This lawsuit build on a false premise. Steam doesnt have a price parity clause for other stores. What this lawsuit alleges applies to Steam keys that the developer generates through Steam. If the developer lists those keys for sale at a price lower than what the game is listed for on Steam, then the price of the Steam Store purchase price must match it, so that people visiting the store page on Steam get the same discount. It doesn’t matter if you list your game on GOG and discount it there.
Steam is a service that costs money to keep running - lot’s of money actually in their scale. When you sell a Steam key outside of Steam, they don’t get their cut which goes toward running costs and whatnot. It doesn’t of course matter if it’s just some random few keys but if almost all devs started to do that, it could cause some serious funding problems to Valve. That could then lead to reduced service levels of Steam and that would hurt their customers - the players - the most.
So while it’s not a big problem currently, it could be if it wasn’t prevented properly in contractual level. People who think that is an unfair clause don’t probably understand what it actually takes to run a service like Steam or they are straight competitors trying to run them out of business in any way imaginable.
E: And actually if Steam still allows selling the Steam keys in external services but only requires the price to match the price in Steam, it’s already a quite charitable policy. I guess they count on not too many people buying the key externally for the same price than in Steam store.
Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.
Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.
Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.
1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.
2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.
What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.
Let me try and understand this by altering the product.
Valve now produces cars and the devs are people who make these cars inside factories. Same as is currently the case, these employees get cars cheaper and are asked to not undercut the seller by holding onto the cars for a certain amount of time before selling them used.
It does make sense for me to view it that way. One could argue that the couple cars that get sold by employees doesnt do anything to hurt the brand and that pressuring them to keep the price high manipulates the market.
Also, doesnt the work of steam accumulate to hosting mirrors of a game and hosting a large website they get billions in revenue for?
This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.
I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.
Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.
Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.
You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.
Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.
First of all, people sometimes use analogies that dont make sense to you. No need to be a dick about it. You could just make a better example.
Staying with cars, I see my mistake. Valve is not producing the cars in this example, valve is doing the car sales for the (small) manufacturer. They dont provide any part of the car, only the exposure and surrounding community. Its not nothing but has zero to do with the product.
What they are asking is „you can sell cars from our showroom, just dont sell them for cheaper than we do“. Which does make sense.
Seems like that’d be hard to track with so many stores selling steam keys just looking at isthereanydeals.
Weird thing is it is the publishers themselves that are able to set the price so they are choosing not to put the game on sale same as it is elsewhere. Probably to not devalue the price of their game like the Nintendo strategy when it comes to certain storefronts.
I think EA makes games like this to reinforce THEIR notion that single player games are dead so they can use that as leverage to make more “games as a service”. If they made things people actually wanted to play, they’d find that single player (yes even shooter) games are still just as popular as they ever were and poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly marketed games still suck.
The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.
The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.
So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.
That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.
Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).
It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can’t find a job it doesn’t matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are… they sure as hell aren’t coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn’t hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world… not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.
When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.
Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.
The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.
Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn’t profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start)… The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!
Wait… the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?
sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notably sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?
How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?
I don’t know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn’t like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.
And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.
You slipped in an edit while I was responding, and I think the gist of it is that you and I fundamentally don't agree, especially not the hyperbolic flourish you used. I think you'll continue to see plenty of great games come out in the next decades, because people still want to buy games and other people still want to make them.
If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.
There will continue to be games to play because people will continue to make them. A bad experience in one place leads to a new studio designed not to repeat it.
That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.
Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.
I doubt it, this kind of logic is the same as “medical costs are insane because modern medical tech is expensive.”
It completely ignores the entire economy all functioning under advanced technology to create and produce advanced goods more cheaply with the technology that costs money. It’s also mismanagement in the same way the movie and TV industry has seen, they don’t want to hire writers cause they don’t want to pay them, so instead they just spend hundreds of millions on reshoots because having a writer being paid 60k on staff 24/7 was too costly apparently and some suit got a promotion for “saving” that money.
