Aren't they called collectathons and are usually remembered poorly?

I don’t know what the visual style of the Luncheon Kingdom is or if it has a name, but I don’t like it. All those bright colors, lacking any kind of texture.

But in general, the incongruity of visual styles is obvioiusly very deliberate. It sometimes works really well, I think, and if there’s a problem it’s that they didn’t take it far enough. Like when you see the dinosaur in the first kingdom it’s so unexpected and so bizarre that it prepares you to think that really anything could happen in the adventure you’ve just embarked on; it also prepares you to think that any sense of coherence is out the window, the way it mixes up realist and cartoonish styles for an ironic effect (I’m trying not to use the word postmodern, but alas). I wish there was more of that (although you do get some more of it with the Metro Kingdom).

Heh, I don’t know what those are and they’re not what I had in mind (I was thinking Doom and DF). But certainly Mario 64 is still a highly regarded video game.

Gotcha

What are some examples?

DK64, the Spyro games are prime examples. They kind of dominated the SNES/PS1/N64 era of gaming, where you have to run around and collect thousands of meaningless tokens.

yeah, that's the reason I said "boring star hunt" and not "star hunt". It's been done to death. Doesn't matter whether you call them stars, shine sprites, power stars, or power moons. Nintendo should have moved on from this after Sunshine flopped.

("flopped" for Nintendo is always a relative statement)

Gamestop death watch part 2:

About a week after I posted this, Gamestop announced a $300 million modified Dutch auction share repurchase. Analysts were ecstatic. To quote Barron's, "Not so fast, GameStop bears", as GameStop's stock shot upwards 8% overnight from $5.02 to $5.44. CEO George Sherman, whose past entertainment retail management experience includes absolutely ****ing nothing, confidently stated, "While improving our operations and capturing efficiencies in our business to drive returns for our shareholders continues to be the top priority for the new leadership team, we view the purchase of our shares to be financially compelling at this time." In other words, the company has no strategy beyond squeezing the rock they've already been given, and the leadership team has no clue what they're doing, but everybody else is buying back their stock so probably GameStop should do it too.

The stock is currently back down to $5.30 or something in after hours trading. For hilarious reference, their earnings per share are $-7.43; yes, negative seven dollars and forty-three cents, which means the company is burning through so much money that they could immediately cease all business operations, take the entire company private, give themselves $200 million in bonuses, and it would still be cheaper than staying in business. Which, of course, is exactly what's going to happen.

Hey look, this is sorta TV and sorta games, so I'm gonna post it here and let someone else sort it out.

One Punch Man season 2 ended last week. See y'all in another 4 years I guess, but while we wait I've caught myself thinking.... the whole idea of OPM is that the protagonist is like the main character of an RPG after the game ends, right? Like he's grossly over-leveled to the point that nothing in the game is remotely challenging anymore, virtually indestructible and capable of killing any enemy in one punch (thus the name). This analogy is explicitly stated.

The thing is, this idea is also based on a real thing that can be tried: grossly over-leveling a character in an RPG. I've done this in Skyrim. Like, legit, a "One Punch" build - effectively infinite health, stamina, and punch damage. It's fun to break the game, but the result is kind of sad. Not because the game became too easy (honestly it is not possible to make Skyrim much easier than when it is played vanilla) but because the game wasn't designed to react to that sort of thing. You punch an enemy, dealing millions of points of damage, and they gingerly drop to the floor like you gave them a love tap on their glass jaw. Harkon still monologues to you about how awesome vampires are, flagged invincible of course so you can't just wreck his **** and turn the rest of the DLC into an optional side adventure.

Compare to OPM, where competent monsters do realize how dangerous Saitama is, where long monologues and stories get harshly abbreviated because Saitama is bored of them, and, most importantly, where his punches that deal millions of damage go off like a nuclear bomb.

I know Skyrim is unusually broken among RPGs, allowing some pretty insane stuff. So what I did there is sort of an edge case. But honestly, over-leveled characters in general aren't. It's an inevitable outcome of any RPG. The people who enjoy playing the game are inevitably going to spend almost all of their play time over-leveled. This seems like a case that RPGs should handle much better. Does anybody know of any RPGs that do?

