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.
I don’t understand people who “demand” things from volunteers. Open source devs, modders, and still recently content creators are/were treated like public service workers, by some.
Imagine if we went around treating artists as if they were obligated to please each of us individually with their every piece? I’m very happy to see this attitude improve with streaming and youtube, where creators are more and more met with care and support when they have to step away for a bit or retire entirely.
It sadly seems like this modder was eventually putting in tremendous effort, in a vain attempt to please absolutely everyone using her mods. But that isn’t a good reason to work for free.
Any work I do for free, is something I do because I want to, but this modder explicitly says she did work she didn’t want to do in order to please fans. And I can’t help but ask, why? (I know why, but someone should have cared enough to show her she is allowed to just say no, and do whatever she prefers.)
The blurb about her doing music is how you’re SUPPOSED to feel doing something for fun. I’m happy that she found her way to something that makes her feel that way.
it doesnt even have to be a mod, just free. See what happened with AetherSX2(android ps2 emulator) and how a bunch of people kept pestering a dev till he basiclaly quit working on it on mobile because they ask for a lot for something that was literally free.
early access games are also notorious for being dogshite and left as such, or they’re fine but with obvious flaws which are never fixed because “bro it’s still in early access!”
It really does depend on the game, though. Going Medieval for instance has been in early access for almost three years, but it’s three years of active development. Just about every week brings some kind of update, whether it’s little coding and qol stuff, to full upgrades and new mechanics being added in. They’re almost done with their roadmap.
People do this with artists too. Especially the moment you offer anything in the way of free commissions for a specific community and such.
Many forums had gfx threads, where members who enjoy putting together banners and such would offer to make something for those who asked. A good friend of mine ran one in a certain game’s forum for a while and the absolute entitlement in which some of those people acted (in regards to speed and nitpicking about minor things) was disgusting. It was maybe 1 in 25 people but it soured the whole thing for her, understandably so. The moment you give people a little finger wrt their requests, one of those people will take the whole hand. The same likely applies to modding.
And I’m sure being a woman doing gaming stuff isn’t helping because there’s way too much sexism in gaming culture, even though there are also a lot of subcommunities that are super welcoming to everyone.
Setting aside prices, I’ve seen an unexpected amount of sourness directed at the first game. While the first game wasn’t a greatest of all time RPG and had flaws, I found it overall enjoyable enough and it was clearly a project with some passion that I didn’t regret sinking time into it.
I expect similar of the sequel, with hopefully improvements based on feedback from the first game. I plan to have fun with the game, and it is a bit tiring to see things like the pricing prompting people to badmouth the game itself when they are separate things.
Am I going to pay $80? No. No I’m not. This is a single player RPG though. There’s no FOMO of getting left behind on the multiplayer unlocks or the lore of a new season. It’s a singleplayer game. Put it on the wishlist and buy it on a sale. Simple as.
The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).
I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.
Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.
I don’t think it was the lack of open world that put me off from it, as I’ve always preferred hub based games ever since Dragon Age Origins. I think it was just the writing honestly. I don’t like the whole “le soooo epic zany & ttlly rndm” writing that it shares with Borderlands. I don’t find it funny, endearing nor entertaining. It’s just annoying to me and it was everywhere at the time because millennial culture was at its height.
I wouldn’t categorize it that way at all. It extrapolated nationality to one’s employer and religion to the law. It was unsubtle in its views of classism and such, in a way that I appreciated, but it wasn’t just doing zany things “just because”, unless you’ve got a good example that’s slipping my mind.
I can’t say I follow you. I would call it satire rather than “totally random”, but if you didn’t care for the writing, you didn’t care for the writing.
found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG.
Yes, exactly. It followed that formula, not Fallout. That probably should have been made more clear so people wouldn’t be making a comparison that didn’t fit at all.
I made it maybe 20 min before I un-installed. I don’t vibe with Fallout in general (but I’ll suffer through them) and with the writing style, just wasn’t my thing. Maybe the 2nd one is a bit more polished and I can get into it cause I heard good things.
