Those games are played by a demographic that only plays that game, or close enough. They’d consider themselves a Dota player before they consider themselves a video game player in general. These games aren’t played exclusively by that type of person, but a large part of their audience is the type of player who just plays that game. I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
That kinda explains the dissciation gamers and game makers (studio,publisher etc ) have with each other today. And the publishers continuus trying at live service games. I imagine similar thing is happening with consoles. I personaly knew it was a thing with FIFA but i never knew it was so widespread ( fifa and sports game are kinda special or at least i thought they were ). Maybe those pepole bought one game a year additionaly sometimes if it was aired often enough as ad on tv.
That actually explains so much shit we see today , like online subcsriptions on PlayStation and xbox. If the majority ( or large enough minority ) will play one game only making them pay for online is a goddam goldmine. F* i would probably do it if was ceo of PlayStation and actually knew the stats ( and Obviusly if they were favorable ).
20 years ago, we paid for online because it was better than what you got for free on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. Now an online subscription is probably one of several reasons that people are moving to PC.
I’m having trouble digging it up, but the person who created Steamspy a number of years ago, before privacy laws made public profiles opt-in and interfered with its ability to collect data, found that the majority of Steam accounts only had a single game in their libraries.
A lot of those are going to be alts people made to evade game/server bans or smurf.
I may or may not have made 10 accounts that only had Garry’s Mod on them circa 2010.
That may be true, but you can also see, for instance, that there are a ton of Chinese users who only play Dota 2 or only play PUBG. You’ll see the percentage of Simplified Chinese users ebb and flow with a similar cadence to just those two games.
Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!
No guessing is required to solve any puzzle either, despite some variants seeming completely impossible.
Fun fact: There’s an achievement for stumbling across a level with a conpletely empty starting board, without any spaces being revealed to be mines or non-mines. Yes, that can be solved without guessing.
Fun Fact 2: I’d argue there are more than 14 variants.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
I know the “hold a button to lock-on to an enemy” was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it ‘because game.’
While we’re on the topic of EU initiatives, the tax the rich initiative still needs signatures. It aims to set a floor on tax rates for the very wealthy, and have member states use that new money for environment, employment and social policies.
They’ve hit the threshold for France and Germany, but still need more signatures everywhere else.
I had a harder time getting good at and staying interested in ITB. I still really enjoy a playthrough every now and then.
With FTL I guess it just feels more replayable and “on edge” to me. There is just something special about ftl runs, be it overpowered, under powered. There are so many ships, weapons, systems, and crew combinations that no run really feels the same.
The same could be said about ITB and their different mech teams but I guess it just doesn’t have the same feel. ITB feels like I’m selling my services to big corporations with saving people as an after note. FTL feels like a suicide mission for the fate of the galaxy and I think that feeling is what really makes me come back to FTL.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing, I don’t really disagree with any of your points. Maybe I just liked the style of ITB more…I do love isometric tactics games
Personally one of the aspects I enjoy a lot in FTL is managing my power levels mid-fight (Do I need my oxygen powered right now? I could probably turn it off until the fight is over…) I don’t know if any other game that has you shuffling around power like that.
Ultimately, the world is not a grid. So while grids may be great for pure strategy games like XCom (and I really enjoyed XCom, not knocking it at all), I think a lot of people would say that for more story-focused games like RPGs, they break the immersion. Thus, BG3 (which I’m also really enjoying) does not use one. Neither do any of the party-based RPGs that I can think of off the top of my head. For me personally, it depends on the game. I am perfectly happy without one in BG3. But I enjoyed having one for XCom, and more recently for Warhammer 40k Mechanicus. I would offer that as a suggestion if you are looking for a gridded turn-based strategy game.
I’m really confused as to why everybody’s saying BG3 doesn’t have a grid. It’s not visible, but it’s there. BG3 is obviously built around a grid of hexagonal prisms as its basic building block and it shows in everything, including combat and level design. They’ve done a great job with graphics and animations to make them smooth and make it seem like the grid is not there, but it is.
Of course the ground itself needs some kind of abstraction, there is no actual computing in the real numbers. Thats not the kind of grid OP is talking about though, they mean a grid where a character uses up a single tile.
As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.
There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.
It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.
Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.
Generally, yes. But Epic is not competitive in any way.
