BlueStacks Inside Turns Mobile Games Into 'Native PC' Games on Steam (venturebeat.com) 64
PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers take existing mobile games to Steam and Discord. The initial launch will include several high-profile developers like KOG, Funplus, Fabled Game Studio, and many others whose games will be available directly on Steam. Mobile developers have started allocating large budgets to game development, and that means mobile games can be competitive on Steam without a ton of modification.
With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.
With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.
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As an old school gamer (assuming you weren't pirating everything) you are probably experiencing wasting $20, $30 ... $60 on a box title, for you to realize how much that game sucked after you bought it.
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As another old school gamer, as long as you actually paid attention to reviews and didn't pre-order, there was no problem. Although the whole pre-order thing is relatively new to me compared to my gaming lifecycle - there were no pre-orders in the late 70s when I started gaming, for example. And factoring in inflation plus a Canadian dollar exchange, finding out if a game sucked before buying was very important.
The thing that sucks these days is buying those $80 "box" titles now and not getting a whole ga
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> Pretty much everything came out as shareware back in the day.
Yeah.... no. Shareware didn't really start until the early 90s. And it was hardly "everything".
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Well, I never had an Atari 800, 400, 600 XL or any of those. And all the Commodore kids were busy pirating the crap out of everything that moved, so even if I ever saw shareware at someone's house it wouldn't have been recognized as such. All the cool kids were running TRS80s like me, which definitely didn't see much if any shareware.
The core tenet of shareware was a method of sharing, which for binaries didn't come along until BBSs, and the second wave of those which allowed for file transfers. I'll def
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> Todays games are graphically superior, however they have not evolved much from the days of Doom. Not worth paying for, though I am a member of the, "been there, done that" club.
I'd dispute that a bit. A lot of games are in the same mold and haven't moved on design wise, but there are some good gems out there. I mentioned Rocket League earlier, there's a lot of nuance to that game and you're always playing against other humans. It's fun. I also like the rebooted Xcom series, although some of the pu
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First game I ever played was a text only (on an apple IIc clone called a Franklin with an incredible 256k of memory! WOW!) back in 88 called The Pawn, so I think I qualify as an 'old school gamer' at 60.
Generally with a few exceptions they won't be as pretty as AAA titles, and with a few exceptions will be priced lower than a AAA but the game-play can be excellent and sometimes quite innovative..
Don't Starve, Oxygen Not Included, Kerbal Space Program, FTL, Into The Breach, Cit
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First game I played was Pong, and I was quite the champ with Defender and Stargate back in arcade days.
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Oh I do look at smaller devs. I must have 300+ hours into FTL, and am working through unlocks for Into The Breach now. I bought Stardew Valley (one guy, can't get much smaller dev than that...) for my daughter and ended up enjoying that a ton as well. Banished was fun but once you get past the survival bit, it seems to get a bit too easy to enjoy, unless it's been tweaked since I last played it a couple years back. Kerbal Space Program is a blast too. And while I wouldn't call it "indie", Mechwarrior O
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Shareware was a full program with no price tag. What you're thinking about would be demos, essentially a level or two of a given game so you could try it out before buying the full thing.
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Whipper Snapper.
Shareware until the mid-late 1990's was a load of crapwhere.
If it wasn't published by Apogee (or Epic Mega Games) it was going to be a crappy game.
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How are most Mobile Apps today are not like shareware?
You get a free version that you see if you like the game, then you pay for add ones and new levels. The only problem with Mobile Apps is you just keep on paying.
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Magazene Reviews. AKA Paid shills. Who will rate the game based on how much the gaming company paid them.
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Having seem both sides of the industry, there are some legit reasons why they have paid unlockables, etc.
Server costs. Sure, you paid full-price for a boxed game 4 years ago. That doesn't pay ongoing server costs. Micro-transactions aren't necessarily greed, they're the bare minimum to keep game servers alive. Only a small fraction of games are really profitable off that, most in fact close because the servers costs too much to run. Microtransactions are mostly not enough revenue.
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to sum up: back in the "old days" almost all games were only single-player. So you only paid for a boxed game, end of story.
Now, games are often single-player but with online options. Your online options could include private servers (don't have to pay, but have to be friends with someone who can afford the costs).
However, people now expect "play online any time you want on public servers" as a "free extra" covered by the original $60-80 box price. But that's frankly a ridiculous expectation. The box price
Re:I'm an old school gamer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the old school games were awesome in their day! Now, well, let's just say the limitations, especially in graphics and sounds, become very apparent. Maybe I've become a bit jaded, but I can't stand the 8-bit chiptune type music, the teletype slow text, and the jaggies of those horrible graphics! Upgrade it enough by one means or another, and plenty of those games are still killer! Some have become too cliche and boring, but still, there's plenty of good stuff left.
Does that mean Modern games are trash? Not at all, there's always been trash, and always will be. On the other hand, games that give you only a small part of the game and expect you to pay premium prices for the rest of it, as well as for most of the basics the damn thing should have had in the first place is a total scam!
Still, there are some good games that don't do that, but among the so called triple A field, they are few and far between.