Besides that I just kept feeling like it was “been here, done that”. I remember at one point there is a small village and you have to choose to pull their power source or leave it and it felt so damn familiar, I didn’t bother continuing much past that. I felt like if I hadn’t played a bunch of elder scrolls and fallout games it was probably great but for me it was so much retreading old ground I couldn’t stay interested.
…yup. I didn’t get far. I vaguely remember there were a bunch of other little things but that one drove it home. It was literally a tamer version of fallout 3 opening.
I feel like Outer Worlds at least tried to have a message. But they got scared and pulled away and gave up before the end. It starts way stronger than Fallout 3 imo. At least when it comes to writing and story. It’s of course not a SERIOUS game, but it tries to say something even if it does give up. In my experience Bethesda games are allergic to having a message or point.
The first game was like RPG soul food. It didn’t do anything new, the gameplay was fine and the story wasn’t bad. Nothing innovative but nothing poorly executed. I think people should look to the game as explanation for why Nintendo doesn’t make the ‘normal Mario game’ they want. Innovation is the simplest way to dress up a game, even if you like the loop it’s healthier if the sequel is different.
I honestly don’t know why so many game journalists and bloggers are obsessed with innovations, and judge games based on that. A game doesn’t need to reinvent a genre to be good and enjoyable.
They probably meant that it felt like a game that was stripped down and shallow compared to similar AAA “full price” games and I completely agree. After playing the first one, I wouldn’t only consider buying this new game if it was at least 50% off.
To be clear, I find this rhetoric pretty silly given that price has no influence over a game’s intrinsic qualities and vice versa.
I’m not arguing for games to be priced higher either, because a lot of that money likely wouldn’t end up going to the devs, but I think the price argument doesn’t stand either way.
Pricetag sets expectations, simple as that. It is documented that no matter the product, people have more trust in a more expensive product than a cheaper one, even if they are actually identical. And thus, people also rightfully expect more of a more expensive product. Let’s talk about cars for example : if I buy an old overused small one just to get from point A to point B, I’ll be absolutely satisfied if I paid a few hundred bucks, and absolutely not if I paid a few thousands.
Same with games, if I have a small indie game entertain me somewhat for a few hours, I’ll be super okay if it cost me a few bucks, and super not ok if it cost me 60 or 80 euros. The intrinsic quality may not change, but that was never what was discussed in the first place.
I think the equivalence doesn’t apply, because a car is a functional product and you should expect price to correlate with added features.
Indie games, as well as AAA, can offer similar quality levels at wildly different prices, so price doesn’t (shouldn’t) enter the equation imo.
Quality, possible enjoyment and my tastes are what I take into account when buying a game or not, not its price point, so that might be the difference.
That’s not what I’m saying.
What I find silly is to expect price to correlate with quality in the video game space, because you have Indies as well as AAA, with wildly different prices, ultimately offering similar qualities. Price shouldn’t come into the equation when talking about a game’s quality or “value” imo.
I guess this is just a difference in how we look at it. I have for decades now used what I perceive as quality/value to decide whether I should buy a game or whether it may be worth if later if it goes on a steep sale. For example, some AAA game that get polarizing reviews or is known to be very short might be an instance where I’d be not be inclined to pay full price because to me, it wasn’t worth the price. Raising the price of a game to $80 means that I personally will want more value out of it. I just bought a game on Steam yesterday for $20 on sale, which was to me worthwhile. If it had been $80, there is no way I would have bought it.
I’ve always maintained that the first was a fine game that was tanked by the price. It was priced to drive gamepass subs, not sell the game. At $35-40, it would have been received much better, imo. Years later, now that it’s more appropriately priced, it seems to be more well-reviewed.
Unfortunately the second is going down the same path. It may take 5+ years for the game to be appreciated to its fullest (assuming no glaring issues), through no fault of the devs.