Their idea of being competitive is not to deliver an amazing product, it is to buy exclusivity for games so they can’t be sold on other platforms, which benefits no one except themselves.
Gog, then? Itch? I'm not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.
Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.
GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.
Unless it’s infrastructure or something with a natural monopoly.
The main competition with steam is buying physical copies of things. If we want to support retailers selling physical copies of games and bricks and mortar shops, that’s a good thing.
Alas, I think the games industry is chosing to abandon them. And Steam has the ability to add games purchased outside of Steam to it for convenience. Unlike Epic it puts the user close to the top of priorities.
The fact N64 games are behind a subscription is what really irks me. I wouldn’t mind paying €5 for Harvest Moon 64 - the way you could buy retro games on the wii - but having to pay yearly, for a bunch of games (many of which I might not even be interested in) that you can’t play anymore once you stop paying? Fuck that
I dislike game subscription services on principle, but at least the other guys have new games on their subscription services, not just ancient ones. Nintendo being the first to charge $80 makes it an extra kick in the balls.
Devil’s advocate here, I subscribe to movie services that are much more expensive to watch movies I’ve already seen. If playing these old games is important to me, that doesn’t seem too bad. $80 for Mario kart on the other hand… never.
I have my issues with Nintendo recycling Mario Kart ad nauseam, but Mario Kart was $66 when it launched in 1996, which is like $130 today. The prices haven’t really kept up with inflation. It’s cheaper to buy Mario Kart today than it was back then.
Pioneer is a great remake of the original Elite Space Sim.
It simulates the entire galaxy (core systems are hand-built, everything else procedurally generated), allows landing on planets, trading, combat, etc.
It features the original game’s Newtonian physics, so actually arriving safely at your destination is a challenge in itself, similar to flying in Kerbal Space Program. But the HUD gives you all the info you need for that.
There may be more people watching Deadlock than there are watching and playing Concord today based on available data and reasonable extrapolation. Valve continues to market in a unique way that works.
Concord is dead on arrival. Kind of a shame, the game looked a bit interesting but being $40 and having very generic art this was bound to happen. Deadlock is in a whole other league.
It’s basically impossible to increase the price tag on a game like that, and if you go free, the design pivots to a lot of abusive monetization systems. People run into that at the 10th hour of any free game.
It might be failing for a lot of reasons - I don’t think that one is necessarily their mistake though.
Honestly, paying for a (primarily) multiplayer game isn’t a problem for me. I actually might prefer it when you look at Overwatch vs Overwatch 2. But I wasn’t about to sign up for a playstation account to play my Steam game.
I think that’s what makes it such a good point of comparison though. It’s titled differently and we were promised it would be different, but all that really happened was they changed their monetization tactics. And maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I remember liking Overwatch when it came out, but now I have almost zero interest in playing Overwatch 2, even though I’ve gone back to it a few times just to give it a try.
Yep. Gog is probably where we should all be getting our games tbf. Being mad that a game is available on one drm store instead of another drm store is kind of silly. In either case we’re only buying the license and not actually owning anything.
When I saw the post’s title I was hoping for a good, perhaps even balanced, critique of the remake’s choices, or the underlying engine’s shortcomings, or perhaps even the original designs.
BG3 is great and all but there are other games with at least equal voice acting quality. For all its qualities I never felt like “wow, I’ve never seen voice acting like this in a game!” when I played BG3. It’s really good and really consistent but nothing earth shattering.
I know I bring up Disco Elysium a lot, but that is one game where I got repeatedly shocked at the quality and diversity of the voice acting. With the exception of one single character I think it’s acted to absolute perfection.
I also didn’t really feel the same about Alan Wake 2 like, at all. I thought it had superb acting (both voice and full video segments) and probably hold the quality of its acting above BG3 personally. Alan Wake 1 less so.
mass effect and the first few dragon age games had great acting, Kingdom come has great acting, most of the Sony exclusives have great acting, it’s out there. It’s just rare.
I second Disco Elysium’s voice acting and also all of Supergiant Games catalogue, especially Bastion, Transistor, and Hades. Portal 2 is the most hilarious video game of all time, and a major part of that is its voice acting.
The Stanley Parable, Borderlands 1/2, Prey, System Shock 1/2, the Bioshock series, SOMA, the new Doom games, Path of Exile, all elevated by their voice acting.
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