because of the anti-competitive price restrictions that Valve often imposes on game developers and producers (the Price Parity Obligations). This means a publisher or developer would not be able to list a game on another platform as well as Steam, unless the prices offered on Steam is the same or lower. This applies to games on all other distribution stores (including online and physical stores) not just those distributed by Steam Keys
Textbook anti-trust lawsuit. Different from what Epic does, I doubt they impose such rules on developers.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
thats what apple forces and imposes on any developer that uses the app store, which is most of them since on ios alt stores are only a thing on eu and japan afaik
Depends if you’re a big developer or some indie one. Big developers commonly don’t pay fees or have special deals (Uber, etc.). Smaller ones pay 15% up to 1 million downloads, then it’s 30%. So if you want to pay less, get really rich first.
That being said, this is on top of the VAT, not part of it. Still charging 30% in 2026 feels criminal and greedy. This applies to nearly all big corporations, including Valve Corporation with Gabe’s fleet of yachts and company making more money per employee than any other company. It made more sense to take 30% cut when 100Gb of HDD costed thousand dollars, internet was metered in megabytes and the whole infrastructure was just not there yet, but this “industry standart” tax never changed even tho for them distributing apps has become far, far cheaper than it used to.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them
We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.
devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.
are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.
again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.
to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.
Cyberpunk 2077 - it still doesn’t go on steep enough sales to justify buying when I have hundreds of unplayed games on Steam. But I’m keeping an eye on its downward progress. Maybe when it reaches £10-13…
I wish I could go back and never experience it before PL. It’s what it should have been at release, took me ages to get around to trying it after the broken and underwhelming early versions because the main story was long and linear. I’m glad I did though, it’s an entirely different experience
I think the base game is really a testament to the fact that CDPR have a lot of success with open world games, but don’t really do them very well… They make really solid campaigns, and then pad them out with utter nonsense that kills the pacing stone-cold dead.
“Oh hey, here’s something really urgent. We cannot stress enough how urgent it is. By the way we’ve also just unlocked about a hundred side quests. Enjoy!”
I’m still salty that I missed one of the ending achievements because if you follow the instructions it gives you, it will cause a fail state on that particular ending.
buggy mess? not at all. 100+ hours, i don’t even remember a single bug. I’m sure i must have encountered some but clearly the nothing memorable. could be buggy but buggy mess is a ridiculous overstatement.
giving you the benefit of the doubt it could be related to hardware difference or something.
I encounter some kind of bizarre NPC behavior or graphics glitch about every ten minutes.
For example NPCs panicking for obvious or not so obvious reasons, trying to flee but nearly or actually hurting people by driving or running away, which incites the ire of NCPD, which results in them gunning down those civilians, which causes more to panic and flee, and suddenly the cops are just dumping lead at everyone with a pulse but no badge. I’m sure you’ve noticed the random screaming and cops shooting but I guess you never bothered to figure out why.
Another common one is people missing textures, their limbs (especially heads) wiggling chaotically or missing entirely, and then of course the classic A-pose. The latter is much more rare than on release in my experience, but I often catch someone just barely coming out of it as I turn to look at them and the game freshly renders their animation.
None of the above is game breaking, but it’s plenty noticeable if you’re paying attention, and it’s not the kind of thing you expect to see from a full priced AA or AAA game years after its release. Snaps my immersion in half every time.
If you go into a game expecting a buggy mess, you’re going to notice bugs more often.
Whether or not the objective amount of bugs present meets your criteria for “buggy mess” or not is of course highly subjective, even if you noticed 100% of the ones you encountered.
I’m also waiting for it to hit a low-enough price to justify the amount of time I will lose just trying to mod the thing into a playable, enjoyable state.
I bought it this winter for 25. Solid beginning. Haven’t finished it. But it’s there. I hop on when I want to veg out and the story is pretty damn good.
That’s my strategy as well. Whenever Witcher 3 is on sale i think to myself “Can’t wait for Cyberpunk to get that low”. Same thing for Elden Ring +DLC, except there i would be willing to pay about 30-40 bucks.
I have this very cheap “200 games in 1” devices that has a game called “Pikachu” and it’s just endless Tetris with a little dancing/cheering Pikachu frame.
I’d love to play games like Fortnight, PUBG, and League of Legends (I know, don’t judge me), but they don’t work on Linux, so they’re just a no-go for me. I used to play GTA V Online, but they added kernel anticheat to that too, and now I don’t play that anymore.
I have Windows, but I’m not booting into another partition just to play a game. I use it for compiling my software for Windows users, and that’s already too much of a pain in the ass. I cannot stand Windows. It’s a bloated mess, and I don’t understand how anyone gets any actual work done on it. Just navigating it feels like a chore.
I can’t even play Apex anymore because EA decided Linux players cheat, and therefore, must be categorically banned from playing. All they did was turn off that switch for Proton/WINE support.
didn’t know they added kernel anticheat to gta online, thought they just disallowed linux players. i had 5k hours on it, didn’t really play anything else for almost 10 years. dropped it entirely that day because it’s not worth using a worse OS, and turns out single player is more fun anyway with mods. will also pirate gta 6 and play it without windblows, suck my shrimp rockstar.
