They make a console that is underpowered but is still marketable because of its uniqueness, then they make first party games that require better performance than the console can deliver.
Pokémon is not a first party game, it’s developed by Game Freaks. And the Switch isn’t underpowered for this kind of games, there are lots of better looking games on it, such as Breath of the Wild, which is a launch title. Game Freaks is a terrible studio who can’t make a game run smoothly even with GameCube graphics.
Low bars for entry with high community trustworthiness, you can make a .ca account really easily and most lemmy users have a positive opinion of .ca and its users.
Nah you are right but they actually do, but valve has also always done that. Dunno why you are so hated but I think it has to do with epics exclusive deals
Easy to forget both Sony and Microsoft had nothing to do with gaming previously. Even MS had terrible inroads in spite of games for PC being written in DirectX.
I felt like Amazon and Google had pretty good chances. It was only due to terrible direction both managed to screw it up.
Reminder that Arkane was on bad waters before Red Fall, immersive sims just aren’t that popular with a lot of people, and these companies want to do AAA with everything.
I won’t say no to cheaper games. The 30% cut was settled upon in the days where physical copies were the norm and Steam was still under heavy development. Given how established Steam and digital distribution in general is, it’s not really fair to developers to dedicate almost a third of the price of the game to a hosting platform. Yes, exposure is important, but that’s a service provided passively due to the fact of being the largest platform. Reducing Steam’s cut hurts no one except maybe Gabe’s ability to buy another yacht (and even then, not likely). Even if customers don’t see lower prices if Steam were to reduce their cut, it’d be great to see the actual developers getting more money from the games they put all the effort into making.
They being the largest platform because the consumer wanted their service, not out of obligation. Epic provides cheaper cut for the developer and is steadily building up their library. But why don’t users flock there? Heck, they even have some actual exclusive titles there. EA and Ubisoft too got their own store, and they too got a few exclusive title. So why does steam is still being chosen? Maybe there is other value provided besides hosting, like, idk, remote play? Controller remap? Family sharing? Opening linux gaming market? Social feature? Forum? Modding?
Momentum. Steam was among the first on the scene and provided the best experience. Thankfully Steam has kept the momentum going instead of enshittification (thanks to being a privately held company), but almost a third of the price of the game is still ridiculous if you consider the effort that goes into making a game vs maintaining a mature platform.
I mean, did the competitor even make an announcement to have at least feature parity with steam? Last time I heard, GOG doesn’t have regional pricing, Epic is not supporting linux just because, and EA/Ubisoft is just a glorified ad
The end of my post is where I address this. Publishers have the option to use their bigger cut to reduce prices, but even if they don’t, money is moving closer to the people actually making the games possible instead of a platform provider. There are also a lot of indie developers. It’s not just all greedy publishers.
I love this thing where buying something has been replaced by buying an alterable, revokable license to access that thing. It lowers costs and adds flexibility for producers, which allows them to save money, and they pass that savings on to me in the form of higher prices and my shit that I paid real fucking money for just disappearing one day. Then they explain that I never really “owned” it despite the fact that they use the word “own” in the marketing material, because it’s also legal to use words that have known definitions in agreements and then later explain that you were actually using an entirely different, secret definition of that word that’s actually the opposite of what you very purposefully implied.
As long as laws don’t constrain this rampant drive for short-term profit maximisation, and as long as laws permit the only truly valuable customer to be the shareholders and the C-suite’s own bonus programs, this won’t ever change.
Which in turn also already implies what needs to happen: Companies need to be prevented from caring more about the above two groups than the actual workers.
But this is difficult to pull off. The CEO (etc) should ultimately have the responsibility for the overall direction, but directly tieing them to the stability fo the workforce is tricky. It would be a way of doing it, of course. As in, loss of income of individual workers is directly judged against whatever payment/share program the C-suite managers enjoy, making them directly reponsible for not fostering an environment in which regular mass-layoffs are desirable.
Likewise, if shares automatically lost value whenever personel cost is cut (instead of gaining), firing workers would be heavily discouraged as it would decrease short-term profits and (correctly) flag a destabilizing event in the company.
All really tricky though, especially on an international level. But something ought to happen to keep this shit in check.
I’m sure you already understand this, but this is an unprecedented political project that would require the vast majority of people to stop simply sitting by reacting to political events.
I like Paradox DLC policies. Most of them are actually good and add a lot to the game. It also lets them service the game for a long period of time and push free updates along with DLCs.
I really dislike Paradox DLC policies. Most of them are actually really bad and add nothing to the game. It also lets them procrastinate bigger updates and bugfixes for a long period of time and push free updates along with breaking 50% of the mods.
The base game gets updated over a period of what, 10 years? Core gameplay mechanics which don’t work well or at least don’t make the developers happy are tweaked or revamped all the time. I only really play Stellaris, but the changes to the game throughout the years have kept things interesting.
The alternative is… not updating things which they don’t like? Perhaps that means mods never break, but then we’re shifting the onus of fixing the game to a third party, who can decide to quit whenever they want and let their (closed source) code deprecate. I’ve seen that kind of thing in Civ and I wasn’t a fan.
I guess with a studio that has demonstrated a pattern of long-term support for their games, this is what we get.
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