The article says that comment came from a CEO of another game company, not players. Tim Bender, the CEO of the publisher for The Manor Lord, said “Players are happy, the developer is happy, and we as publisher are thrilled beyond belief.” I don’t understand where the post title that says he cited gamer expectations came from.

There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here’s their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.

Have you tried Itch.io? They have a lot of Gameboy and NES roms that are “Name your own price.” I don’t have any recommendations - I’ve just started poking around with homebrew roms myself.

• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-nes-rom
• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-gameboy-rom

Those responsible for sacking everyone have been sacked.

What is your source on multiplayer games being more popular and prevalent than single player? Because a cursory search only turns up the opposite preference. You’re ignoring the parts of my argument that don’t suit you as well, like playing only with friends, so I don’t think you’re really being an honest interlocutor. That leads me to believe you are probably a player that bullies other players, which is why you’re so strongly anti-moderation.

• https://www.statista.com/statistics/259577/us-single-player-vs-multiplayer-frequency-among-gamers “According to an October 2022 survey of PC and console gamers in the United States, over half of respondents stated that they spent about 75 to 100 percent of their gaming time playing alone.”

• https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/single-player-vs-multiplayer-a-generational-changing-of-the-guards-or-a-bifurcation-of-gamer-behaviours “57% of gamers prefer single-player over multiplayer games, compared to 22% who prefer multiplayer games. While the overall preference for the single player mode holds true across all age segments, the degree to which the single player mode is preferred differs significantly with age.”

You don’t know what is true? That people can’t stop playing a game? That developers care about players quitting their game? It’s trivially easy to play video games and avoid trolls. There are single player games. You can play only with friends or family. You can play live service with lots of solo-oriented content and mute the chat. It’s not a hyperbolic choice between playing video games or avoiding all social interaction in life period - that’s a very “terminally online” kind of perspective. Normal people reduce toxic interactions where they can, they don’t think, “Welp, I either put up with constant bigotry and rape threats in this totally optional entertainment or I have to move out to a shack in the woods.”

nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.

The problem for developers is that the easiest way to stop engaging is to not play their games. They care about moderation because they want people to continue to play their game.

I can’t speak for others, but for me it’s just a nuisance. I’m not furious about it. I avoid buying EA and Ubisoft games too. It’s a small thing for one game on one account, but when you acquire a lot of games across a bunch of different accounts, all those different logins and launchers just become a bother.

Warframe and Lotro are terminal illnesses for me. I’m never done playing them. It’s an endless cycle of dressing up a hobbit in Middle Earth or dressing up a Warframe in space.

I don’t mind DLC that’s done right for games I love. I just know it’s a common complaint for Paradox games to have a lot of DLC. That said, there are games that have produced a ton of free updates with very little DLC, like No Man’s Sky, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. So, I don’t know that it’s always necessary to have a ton of DLC to support ongoing game development. It’s all very subjective and varies a lot from game to game.

I had not heard about Life By You being on hold. That’s frustrating. Paradox games go nuts with DLC too, but some competition is better than none.

Oh okay. A while back, their VP Lyndsay Pearson explicitly said they plan for Sims 4 to continue to exist side by side with Project Rene (aka Sims 5). I was wondering if that had changed. My cynical take on the plan to keep both going is that Sims 5 is probably going to be a live service abomination, which they wanted Sims 4 to be, so keeping Sims 4 might be hedge in case Sims 5 fails hard. Of course, they could also have been lying.

They didn’t need to announce this. They could just fix the bugs and players would start noticing that a bunch of bugs were getting fixed.

Where did you see that they are no longer making new content for Sims 4? The article doesn’t seem to say so and the last I heard they planned to release content for Sims 4 alongside Sims 5. FYI, I would prefer they stop with Sims 4 content.

Terrarria has 2d shooting, cartoon violence that is kid friendly, and you can have up to 8 players in a world.

What’s galling is that big companies claim that the main reason for making people come into the office is to promote in-person collaboration. But, they constantly demonstrate that they don’t, in fact, value in-person collaboration. They organize people into cross-geography teams all the time to save money on hiring. So, you’re often sitting in a cubicle on a conference call with people on the other side of the planet that you will never see in the hallway. Or worse, you’re sitting in a conference room with a handful of coworkers, struggling to communicate over a crappy speaker phone with a handful of coworkers on the other side of the planet. They also frequently lay off entire product teams in one fell swoop. Decades of institutional knowledge that you might tap into during a water cooler conversation just disappears overnight. It’s hard to go along with all the extra real costs and pay the happiness tax that commutes and cubicle farms extract when it’s so obvious that the stated reason for it all is a lie.