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.
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.
I don’t think we need an article to figure out the answer: Slay the Spire was a megahit and it’s a copycat industry.
I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way either; there’re always plenty of devs finding interesting new angles on the current hot genre and creating genuinely interesting new games in the process, but also a huge number of devs that end up just chasing the trend and releasing something uninspired/derivative.
I really think it deserves its own genre. Games like Cobalt Core, Balatro, Tower Tactics Liberation, Alina of the Arena and Loop Hero are all unique in their own right and differ greatly in gameplay from Slay the Spire and each other but still hold to the deck building rogue-like core.
Slay the spire is the granddaddy of the genre, but isn’t the single defining example by far.
I think the “rogue” in rogue-like refers to the fact that you start over if you die. Not the similarity to the actual game. Am I misunderstanding you?
I think I get what you’re saying, that rogue-like was named after the game and therefore this genre should be named after slay the spire. But I think Rogue named the genre because there wasn’t anything else like it. Slay the Spire is still at the end of the day a mashup of two existing genres.
Rogue was the start of the genre - games that came after we’re always measured against it.
Rogue was a dungeon crawler - a type of game that had been done plenty of times before. Starting over on death had also been done.
But it became genre defining by being the best at both.
Spire I’d say is similar. It is genre defining because the combination of gameplay elements was so perfectly executed that it will become the measuring stick against which all roguelike deck builders will be measured. So Spirelike fits, I think.
The genre can be called “rogue like deck builder” all you want, we all know what it really is: “Spirelike”
Well, you did. And you also directly acknowledged that the genre already has a name in the same sentence.
It seems to be your opinion that it needs another one, even though the name it has is already so well established that it has its own steam tag.
I mean, you’re entitled to have that opinion, and I also understand the logic behind it. But this conversation wasn’t started with “us” saying it needs another name.
I meant that to say, it’s a genre that deserves to be distinguished from just one of the many games that define it.
As a rephrase of that comment, defining the 5 games I listed after one game that basically just came before them would be dishonest because of how different those games all are from Slay the Spire and each other. That’s why the genre is named after what they all have in common, which is a mashup of two existing genres.
What you’re proposing would be like renaming the first person shooter genre to “halo-like” or “call of duty-like” just because those games predate a lot of others and people like them. It’s unnecessary and loses the descriptive quality of the name it has.
It’s false equivalence to claim steam has a monopoly when you’re literally giving epic a monopoly on your games for financial kickbacks between yourselves that in the best case doesn’t impact the user and worst case actively compells them to a much worse platform. What epic and gearbox did is monopolistic, what steam did is just make a good enough product that no one gives a sh*t about EGS. If you want an actual competitive store front, make something your users want, not your business partners. Gog is struggling but it’s still my first goto for games because even if it’s missing all of steams functionality, it gives me ownership of games that can’t just be revoked or broken by publishers. That’s a value add I’m willing to pay for. Paying more so publishers can make more money and sell a worse experience through EGS ain’t moving me.
It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.
Steam did exactly that for years under the “Steam Greenlight” prism where users voted for games to be released on steam with the condition that they would be exclusive. They only stopped it when they decided to go the Amazon route and sell any old shit with zero curation instead.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
But Steam charges nearly triple what Epic does and can depend on gamers to defend them for some reason.
The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.
It makes the cost of developing games more expensive. They have to charge nearly 20% more for games on Steam to make the same money they do on EGS.
It’s also why Valve hardly makes games anymore. They sell 4 games made with other people’s money and they’ll have the same gross income as selling a game they paid to develop. Throw in the cost of development, and they just can’t justify game development as a major part of their business.
The last time they made a full-sized game was Half-life 2, which launched the same day as Steam.
It’s litterally a tunnel shooter with endless repetition to pad it out and pretend it’s a full game, when in reality it’s a tech demo to bundle with VR hardware and try and make Steam the default home of VR games.
This argument about cost of development would hold more weight if the game store savings were passed onto the users rather than just eaten up by the publishers. Borderlands 3 base game has the exact same price on steam vs EGS atm, £49.99. Clearly those 20% savings are just extra money the publisher wants to pocket rather than actual necessary costs to the game. If their happy to pass it off to steam when sold on the steam platform rather than raise the price to recoup the platform tax.
Yes, but with EGS more money goes to the company making the games. AAA games have never been more expensive to produce, and developers are shutting doors left and right. After the costs of marketing and overhead, more of the proceeds of the game are going to the fucking download service than the people making the game when it’s on Steam.