Someone made a better version of “the day before” with a few grand in purchased assets and a couple months using UE5. If you were creating your own resources instead of buying them and you had an actual vision then you absolutely can make a game for less than hundreds of millions that will return that money back to you. How much did pal world take in? How much is helldivers 2 currently making? What were their production costs?
Just because some inept studio run by corporate bean counters can only churn out tech demos for millions of bucks doesn’t mean that’s the actual standard for cost and production of gaming.
It’s only expensive to make if studios decide to make them incredibly expensive. There are plenty of high quality indie games made by a single person.
The problem here is they went all in on “THE BEST GRAPHICS EVAR!!!” And it flopped because of the lack of story and gameplay. The lesson here is to not make it incredibly expensive to develop by focusing all efforts on graphics, and instead focus on gameplay and story and people will tolerate much less flashy visuals.
Games are getting too expensive to make because they’re adding extra shit that no one cares about, not because of the cost it takes to make a decent game. Too many admin managers in charge at companies and not enough artists or engineers at the management level.
Single player (with optional co op multiplayer) but massively successful.
Not to beat a dead horse. Its just the first example that came to mind.
A huge amount of very successful indie games are single-player and even other AAA games.
They talk about the genre being dead but they forget that most games dont charge you to play them anymore. They make money through in game purchases selling cosmetics and battle pasees.
These game genres could be described as dead by the same criteria if they cost actual money.
Uh, in this case it’s a single-player, shooter, from a brand new IP. I’m probably just commenting just to argue but I don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good comparison at all.
But in the i terest of a fairer comparison, i had a quick google and found this game “atomic heart,” a generally well received game with high ratings and the following from Steam Revenue calculator
“We estimate that Atomic Heart made $55,756,625.68in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $16,448,204.58.”
New ip, single-player, shooter.
Comparatively, immortals lost money and tbey apparently laid of 45% of the staff who made it to avoid losses.
No, AAA+ blockbuster games are dead. The 150 million budget is insane. Spending that much on a game, you end up having to minimize the risks and having to cater to the widest audience possible.
If you split that budget into maybe 2 larger and a few smaller games, you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. You can take more risk, experiment with new mechanics and ideas. You can target different types of players. You can give a chance to smaller, lesser known writers who might have potential.
The first game in ages where it actually feels like the company/ developers actually put in effort and released a complete product. It’s not that hard to understood why consumers are flocking to it. People are just fed up with the garbage EA and ubisoft have been putting out. Honestly, I’d be fine with ubisoft dissolving and going out of business.
This. No matter how talented the game devs are, it feels like the suits do everything they can to squeeze every last drop out of the game. And the game feels incomplete because they often take things out of the game so that you have to pay to get it back in.
The first game in ages where it actually feels like the company/ developers actually put in effort and released a complete product
Ironically the only people who say this about BG3 have not reached the third act yet. Still my favourite game in years, but the later stages of the game really could have done with more playtesting. there are bugged quests, disappearing characters, people ignoring story events in dialogue, missing cutscenes and multiple outcomes for storylines happening at the same time.
I just started Act 3, and yeah, there are some bugs with the dialogue, like Gale chewing me out for making a decision in a quest I hadn’t even started yet (I was very confused when he started chewing out my character for making a deal with a devil, a deal I had not even gotten offered because I hadn’t started that quest line, and I was like, “Wait, what?”) With luck, the next patch will fix stuff like this.
For some reason, my game really likes bugging out with Gale dialogue, like Gale acting like we were in a relationship when I had just turned him down flat. He now is benched and doesn’t get to come out anymore.
I think I know exactly which dialogue bug you are referring to. Happened to me as well, although after I turned down the deal. The second part might just be Gale being Gale
It’s the same as when Elden Ring dropped. Even people who never played Souls games prior were picking it up because it was just a complete, solid open world RPG.
I’ve never played Baldur’s Gate before, but I’m probably gonna pick 3 up to play with my roommate in splitscreen.
I think that is the main point of the lawsuit, if developers sell their game on Steam they can’t sell it cheaper somewhere else. If Value gets 30% the developer has to raise the price a bit to compensate and they have to raise it everywhere. Outside of sales I don’t think most games that are not on Steam are much cheaper elsewhere, so not sure how this plays out.
