Well, we’ll see how I feel after Throne of Bhaal, but she sure spends a lot of the base game being that character, and she worships a cartoon villain of a goddess.

There’s at least one character in BG3 act 3 that was alive that shouldn’t be if the base game was where you stopped, and I found out that was in the expansion. There’s another that I see a lot of people freaking out over how they were portrayed in BG3, seemingly specifically if you romanced that character in BG2, but so far in this run, that character’s representation in BG3 still makes sense to me.

It would probably be way smarter if everything was funded out of a policy of austerity using the previous game’s profits, but I don’t think that’s how it works, hence the people fired the minute this project was cancelled.

I’m continuing my replay of Baldur’s Gate 2, with the theme of this run being, “I mostly know what I’m doing this time”, playing on core rules difficulty instead of having to resign to story difficulty. I also didn’t realize how canon the expansion would be, so I skipped it last time before playing BG3. I also need to get back to Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Last I left off, I had just been…made…king…and started getting into those mechanics. Sometime this year, I’ll make it around to Zero Parades. I didn’t like Disco Elysium for the character writing, but a reviewer I trust told me in no uncertain terms that if that was my hangup with Disco, there’s a good chance it won’t be a problem for me here.

I didn’t know the budget was out there, but I knew there was a possibility it got that high, using a benchmark of Spider-Man 2 at $300M, and Horizon: Forbidden West at about $200M; European studios tend to come in cheaper than their American counterparts, pound for pound. Still, they cleared the bulk of that expense in a week, and they’ll have a very healthy tail on the game’s sales from now until Christmas.

Because money is complicated, and it’s priced where they expect that (copies sold) * (unit price) will result in the highest number for each region.

I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven’t had disc drives for a long time. Games are also getting so big that you’d either need to require UHD discs (even I don’t have a drive for that) or multiple discs, and even back in the day, I hated multi disc installs.

SteamDB says an account value of $4017 and $6438 USD in today’s prices, over the course of 21.4 years. I’ve transitioned my new purchases to GOG when possible.

Fortunately, someone linked an article in here saying that Blu Ray sales are up a lot in the past few years, which is a metric I’ve been contributing to personally.

Nice! If you got used to your ability to “use X on Y” to solve problems creatively, that’s Larian’s special sauce, so unfortunately, you’re unlikely to find that kind of depth in any other video game besides those last two Divinity: Original Sin games. As far as the combat and skill dice rolls go though, there are definitely plenty more of those.

DRM-free works for that use case when sales go deep enough. Then, if you decide it’s not something you want to keep forever, you’re not out of any more money than that 15% you got back. I thought I wanted to keep Uncharted 4 for a while, and then it got a PC version. By the time I wanted to get rid of it a handful of years ago, it was worth a few dollars at most, and I got no bites for it. These things lose their value quite quickly. As far as ownership goes, DRM-free works better when you don’t plan on selling, because you can freely copy it and back it up long after the degradation of the medium it’s stored on.

Consoles are the cheapest way to play games until one line crosses another line. They have subscription fees for online; they have less competition so the sales aren’t as good; they have smaller libraries; their convenience has diminished and their entry prices have risen; there are mandatory costs on things like peripherals and getting higher frame rates on your back catalogue; etc. In general, the more games you play, the less likely it is you’re saving money on consoles. I feel for you having lost your use case, but there’s a reason I’m personally okay with losing physical, and it’s not because I’m okay with losing ownership.

Blu Rays are a pain on Linux, but MakeMKV rips these discs pretty universally. It sucks that it has to be done this way, but I still get my videos in full quality, well above what streaming services send me, and they can’t take it from me. In my experience, though I don’t pirate much anymore, seeders don’t have much desire to seed the full uncompressed video, let alone the special features. And you’re correct; CDs didn’t have DRM, because the invention of the format predated their desire to make DRM. DVDs had very basic DRM, but it’s now been thoroughly broken wide open.

Nobody bought my old copy of Uncharted 4 either. I had to give it away for free.

There are very few games out there expensive enough to not make back their development budget on 2.7M copies at $70, and that’s if it never sold another copy after the first week. They’re surely on pace to make a great return on their investment here.

There are still DRM-free games. Call it just buying a license if you want, but they can’t be taken away from you.

There is no GOG or Steam for movies. “Digital copies” are just extended rentals for TV and movies, so anyone revolting against streaming price increases are either pirating or moving to physical, because it’s all that’s left. It pushed me back to physical, for sure, so there’s still money to be made there.

Normies figure it out on a lag, but they get there, with enough exposure to nerds like us.

Yeah, they’ve got competition just like Steam does. If you don’t buy from Sony’s store, you can buy from…er…okay, I see the problem.

I would argue that DRM-free has always been what we really need rather than the physical media, particularly in the era of patching.

The real problem here is operating at such a scale that you’ve got no war chest or plan B for these employees the second that funding gets pulled on one project.