I think friction in onboarding is an important way to make sure new members are both motivated and moderately tech literate which is really important to keeping the community good.

I kinda lost all interest in csgo when I realized that my ping had more to do with my success than my skill. And it wasnt like my ping was ever crazy high either. I got to smfc (2nd highest rank) when my ping was 20 and fell down to DMG (3 ranks down) literally immediately after my ping went up to 50 from a move.

I think your right that’s its a lot easier to monetize a pvp game than a pve or single player game (especially these days when players expect ongoing support even for single player games) but I think your comparison is a bit unfair when it comes to creativity to actually create the game bit.

The battle Royale (and previous trends before it like bomb defusal, team death match etc) are mature game modes with well understood mechanics and limitations. That does indeed make things a lot easier to make. But it’s also a lot easier to push out yet another assassins creed game than to create an interesting single player game. I think creating a novel pvp game is just as difficult as a single player or pve game.

I think triple a games in general suffer from a lack of creativity due to a huge aversion to risk and a misallocation of resources to asset development rather than gameplay mechanics. And unfortunately creating a successful indie multi-player game is insanely hard because of how robust the player vase has to be.

Not to rain on your parade but I have heard fortnite puts the first few games on new or inactive accounts in bot games so they get a taste of winning.

Overwatch 1 was wildly unprofitable. They made overwatch 2 very heavily monetized and it had a rough launch. These are the problems:

• they removed a bunch of quality of life features (that they have been slowly adding back)
• they moved from 6v6 to 5v5, a controversial change
• they made the game ftp, removed loot boxes and made cosmetics very expensive (40 bucks for some skin bundles), there is a battlepass that’s ~10bucks though
• new heros need to be unlocked with a long grind, waiting a season and doing some easier challenges or by buying the battle pass.in general there’s a lot of focus on the battle pass.
• they announced an ambitious pve gamemode, then scrapped the most anticipated part, (the community and media generally misinterpreted this as a full cancelation of the pve mode)
• in an effort to address some of the problems with the old game (very stun heavy, very shield heavy) they reworked many of the heros in ways that some felt removed their identity.
• the matchmaker is noticeably worse leading to unfair games (it has been steadily improving). Personally I think this is the result of a large influx of new and returning players combined with what is actually a very hard game to balance matchmaking around.
• a lot of the public faces of the game left including the head designer (rip Pappas jeff) and the head writer.

Personally, I think the game is in a very enjoyable state so long as you don’t want or care about cosmetics. Not as good as when the game was at its peak in 2016 but a lot better than the tail end of overwatch 1.

I completely agree, but there is a way to mitigate this. BRs are most fun imo when you have to constantly keep moving and fight while you move. This isn’t a very good winning strategy but it is fun. I try to land in a moderately hot area, ideally with 3ish teams in the area then I keep near the circles edge and run with the circle as much as I can. This leads to some very cool dynamic fights where multiple teams are fighting at once while also trying to fall back run away entirely and also keep up with the looting. It can be super fun when it happens, but even when I try to force it it only happens every 5 games or so at best. It has very unique moments like sacrificing yourself so your teammates can run away and live or trying to carry a fallen teammate while dodging shooting only to be saved by a third party raid. When it’s good it’s very good, problem is all the BRs I have played aren’t good most of the time.

Battle royalist are interesting but i think they have some mechanical flaws that havent been solved yet. I like the tension of a good match, but I feel like there is kinda a problem where the best way to play is rarely the most fun. I’m a very competitive player mostly, but I haven’t seriously played BRs.

I feel like BRs aren’t really for me, very few have ladders and I’m not a fan of tpp (the fpp lobbies are usually much smaller), but I have fun with fortnite no build mode with friends. For me the anxiety and nerves (which I would call adrenaline!) Is the appeal of the games, but I can get why it isn’t for everyone.

Battle royals are at their best when you are constantly chasing or being chased, staying at the edge of the circle and moving in. Camping is probably the best strategy for winning in most BRs but it’s not very fun. Hot dropping is more or less just death match, and while I can see the appeal (I do it too sometimes) I think it’s bad for the overall game most of the time. There have been lobbies where I hit top 20 before I even leave me drop location because so many people hot dropped, which leads to a boring game. They need to do more to incentivise fun strats. Seems like every BR tries something, but imo none have really succeeded yet.

Me and my wife have been really enjoying Bread and Fred. Your two penguins tied together who have to use your momentum to climb a mountain. It’s in the genre of “getting over it” where you can fall at any time and lose all progress. Two player only, it’s more a couple game.

I don’t see overwatch 2 on the list. I think the game gets an unfair amount of hate, it’s one of my favourite games. One of the few games that is competitive but not Grey army colours. Community is toxic, and it takes a long time to learn though. It can be an exceeding satisfying game, but unfortunately I think it only really gets fun at Plat and higher elos (similar to csgo in that regard)

Stardew valley is a great vibe game that I don’t see listed. One if the best games for casual chat and play imo.

I hope they take stuff from popular custom game modes. I think it would be neat to have an ana sleep dart or mercy parkour with global leader boards and such.

I think for Apollo to be profitable they will need a bigger user base than lemmy has right now, I think they’ll be late to join. I also think it’s possible the dev feels so burnt by the fiasco that they may want to walk away entirely.

It coulr be misleading, but outright lying here wouldn’t be particularly useful since they have a duty to report truthfully on their finicial results.

E: nvm I just realized the source isn’t Netflix themselves.

I canceled mine at the beginning of the year. For me it represented a 5x increase in the cost of the platform. But I agree overall, it’s probably a slight positive for them in the short term (I’m skeptical its worth losing mindshare in the long run).

I think there may not be enough competent volunteer mods to take it over. They could replace them with paid reddit employees like other big platforms but that’s gonna cost them more than the 20mil a year they apparently think 3rd party apps are costing them.

It seems so bizarrely personal at this point. It’s strange.