Want to see more of this character? Be sure to join us on Patreon to see more updates. We like to share new information and images as we make progress. We're now developing two games at present, and production is going well. However, resources are limited and completing those titles is becoming more challenging. We really want to bring these adventures to you, so please help us by liking, commenting, and sharing.
No identity politics, no partisanship, no ugly sprites, no gimmicks, and no bad writing. This level of quality and detail is guaranteed in all of our games. We aren't reducing the quality of any asset for any title at all.
Hit the link above to directly to our Patreon page and keep the projects alive. Every little bit helps! If you want to watch a while, follow for free, like, comment, and share. If now isn't a good time to drop dough on it, follow for free, like, comment, and share. Exposure is the most important part of this campaign. We have loads of posts available to everybody, so you won't run into constant pay walls when you're trying to see what's going on. We need to meet our goal of 800 Patrons from the Donations, Donations, Donations tier, or 400 Patrons from the Tree Tiers or higher. That will accelerate development. We can do it together! Uncomfortable with hot links? Here it is typed out: https://www.patreon.com/gamerspointe Thanks for reading. Peace! Your friendly neighborhood analysists and gaming culture reviewers are back. Wow! It's been a long 15 months, hasn't it?! We were pleasantly surprised to see hundreds of readers still returning and giving us thousands of impressions. We love and appreciate every one of you who kept our site alive during our hiatus. First thing's first: We sincerely apologize for our absence. We admittedly haven't been motivated to cover much over the course of the last year and three months. For starters, there hasn't been a whole lot to discuss. We bet on Stadia surviving the whimsy of Google due to its growth, stability, rapidly growing list of titles, and convenience for traveling gamers. Google killed it anyway and it caused quite an uproar for a few months. Those who wanted Google out of gaming got their way, and the millions who actually enjoyed the platform, including us, had to eat crow. As expected of corporations, there were sleights against Nvidia and Microsoft hidden between the lines. The cost for performance with Azure was untenable, and Nvidia's inflated GPU prices didn't help matters. Google apparently wanted to see wider margins during a time when games needed more powerful components, so cloud gaming was handed over to Amazon, Sony, Nvidia, and Microsoft. We briefly addressed this on X [formerly Twitter] in a series of tweets that we've since deleted. You'll understand why we deleted them by the end of this entry. Because Microsoft owns Azure, it doesn't cost them extra to run a cloud gaming platform. It's all in-house. However, Google has to pay their asking price, which is awfully high. Since Microsoft has a cloud gaming service, this is actually a conflict of interest, anticompetitive, and a result of a culture embracing monopolistic practices regardless of the law. It's all about a favorite winning, not about what's actually best for the people and the industry. Listen, folks. We can't let a small group of people buy and control everything just because they have a lot of money. Why? Because that will leave nothing for anyone else, and since the owners get full control of whatever they own, it results in a loss of freedom and options. Take a look at your power bill. It climbs pretty high right? But do you know why? It's because of a lack of competition in your area. These are called local monopolies. Now, 30 - 40 years ago, the companies competed for service area. That means different companies could run power lines in the same territories. Because of that, customers had options and the companies were forced to compete. Nowadays, your provider owns everything in that area and you have no other options. It means they can charge you whatever they want, and you have to pay because you won't have any power otherwise. If you let that happen in gaming, you surrender all mobility in the space. That's true of every industry. These developments are heartbreaking, and we kind of lost our voices. It's not an excuse or even a backhanded apology; it's just an explanation of where our minds have been. What's there to talk about, you know? We can actually answer that question this time...with a segue to our sponsor.
Here's the straight dope: We're creating a multi-entry adult visual novel epic. Yes, an epic. There will be three sagas, each containing four major arcs. So, that character has no missed details.
