I would encourage you to support GoG before you have to rely on them, otherwise if everyone does like you they may not be able to sustain their business.
It’s a bit akin to waiting for a crash before putting your seatbelt on.
If GOG benefitted Linux users as much as steam does then Yea, I’d be throwing cash at them every payday. I love GOG and what they do, but I also need to show support for what valve is doing for Linux too.
Honestly “it’s this game but with that.” could be a pretty good way to innovate unless you’re totally phoning it in IMO.
Metroid was created when people at Nintendo wanted to combine the skill-based platforming of Super Mario Bros with the exploration of a Zelda game. That ended up being one of the two founding games in the Metroidvania genre.
System Shock was created by people who wanted to make a game with the same “emergent gameplay systems as a puzzle/playground” aspect of dungeon crawling RPGs like Ultima, but in a SciFi rather than fantasy setting. What we ended up with was something that combined fast paced shooter gameplay and a tight narrative presentation on the one hand, with letting the player make their own solutions to levels by manipulating open-ended gameplay systems on the other. This is very similar to the situation with metroid IMO, in how it tried to combine two very differnt styles of gameplay. Today we have an entire genre of games inspired by System Shock called immersive sims (though its more of a design ethos than a genre IMO).
The famous level design and exploration of Dark Souls was inspired by the 3D Zelda games, and while I don’t have a source for this its hard for me to believe that the lock-on mechanics and basic idea for the movement weren’t at least a little inspired by Zelda too. Or, in other words, Dark Souls is basically a 3D Zelda game but with the tone and difficulty of their earlier King’s Field series.
Now, I don’t mean to imply that combing two good things is a guaranteed way to get something good. Or even that, if you do hit upon a good combination, that that’s the only thing you need to put into your work. The games I’ve just talked about are all absolute classics and obviously a lot went into that. For example, the genesis of the iconic multiplayer aspect of Fromsoft’s games came about during the development of Demon’s Souls, when Miyazaki was trying to drive up hill in a bad snow storm. There was a line of cars, and when one began to spin it’s tires then ones behind it would intentionly push on it to help it up. This all happened without the drivers being able to talk to each other, and, seeing this, Miyazaki wondered what became of the last car in the line, but knew he would never get an answer since he would never see these people again. It was this experience that inspired the creation of phantoms.
However, what I am trying to say is that taking something you like and understanding what makes it tick, then making it work in a new context, can end up creating something that then seems wildly innovative in that context.
As an aside, both Zelda and King’s Field were inspired by a dungeon crawling game called “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”. Both Wizardry and Ultima were derived from earlier games that were basically “Dungeons and Dragons, but on a computer”. Some of them were even named “DND” on the early computer systems they ran on.
DnD itself was created when people wanted to do wargames with a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare (such as spying, diplomacy/intrigue, propaganda, etc) that by necessity required roleplay. After one of these kinds of games was set in a half Conan the Barbarian half Gothic horror medieval fantasy setting with a spooky underground labyrinth beneath a town we got the trope of dungeon delving and returning with treasure to a (relatively) safe town just outside the dungeon entrance.
if you think a 30% cut doesn’t reflect on the cost a player is paying, you’re out of your mind. This is business 101.
Isn’t business 101 charging as much as possible and not passing on savings to customers, and trying to capture as much high paying consumers as possible before being forced to start capturing price sensitive consumers with discounts?
Price of games that didn’t release on Steam seem to reflect that. Even games released by platform owners like Sony or Nintendo first party exclusives and the beloved Blizzard. Isn’t that pricing strategy business 101 as opposed to this belief that savings pass onto consumers? Lowering price right away doesn’t seem like good price maximizing strategy when goal would be to increase retail price consumers are willing to pay over time.
As far as I know, they do - for Steam keys. If you’re selling your game through other stores, not just a Steam key, there aren’t any demands placed upon you. The OC might’ve been talking about that.
I’ve bought most of games through other sites because the games would be discounted lower and sooner than Steam. So it’s more personal experience than theory in my case.
Humble bundles on the even more extreme end of like 8 games sometimes being cheaper than a single title has ever been discounted.
Huh, interesting… You know, I’ve never really wondered about Humble Bundle specifically, but you’re right, they seem to be selling your run-of-the-mill Steam keys, or at least you can activate them effortlessly in Steam. Maybe it’s a case of Steam themselves handing out keys (instead of the publishers) to increase user retention? I honestly don’t know, this is all just speculation.
I actually didn’t click on your link at first, because I assumed it would just show other stores where you could purchase the whole game instead of a key, so I’m sorry that you had to clarify that.
