It’s nice to see gaming covered in NYT at all. The article generally rings hollow to me. I’m not an industry expert, but:

• It’s easy to be profitable when you’re just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
• High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics
• AAA developers aren’t optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
• AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That’s at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won’t get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they’ll still be $70.
• Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it’s hard to say the corps are hurting.

Some classics in there for sure. For those that haven’t played it, Oni was a quiet favorite of mine from around then. I don’t think it got a lot of attention at the time, or even today. This was Bungie near the end of its Mac-first pre-Halo era.

Wow some of those mods sound very fun.

Edit: mostly the total conversions and new story mods get my attention. Bringing TIE Fighter into X-Wing Alliance? Yes, please.

I don’t know that there is anything left in borderlands if you take out the toilet humor…

I never played 3, only 1 and a little of 2. Does anyone have a good video recommendation on how severe the problem is in 3?

As the article says, since his comments were run through machine translation, it’s possible they’re meant more in jest rather than seriously. I’ll keep a charitable perspective on this until we learn more.

With how built up the apps are these days, and how much data they collect and upload back to corp HQ, it’s good to check and confirm the performance impact.