There were already some rumors about bad working conditions during the Dark Souls titles, now more with Elden Ring: https://www.ign.com/articles/elden-ring-developers-compare-working-at-fromsoftware-to-playing-dark-souls

Even with some negative accounts, other FromSoftware employees said working at the studio has been a great experience. One employee even likened it to FromSoftware’s own Dark Souls, saying, “There’s a lot of struggle to get things right, but if you get over the hump it is very satisfying. It’s just like you defeated a boss in Dark Souls.”

I’m not sure if we should be approaching work like Dark Souls.

The second half is worse indeed, but still worth playing.

This works in Mount & Blade, I suppose, at least for the first x hundred hours. The difference is that Mount & Blade makes grinding actually fun and you don’t notice to be grinding for a good while.

What I find interesting is that every generation of gamers has a different original hype disappointment moment. For some, it was E.T. next, maybe Daikatana. For me it was Spore.

Great to have a new RTS, but I’m with what I assume to be a majority of the playerbase and worried they will prioritize online play / PVP instead of story and campaign.

Europa Universalis is possibly the only thing where I am okay with a subscription model. When the itch takes me, I subscribe for a month for 5 buckazoids or whatever the sum is, then immediately cancel. Typically by next month I’m no longer interested. That’s a lot better than paying, what, 200 euros for all non-cosmetic DLC.

This is a big one. Another one is that developing software for Macs is a huge headache compared to Windows, Linux, and BSD. The tooling simply feels much more awkward to use than most things available on other platforms, and the application packaging is so easy to mess up (not that every developer doesn’t forget the occasional DLL…)

Can now play the game on Linux

Yes!

Or a zip package signed by the developer.

Now if only there was a way to safely pirate stuff without the possibility of the binaries having keyloggers or cryptominers embedded in them. I seem to recall some studio hosting an official torrent on their website precisely for this reason.