I played it on steam deck about a year ago, and TBH it struggled. Though it’s probably been optimised better since, I think development is ongoing. Still the best driving game I’ve played.
BeamNG is hungry for memory, and afaik became only hungrier with some update last year or so. And it’s generally not very fast, and been so for ages. I doubt it will ever be optimized, they’re probably just betting on hardware outpacing it.
The game has a bit weird architecture where every onscreen widget is a Lua script, and they all communicate with the game via the network. Scenario scripts are done the same way, from what I understand. Although Assetto Corsa has Python and Lua widgets running without any hiccups, so I guess BeamNG’s engine is just heavy.
However, it was running vaguely tolerably on my laptop from the last decade, so anything newish should handle it fine.
Ah, fair enough. I played it for a bit and then moved on, partly because the steam deck was struggling with it. TBF I’m impressed the steam deck could play it at all.
Have a search for “universal pokémon randomiser” (there are apparently loads of different forks of it now), it’s main feature is to randomise which pokémon you encounter, their types, moves, etc, but you could skip that and just set “change trade evolutions” and “catch em all mode” to get exactly what you want. I would recommend playing it randomised though!
I swear every time I start looking into a romhack that claims to just be a mostly vanilla QoL update they always add in a bunch of random stuff to “fix” the difficulty.
Like, yes I am aware the games are incredibly easy. They’re for children. I originally played most of them as children. Just let me get high and stomp all through FRLG with a perfect-IV Feraligatr and the Gen 4 physical-special split. If I wanted to do Nuzzlockes I would… Do Nuzzlockes. If I wanted a game with difficult gym leaders and level caps, I would go play one of the thousands of romhacks that have that.
Deadlock. As a parent and full time worker I don’t have time to commit to a new live service multiplayer. It would be amazing to be a teenager or student again and just grind that game as nolife.
Wow is kinda similar. Housing update seems like fun thing that they finally added but no way I have time to play wow.
Deadlock is no joke, the best game i have ever played. But i never played a maba before, so that part was completely new. Someone said that Deadlock might be the hardest game to learn, and they might be right. Deadlock is the only game that has ever made me nervous when i start playing. I’m glad i got into the game early, but even if you don’t want to learn, i think it’s worth downloading and walk around in the cursed apple or play some bot matches. The design and the feel of the game is one of a kind and it plays so smooth.
I played it when it was in closed beta. And as a fan of Overwatch and previous LoL player, Deadlock was super fun to play. But combination of high mechanical requirement and knowledge requirement it is hard to enjoy the game as casual peopler. Thank god now there is light version of Deadlock as Overwatch Stadium.
I went back to OW stadium because of deadlock, but i was sick of it pretty soon. It’s just not it for me. I think you can enjoy deadlock without being a good mechanical player, depending on the hero. The rough part is other people. Because of the moba part of it, people tend to get super angry. I never get angry because of video games, but even i can feel it. I’m not angry at other players, but it is frustrating to be in a team that is really bad, while the other team is really good. It happens a lot lately, and i never cared while i was learning, because it didn’t really matter. Now that i’m better at the game, or pretty good even, you just have players in your or the other team that just started playing and you usually just don’t win those. People get mad and it’s a whole thing.
yeah being casual in comp games can still be fun! I never got past silver 2 in CSGO and I had a great time. I was dogshit by all metrics but I way more fun than when I was Diamond in LoL(that was miserable).
People were more friendly, there were dudes ripping bongs and rapping mid round. I could play with any of my friends, I could play tired, drunk no worries, no ruining the game etc.
The problem with low level Deadlock is that you end up in games with people who have never played before. The game got way better when I reached high ranks. Now i’m at a cataclysmic losing streak and i’m back to low ranks. It can be brutal.
I keep trying Civ VI and keep uninstalling it before finishing a single game.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what’s changed since earlier games, but it’s lost a lot of the addicting charm and intuitive flow that made me play prior versions for days. Also, the goofy-ass style and overly dramatic narrative starts to irk me.
If that’s the trend of the franchise I sure won’t be touching any of the later ones.
If that’s the trend of the franchise I sure won’t be touching any of the later ones.
Good news! It’s prolly not. In an interview I’ve read quite some time ago, creators said that they hit a silly problem of not having path of improving the game because everything works and…well, not much to add.
So instead they experiment slightly with each version, making small changes every time to create another “flavor” of Civ.
Yah I did, it was kinda wacky, not as bad as Civ VI but not great, I’m not opposed to the concept but I think they could have done a lot better with the idea than just “toxic gas” as the most memorable, key mechanic.
Tetrips, or maybe it was Tetripz, I can’t remember, it’s been years. It’s Tetris except with crazy video effects that supposedly simulate being on various drugs. It’s a lot harder to play when the whole screen is flashing and bouncing and twisting.
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