I don’t get why anyone pays attention to these wannabe Hollywood producers like him or Todd Howard. The most interesting and innovative things in gaming are NOT happening in the AAA space.
Honestly AAA studios don’t even exist anymore. Is there any gaming studio making multipe $60 games per year you can name where you would vouch for the quality of their games solely on the basis of who made it?
Maybe some first party console games(and even then only some series), but nothing for PC.
I’d be very worried if a studio was pumping out several full-scale games a year. Did you mean publisher? I find following publishers to be pretty hit or miss, they usually deal with a multitude of game studios whose output will vary wildly. The days of EA making a bunch of EA games is over, now people care whether it’s Dice, Respawn or BioWare, and what the specific game is like.
Studios still just making games do exist. Kojima Productions, Santa Monica, Guerilla, Remedy, Fromsoft, Square Enix, Larian, Id Tech, Insomniac, Sucker Punch, CDPR…
They’re just relatively fewer and farther between as so many studios have pivoted to spending years and years working on one live service title or another, and the rest of these you only really hear from once in several years, when a game comes out.
For publishers, Devolver and Paradox come to mind.
I’d like to think Firaxis and Sid Meier still hold water for Civilization at least, but I do get your point. Most of the games I go back to now and enjoy are nowhere near the ballpark of “AAA”.
The hotdog vendor keeps going on about how he’s the good guy because he pays more to the sausage suppliers. As if that’s at all relevant to his customers.
To be fair, with regular groceries, it’s not uncommon for consumers to be concerned about whether or not the person who manufactured or processed the good or food you are buying was paid a fair wage. So in that sense, it is kind of relevant to the hotdog vendors customers.
I’m only playing devils advocate though. Fuck epic lol
yesssssssss, but the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can't because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand, and the second responds by attempting to throw piss water-balloons at any passers by, or something
the second hot-dog vendor wants to offer customers lower prices, and the first says they can’t because otherwise those hot dogs will be banned from their stand
It’s more accurate to say that the plain hotdog vendor wants to sell the other vendor’s hotdogs at a lower price at his own stand, thereby undercutting the sales of the first vendor for their own hotdogs.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
Nope, you are wrong, this is a common mistake that Epic keeps spreading as missinformation. Valve does NOT enforce price parity on other platforms, there are games that are sold cheaper on other stores, this is up to the publisher to decide, but most publishers find it easier to have the same price across the board. If this was true games that are exclusive on Epic would be cheaper until they come to Steam years later, but they aren’t.
The mistake happens because there is one specific case in which Valve enforces price parity, but for this you need to know three things:
Valve gives away for free infinite steam keys to publishers
Those keys can be sold by the publisher elsewhere
If they do that the publisher keeps 100% of the revenue of that sale
That sale of that free steam key for which Valve is not charging anything is regulated and can’t be sold cheaper than Steam on regular basis, it can be in a sale for cheaper, but the regular price must match Steam and if it goes on sale outside of Steam eventually it needs to do a similar sale on Steam (but not necessarily at the same time).
So one thing that’s amazing that Valve does for people who publish their games with them is getting them hate because of Epic, please stop spreading missinformation.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
In that link you have one person making a claim without any backing or evidence. Even if that did happen there are multiple possible explanations:
The email was not clear about the other stores not selling keys
The person who answered the email did not understand that they weren’t talking about steam keys
The person answering the email doesn’t know what they’re talking about
Etc
And in that same link you have multiple persons in the comments describing the exact opposite experience providing the same amount of evidence, so if the text on that link is evidence that Valve does that, then the comments there are even more evidence that they don’t.
If only there was a way of knowing… Well, they did say they opened a lawsuit, and those are public record so the email would be there since it’s crucial to the case, without it they would have no case, right? Feel free to read the entire complaint here and you’ll notice the email is suspiciously missing, their claims are that Valve wouldn’t give them more keys to resell, which is directly opposite to what the blog claims.
I can do you one better, Overgrowth is a sequel to Lugaru, which is paid on Steam but free if you install via your package manager on Linux, therefore completely disproving the fact that Steam enforces price parity even for games from this company
You provide a link to someone saying “Valve said they would do X” without evidence, I point out that in that same link you have multiple people saying “Valve told me they would not do X” with the same amount of evidence.
I additionally show you the lawsuit the blog talks about where at no point the supposed email is shown
Additionally I show you another game from the same company that has lower price outside of Steam
Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.
Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?
Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).
However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.
I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?
I’m also not American (well, technically I’m, but you meant from the USA not from the American continent) but yeah, I think it’s still ongoing, although I remember hearing a while back that Valve settled some case, not sure if this one (notice that settling doesn’t mean admitting guilt or that they were going to lose, but sometimes it’s just cheaper to settle than to keep defending yourself (the problem is that on the long run this sends a message that you’re a good target).
Also I believe they would have won the claim that they don’t enforce price parity just by pointing at the other game from Wolfire (Lugaru) which is paid on Steam and free outside of it, and Valve never did anything about it.
That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.
Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.
Oh yeah, I don’t have time to play my main Elite:Dangerous profile anymore but I’ll totally have time to use my free Epic license to plaster my name across the galaxy on deep space exploration.
Not sure if joking… But someone did take advantage of the 3rdgparty heat map and spent a couple dozen hours of game time drawing this dick in the galaxy
I gave Epic’s store a chance but even after all this time it’s still shit and very far from feature parity with Steam. There’s not even proper reviews. No big-picture equivalent. No good out-of-the-box Linux support. No Steam-Deck. The list is very very long. Until Epic starts delivering, the 30% cut Valve takes is more than justified.