Isthereanydeals is a great resource. I always make sure to look up a game there before buying to check what the lowest price it was ever sold was.
That link was for helldivers 2 which is only available on steam on pc. From what I understand the keys are actually provided by the devs/publishers and steam doesn’t get a cut of key sales.
No it doesn’t. The price parity thing is only if you are selling the game on Steam platform, i.e. selling a steam key, it’s essentially a way to allow publishers to sell the game on their own website, without paying the 30% to steam, but don’t allow them to undercut steam entirely while still taking advantage of their platform.
Games on GoG, itch, Epic store, etc, can have any price they want, as long as they don’t give away a steam key valve doesn’t care what price you sell your game elsewhere.
This is one of the most annoying fake news out there, Valve are going above and beyond what any other store is doing, and they get bad rep from people who have never read their policy, published a game there, or talked to anyone who has.
They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.
How it works on Steam:
User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.
For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.
If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.
I know how Valve’s publisher API works, others are similar in case you didn’t know. But that is only true for games that need online validation of some sort, DLCs for offline games don’t need to implement this.
Valve is hosting the game, providing the storefront and bringing in a lot of customers. If you didn’t think those 30% were worth it you would not have put your game on steam.
Plus all of this is irrelevant to the point that Valve doesn’t enforce price parity.
For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense.
Because they're providing a complete solution.
For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn't complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they're doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I'd consider that fair.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it’s much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I’m totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn’t getting so crowded. It’s making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
Honestly, if an indie game is promising, I’ll gladly pay full price. Pacific Drive, The Forest, and Inscryption (small sale) were all games that I picked up because of interesting trailers, premises, and very positive reviews :)
Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.
I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.
But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.
It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.
My dude, I’m very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it’s competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there’s less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That’s why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it’s because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it’s now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn’t have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it’s just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you’ve never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It’s an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There’s plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn’t mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It’s just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn’t easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
I don’t know about the main point that you are making, meaning that it’s the economy’s fault.
I only have a few data points to compare, but anecdotally me and my friends have plenty of budget to buy games, but not enough time to play them as the poster above says. I have such a huge backlog of nice games that I don’t care to buy a game at release time, I can wait for a discount. If it is something exceptionally good that I want to play now, i will do it, but mostly on the ~20 euro range
So I will agree with the poster above. Make something exceptionally good, otherwise it compares with my backlog.
At any given time, there’s about 400 million people playing game on the planet. Of those people, only 14% play NEW games released within 12 months.
It used to be 30% 10 years ago. Now it’s less for a variety of factors, but one of them is less people have the income and budget they used to.
You are in that 14%.
Which is great - but the games you buy as part of that 14% are based on your taste. Not if they are exceptionally good, only if they are exceptionally good to you.
So making games that are “exceptionally good” for an audience isn’t easy because your audience doesn’t even know what they want beyond a genre. I’m sure you could tell me about the games you like and prefer to play, possibly even a genre of games you love.
But if I asked you to tell me what game COULD be exceptionally good in that genre, you might not have an answer. Just other games to compare it to. And if you do have an answer, there’s no telling if it would actually be popular with a bigger audience that genre enjoys.
Making “exceptional games” isn’t a bar to be crossed that makes a game money. Rather a game is “exceptional” once it finds an audience that feels that way about it. Games that have broad appeal have broad audiences like Call of Duty who all feel that game is exceptional too. Many who play it would argue which one in the series was the most “exceptional” and wouldn’t have a great answer for what to make as a better version of that game.
People like what they play, and exceptional games are only exceptional to the audience that plays them. So it’s not so much about making something exceptional, but making something that has an audience that thinks it’s exceptional.
And finding that audience is the hard part. Especially when only 14% of people who plays games are even looking at what you’ve made.
But it’s not impossible. Just difficult these days.
I’ve thought about pirating it too. Seeing as I bought the game years ago, but I lost my email account associated with the 3rd party login, thus not allowing me to play the game.
I never really played it. I started to, but then life happened lol. But I thought I’d go back and play it… nope, can’t remember my password and can’t recover my email.
If you had a DRM-free version on a CD and you lost that CD, would you just pirate that game? Not trying to judge or anything (I’ve sailed the seas myself), just genuinely curious
Probably. The dev has already made the sale. The usual argument from pirates that will never be settled “I was never going to buy it anyway so they lost no money”. But this way they’ve already made the sale. No harm no foul. With the receipts to back it up.