I only know one that absolutely didn't. KOTOR 2, for all its unfinished glory leaves you with this incredibly overpowered character about halfway through the game. From then on nothing is a challenge anymore. I guess this stems from your ability to play the game in any order you like. They could've gone the Gothic route of placing a very powerfull enemy at the start of each new level but I guess they wanted to leave the player some freedom.

In Tomb Raider you kinda see a reaction to overleveling, but only from Lara. At the beginning she tries to reason with the enemy soldiers like "You don't have to do this." and by the end she yells stuff like "I'm going to ****ing end you, you bastards!"
I guess this is what happens when you gain quantum immortality. Although the player has seen Lara day many times, she herself experiences mastering every obstacle she encounters with ease. Of course, the enemies don't see that either. They just see another kid standing in their way, trying to be cocky.

How did The Force Unleashed handle this? Being insanely overpowered was more or less the premise of the game and I remember hearing something about setting the focus on naturally feeling AI. But I only played the Wii version and that's been a while ago.

I guess the closest you can get is Doom. At least sometimes you see a monster trying to run away, only to find themselves locked into a battle arena.

Like OPM, you gotta just keep going in RPGs for the trivial bull****.

Who are these analysts who recommend these stocks? Are they just filling up the portfolios of old people with Gamestop or something?

The only games distributor I'd want to hold shares in would be Steam, but that's private so GL.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance. For one, it's hard to be so OP you one shot anyone, at best you get as well-equipped as any knight and if you do challenge a knight you'll still struggle. But once you get enough battle gear you're treated with more respect by common people. Some will mistakenly call you a knight.

Heh, someone on Rebbit posted a Blizzard Q&A about wow from a few years ago. Some interesting things to note from it, mostly how little the developers seem to understand the appeal of their game.

For those who don't know, looting has changed in WoW quite a bit. It used to be that a raid would down a boss, some items would drop, and the raid could have varying loot systems but ultimately only one player got each item. Apparently now in the latest expansion, items from bosses drop per player and are totally random. AKA no organization is needed around loot, you either get something or you don't.

In the same Q&A the developers acknowledge the game has no community anymore, and say they want ways to "fix it without requiring players to depend on other players". I mean first it should be obvious that needing other people is what drives MMO interaction, so the sentiment is dumb. But they fail to see why their raid loot system kills the necessity of organized guild gameplay for most players. It's straightforward why. If you raid with the same group of players, when other players power up it assists your future self, even if you don't personally get loot. Guilds in WoW are essentially communist in that way, everyone pools and shares resources knowing the collective is ultimately a bit more important than their personal loot, and keeping loot within your group is better than organizing with strangers for the same content, where if another player gets an item it won't benefit you. The group power is your power in older WoW, and you progress together, hence community and MMO.

When items drop individually, of course, there's no distinction between joining a guild and doing the same content with random people. And players will always opt out of social interaction unless it's mandated because online nerds have social anxiety and ****, so naturally unless they're made to they'll play with random people. And then nobody has fun because you're playing Diablo III except for you're paying monthly and need other people to roleplay friendly NPCs for you.

The other interesting comment they make is they're capable of doing analytics about where players spend their time, and presume players who spend lots of time doing an activity means the activity is fun and the game should focus more on it. Aka design by spreadsheet. Which is a pretty bad way to design a game.. I guess though it makes your presentations at team meetings sound more convincing to have pretend data backing you up, and surveying players or doing critical thinking is hard? Who knows, but the Q&A makes the dev team's decision making sound questionable.

I would never dare to suggest that the entire retail financial services industry is an elder abuse scam.




...wait, no, I've done that repeatedly. Yeah. That's exactly what's happening.

I genuinely wonder how much these analysts are just part of a convoluted pump & dump. A fund manager decides Gamestop is dead in the water, leaks some "positive news" to analyst friends while bleeding off that stock slowly to avoid suspicions. The analyst can then say "full disclosure I have no position on XYZ" on tv without lying.

Maybe so maybe no, all I know is bank employees were willing to manipulate LIBOR rates for years by messaging on Facebook so who knows.

If I were being charitable, I would suggest trying to distinguish quant analysts (people who work for funds and inform decisions) vs. "analysts" (editorialists who work for financial news companies).