Blame the publishers then. They set the price and they dictate the bonuses of the devs based on sales. Choosing to believe more money from the game store is actually making its way to devs instead of shareholders is naive at best.
And Tim Sweeny made the offer to stop offering Epic exclusivity and even sell their games on Steam if Valve offered to provide their service to developers at the same rate as Epic.
Tim Sweeny didn’t make an offer, he tried to make positive PR to EGS while trying to paint Valve as the bad guys; Valve obviously wouldn’t charge the same rate as Epic because they include a lot more value for both user and developers than Epic does: to list a few of Valve services that Epic doesn’t have:
Steam Workshop (hosting terabytes of content for absolutely free);
Family sharing;
Steam Link for game streaming;
Remote Play Together tech for all the major OSes;
Linux and Wine/Proton investments (which you could argue was an investment because of the Steam Deck, but that’s an investment that benefits everyone, regardless of whether they own a Steam Deck or not);
Cloud save hosting;
Universal controller remapping interface compatible with all the major gamepads;
That’s not to mention the benefits developers can get from Steam’s platform and SDK:
Steam Input (for not needing to deal with custom implementations);
Steam Voice API (for in-game voice chats);
Steam Inventory and Trading Cards, which can result in extra cash for the developers;
Multiple networking options: Steam Game Servers, Steam Matchmaking & Lobbies, Steam Peer-to-peer Networking, etc.
If you ask me, I think Epic is the one charging way too much
The entire greenlight catalog was exclusive. That’s over 100 third-party games, and they only reason it stopped is because they stopped curating products to become the Amazon of online gaming.
An absurd change followed by rolling it back to an “acceptable” version that is still worse than their original position prior to the initial announcement.
This is a psychological manipulation.
And more to the point it ignores the issue of their violation of trust and consistency.
This is still precedent, they still showed their hand.
They want to have “passive income” at your expense.
If your instance is any indication of location: there’s an eclipse visible in most Oceania and SE Asian islands in 2028. For a good chunk of Australia and NZ, it’ll be a total eclipse. For further info, check it here.
For me (South America) there’s one already in October, but it’ll suck from my region (14% coverage). And another in 2027 (~75% coverage).
The big difference is how close the sun is to solar maximum this year! The sun is at a point of peak electromagnetic activity, something that happens every 10 to 13 years, which is reflected in more chance of witnessing bursts of energy (flares and ejections) during the eclipse.
Me too, the clouds overhead parted just before totality and the corona was so dazzling and magnificent. I really hope there aren’t clouds in the way during this one.
Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they’re litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.
This is my current dilemma with the new Star Wars outlaws game. Epic has exclusivity on release (or can buy direct on ubisoft), but I have 29 other Star Wars games all on Steam. Do I really want one odd game on a different platform, or do I just accept that I won’t be playing it at release and wait the months for it to come to Steam?
Is the new CFB game going to be released on PS4? I still have mine, but I’ve switched to PC gaming the last couple of years. But NCAA 25 isn’t going to be released on PC right away, and I heard GTA6 was going to be the same. Those games are probably what get me to finally upgrade to the PS5
I have a steam deck, and have used a friend’s analogue pocket. They aren’t even the same category of device, and the analogue is literally the best emulation experience I’ve ever used. The screen, by itself, is a better emulation experience for GBC games than the steam decks default experience.
Yep, ask anyone who owns both. Nobody is playing a Gameboy game on a Steam Deck when they have an Analogue Pocket. Experience is much better, it just feels right on it.
That being said, if that’s not an important thing to you then a Steam Deck will play Gameboy games with near perfect accuracy and no issues, as well as do a million other things. So it’s indisputably a better value.
I would never pitch an Analogue Pocket at someone because if its the kind of thing you want, you already know about it and probably have one.
and the analogue is literally the best emulation experience I’ve ever used
The Analogue Pocket doesn’t use emulation. That is literally the entire point of that device, and the reason they can charge 10 times as much as you would pay for an Anbernic device with the same form factor
“The potential here is absurd,” wrote app developer Nick Dobos in reaction to the news. “Why write complex rules for software by hand when the AI can just think every pixel for you?”
“Can it run Doom?”
“Sure, do you have a spare datacenter or two full of GPUs, and perhaps a nuclear powerplant for a PSU?”
What the fuck are these people smoking. Apparently it can manage 20 fps on one “TPU” but to get there it was trained on shitload of footage of Doom. So just play Doom?!