Mobile games. When the phones finally had the specs to do decent games despite the limitations of the platform I was thrilled. Too bad the entire platform didn't go down the darker path, but rather ran down it full speed shooting out the lights as it went...
Nearly all mobile games are basic repetitive trash filled with very little actual gameplay and serve merely as a platform for microtransactions, loot trash, and pay to keep playing scams.
Bringing mobile games to other platforms is anything but an improvement to gaming as it just makes the signal to noise ratio that much worse off.
Bluestacks creating an android (or ios) wrapper for mobile games is no mean feat, and is just another way to try and sucker people into the mobile trash pit.
After all, if you want to play mobile stuff on your PC, just get ahold of Bluestacks, or Handy Andy, or Nox app player, among many others. All of which are Android emulators that let you seamlessly and easily play android games on your PC. By the way, the ones I mentioned are free, but of course there are others you can pay for if you feel that would be better.
For various reasons, all of these categories have advantages and disadvantages, but of late the disadvantages have been growing. Any steps to make things worse for us gamers is not appreciated and should be resisted. Bluestacks Inside isn't going to bring the few remaining good mobile games to Steam, rather it will induce a flood of the money grabbing mobile trash to flood the already flooded Steam store with more trash than ever before. Which in itself is a momentous accomplishment, but not an admirable one in any way.
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Then came Space War and Space Invaders.
It was an amazing time.
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yay (Score:1)
If there is one thing PC gamers have been clamoring for, it is more ported games. With this we get a whole new batch of microtransaction filled clickers to wear our our mice. I'm excited, are you?
Input devices, not graphics? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe it's just me but the variety of controls available on a PC are far more important than an improvement in graphics over my cellphone. Cellphones today have impressive graphics if not all that impressive battery life. On the other hand, not having portable console style controllers for them that don't require bluetooth, or clunky mating adapters is a real killer for most of the PC market. There are however some very innovating Chinese companies producing x86 portables combining both keyboard and multip
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Controls available on a PC:
* Xbox 360 controller
* Xbox One controller
* Clones of the above two controllers
What? Bollocks. For any games where it actually matters, there's support for appropriate controllers. I have a wheel and a flight stick, and occasion to use both. With that said, those Microsoft controllers are surprisingly adequate, as twin sticks go. And you can get the 360 controllers very cheap if you're willing to replace some joysticks (since pretty much all used ones have busted sticks) and use either an RF module with a diode, or a Chinese knockoff of the official adapter. (I've done the former, but
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Then of course there are the over priced stick controllers out there for the flight type games.
Heck, even used the original Xbox controller after rewiring a breakaway cable to a usb cable. (Easy job, only 10 minutes, ugly but worked fine.)
Turns out those were also usb controllers, they just had a non-standard usb connector. You could also buy prettier modified connectors on
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Also mouse and keyboard. Not sure how the hell you managed to forget those.
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Graphics havn't been a big concern in PC games for the past 10 years for the most part.
1980's goal 256 color so you can have non-cartoon images.
1990's goal get the resolutions small enough so you can't see the pixels easily
2000's goal get 3d images to not look like a world of triangles.
2010's a refinement and better textures...
However for the most part today because we are still not close on crossing the uncanny valley, there hasn't been too much work in photo-realistic but more into stylized designs, which
Competitive on Steam? (Score:3)
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In what sense? Here is thing about PC gamers - we're elitists. Porting bad microtransaction laden games to the PC is just going to result in them being shit on.
LOL are we living in the same universe? That used to be the case 20 years ago, hasn't been since the late 90's and early 2000's when the PC gaming masses proved they were stupid when game companies making RPG's rebranded them mmo's, they got PC gamers to pay for the same RPG without game ownership, with overwhelming drm and a subscription, that lead to the rise of STEAM in 2004. The fact that mmo's, always online drm and steam even exist tell us all we need to know about the vast majority of gamers - the
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No. No no no. (Score:2)
Not even 'no thanks'.
The mobile marketplaces are almost completely garbage.
Premium currencies, energy-per-day systems, wait-timers with paywalls, hyper-grind, paywall horrorshows.
I've been at game developer conferences where half the presentations were on these garbage topics - and how to manipulate your customer base.
I know that the Steam marketplace is perceived as a wasteland - but pouring this kind of gameplay mentality into it is just insipid.
I know, "it's not all mobile games" - yeah, but it is the de
Bluestacks is not a "PC Gaming platform" (Score:2)
Seriously, topic. Bluestacks is not a PC gaming platform. It's an average quality android emulator for x64 machines.
And everyone can already play android games on wide variety of available emulators, including bluestacks emulator just fine. Except of course when bluestacks does what it's famous for and bugs out or suddenly drops in performance to utterly unacceptable levels.
I'm guessing this project is basically "licence our emulator for your game and pretend it's native, because fewer and fewer people are
Yay, more shovelware (Score:2)
That's just what we didn't need.
Relax, people (Score:2)
If everything fails, there will be a tag to identify this bullshit, simply add it to your list of ignored tags and you're done.
i wish i could play mobile games on my pc (Score:2)
said nobody ever...