There’s a very good couple of paragraphs in this article showing where the likely culprits are in the pricing of these consoles. There’s about as much competition now as there has been for the past four decades, but Moore’s Law has broken down.
Can’t speak for competition in consoles, but parts costs have radically increased, particularly GPUs (and it’s getting much more difficult to have generational leaps in graphics quality).
The implication for that is new console generations are unnecessary. At most, they only need to refresh aspects of the design to control costs.
And this is a direct result of Moore’s Law breaking down. As originally formulated, it isn’t just about density of integrated components, but the cost of integrated components. That factor is gone by at least an order of magnitude. Nodes are still shrinking the size (roughly in line with a 24 month doubling rate), but they’re not making it cheaper.
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.
Because it's not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it's a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn't taking Valve to court in the first place. It's not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they'll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.
While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.
So if it's worse for the consumer for valve to allow class action lawsuits, then should the consumer see all the other companies who force arbitration as the better outcome?
Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn't just say "come sue us" if they weren't wholly confident that they weren't about to be losing any cases any time soon.
This isn't some huge "win" for the people; gamers aren't gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam's userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.
Other companies didn’t pay the arbitration fee so valves system was a bit better than the rest. Realistically, the consumer always gets fucked.
The point is more that Steam is getting praised for this, while it’s just to make class action lawsuits, like the one they were just served with for their anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, much costlier for the other party.
Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.
Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.
Hell, Epic does not have any social features, didn’t have cart, refund process through support only, very basic search, I am not sure about cloud saves and if they don’t break completely when you play offline (is there even offline mode?).
Steam, on the other hand, is constantly adding and improving features - like the new beta family sharing which is finally what an easy way to share with my GF and sister.
The only things that Epic has are free games, exclusivity, and lower fees - and that’s about it. All three, as you can see, are not really hard to implement for the developer team, but easy to throw large sums of money at for a quick boost so they can boast numbers.
Fuck Epic, seriously. Money can solve lots of stuff, but not by throwing it at the wall. Meaningless.
Oh, completely forgot about my Steam Deck, it is just that seamless.
I also hate the other side of the coin that is against both Steam and EGS. Citing Steam doesn’t “deserve your loyalty”. Why not? I can’t really pinpoint any particular fuckup in the 15 years I’ve been using it. Sure, some delays in games, updates, and other minor shit - but imagine if like game ratings broke, I am sure they’d get fixed in an hour.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, in just a few years time, pre-AI-era content of all kinds, not just games, ends up becoming cherished by people, to the point that entire fandoms and subcultures develop around preserving and promoting it.
This is no different than anything else, we naturally appreciate the skill it takes to create something entirely by hand, even if mass production is available.
The games will still be designed by humans. Generative AI will only be used as a tool in the workflow for creating certain assets faster, or for creating certain kinds of interactivity on the fly. It’s not good enough to wholesale create large sets of matching assets, and despite what folks may think, it won’t be for a long time, if ever. Not to mention, people just don’t want that. People want art to have intentional meaning, not computer generated slop.
Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It's a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it's a pillar of their genre.
There’s been a ton of back and forth finger pointing but the more I hear about it (and other news about Krafton), the more my gut tells me that Krafton are the bad guys.
I mean it’s pretty obvious they are. The original reason Krafton gave for firing the founders was that Subnautica 2 was being pushed out before it was ready just so the founders could get their bonuses.
Krafton has since dropped those arguments in the legal fillings and changed their reason for firing them to some nebulous shit like:
“abandoned their posts” and “deceived” their employer.
I mean come on. This isn’t even a both sides issue anymore.
The original reason Krafton gave for firing the founders was that Subnautica 2 was being pushed out before it was ready just so the founders could get their bonuses.
No, it’s pretty one-sided. The game was ready for a soft launch by the expected date. They even have communications exchanges between Krafton’s CEO and their global ops head how to avoid paying out the bonus before firing them.
“Krafton terminated the Founders and seized control of Unknown Worlds in order to avoid the earnout,” reads the group’s latest filing. “Smoking gun documents show that Krafton was looking for ways to ‘cancel the earn-out’ and that its secret ‘Project X’ was designed to either make a ‘Deal’ on the earnout or execute a “Take over.” When the Founders would not agree to Krafton’s demands related to the earnout, Krafton decided a ‘take over’ would be the ‘easier’ route.”
Latest development makes it seem like Krafton just wanted to save the cash to plow into their lame AI venture.
I mean honestly, when has a video game company actually been on the right side when things came to a head with the founders?
“The termination notices of the founders gave one reason for their termination,” said Fortis, “and that was the supposed lack of readiness of Subanutica 2 for release. Krafton reiterated that basis for its actions repeatedly.”
Fortis called it a “seismic shift in the case” and “a little bit bewildering”. This was also echoed by the judge, Lori W. Will, when the parties met for a ruling on the filed motions, saying: “Well, that’s something that we definitely need to get to the bottom of today, because that is precisely what was cited as the reason in the answer.”
Krafton’s representatives were not clear about why this argument has been taken off the table, only that it has been, and that it’s no longer why they are saying the founders were terminated.
Instead, Krafton is focusing on the argument that the founders “abandoned their posts” and “deceived” their employer. Causing more confusion is the accusation that the founders downloaded files and kept devices with confidential information on them. This only came to light after the termination, so its relevance has been questioned.
Nothing about PUBG and Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton’s recent decision to become an “AI-first company” look good. The company plans to drop over 130 billion won ($88 million) into the project, recently stopped hiring new employees, and started a voluntary resignation program for its employees in South Korea this week.
Far down the ladder from these decisions is Eleventh Hour Games, the developer behind Last Epoch, which Krafton acquired in July. The timing couldn’t have been worse as it happened right after the founders of Subnautica developer Unknown Worlds were unceremoniously fired for what they claim was a move to avoid paying a $250 million earnout.
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
That’s how it was for me in 2017. The path of totality went right over my house. I took the day off and strolled out to my back yard to watch it. We also smoked some meat and invited people over for a party, which was the most effort in the whole situation.
arstechnica.com
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