If you have a point to make about why Valves is not abusing it’s monopoly position make it. Otherwise no one wants to hear your dumb ‘but the free market is always right’ statement.
As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam
I don’t think there’s ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you’re not selling those freely generated Steam keys
This suit seems to just be vaguely, “30% is too high”, along with requiring that DLC for a game bought on Steam also be bought on Steam, it was the Wolfire case back in 2021 that alleged they’re not allowed to sell their game for cheaper on other platforms
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
This is true and public knowledge though as I said (details seen here in the “Steam Key Rules and Guidelines” section), if anything Valve is giving devs a lot of leeway by allowing them to do that at all, not only are they giving up their 30% cut but are also then distributing and committing to updating those copies of the game for free
That’s exactly what they’re trying to say. It could have been cheaper if Valve didn’t have pricing clauses that doesn’t allow developers to price things cheaper elsewhere.
Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.
You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.
Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.
The only thing that doesn’t sit right with me is developers stating Steam threatened to delist the game when they expressed wanting to sell elsewhere. I haven’t seen any proof except just the statements, but it would be weird for a developer to lie about that stuff. If anyone has any more sources on that, it would be appreciated
The one example I can think of is the Remnant games, at least for Remnant 2 on release it was cheaper on Epic Store than on Steam, by like 10 USD if I recall correctly
They don’t really though. They’re talking about selling steam keys in a different platform, not selling the game on a different platform (like Epic Games for instance). You can sell the game for cheaper on Epic or GOG if you want to.
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results. 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.
They don’t. The thing most people who have never published a game on steam don’t know is that valve gives you infinite steam keys (for free) that you can give or sell as you wish. This is to allow studios/publishers to give keys to whoever they want, and also allows them to sell those keys on their own or third-party websites. This is a HUGE deal, Valve is letting studios/publishers sell games on a separate site without charging anything while hosting the game themselves. The only condition to those keys is that they can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam.
That’s a completely different thing from what you’re claiming. This means that games can be cheaper on GoG, Epic, etc as long as they don’t give you a steam key together (which they could, for free).
Disagree. The fact that I’m only hearing about it now that it’s flopped is a good thing because I might have given it attention before. Well, probably not because it’s EA.
I just hope that companies that aren’t EA don’t take what they say about single player games at face value. EA games probably need friend group hype to succeed at this point. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking that there are many others like me who want to avoid anything from that company and thus would only play when pressured by friends.
But if EA does fail, there likely will be a period where they try to talk about it like experts and will just say, “oh, gamers must not like x genre anymore”, when gamers really just don’t like overproduced garbage games that are clearly tuned to sell MTX rather than be fun.
Don't work at Bethesda. Not going to claim this is in anyway accurate. Maybe the reason they left was because they weren't allowed to design interesting quests and thus were tired of being railroaded. I say this because any quest designer is essentially a storyteller so for quests to be so bland to lack character has to be intentional.
Agreed and much like skyrim this game is better enjoyed with minimal fast traveling, the problem is that fast travel is just too convenient and people will complain that it’s just talking and loading screens without actually enjoying the exploration.
I’m intrigued, how the hell do you explore in this game? I thought the only way to get from system to system and planet to planet is to click through menus. The only choice seems to be whether I’ll go back to the ship and click through menus or stay where I am and click through menus.
Within a system you can bring up the "scanner tool" view in the ship to then point yourself to a planet and travel that way.
But to to travel to various systems, yes you'll need to use a menu. But then I'm not sure how you would expect to fly between systems without some form of menu to select where you want to go.