It was a fine game that was tanked by the massive inconsistency of its quality as you progressed. The game starts out absolutely fantastic, but the quality takes a very sharp and sudden fall after a few hours, and then it just sorta ends not long after. It was a very weird experience. Definitely felt like something went very wrong during development and they had to make big changes.
I got it for cheap layer (I almost never buy new games) and found it kinda shallow and boring. I wanted to like it, I love the theme and settings but ehhhhhhhhh
It was hyped up to be Space Fallout and I did not get Space Fallout out of it. Even like… Space Bad Fallout. I just got mediocre space game.
It also wasn’t up to the obsidian standards we come to expect.
But then again i understand not being able to realise it was not a well written or designed game as a large chunk of people think starfield wasn’t that bad.
I know a lot of people hyped up Outer Worlds as a spiritual successor to New Vegas and were disappointed when it didn’t reach the same heights of writing. Obsidian not being given any time to make New Vegas and then missing their contracted bonus payout by a single Metacritic point was brought up a lot before release, and gamers trumpeted this new game as what Obsidian could have made without Bethesda mismanagement. Then it came out and had the temerity to be average, leaving fans acting like they’d somehow been betrayed by Obsidian.
It wasn’t Obsidian’s or the game’s fault that people decided it had to be a 10/10 masterpiece, it just got caught up in a stupid fanbase war against Bethesda and its reputation suffered when it couldn’t meet people’s sky-high expectations.
The sentiment is that we all have a responsibility to hold our community accountable for this type of behavior.
You can disagree, it is likely a matter of philosophy. I feel a responsibility to try to put more positive influence to the world, and to call out harmful actions. Not everyone does, that is fine too, albeit a little sad.
Lol you’re getting downvoted for having a rational viewpoint and wanting something you care about and enjoy to be safe for other humans to enjoy it too.
Not even being sarcastic; I am completely open to suggestions and constructive criticism.
That’s a pretty harmful word though, my guy, kind of antiquated. There are better insults, like “cock-brained” or “silly stupid little groundfuckers”, to name a few suggestions.
"Our community" feels a bit monolithic. It's like saying "film watchers" or "readers". Lumping anyone that plays video games regularly into a single social group feels unhelpfully reductive.
we all have a responsibility to hold our community accountable for this type of behavior.
Much like the “teach men not to rape” sentiment, the ones that will listen weren’t the problem in the first place. If the people that need to be called out were reasonable, they wouldn’t need to be called out, they don’t see what they’re doing as wrong. So we’re just screaming into the void.
So, I’m not trying to be severe here, but your argument implies you would watch someone be raped without intervening. Your argument falls apart for me with that context. Someone has to yell into the void, it’s something more than letting the problem fester unabated.
The ones who will listen need to learn to speak. Otherwise, why are listeners paying attention at all?
My argument doesn’t imply that at all. My argument is that you can’t reason with the unreasonable. You absolutely should say or do something about these people in the moment, but its extremely rare for them to realize they were in the wrong.
Telling someone on a forum that the way they’re treating a creator is wrong is not at all comparable to catching someone during a rape, and implying that because I think trying to reason with an internet troll is useless means I’d just let a rape happen is disingenuous.
I’m not a gamer. I play games, but I’m not a Gamerᵀᴹ. I noped out of the “community” a long time ago.
I’m a little curious where she’s getting the harassment from. If it’s from twitter, I don’t know what to tell her. It’s designed to amplify hate and anxiety. If it’s from lan parties or irl shit, yeah, I haven’t experienced it, but I have seen that to a degree.
edit: Wait. Is the “harassment” coming from needy fans asking her to tweak her work for their liking? That’s a little different from what I assumed this was about. I’m not going to side with the community nagging her for tweaks, but if she’s creating this for herself, she needs to disengage from those types. If she’s creating these mods, putting them out online and expecting only positive comments, I don’t know what to tell her. This is something all big modders and have to deal with.
The article glosses over the sexual harassment until the end. She says that pictures of her were distributed on discord and mentions the daily harassment and sexualization from the community.
