trend – OfdmFORUM

The new worst gaming trend: killing our favorite games to replace them with sequels

November 1, 2023 Audrey

There used to be a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. You might’ve heard of it—one of the most popular games of all time, played by hundreds of thousands of people every day for over 10 years, the reason every shooter has gun skins now. Anyways, Valve deleted it last month and replaced it with Counter-Strike 2.

That is absolutely wild to think about. One of the biggest games of our time has essentially been swept under a rug, or more accurately, banished to the properties tab of CS2 with broken matchmaking and nothing but community surf servers left to maintain a pulse.

Years of living in the live-service era have conditioned us to embrace change in our favorite games. We herald the arrival of reworks that transform how games are played, celebrate when longtime bugs are finally squashed in patches, and sometimes have to accept the permanent removal of features we like.

Sometimes we’re happy about changes, sometimes we rail against them. But what happened with CS:GO and Overwatch—entire games being swallowed up, diminished, or outright deleted in favor of a sequel—is not good for anything, except keeping costs down at some of the biggest and most successful publishers and developers. It’s a nightmare for PC gaming preservation and a huge disappointment for the dedicated players who keep these games funded in the first place.

Some of the biggest games of our time are being wiped off the internet for no good reason, and it’s time to raise the alarm.

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The worrying trend of throwing games into the virtual incinerator once their sequels come around began with Overwatch 2. Blizzard spent three years failing to accurately explain what a sequel to its live-service FPS would look like, which in retrospect probably happened because Blizzard itself wasn’t quite sure either. At first, Overwatch 2 was to be a completely separate full-priced game with a singleplayer campaign, co-op missions, and multiplayer backwards-compatible with Overwatch 1. We all know how badly the PvE stuff went down, but as we learned more about Overwatch 2 over three years, Blizzard began to indicate it saw no distinction between Overwatch 2 and its predecessor.

Overwatch 2 character Moira wearing Lilith skin facing camera with her hands held up — (Image credit: Tyler C. / Activision Blizzard)

It happened slowly:

November 2019: Overwatch 2 is announced as a separate game that would coexist with Overwatch 1.
November 2019: In an interview, then-game director Jeff Kaplan says Overwatch 1 and 2 will eventually merge to maintain competitive parity. This does not come up again for years, and Blizzard continues to market Overwatch 2 as its own product.
March 2022: Blizzard changes its mind, decides to decouple Overwatch 2’s PvE and PvP content so it can release the game sooner. This confuses everybody. It’s still not clear which parts of Overwatch 2 will be paid content, and if all PvP content is compatible with Overwatch 1, what is the point of having an Overwatch 2?
April 2022: Overwatch 2 holds its first PvP beta, and we notice that not only does Overwatch

Placement games have been 2021’s most calming online video video game trend

January 2, 2022 Audrey

A lot of games get sold on their pulse-pounding motion or their deep, lush stories. This year, we guided Grasp Main around still yet another Halo and took on evil Nazis in Connect with of Responsibility: Vanguard. Nonetheless, underneath those people big, bold, brassy game titles and their dozens of hyped-up brethren, was another, a great deal stranger sub-style that kicked into substantial gear in 2021. I connect with them placement game titles, and they’re all about putting points into a minimal electronic globe and feeling fantastic about it.

Unpacking is in all probability the most notable, sliding on to the scene this fall with a very simple activity: open up cardboard packing containers and unpack the contents. Around the study course of the recreation, the factors you unpack, and the destinations you unpack into, convey to a wordless tale about a single person’s shifting everyday living conditions in the early 2000s. Entirely achieved by means of one particular basic mechanical conceit, Unpacking’s narrative was praised for how cleanly and clearly it approached its subject matter.

At the coronary heart of all of this was placement. Selecting where points go in Unpacking comes about in two ways, the very first of which is fully mechanical. Some matters are meant for particular locations — the toothbrush can only go on the toilet counter, for occasion, although the desktop pc can not be positioned in the kitchen area. The second stage is practically solely aesthetic. The precise locale of publications, stuffed animals, video clip game titles, and a entire host of other points is not straight dictated by the video clip game. The participant, on the lookout at the place and judging how it must glimpse as the protagonist moves in, is only satisfying their own organizational needs.

Though I am confident that some men and women are content to blitz as a result of Unpacking carrying out the bare minimum amount of manipulation to get to the up coming amount, it looks obvious to me that Unpacking wants its gamers to contemplate, perhaps even interrogate, why they put specific merchandise wherever they did. In a incredibly The Sims way, this game appears to want gamers to consider the arrangement of motion figures on a shelf or guides in a stack as a way of purpose taking part in the everyday living of this character we only know by means of their possessions. We’re meant to create a baseline of what it means for this character to reside in a new place, and to consider as a result of and contemplate how, and why, they may well put items to make their new home as satisfying to them as attainable.

Placement game titles prosper in this contemplative area. Whilst they all have the fundamental ambitions and mechanical interfaces that we associate with video clip video games, all those mechanics do not exhaust their value in the extended time period. Dorfromantik, which appeared in early access

2022 technology trend review, part one: Open source, cloud, blockchain

December 30, 2021 Audrey

In the spirit of the last couple of years, we review developments in what we have identified as the key technology drivers for the 2020s in the world of databases, data management, and AI. We are looking back at 2021, trying to identify patterns that will shape 2022.

We start today with a review of open source software, the cloud, and blockchain. We will continue in the coming days with a review of AI and knowledge graphs.

Open source and cloud

Open source software has been on the rise for a while, and we don’t see any signs of this growth slowing down. According to Gartner’s 2021 Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software (OSS): “Through 2025, more than 70% of enterprises will increase their IT spending on OSS, compared with their current IT spending. Plus, by 2025, software as a service (SaaS) will become the preferred consumption model for OSS due to its ability to deliver better operational simplicity, security, and scalability”.

Gartner’s predictions of open source at large are even bolder and more specific when it comes to open source in the database and data management world. As far back as 2019, Gartner predicted that the future of databases is the cloud, and that future of databases is also something else: it is open source.

By 2022, Gartner predicted, more than 70% of new in-house applications will be developed on an open-source database, and 50% of existing proprietary relational database instances will have been converted or be in the process of converting. At the dawn of 2022, it’s hard to verify the accuracy of these predictions.

What we can do however, is offer a reasonable, even if a bit of a cliche by now, explanation. Gartner also offers a hint to this, by linking OSS and the cloud via SaaS. OSS can mobilize people beyond the boundaries of a single organization to contribute to high-quality software, and it can skip the line in enterprise sales and establish a presence by winning developer hearts and minds. Those are widely acknowledged facts by now.

In the database and data management world, especially when it comes to analytics and AI, the focal point is the data. The reason why those databases and data management systems operate in the first place is to collect the data that will be used to build analytics and AI applications.

For many organizations, databases and data management systems become somewhat of a commodity that is best operated in the cloud, where resilience and elasticity is someone else’s job. This way, organizations can focus on their core mission, which is to use the data to deliver value.

Cloud and open source are the great enablers for databases, data management systems and machine learning platforms

By Who is Danny — Shutterstock

While it’s hard to verify the accuracy of Gartner’s predictions concerning the prevalence of OSS in the world of data, we can look at some indications as a proxy for this. First, in January 2021, OSS