Every object in the games will be rendered; no snapshots or illustrations. This is key because we will have the freedom to repose the characters, move objects around scenes, and get the angles right. Now, you're probably wondering if they'll be more typical visual novels that are loaded with stills. No. As the series progresses, we will use more animations and voice acting to give life to the titles. We would like to get into motion capture at some point, which isn't exactly cheap. More on that later. Over time, we plan to recruit models to cameo as characters in our games. This will allow you all to be more involved with the development process. How so? You'll get to vote for who we extend offers to! We want everyone to be a part of it. Depending on the responses we get, we may even do some spinoffs of your favorites. This is all just the tip of the iceberg. We have fighting games, FPS titles, and a MMORPG planned as well. Every release will be a step towards something even bigger. Back to visual novels. We want these games too be dynamic and immersive. We also want to offer convenience. So, we won't be exchanging text for voice acting. We'll instead do both. This way, you can listen to the story and focus on the scenes in front of you, or continue reading if you prefer. We even found some ways to give players more control of the environments. Naturally, this endeavor will be a bit pricey. That's why we need you. We've finally launched our Patreon, and we'd love for you to join us there. We have multiple tiers, and we post updates for those who want to follow along for free before diving in. We understand; no one wants to invest in something before they're sure it's going to happen. It's going to happen, and we'll be sharing every milestone. If you're not comfortable with hyperlinks, you can copy and paste this one: https://www.patreon.com/gamerspointe That's all for now. Please be sure to share. The more people our project is exposed to, the faster we can get the games to market. Thanks in advance, and happy holidays! It's been about five weeks since our last post. We know! You missed us! We checked our metrics for the period, and we still see a rather sizable percentage of you checking back. Thank you for not giving up on us! As with any growing business, we need to make changes in order to keep up with the times. We greatly appreciate all who understand and remain patient as we take these measures. Now for the new information.
1. Ubisoft is bringing another Assassin's Creed to market, and it's going to be a return to form! Yes! We should FINALLY be getting back the stealth mechanics that the franchise was built upon. To be honest, it started to fall apart with updates to the engine that gradually made it play more like God of War. This was bad because it had latency issues, it was much less precise, and it prompted button mashing. God of War was special in that it didn't rely on precision and agility, just extremely good combat in a smaller box. AC is more open world with loads of travel, tons of ways to navigate and interact with the areas, and was built on quickly dispatching foes. When they reformatted with AC3, they tried to fix - and broke - something that didn't need fixing in the first place. After trying AC3 and Unity, we swore off the series. They felt terrible. But maybe this is the giant step in the right direction that they need to get it right again. We'll see! 2. We've officially started our Twitch journey! We've been trying it out for nearly a month, and we have unexpected growth rather early in our first player's career. Most current projections are that it would be about three months before the first viewer and follower filtered in. Yeah, we're far and above that. Hit that link and check it out. And the channel is still growing, so don't expect Pew Die Pie level content just yet. Our player is working as quickly as possible to make improvements, but no one's complaining so far. 3. We've started our official Discord! It's a work in progress, but it's currently open for free membership. In truth, we plan for the Discord to always be 100% free, so no worries there. It's really for growth, idea exchanges, community member promotion, quick updates about the stream, and feedback. Who wants to pay for that, you know? That's a reasonable amount of free access that everyone should expect, so that's exactly what you'll get: free access. We're taking a different path towards monetization. Yes, if you stream or have an active YouTube channel, we follow back. Yes, we do party up with our followers and game together. No, we don't use the Discord or stream chat to cheat in Among Us. Yes, we will raid your channel to help you grow when our streams line up right. Yes, if you follow us to get a follow, then unfollow us right after, we'll unfollow you. How else can we grow this coalition without your help? That's it for now, folks! Follow us on Twitch and join us on Discord! Peace! It comes as no surprise that the economy is kind of on the rocks right now. Despite recent declarations that we're not experiencing a recession, including a concerted effort to officially revise the definition of the word, the truth is that we have entered another recession. We're not going to get all political, we're purely stating the truth of the situation; we're not going to entertain the blame game. On to what you'll need to know. This will be brief.
