Not to try to dissuade you from your stance, because as an American who could not be more divorced from knowing anything about soccer, I only learned about Ronaldo when he was announced as a character for Fatal Fury; but a guy who can do mixups with a soccer ball is among the more interesting character designs in that game. Shame who it had to be attached to, but it wasn’t nothing.

But doesn’t it speak volumes about the genre of the eighth best selling game of 2023 can’t support three years of service (as in meaningful content updates)?

Oh, they could have, but this is NetherRealm Studios. This is the first time they went 4 years between fighting games. Ordinarily, they’re on a two-year cadence, and each game sells multiple millions of copies. Which do you think makes more money? Selling a game at $60-$70, or selling DLC to people who already bought an old game? The experiment they tried this past game was the big cinematic expansion, because it was successful for MK11, but they were going to do a series of episodes for MK1 that basically meant the story was never-ending; and they replaced the Krypt mode with Invasions, which was also intended to be never-ending. Neither of those things took off, and this big cinematic expansion also cost $50. Their average customer was not thrilled about Kameos, so it makes far more sense for them to just put out the next Injustice game, as long as their parent company can keep from collapsing long enough that DC superheroes are still intellectual property that this studio is allowed to use.

While there weren’t any Fatal Fury entries, the characters did have presence over the years via King of Fighters, and Mai and Terry were even in SF6.

King of Fighters games are not multimillion sellers. People being vaguely aware of Mai and Terry does a bit of help, but brand recognition takes longer than that. Fatal Fury didn’t get enough production value out of its development budget to do anything like SF6’s world tour mode, or NRS’s story modes, that would bring in the less sweaty players. Instead, it just got Saudi money thrown into marketing a game that was never going to make that money back.

SF6, arguably the biggest game in the genre, is currently in 60th place in the steam 24 hour charts. You might argue consoles have a higher share for the genre than games you find on steam, but still, that’s not totally mainstream.

No, in fact, that’s an old way of thinking. Since the pandemic, there have been a few ways where we’ve been able to measure the share of players on each platform in certain fighting games, and PC is the biggest one every time; I’m sure there are outliers, but PC is the largest platform whether we’re talking about fighting games or not. 60th place on Steam’s charts is phenomenal and not at all niche! There are so many games on Steam being played by about 140M people per month. Only being beaten by 59 of them is incredibly successful.

Except for Fatal Fury, which is a revival of a series that people haven’t heard of in decades, all of those games are tremendously successful and could not be counted as niche anymore. MK1 did poorly by Mortal Kombat standards, which still made it the eighth best-selling game of 2023. DBFZ sold over 10 million copies. The genre is not the problem; not even being a tag fighter is the problem. This game just didn’t take off, and free-to-play games need volume. If anything, the genre is in a gold rush, and there’s still more money to be made, but you’ll have to charge for it up front.

It released. They’ve been juicing fighting game tournaments, and somehow the game made its way to NorthernLion, so I don’t know if that was their marketing or not. I don’t know what they did differently here than marketing for something like Valorant, but I only really saw ads for Valorant around the time that it came to consoles, which 2XKO has now done.

Yeah, it’s not the worst deal in the world for them, but it does show how the game definitely didn’t take off like a free to play game needs to to survive.

If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don’t trust that for a minute.

By all means, challenge your government, but I’m not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.

Thanks. I’ll have to give it a trial run at some point soon.

For me, I think the thing that keeps Bluesky usable is that I can use it as a straight linear feed without an algorithm. It’s not truly federated, but the thing I’m always thinking about is that gag in South Park where they burn down the local Walmart and accidentally turn Joe’s Drugs into the new Walmart. Bluesky is safe from that as long as I’ve got the algorithm-less feed. Plus, Mastodon still works, always will, and I still use that too. Even if Discord users migrate to some other closed platform, it gives open alternatives more time to catch up to the most important features before that new platform takes a turn, too.

Migrations like this happen when the other thing sucks. Linux usage even on Steam has tripled in the past four years, and these days if I’m not coming across a PewDiePie or Linus Tech Tips video about switching to Linux, I’m hearing my least tech savvy friends come to me to say I was right for the past 9 years and that their next PC is going to run Linux, if not a Steam Machine. People switch to Bluesky or Mastodon when Twitter becomes all bots due to incentives that Musk put in place, or when his company-sanctioned AI generates CSAM. People will switch off of Discord when enough is enough, and requiring ID uploads to a database that will certainly be hacked one day could be it.

Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.

That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.

That’s cap.

I can convince my friends to try lots of things if I take care of the hard parts. Discord’s changes are not going over well in our server, so we’re looking for the parachutes. I understand it depends, but would you say it works well enough? Or is there even some other hack we can run where I’ve got OBS open in another window sending a stream out to something that isn’t Twitch, like our own video clients? If that’s easy enough to do, I could even convince my friends to do that.

How well does Matrix / Element work for screen sharing games?

How does it handle game windows? Presumably TeamSpeak cares more about such a use case, but I have to ask. How well does P2P screen sharing work for a group of about 10 people?

I’d like to see a 2026 release date for Marvel Tokon, even though there’s a very real possibility that PSN screws with Linux compatibility on PC.

Intergalactic isn’t due out for at least a year still, so we might see it, but we might not. Behind the scenes, there’s also that new sci-fi project from Sony Santa Monica that Cory Barlog has been working on, plus a Greek God of War 2.5D metroidvania from another studio. A release date for Wolverine is pretty likely, and we’ll probably see more of Saros, given how imminent its release is.

From third parties, aside from just seeing brand new announcements for games we didn’t know we wanted, which is always exciting, it would be nice to get release dates for the likes of Mina the Hollower and Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement.

Not anymore, but I doubt a graphic like the one they used would have cost a pretty penny.

Sure, don’t update it, and it will continue to exist without further intervention from the developer. We used to get this all the time. A multiplayer mode that isn’t expected to continue to grow or maintain an active player base month after month, because that’s an absurd goal to hit that only a lucky few will ever succeed at under the best of circumstances.

Xbox doesn’t really do exclusives, but that’s worse than doing “exclusives” that end up on PC months later?

Although spin-offs and even an MMORPG then surfaced, there were hopes that a new single-player title would arrive as soon as 2027.

I think plenty of Horizon fans would be just fine if they integrated a non-live-service multiplayer mode alongside the main single player mode, but AAAs have just about forgotten how to make multiplayer modes that aren’t live service.