The researchers speculate that with the technique, new video games might be created “via textual descriptions or examples images” rather than programming, and people may be able to convert a set of still images into a new playable level or character for an existing game based solely on examples rather than relying on coding skill.
It keeps coming back to this, the assumption that these models, if you just feed them enough stuff will somehow become able to “create” something completely new, as if they don’t fall apart the second you ask for something that wasn’t somewhere in the training data. Not to mention that this type of “gaming engine” will never be as efficient as an actual one.
I mean, you’ve never seen a purple elephant with a tennis racket. None of that exists in the data set since elephants are neither purple nor tennis players. Exposure to all the individual elements allows for generation of concepts outside the existing data, even though they don’t exit in reality or in the data set.
Try to get an image generator to create an image of a tennis racket, with all racket-like objects or relevant sport data removed from the training data.
Explain the concept to it with words alone, accurately enough to get something that looks exactly like the real thing. Maybe you can give it pictures, but one won’t really be enough, you’ll basically have to give it that chunk of training data you removed.
That’s the problem you’ll run into the second you want to realize a new game genre.
There are more forms of guidance than just raw words. Just off the top of my head, there’s inpainting, outpainting, controlnets, prompt editing, and embeddings. The researchers who pulled this off definitely didn’t do it with text prompts.
But at what point does that guidance just become the dataset you removed from the training data?
The whole point is that it didn’t know the concepts beforehand, and no it doesn’t become the dataset. Observations made of the training data are added to the model’s weights after training, the dataset is never relevant again as the model’s weights are locked in.
To get it to run Doom, they used Doom.
To realize a new genre, you’ll “just” have to make that game the old fashion way, first.
Or you could train a more general model. These things happen in steps, research is a process.
I know the input doesn’t alter the model, that’s not what I mean.
And “general” models are only “general” in the sense that they are massively bloated and still crap at dealing with shit that they weren’t trained on.
And no, “comprehending” new concepts by palette swapping something and smashing two existing things together isn’t the kind of creativity I’m saying these systems are incapable of.
Bloated, as in large and heavy. More expensive, more power hungry, less efficient.
I already brought it up. They can’t deal with something completely new.
When you discuss what you want with a human artist or programmer or whatever, there is a back and forth process where both parties explain and ask until comprehension is achieved, and this improves the result. The creativity on display is the kind that can unfold and realize a complex idea based on simple explanations even when it is completely novel.
It doesn’t matter if the programmer has played games with regenerating health before, one can comprehend and implement the concept based on just a couple sentences.
Now how would you do the same with a “general” model that didn’t have any games that work like that in the training data?
My point is that “general” models aren’t a thing. Not really. We can make models that are really, really big, but they remain very bad at filling in gaps in reality that weren’t in the training data. They don’t start magically putting two and two together and comprehending all the rest.
You keep moving the goal posts and putting words in my mouth. I never said you can do new things out of nothing. Nothing I mentioned is approaching, equaling, or exceeding the effort of training a model.
You haven’t answered a single one of my questions, and you are not arguing in good faith. We’re done here. I can’t say it’s been a pleasure.
My argument was and is that neural models don’t produce anything truly new. That they can’t handle things outside what is outlined by the data they were trained on.
Are you not claiming otherwise?
You say it’s possible to guide models into doing new things, and I can see how that’s the case, especially if the model is a very big one, meaning it is more likely that it has relevant structures to apply to the task.
But I’m also pretty damn sure they have insurmountable limits. You can’t “guide” and LLM into doing image generation, except by having it interact with an image generation model.
To be fair, half of the AAA gaming industry is all about trying to clone the latest successful game with a new coat of paint. Maybe using AI to make these clones will mean that the talented people behind the scenes are free to explore other ideas instead.
Of course in reality, it just means that the largest publishers will lay off a whole lot of people and keep churning out these uninspired games in the name of corporate profits, but it’s nice to dream sometimes.
its not exactly for the positive reason you think. theyre trying to prevent the class action lawsuit going around the (UK?) right now and realized when a certain amount of people take the arbitration, it gets fairly costly, so they reverted on that clause.
regardless fuck arbitration, its like paying off judges but even more transparent about it.
its basically doing the right thing for the wrong reason (reverting arbitration cause not for thr consumer, but for their wallets)
Valve's contributions have singlehandedly revolutionized the Linux gaming scene. They're the only reason I can play most of the games I own. I don't worship them, exactly, but I do think very highly of them.
This for sure. Making games easily accessible on linux have lead to a lot of people not having to deal with windows anymore.