Heh. I asked myself, "I wonder why Gamestop never broke into the digital downloads market". Turns out, they actually have tried. There's a website where they sell digital downloads and microtransaction bullcrap.

Turns out, their prices are very competitive with Steam. And they have a Summer Sale gimmick, too. Digital receipts in Q1 2019 amounted to $255.4mn, a bit shy of Steam's $1bn+ per quarter. And steam doesn't even sell for the console market.

The big question for me is, how haven't I heard of GameStop's digital distribution? I play video games and browse the internet. If I didn't even know the service existed, then they're clearly missing their target market with advertising. I'm not sure how they advertised the platform, maybe only at the brick and mortars to loyal customers?

In any case, their digital distribution business seems to earn a good amount. I'm not even sure if they can turn their brick and mortars profitable, but maybe they should focus on digital distribution. Maybe create an advertising campaign for a free game or some **** to get people on your platform who are not using it currently? Who knows.

You mean people who know something vs. people who don't? Sure, I mean who would pay an analyst to go on TV and share valuable information? That would make zero sense.

Looking at Epic: https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/about



Mmmm, is this legal? Essentially adding a surcharge to developers who sell the game on a competitor's platform?

What do we think of Epic Game's chance of success, btw? They're probably developing a loyal fanbase of teens/preteens who adopted the Epic Games Launcher as their first platform and may develop some brand loyalty. And their pricing scheme marketing seems targeted at making players take the side of developers against the big bad steam, which I've seen people online refer to so the propaganda is definitely working to some extent.

As far as I can tell they aren't digitally distributing anything. The vast majority of their products are timecards, along with a smattering of Steam/Origin/UPlay keys they're reselling. Of course Gamestop's price competitive with Steam; they're probably automatically buying a Steam key whenever you buy one from their website. This is probably also how they're "digitally" distributing timecards, by paying some poor **** in Texas to scratch/peel cards and transcribe them. Regardless of how they're getting their inventory, though, they clearly aren't offering anything that the originating services don't. Actually, they're offering less because it's much less convenient.

I tried looking at Gamestop's 10-Q to see if they break down COGS by category, and of course they don't. My baseless speculation is that they're booking physical timecard purchases under the digital product category. Or maybe they're booking credit card fraud as revenue under that category, but a loss under some other category. Gamestop does so much shady stuff that I'm skeptical that the digital number reported on their 10-Q really means what they want investors to think it means.

None. But I'd pay an editorialist to go on TV to share disinformation, sure. Well, I wouldn't because I have a human soul, but

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not sure, but there could be an argument made that it is anticompetitive price discrimination or a form of tying. The United States does not enforce antitrust law though so it doesn't matter, Epic can do whatever it wants.

Success at what? Nobody knows what their goal is. It's probably in their best interest to create a safe second choice marketplace they can use to distribute their own games for free, with just enough third party titles to overcome the "shoeleather cost" of memorizing yet another login and installing yet another client. Their statements suggest they're trying to break the Steam monopoly. Their bearing suggests they want to drive Valve out of business entirely. They're pretty likely to accomplish one of those things.

Steam should have been broken up a long time ago so idk w/e.

Oh wow, I just assumed they'd have a platform. Still somehow a $250 million/year business, and probably one of the only profitable sectors. I have no idea who shops at gamestop.com but I find that number pretty impressive for how little their website seems to offer. Their prices are competitive but the platform probably can't justify its own existence. IDK, I still think if I ran the company developing a competitor to steam would be the route I'd go, but what do I know. They'll probably just drive the company into the ground with golden parachutes.



What other shade stuff has Gamestop done? I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing some accounting shenanigans though.

Creating a true competitor for the steam platform. You're right though, Steam can't have massive overhead (if the profitability of Valve is any suggestion). I can't fathom why a decent competitor hasn't yet emerged.

If I ran the company I would be winding down operations and returning as much money from liquidated assets to the shareholders as possible. There's no future for GameStop. Specialty retail only makes sense when you can turn your specialization into a comparative advantage by providing selection and sales expertise that general retailers can't justify. Major game studios have been throwing exponentially more resources into fewer and fewer products, which means the commercially relevant titles for any system now fits handily inside a single display at Walmart. As far as physical stores go, they are done. They deserve it, too, which is also nice.