It's not that we weren't feeling it for the last approximately three weeks, it's that we've been hard at work stepping up efforts to make an important transition. No, Gamers Pointe isn't dying. Instead, we decided that this is the most important time in our existence to drive revenue growth. Our team shrank due to the pandemic, and the recession threatens to force more members to leave in pursuit of more income and stability. That being said, effective immediately, we are taking an extended intermittent hiatus here on the site. We'll post updates as we are able, however, our time will be most dedicated to launching our stream on Bigo, expanding to Twitch, launching our YouTube channel, hiring, and fundraising. We're just stretched too thin as of July, so hunting down news is just something that we aren't able to do consistently at this time. But don't worry, we'll report big news that we care about. Bigo will be the best place for us to initially grow our community due to its kinder exposure algorithm. We won't be joining an agency there, so we won't be sourcing any revenue from that site. There will be no pressure to send gifts. Instead, we'll be promoting our Twitch stream. Once we hit our follower goal, we'll drive followers who want to contribute to Twitch. From there, we'll be focusing on raising funds to buy land and plant seeds to reforest that land. This is especially important, as we'll be sourcing lumber, building, and replanting as we build our first location. Hopefully the team will be significantly larger by the time we begin construction, in which case, we'll launch our YouTube channel with a playlist showing the work as it's being done. This is also when we intend to hire. So, fundraising will continue until the location is built and fully staffed. At that point, fundraising will end and it will open for business. Because our posts will be quite infrequent during this period, it's more important than ever to share our content and check back for new information. We hate that we have to make concessions right now, but we have to do all we can to survive the recession. Many people analyzing the GPU market are overlooking some important facts about economics.
By focusing on crypto mining, tech enthusiasts are overlooking something critical: lower demand for the crypto mining hardware isn't a big deal. For those who prefer to buy used, their prices naturally drop as miners flood that sub-market with cards. That much is obvious. However, counting it as the main driver behind new prices falling is unreasonable. The demand from other people is still quite high, so there's no real reason to reduce prices there in response to that demand. That's not what's happening. Crypto is only a buzzword, as brands continue to shift the blame onto crypto miners - even though the majority of them are only individuals looking for a little extra money. So, what's actually happening? Being conveniently ignored is the fact that production and GPU shipments reached a high right as prices started to fall. As markets stabilized when tariffs and trade embargoes in response to COVID fell apart, GPU shipments essentially spiked. Manufacturers ramped up production to catch up and flooded the market themselves. They also introduced new products that widened the range of components that are available. Literally more GPU's of various tiers are available. This caused production cuts to bring down the amount of units hitting the market so that it can stabilize. To prevent as many issues as possible and have a better guarantee of longevity, most buyers would still rather purchase new. This is actually what's happening here. To stabilize the market faster, scalpers were dealt critical blows after price gouging. Buying limits were imposed, so a huge chunk of the reseller market was simply dissolved. That makes it significantly more difficult for shops to justify high prices due to shortages. So, the new products being released are much less negatively impacted by scalpers intentionally shorting supply by purchasing as much as they can, holding them until buyers become desperate, then finally selling their stock for hugely inflated prices. To cut their losses, they drop their prices to near MSRP, which benefits them less than it benefits shops. To shut scalpers out of the market, shops hold sales and further reduce prices below MSRP to make it up in sales volume. MSRP is only the suggested retail price, which includes profit margins. When using this method, a shop willfully narrows its profit margin per unit in exchange for an overall larger long-term profit through a greater number of units sold. You can still see some incredibly stubborn scalpers hawking GPU's for prices that are several times the suggested retail price. Those parts don't sell, so they have to bring them down. These are the people who missed the prime scalping window trying to snag a sucker who didn't do his / her research, and using the sunk cost fallacy. They bought late to sell high, and they refuse to cooperate so they can cut their losses. Only this usually doesn't work because the financial damage has already been done. With more new GPU's available for sale, their stock is less valuable. We held these discussions and personally informed buyers since January 2020 that this is the solution. We were right. The very thing that everyone told our team wouldn't work is exactly what's working. Just saturate the market with variety, increase production and shipments, and crackdown on scalpers. Don't keep falling for the scam. The answer was obvious, they're carrying it out right now, and the responsible parties are denying all accountability for this mess. You're welcome. Thanks for reading. Until next time! |
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