Use the scanner tool, I find I have the opposite experience most people have while exploring. Many people say there’s nothing to do, I hate it when I pick a random ass moon in some god forsaken system and keep fining structures littered all over the damn place. I just wanna be the first person on this planet and find animals and shit, yet there’s always a solar farm, mining rig or small lab in the middle of fucking nowhere.
when i first played skyrim i fast travelled everywhere. then years later i did a no fast travel playthrough and wow, the sheer amount of quests i had never seen before was astounding
That’s what I’m saying. Almost all of the main quests are some of Bethesdas best ever. I really don’t get all the hate for this game. It’s not perfect by any means but to say it’s garbage is just wrong. I’m pretty new to Lemmy and I can’t help but compare it to what I see back over at reddit. More hive mind bull. The Internet told me I need to hate this thing so I hate it.
yep exactly, everything about bethesda has been shit on ever since fo4 release, and 76 made it much worse. its like nobody actually enjoys gaming anymore, its just a side picking insult throwing cult
Yes, it is a lifeless game in its current state. The framework is there, but everything has the feel of a shopping mall that’s going to be torn down in couple months EDIT: a screenshot of New Atlantis
The writing is the strongest part of the game in my opinion. But the writing almost NEVER translates to interesting gameplay.
As an example, there's a quest where you're tasked with tracking some bad guys through a labyrinthine canyon, then you need to search for clues to find out where they came from, who hired them, etc. The gameplay for the quest is about the least imaginative way to interpret that story - the tracking is just following waypoint markers on your screen; the combat is just shooting four basic enemies; and finally the "search for clues" is just looting one item from the enemy leader's corpse. Then you fast travel back to the quest giver and get some credits as a reward.
Nearly every quest is like this. They present an interesting story via the dialogue, but then the actual gameplay for the quest is always just travel to a location, shoot some bad guys and/or pick up an item and/or talk to a person, then fast travel back and get some credits.
I’m more trying to be realistic, It’s difficult to imagine how you would hire a lead anything and not give them any agency into what they are doing. That’s the whole point of lead, to lead the others in the goal of whatever that thing is.
I think that you can be marginalised and restricted, but it’s pretty unlikely this person, as a lead, had no agency about quest design
That also does not mean that they couldn’t do something better elsewhere. Just that assuming that they were locked down by bethesda into writing boring one note quests seems… like a reach.
The game is fine. It’s on Gamepass so I’d play it through that, I wouldn’t pay the full retail for it.
Mostly I was referencing that the quests are fairly flat and uninspiring.
For what it’s worth, game quality-wise, I finished one playthrough in about 80 hrs and while there’s a NG+ mechanic that many seem to be enjoying, I wasn’t too interested in that. I really liked the ship building mechanic, and I had a lotta fun leveling up to see all the new ship parts and play with em.
Maybe after the modding scene develops more (though it looks like it’ll get there) I’ll come back to it if it’s still on Gamepass
It’s atmospheric and good, but player choice during many missions is lacking. Choices often boil down to “Yes” or “Not yet.” But you’ll go the way the mission wants you to go or you won’t finish it.
You also have options that change depending on your skills and progress.
You can choose to bribe, persuade, manipulate, flex your muscles, or do them a favor. Sometimes you can choose to kill them if they’re not cooperating. If a task is related to one of your skills, you can show off your knowledge.
The whole no choice paradigm was much more true for FO4 than for Starfield.
Yep, no legitimate criticism to be found. None whatsoever. Just wait for mods, they'll fix a game for free. The multi-million dollar studio did nothing wrong.
There is legitimate criticism, but there’s a lot of complete shit. I’ve heard people complain about procedurally generated planets that you have to go out of your way to interact with. There’s complaints of bullet sponge enemies from people who insisted on going to level 40 areas at level 20. Both of those complaints are bullshit
Agreed. I often spend 30-60 min in an area trying to find an ideal outpost location. The limuts on how far you can go on planets are already huge. From what I recall, the total area is comparable to Skyrim, though I’ll have to double check that
i was around during the first lvl 200, fully support the player’s decision. ppl asking “why play then?” have never been in an abusive relationship. it’s a great game tbh, just filled with mtx & grinding to the brim. ima check out his latest vids @tniru to see his side of the story
Exactly. It is a really great game and the grinding can be very fun with the character skill explosions wiping out entire screens worth of mobs.
When the game released, the only micro transactions were clothing for your character and a pet that could pick up items automatically. Its really sad they didn’t just keep it that way.
A few months ago they got in deep shit because the gacha part apparently sometimes didn’t contain the low chance stuff at all. So you could pay a million dollars and you would never get it.