Yeah and someone else in this threat brought up that there’s another side to the discord drama. Frankly, this case is too messy to untangle. I can’t tell if she’s being completely honest or if all this could have been prevented of she set better boundaries. Regardless, I don’t think it speaks to the greater issues in “gaming culture”.
I’ve been a great fan of gaming for my entire long life. But I don’t play online games any more, because so many gamers are toxic. Obviously there are good individuals and some good outposts, but taken as a whole it is a toxic community.
Exactly. Hence why the assholes get away with driving good people out. Maybe if people stood up and told the trolls to STFU and instead defended these people they wouldn’t be forced out of the community.
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.
Also too many mouths to feed. When you’ve got so many people (including admin) to keep paying, then you can’t “afford” to make a cute little experiment. You’ve got to go huge production, latest fads, cutting edge, and super broad appeal.
What kind of identity can a game like that even hope to have?
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
The thing about them is that they are loud, directed, and often affect the first impression a game gets. If this wasn’t with The Witcher fame, the effect would be more notable, and oftentimes they don’t admit why they really have a problem with the game directly.
I realise i must be an edge case but i think my steam account of 10+ years is positive money wise. Got thousands of hours in the same few games and sold my old €100 CS inventory for about €500 PayPal when the market boomed.
The amount of money I’ve spent on my system to play those few games at more fps tho, lets not calculate.
Lmao. I mostly play the free games. I also have the heroic launcher and I’m signed into gog, epic and prime on it and so far, they’ve given me 85 free games. I have a lifetime supply of games.
20 million divided by 1.7 is about $11 per person, which isnt really that high.
I also think theres a distinction to be made between microtransactions in f2p titles and microtransactions in AAA premium titles. I logged something like 4000 hours in Mechwarrior online and I bought mech packs because I wanted to support the devs.
I feel like a lot of the microtransaction revenue is DLC as well. But like someone else said, there are the rare games that are free to play and don’t have super predatory mtx like Path of Exile or The Finals.
“Now, I understand why so few companies have attempted to develop a life simulation game. The challenge isn’t just additive the more you try to build—it’s exponential. At a certain point, finding bugs in this vast world we’ve created feels like playing tag with invisible ghosts.”
He’s not bragging; it’s honesty. I’m thankful he is sharing the experience. I know totally what he’s talking about. I remember trying to make a simulation of reality in the wc3 map editor in elementary school. Add the weather so the plants grow. Tie growth variables also in to deer eating them. wolves eat the deer. So everything needs hunger variables. But already we start having the ‘exponential growth’ he is talking about: because what about the Weather and the Deer? And the Weather and Wolves? Add aspect of the world for one type of object (weather for plants), and suddenly you have to figure out how or whether it relates to everything else you have (Deer and Wolves). Now let’s say we add villagers and Structures. Every time we add something, we have more nodes to consider the interrelations of.
It’s easy when there are few systems and few types of things (like a cardgame of creatures with atk and def), but it escalates quick and does exactly what he’s saying the more systems you try to accurately include and farther toward ‘full life sim’.
So im just a noob, but I see clearly this is what he is conveying to us. (probably cuz i tried a similar path in elementary school. if i remember correctly i ran in to this same issue, scale was too big too big project and i switched to something else. it exponentialed quick; just like he says)
edit: i bet he wasnt brave as much as did not forsee the exponentialness aspect and wanting to aim high caused him to fall in to it
Dwarf Fortress goes that deep. They once had to fix a problem where cats died from alcohol poisoning. Dwarfs in a bar would spill their drinks, the cats would walk through the puddles and subsequently lick their paws to clean themselves. It's crazy!
Yes that was the bug. After all it makes sense that cats would clean their paws and get a bit of alcohol in their bodies. Kind of bizarre to think though that the system was sophisticated enough to track grooming behavior but not quantity.
