Backlog: The Embiggening – August, 2024
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/28/24 at 02:49 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Summer will be over soon, and all the cute little autists and gender-queers will be heading back to their Postmodernist Deconstruction Indoctrination mills. While, traditionally, Industrial Gaming bigwigs have chosen the end of Summer to start dumping tons of games onto the market, this year’s August schedule looks like a continuation of the Summer Games Drought.
We’ve only got 5 pieces of shovelware coming in August, with only two of the major subvarieties represented. In Licensed Swill, there’s “Star Wars Outlaws” (which we know Chris will buy for full price, since he’s one of, like, 4 people on Earth who enjoyed “The Acolyte”), a 4th sequel in the ‘Gundam Breaker’ series, a new officially-licensed ‘Monster Jam’ title, and “Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA.” I don’t know what either of those acronyms stand for, nor do I care, but based on the genre tag Chris applied in the database, …
It’s Time to Split Xbox from Microsoft
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/24 at 02:09 PM CT
My all-time favorite President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, earned a reputation as a Trust Buster, regulating the Wild West of Big Business into a more manageable and publicly responsible form. It seems that today’s Federal Trade Commission has finally opened its eyes and gotten back to turn of the (20th) Century priorities in that it recently attacked Microsoft for increasing the price of Gamepass and removing some features from all but the most expensive subscription tier.
Where was the FTC when Microsoft was purchasing company after company? Why did the FTC allow the Activision-Blizzard-King deal to go through if they knew Microsoft would raise prices as they consolidated control and increased the Xbox Division’s market cap by billions of dollars?
They probably had their heads up their collective asses like all appointees from both the Trump and Biden administrations, worrying about pushing their side of the Culture War instead of neutrally and objectively …
“Unprofitable” Gamepass Undergoes Corrective Surgery, Becomes Even More Useless
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/24 at 03:21 PM CT
I still remember when you could buy a brand-new, just-launched console for $200. Now simply “owning” a console costs $240… annually.
Microsoft, the company that first successfully foisted subscriptions upon console gamers after the failures of Nintendo’s Satellaview and The Sega Channel, has made it abundantly clear that the only thing that matters to them, as far as the Xbox Division is concerned, is making their once-optional Gamepass service into a successful, predictable, and perpetual revenue stream. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Gamers haven’t really taken a liking to Gamepass, even among the tiny slice of the pie who are oblivious enough to Microsoft’s past failings to willingly involve themselves in the Xbox ecosystem.
As a result, the company re-branded their Xbox Live service to the Gamepass moniker in an attempt to make the sinking ship appear to be afloat, in spite of being fully underwater. Furthermore, the “introductory pricing” of Gamepass and the …
GOG Sells-Out to “Big Gaming” Company
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/06/24 at 10:57 PM CT
We at MeltedJoystick have been less-than-impressed by GOG – formerly GoodOldGames – and its failure to deliver any meaningful action to follow up its talk. GOG has been making news in Gaming circles since it first launched in 2008 with its novel approach of being a 100% DRM-free marketplace. Subsequently, the company made waves with its FCKDRM Initiative, which quietly went away; and with its GOG Connect program to provide DRM-free backups of select Steam games, which quietly went away; and with its GOG Galaxy client, which was supposed to put all of our digital games in one place, but which is poorly managed, riddled with bugs, and reliant on volunteer coders to maintain most of the third-party store plugins; and the company even made noise about being in lock-step with Gamer culture, while simultaneously kissing the asses of both the Chinese Communist Party and the Marxist Fringe Left.
It should go without saying, but GOG has failed to be the independent, outsider, pro-nerd …
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