This is a trend that I have recently started noticing. PAYDAY 3 came out with basically nothing included after PAYDAY 2 had literally 10 years of continuous content/80 DLCs pumped into it. As another example, The Sims always comes out with a new release that has every feature removed so they can sell you all the same DLC again and again.
In some cases this would appear to be a (corporate) success, but it seems it’s actually been part of the downfall of recently-released PAYDAY 3. As of this moment in time, the rolling 24-hour peak of player count in PAYDAY 3 is 4,699. The rolling 24-hour peak of PAYDAY 2 is 37,399. Why would players who have a fully finished game with all DLC already available want to play your new barren game?
I feel really bad for the people working on these games. PAYDAY 3 will eventually reach success in a niche, but will likely be hated by those same people.
The objective behind a game like this, or Sims, or FIFA/FC, is not to create a great gameplay experience. Sadly, they make a passable game, that will help them leech money sustainably for a considerable amount of time, through endless DLC. Paradox will inevitably make Colossal Order do the same with C:S2, despite them claiming that it’ll be fewer but larger DLC.
There are very few studios I will refuse to show respect for, and the one behind PAYDAY is one of them. Just like what remains of Maxis
Yeah for an example of a series that has found a reasonable equilibrium there companies should be looking at Civ. By making every game significantly enough different moving to the next doesn’t feel like 20 downgrades to get a slight upgrade, but more like 5 has reached the conclusion of what it will ever be, 6 is now new and will have 2 major expansions and a variety of minor ones, but you only see a bit of how it’s incomplete until years later when you’re reminded that some feature came in rise and fall and you’ve just taken it for granted for several years.
I think there ie a middle ground as a rule but a lot of games use dlc as an excuse to sell the game for more.
Sims is a great example. It costs over $1k to buy everything for Sims 4 and the Sims 4 stans will defend it going “you’re not SUPPOSED to guy every pack”. Sims 3 vs Sims 4 is something as well. Sims 3 didn’t get as much dlc, but each one had so much more content and gameplay than Sims 4. 9 years and like 50 packs later, Sims 3 STILL has more content overall. The game was just poorly optimized and badly coded and is only now becoming playable in terms of load times and lag. A lot of the Sims 4 packs don’t even work that well together, or the opposite where they release a feature and you need another pack to fully utilize it. (The goats and sheep in the horses dlc don’t do anything without cottage living. And they already didn’t do much WITH it)
The Weather expansion with Sims 2 made sense at the time. Weather was a mechanic that not many games had and quite the milestone, it was groundbreaking for the time. Weather dlc for Sims 3 you could begrudgingly forgive, since it’s such a big thing and the base for Sims 3 was so big. But Weather being sold as an add on for Sims 4 was just unacceptable. The game was barren, weather is a base feature for every single game within that kind of genre. It feels like they remove the feature to sell it later. And you see this with the pets packs too. Sims 3 you had cats, dogs, horses, and small animals. With Sims 4 you have cats and dogs, my first pets stuff, cottage living (for the small animals, it does FINALLY add SOMETHING new with the cows/lamas and chickens), and horse ranch- for the same experience Sims 3 pets gave - and even THEN there is less gameplay and features. No unicorns, no wild horses, no pet jobs (I think) since you can’t control them, no nothing. Sims 4 still doesn’t have fairies somehow but there’s rumbles that they might be the next occult and they could bring unicorns but… you won’t be able to do anything with the unicorns without horse ranch.
So, it’s not even than Sims 4 costs more than 3, you are getting an objectively worse and more barren experience even when you do buy everything. The dlc for Sims 3 made sense and added so much, barring maybe the weather one as an arguable one. Almost none of the dlc in Sims 4 makes sense to be sold to the player instead of in the base game. City living, island living, cottage living, the vacation one… for that’s about it really. But becausethey are supposed to bring new content and gamellay experiences. But the dlc for Sims 4 was just such an obvious money cash cow that they are like “what pieces of the same dlc can we upsell as separate packs?” They barely add anything new.