It really goes to show how stupid computers actually are. They just follow your instructions regardless of how insane they may be
Reminds me of Rimworld and the fact that, if there is no other accessible entities on the map with a nutrition stat, children and animals will b-line for booze that raiders drop and get hammered. I can’t count the number of Muffalo, dogs, and cats that I have had which end up with an alcohol tolerance hedif out of nowhere.
Making a system like this one day is my dream. I'm not in game dev and I'm probably never going to make a playable game but I naively believe that if you organize this well enough in advance, the moment it starts clicking together would be amazing. If you define all the individual actors in a flexible enough way, eventually the simulation should just 'click' and start functioning on its own, right? :P
For example, you dont need to code the specific wolves+rain interaction - you just need to code "if vulnerable/tired - find shelter" and have rain affect the living creatures in that way. It doesn't matter if there are deer or sheep in the area, "if wolf hungry" logic should just say "find something with meat to eat nearby".
Then again I know enough about programming to know this is extremely naive and it'd probably be a million times more difficult if I ever got around to doing it. I don't even know where I fall on the dunner-kruger graph yet, but it's an interesting thing to think about for me.
Oh I empathize with that. I tried unity/godot and code part would always be fun and easy, I love that... models, assets, animations break my brain however. I wish I could just not bother with them but it's such an important part of the experience, arguably the most important one
I’ve read from a few people who’ve done similar sorts of things that the solution to this problem is to just have everything track everything to begin with. Hunger level, heart rate, mood, everything you can possibly think of to track, and then just have everything else inherit from that global class. A lot of the values will be zero for some objects, but that’s okay, after all a storage crate doesn’t need a mood, both at some point in the future maybe you want to add an emotional box, and your code will definitely handle it now. Otherwise you have to go back in and alter everything every time you make a slight change.
A more complicated but ultimately faster approach is using a structure like an Entity Component System. You build an entity (deer, person, plant) out of components that are just data (health, hunger, mood), and then each type of component has a corresponding system that updates all the components at once based on other values. It’s somewhat similar, but you save space on unnecessary components not being added, and it packs the data together in way that is faster for the computer to iterate through.
I made a tower defense map in the Starcraft map editor when I was a kid , but it was based off of anti air rather than anti ground like the other TD maps at the time. I got it working pretty damn well (at least IMO) but I didn’t have internet at the time and that was on my dads work laptop so it sadly got lost.
I don’t think I could recreate that now if I tried, crazy what you can do as a bored kid with too much time.
That’s cool! I made tons of stuff but most of it never got finished or released cause I just kept starting the next thing. Probably the wildest thing I ever made was a prototype for a sidescrolling platformer in wc3. It had keyboard movement and ability usage, jumping, a heart counter in the top left, enemies, powerups… It was kind of janky but it worked surprisingly well considering what I built it in.
<3 both of u. I was Pixie_Tails on US east and west and in one of the big mapmaking guilds on east. I look back and think wc3 was the mentally healthiest part of my childhood. My most fun thing was a game like dota but with a huge natural map and a minute at the start for everyone to choose their castle locations. Like you could choose to be on a hill, along a river, etc. Then there were diff biomes to choose your hero from and the hero choices spawned like pkmn and there were rares. and choosing base unit types. then it became like dota where units spawned at castles and attackmoved to other castles. Was epic.
My weakness was unit and ability balancing since it didnt interest me so i never did it.
anyway, we thought up and made these as kids. i think that’s the coolest thing
That’s so cool sounding too! I made so many half baked ideas honestly. Tower defenses, single player campaigns (way too ambitious ones), and so many more. It really taught me a lot about proper game dev honestly.
God damn, that sounds awesome! Those map editors were seriously impressive for their time, so many cool things you could do with them. I also liked making “campaign” maps but with hero units and harder AI (SC base ai was too easy but you could set it to be harder through the map editor) or those “maze” maps where you have to keep the units you start out with alive through a bunch of different encounters.
For real. I had a project to make two full since player campaigns and it was waaaaaay too ambitious. I’ve always been hopelessly ambitious with game dev stuff and I still am honestly 😅
So fun to hear everyone chiming about doing this back then.
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