GameStop can't make a Steam competitor. Even if management understood the market well enough, studios and distributors hate GameStop as much as their customers do. They'd sign exactly nobody.

Former employees have alleged that GameStop is booking some new game sales as used sales. If true, it is probably not fraud; as mentioned, GameStop doesn't define its product groups, nor does it break down its cost of sales by group. However, if true, it is certainly unethical.



Because Steam is a natural monopoly.

I'd say GOG has more chance of disrupting the distribution market than Epic. Their new client GOG Galaxy 2 is supposedly able to interact with most other clients. That should solve the problems of those that hate Epic for grabbing "exclusives" while bringing them under the roof of GOG.
I already have a similar setup via Lutris on Linux and I quite like it. Even when I know that I want to play a Steam game I launch it through Lutris because I got so used to it. I bet GOG Galaxy 2 will do the same for many Windows users. Convenience is the key. It's what brought people over to Steam (and stupid publishers just putting a Steam key inside a DVD-case) in the first place.

Gamestop also bought and recently closed Thinkgeek (or brought over a "curated selection" to their own site, whatever). That might be the only reason I'll ever visit their website.

To quote Barron's literally 12 hours after I made the above post, "Shares of GameStop dipped Thursday after the videogame and collectibles retailer’s tender offer for its shares expired, with the shares falling below the low end of the offer."

nOT So FAsT gaMESToP beARs

"The company has struggled to adapt to an evolving industry that has seen videogame sales shift online and more distribution turn digital."

if you dig more than inch into this argument, you'll find out that this "shift" isn't actually a shift to digital distribution at all, it's actually explosive revenue growth in f2p/mobile and e-sports. While the medium is superficially similar, you don't need to look very hard to realize these are materially different verticals exhibiting their own growth independent from the growth of the PC-centric and console-centric verticals. This certainly should be obvious to anybody who actually plays games, and should be obvious to anybody who crunches numbers for a living, but perhaps not to the non-participating entities who own and manage most big game companies.

So you've got GameStop swinging from a short rope because "digital", but meanwhile Walmart (while not specific) suggests they've seen "strong single-digit growth" in the product category. Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't actually digital. Maybe the real problem is, at Walmart I can get the exact same **** at the same price I could at GameStop, but I can pick up a muffler and a pack of diapers while I'm there??



"In March, it named George Sherman, an experienced retail executive, its CEO after a lengthy search."

He's not experienced, you dumb ****.

Almost all of George Sherman's retail executive experience was at Home Depot and Advance Auto Parts. Even under the standard Wall Street demented theory that management experience is highly interchangeable, please tell me what valuable insights gained from selling car and home repair products will help George Sherman set a corporate strategy to sell luxury goods with hyper-elastic demand out of a ****ing specialty retailer.

They might as well have hired the president of a fan club, for all his experience matters.

Oh man, Thinkgeek... I remember being on Slashdot circa 2003 and seeing their ads all over that site.

The markup is way higher on knick knacks than video games. Buying Thinkgeek was some vertical integration to create an in-house supply of kitsch and maximize their profit in that category.


Of course literally nobody goes to GameStop to buy that ****. It's a complementary good at best, really an impulse buy at worst, which means in order to sell it in the first place you need to have something better to draw people in. I've love to offer them some suggestions, but I don't think they can hear me all the way over here in Walmart buying Mario + Rabbids with a pack of diapers.

Hey you know what? Just in case anybody is still convinced that um actually yes ~digital~ is what's killing GameStop, here's a lil thought exercise fer ya:

So let's say digital really is the problem, and the existence of digital distribution is actually shrinking GameStop's market. Last year total game industry revenue was around $137.9B with $70.3B of it going to mobile games, virtually all of which were distributed digitally by Apple and Google. GameStop cannot sell signed games for iPhone and Android; they and all other third party retailers are blocked out of the market by technical measures taken by Apple and Google. Effectively, under the theory that digital is killing GameStop, then Apple and Google are leveraging their smartphone market position to drive GameStop out of the market and directly/deliberately harming them by 50% of their revenue.