It is the same effect as a kidnapping victim beeing grateful when someone comes to release them fom the torture rack. It is not strange that valve gets a lot of goodwill from their actions.
Would i sish more people did as steam does? Ofcourse! But none do, so we are grateful for steam. I think they saved pc gaming. And not only for linux.
Before proton we used wine. And wine will continue development with or without steam.
If anything the open source community did more and gave steam a firm platform to build on.
Edit: And to add an observation steams push for Linux is a reaction to Microsoft becoming a contender in the PC games market place. Its not for our benefit anymore than for valves.
I’m pretty wary of corporate propaganda, but from the article this sounds like a pretty clear case of some greedy people taking advantage of Valve offering to cover all arbitration costs. Yes, they’re doing this to cover their ass, but it’s not a malicious move and I don’t see how it could be interpreted as anti-consumer.
I mostly like Valve, and agree that going too far with Stan-ing over a company is dumb. However I think the majority of people that tend to greatly support Valve comes down to both pushing tech and games forward into better consumer directions, and that they are currently not joining in on the mass enshittification as other companies (but of course all big companies can and will do some level of that given enough time).
With regards to pushing tech, they have done more (in at least the last 10 years) to force Linux to be seen as worth supporting. Their efforts to actually add to projects that were already around has been game changing. And that they kept actually putting time, money, and resources into it even after their initial efforts with Steam Machines and the original SteamOS didn’t gain traction on a mainstream level. The Steam Deck keeps outshining the other options even while being technically less powerful specs and they are putting work in to make sure things like drivers are released to help people that choose to install Windows.
But all the positive stuff will only keep happening so long as people don’t start feeling locked out or cheated. I forget a lot of the time how bad many users hated them back when the original versions of Steam were released. Many of the issues people had and were concerned about were valid and could have tanked Valve if they didn’t do everything they could to address them. If they start pulling shit like EA or really any of the console companies have done. Then it will be their time to see massive losses and get all the hate that is deserved.
I would if it had any lasting power. I mean, can’t they just push out another eula update 6 months from now when this change is no longer useful to them?
Fuck arbitration, of course, I’m just not expecting this to really mean anything.
Don’t worry, 90% of our users won’t have to pay anything at all! Just ignore that like 50% are people who downloaded Unity to mess around for a bit and never made anything other than a “hello world” or similar.
Yea, if you look at your purchases you probably spend less than 20/month on average for games. Plus many of the “big” games aren’t on game pass, so you are paying even more.
I’ve done the math; for what I currently pay if I play two full price games on gamepass a year I come out ahead. Now that’s only because codes are cheap on cdkeys and eneba but once that changes I’ll jump ship
That also assumes you benefit from playing them day one.
There are plenty of games that I would play day one if it’s available. But if not, then I would happily wait and buy it when it’s cheaper. Also, the ownership adds to the value if I’m not keeping it all the time.
So if I would have waited until the game is $40, I’m saving $40 max. But also, I’ll still have it 2 years from now when it’s worth $25, assuming I want to play it again. So it maybe saved me $15, depending how you look at it.
Agreed. I guess it’s that value proposition: if you have the time to play, and you play their whole catalog and have a blast, that’s $16.99 well spent.
As for me I love owning my games (where possible due to licensing and DRM), so the value isn’t there. But my spouse and I certainly took advantage of the heavy discounts they offered like the $1 month. I planned it so that I could try as many games as I could during that period and ended up buying them on GOG or Steam if I really loved them.
If their whole catalog is refreshed and they have another heavily discounted offer for 1 month, I’ll pick up a month just to try those games. But I definitely would never be a long term customer, I’d be a parasite loss-leader lol.
The problem with these things is that it usually works out being a net positive for the company. Like when Netflix stopped allowing households to share passwords. I cancelled, and hoped that drives of other people would cancel too. But Netflix did their research just like any other company would, and they ended up getting more subscribers and more money because of it. The era of good deals is over. The era of squeezing customers for everything they’re worth is here. There is no more competition, and thus no reason for them to offer good deals.
Yeah I pirated a lot when I was younger, then things became more easily available and cheaper so I started buying all my games and movies again. And now they’re going in a backwards direction and making things sorta expensive again and there are a dozen different subscription services so now I’m back to pirating again.
Same here man. We were up to about $70 per month for streaming services, which was right back to cable TV type of shit. When Netflix pulled the password stunt that pushed us over the edge and we’ve been real-debrid ever since.
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