I gave it a chance when they took over Rocket League. The damn platform doesn’t even support profile avatars while Steam did. So to get a basic nice feature working all you had to do was… not use their platform.
Oh really? I haven’t played since they disabled trading items.
I mean, the cyber truck probably looks better than some of the other cars, and you’ll probably get better FPS due to the lowered polygon count! But yeah… no bueno.
Heroic launcher works pretty well to get epic and gog games in the deck. But yes, support could be better, especially since i remember unreal tournament being Linux friendly early on.
Yeah i get and play the free games from there, but they don’t seem to want to do more than the bare minimum for the storefront so I won’t purchase anything through them.
It’s beyond me how they can affors all of these free games and exclusive but not a single capable developer to make this platform beyond just the bare minimum.
FWIW, my understanding is that the owner of Epic is actively anti-Linux, so your third feature is a unlikely at best. The fourth was only remotely likely due to market share.
It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected.
It’s not. EGS doesn’t solve any problems that Steam leaves on the table to be solved. Customers have no reason to shop at EGS when Epic takes its thumb off the scale.
Not only that but it’s a worse user experience all around.
I fucking hate the EGS and Xbox stores for browsing new games. Most of the time you’ll get an animated video that’s not game footage and two screenshots that don’t tell you shit.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
Not to mention that the formatting is so bad that the client requires you to basically be in fullscreen but you’ve still gotta scroll a mile down to get any info.
For Xbox, that’s because the PC app is literally copy/pasted from the Xbox console app. Hell, it probably is the same universal app since that was a big Microsoft push to have more apps available on the consoles and Windows Phone.
Lol I thought it was just my advanced age of 33 that made it difficult to understand a game from the Xbox previews. A majority of screenshots look like garbage once you’re not in character and the store highlights that.
The funny thing is, I feel like it’s not so hard to navigate Steam for particular problems that consumers would like a solution to, but Valve has been ignoring or considers beyond them. For some people, those individual problems form the root of their buying decision. You’d have to beat them at something before you beat them at everything.
If anything, the only thing that other stores have that Steam doesn’t would be games not on Steam. Even then, half of the time, they’re either itch(dot)io exclusive indie titles or shitty triple AAA titles.
When I buy on GOG, I know I’m getting a game DRM-free. They muddied that a tad with how they handle online multiplayer, but for the most part, I get more value from their store for that. It’s a huge reason why I’d choose their store, because they’re solving a problem for me that Steam does not.
While I normally check both locations and buy from GOG if it’s available there, you would be surprised how many Steam titles are completely DRM free.
I needed some DRM free games for the classroom last year and was pleasantly surprised that a lot of the smaller, indie games I own Steam, the ones I was most interested in bringing into the classroom to begin with, run perfectly well on a machine without Steam even installed just by copying the folder to a flash drive. Some required deleting a Steam.dll or adding a text document that states the SteamID of the game, but most of the games I wanted I was able to run from a flash drive, DRM free, no Internet, Steam or game install required.
Steam offers DRM to devs that want it, but it is not a DRM platform in of itself.
I’m aware, but when GOG takes the ambiguity out of it, I don’t have to do tons of extra research to know that they have an extra feature that’s important to me. I’d really appreciate if some store took the ambiguity out of it when it comes to multiplayer games being playable offline. It’s something that Steam should easily tell you in theory, but there are tons of games that have LAN and such without bothering to report it. Some say they require an online connection and actually don’t. These are problems worth solving for me, a particular kind of consumer.
I’m with you, but they’ve got a very generous 30 day refund policy, no matter how many hours played, if it doesn’t work. So far, I’ve only had to use it once, on Phantom Fury, which is Verified on Steam but had issues in the tutorial through GOG; some day I’ll pick up the Steam version and see if it does any better. I also buy my GOG games through Heroic launcher, which has a referral link so that some of the revenue of my sale goes toward the development of Heroic. That way GOG knows that if they want all of the revenue from my sale, it’s clear what they have to do to earn it.
And as a reminder, there are Linux native games on GOG. I just played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami on the native Linux version from GOG.
I would like to see them all turned on at once so I can see the circuit breaker explode.
A bit more serious though, why have them all hooked up to one TV at once? There’s no way all that works right automatically. There’s gonna be some manual invervention to get the console showing on the TV.
I just watched the video and he does have like this really complex video splitter I guess and he show this like giant spreadsheet he has so when he wants to play PlayStation one he looks on the spreadsheet and knows which switch settings to use and then his power he did show some of them and it looks like someone will automatically turn on though
If you do a quick web search, you can find 5 years old reddit posts that link to the exact same github of d07RiV that is first mentioned in the article. So I suppose DevilitionX will be around for the same amount of time.
Looks awesome! and the fact that the dev is starting from a place of having the pathfinding algorithm figured out is promising. Better to start there, rather than end up like Cities: Skylines with abysmal frame rates that even top-end hardware can’t keep up with.
I’m not sure how I feel about the artstyle yet. It certainly looks gorgeous in screenshots, but I wonder if it will be difficult to read when you are actually playing. Camera rotation will be the key for me, personally. If I can’t rotate the camera to get alternate views, that might be a dealbreaker.
It will probably allow you to rotate the camera every 90 degrees like cited Rollercoaster Tycoon. At least that’s what I would expect from a game with this kind of graphics.
arstechnica.com
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