Is this happening? Then where's GameStop's ****in antitrust complaint? because if GameStop is actually being injured by not being allowed to sell smartphone games it should be pretty ****in easy to prove (instead of just being asleep while a new vertical blew up on them)

Okay, so maybe it's not happening. But what about the other half of the market?

About 80% of the total industry was digital. Take out the half that's phone games and you're down to ~60% digital on $67.6B revenue. $33.4B of the remaining amount was PC, which is also all digital, but which GameStop lost like 14 years ago so I'm not sure it would be moving the needle much for them at this point. That leaves GameStop's core console-centric market, at $34.2B revenue, of which $7.2B was digital (21%, up from ~0 a decade ago). So once you get rid of the confounding variables you do see that GameStop could still be hurting from digital, but on the order of 21%, not on the order of 80% like people usually claim.

But is it actually? For reference, a decade ago the entire game industry had revenues of $21 billion. That's 560% growth over the period. So,... uh, back of the napkin, and yeah GameStop's market could be 21% smaller today than it would be without digital... but that's a 21% haircut off 560% whole-industry growth. Digital growth in their segment simply isn't large enough to explain away the fact that GameStop is going out of business while by all rights they should be rolling in it, doin high dives into their big ol scrooge mcduck vault full of gold coins.

ya nah, GameStop is going out of business because they're all in dead malls and have **** all to offer that walmart and target don't, not even the award-winning walmart service with a smile (lol). digital has nooooooooo-thing to do with it.

Since I'm all worked up anyway, here's my lil HOWTO on saving GameStop:


So really one major problem for the company is the fact that GameStop did magnificently well from 2006 through 2015 or so. Within less than a year they saw the 360, DS Lite, Wii, and PS3 all released, all of which sold unusually well (either before or since). Then the GFC hit and, well, it turns out unemployed people really like to play video games. Basically for most of a decade, GameStop could do no wrong. And that means GameStop's management could do no wrong. And that means GameStop's management **** all over the company, because that's what management does when they can do no wrong. And that means a few things, not least of which is the fact that the GameStop brand isn't really worth anything at this point.

That means the first step in my HOWTO on saving GameStop is to invent a time machine and prevent the GFC. You will be creating a mountain of corpses. People will be sad, but only because in that timeline they won't know why they shouldn't be sad.

Next, travel to 2010 and sell GameStop to Target. This deal would involve rebranding Target's entertainment sections into embedded GameStops, along with specialist employees. At the time embedding a specialty retailer will seem like a good thing, because the game industry is exploding and GameStop is well-regarded by the public. Some GameStop mall locations could be converted to City Targets, which will also seem like a good deal because malls hadn't started to die yet.

Take your bonus from the M&A and invest it in US pharmaceutical companies

Haven't been to a GameStop in years but I would be kinda surprised they didn't haphazardly turn the stores into physical VR showcases (given the space constraints) because VR, to the management, may be the next "hot new thing." But I would bet that would just be a money-losing venture, and VR hardware/content providers would not want to associate with a store brand that wouldn't have real expertise setting their products up properly in the first place.

I was thinking about how physical board game shops are still doing well, and the only reason seems to be they have the hook of providing a place for nerds to meet other nerds and play Magic: The Gathering. If Gamestop could have figured out how to gimmick more people into the store, on a recurring basis, to sell people highly marked up junk, might work. But nobody makes games compatible with being physically near another person. Do they even make LAN-friendly games anymore?

Like, from my understanding the local game/card shop has events like drafts, where you basically pay a cover charge and build magic decks. From my calculations it probably produces $300 gross per night, but naturally more than once or twice a week would see diminishing return on customers. But then you factor in that you've brought 50+ people into a store filled with high markup junk and you probably turn over a couple hundred more. Then they do the same kind of game exchanging others do but with magic cards.

Without all of that ****, Amazon would break the store in two seconds. So what can GameStop do to bring people into the store? I guess nothing.

My stereotype of the average GameStop customer is a teenager or the parent of a teenager. In either case they won't spend the money to buy a VR headset, that's going to be purchased only by rich kids and young people with income, who don't shop at GameStop.

On top of that, they're probably not even buying any games. My kid only really seems to want to look at all the other crap they have in the store. It's like it's a freaking Hot Topic or something now.