaming to a Playstation (except Civ V on my Mac). Then I suddenly developed serious health issues, and started playing ESO again, on the PlayStation. I was rather enjoying the simplicity of NOT having mods, and liked using a controller for combat much better than a keyboard and mouse.
A year and a half ago, Microsoft was saying that Starfield would be an PC/Xbox exclusive. I was kind of ticked. I had long since made my bed with Playstation, but I expected that the game would be Skyrim-level good, and I got sucked into the hype. So I bought an Xbox in anticipation, months ahead of time. I was replaying Fallout New Vegas in glorious 4K at 60 FPS, but I got the bug to go back to PC for ESO, where I could get mods again, mainly for inventory management. So I sold the Xbox and bought a low-spec gaming PC just for ESO.
Microsoft’s stance on making Starfield an exclusive was heralded by the head of the Xbox decision as a serious business strategy, and something on which they were going to build a new era of gaming competitiveness. When they bought Bethesda, they also made a promise not to touch pre-acquisition IP. Hold this thought.
I bought the digital deluxe pre-release of Starfield on Steam. I played over the weekend before the general release, and thought it sucked. After a dozen hours or so, you will hit a wall with inventory management, and you will naturally build a base to try to fix the problem, and find that bases do not solve anything. Unlike Skyrim or Fallout, there simply is no concept of a bottomless container that keeps a game like this from being insane. Being a pre-release copy, I found that I could refund the purchase before the actual release, so, after 13 hours, I did.
Now that the Microsoft purchase of Activision has “gone through,” they now own Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft. It is, superficially, very similar to ESO, but has over ten times the number of players. You can just smell that someone high up in Microsoft is asking the question: Why are we paying to develop ESO when we could kill it, and most of the player base would probably move over to WoW? The “synergies” from these two acquisitions must be frighteningly tempting.
They’re reversing course on keeping Starfield exclusive, and now I worry that the other “half” of their promises at the time of the acquisition are similarly precarious. Will they, in fact, start messing with pre-merger games? Will they somehow change the offerings or their monetization to better fit within a corporate strategy which now must be conducive to other franchises that were previously competitors? Microsoft breaks a lot of promises. A lot. Just search on it for yourself.
I’m worried for the future of ESO.
And, while I want a vibrant, competitive landscape in gaming and consoles, and this announcement does not bode well for that, the saltiness of the tears of the fanboys in the Xbox subreddit over this announcement — as Microsoft pulls off their mask, and shows them the face of the monster that hasn’t changed since the 90’s — is just too delicious.