Yes since i’ve already purchased it once. Unless there is a good steam discount. And maybe of it’s truly a masterpiece then I would buy it again at full price.
Yeah, inflation is a thing. But so is increasing volumes in sales with low cost distribution of the product.
After a game is made now, the only cost is distribution now, and games sell in larger volumes than ever before, making more money than ever before. A game like BL4? Even if they spent $300,000,000 making the game they only need to sell 6,000,000 copies to recoup costs at $70. BL3 has sold 18,000,000 copies. A huge profit, even if most of those sales were on sale prices. BL3 was made and advertised with a 140 million dollar budget.
Not to mention, all of the dlc that’ll inevitably be released, following every other borderlands game pattern. Wonder what they’ll try to set the prices of those at
That’s why I boycott video games from Ubisoft. I loved and am nostalgic of their previous outstanding games from when it was great - think of Beyond Good and Evil, the original 3 Prince of Persia games and the assassin’s creed games until odyssey(I’m hesitant to include Valhalla, but I’m at witt’s end here as Einar Selvik sang and composed the ost of the game for goodness’ sake). I even paid a (🤮) connect+ subscription that they threatened at some point that some accounts may be lost as per a number of days of innactivity.
But enough is enough, Ubisoft be better prepared to not own a company and be manned by Tencent. As much as I hate even the latter, Ubisoft is a scummy company and needs to be properly grouped in the scummy companies even by allegiance.
I hope the European Citizen’s innitiative for video games passes, in the end. The source code/maintenance of discontinued/stopped projects ought to be maintained by the players and its community.
I didn’t play the new Prince of Persia because they wanted you to be logged in to play. It looked good, but there are just too many options for me to put up with shit like Ubisoft.
Ubi used to have some neat stuff but post far cry 3 it is just the most generic, worst gameplay slop possible. And avarage person just loves repetetive slop.
“Nobody reads those EULAs, and the Defendant knows that. Therefore, the Defendant cannot hide behind the EULA as a shield because the Prosecution, having clicked Agree without being required to confirm that they read through the terms, could not have possibly known what they were agreeing to.”
“If you are what you agree to, your Honor, then my clients are an unknown spaghetti of legal mumbo jumbo.”
I would relish a lawsuit against EULAs where the defendant somehow sends the prosecutor a EULA in a software package that declares that they automatically lose the lawsuit by clicking Agree.
It would really hammer in the point that fucking NOBODY reads this shit.
I think someone calculated the time it would take to read every single one you’re expected to agree with in normal every day life, and it worked out to needing 76 work days to read everything you “agree” to in a typical year.
There was a video game store that once, for April Fools Day, included in its sale terms:
By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorized minions.
Only 12% of people that purchased that day responded, essentially confirming only 12% of people actually read the terms.
I think one could successfully argue in a court of law that people tend to be hyper aware on April 1st, and so may have read the terms suspecting something amiss when they otherwise would not have.
The judge would tell you you’re an idiot who said nothing worthwhile and that ignorance of the things you agree to doesn’t make them void when they’re used against you.
We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.
Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.
What’s left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.
Edit: Note also that publishers and their lobby groups are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can’t think of any reason why they should have continued control after they’ve stopped publishing them.
“But throughout that time, I actually had no inkling what game development was actually like. How hard the designers, programmers, artists, producers, and everyone else worked,” he says. “The struggle to bring a vision to life with constantly shifting resources. The stress.”
Then tell us about it. Make it heard where you get Stressed and where you rub up on the state of the art. List off what had to be finished in crunch time. What got pushed by Marketing or Management. Leaving everything up to a nebulous “you don’t know” makes any criticism easily dismissed and reduces leverage against systemic issues.
So I bought the game a while ago, but haven’t really been playing it (I need to get into the right headspace). However, I’ve come to realise something.
This is the first game I’ve bought for over £40 in a while where I haven’t felt scammed or that I’m complicit in something immoral. I feel like they “deserve” the money, which is a strange feeling considering the AAA industry right now.
The game doesn’t even include DRM, not even the “free” one you can enable through steam.
same here. I typically buy games on super deep sales a few years after the games comes out just so I don’t end up disappointed by the product, but this game feels properly polished. a few bugs here and there but none so far that I’ve encountered that are game-breaking
Yar har fiddle dee, 80 bucks a game just ain’t for me, yar har fiddle and fat, I’ll just fucking sail the high seas numbnuts publishers, good job trading the 60 bucks I was willing to pay for the 0 you’ll be getting from me now.
And remember kids, if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.
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