I have no problem with dlc like how it is with Witcher 3 was with new stories, gameplay experiences, quests, etc, rather than selling base features of a game for morr.
I’ve been playing Sims since 2006. Sims 4 feels like an insult. I want to like it, and aesthetically it is pleasing, the build tools are nice. But game play wise I need so many mods to make it enjoyable. The packs don’t really integrate with each other and the relationships feel very shallow in vanilla experience. I have Sims 3 and Sims 2 and I love both of them, I used mods but I also it was a fun vanilla experience. I never felt robbed when I bought dlc for them, but at this point with sims 4 unless the dlc is on sale I will not buy it at all. Every sims 4 thing I have bought except base game has been sale. It didn’t even release with pools or toddlers.
I am interested in Life By You from paradox games just to see something different in the genre, it helps that Rob Humble is on the development team. I also keep an eye on Paralives to see how that grows. I just want something new in the life sim genre.
If not for mods, I would not play 4 at all. It’s just bland. It has no soul. And don’t get me started on how broken the few recent expansions were. Not just “egh, an occasional bug that would prompt a restart”, straight up irreparable damage to your save, and broken features that are still not fixed
What trend? You basically just explained it yourself. 10 years of updates and 80 DLCs. In order to match this with their new game, they would have to stop supporting Payday 2 and sink 10+ years into Payday 3 before releasing it. That’s simply not possible. So it’s either a new game with less content or no new game at all for these types of games with lots of support.
The trend would be developers that are unwilling or unable to release a new game that is better than the old one (especially in formulaic series like a racing game), or that they intentionally withhold features in order to resell them again. I’m not saying there aren’t sometimes good reasons for it, just that it’s something I’ve personally noticed happening now that developers are leaning harder and harder into DLC, and now that games are stagnating in innovation and reasons to buy the next entry in the series.
Also for PAYDAY 3 specifically if you don’t have any familiarity with Overkill/Starbreeze I wouldn’t defend them on this one. They have chosen money over their players every single chance they could get, including breaking their promise to never include microtransactions in the game, and then breaking their promise in 2017 that they wouldn’t release any more paid DLC. In 2017 they released the Ultimate Edition with this promise, and in 2019 they went back on it. In 2019, they started releasing DLC again with the mission statement of “hey any money you put into this DLC will help fund PAYDAY 3 development”. The community immediately noticed that the DLC from 2019 onwards was of lower quality and more expensive, and although people frequently brought this up, others would defend it and say “yes, but we need to support Overkill or PAYDAY 3 won’t be made.”
They started development on PAYDAY 3 in 2016, so they’ve had 7 years to develop it before it released, whereas PAYDAY 2 has been out for 10 years at this point. The moral of the story is they kept releasing mediocre DLC for PAYDAY 2 because it was easy and lucrative, and it became such an addiction that they neglected PAYDAY 3’s development to the point where it released with barely any features or content even after 7 years of development.
Seriously. At the end of the day it’s the players who decide whether a game is good or fun. They might not understand the nuances of what went into creating a game they don’t find fun, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
“basically we made a coloring book. It’s bland, boring, but some talented artists will add onto the poorly fleshed out systems later and keep it alive for five years. We love our modding community.”
Watching Bethesda scrape together this new IP and it just being… Average… Is disheartening. I hope they’re just channeling their good ideas in ES6 but I’m losing faith.
Yeah but every NBA game gets flooded with negative reviews and these people will buy it again next year. It doesn’t matter how many negative reviews it has if it sells well.
I always have a laugh when half of these reviews are “wow guys this poorly rated game that everyone told me is garbage turned out to be garbage. They’re making the same game every year!”, fast forward to them posting the same review next year.
I got Madden 22 for free and for awhile I was enjoying it. It was my first Madden game since the 360. So I start going to forums for the game, and every single post was about how bad the game is, highlighting ridiculous bugs, shitty AI, missing features.
Then details about Madden 23 started to come out and everyone that was tearing 22 apart was absolutely in love with every little thing that was shown.
Man I remember being on the Gamefaqs forums back in like 2005 or so, and people were complaining about this exact scenario back then. Some things never change
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