Yeah, OP’s videos in the posts were the exact ones I would have linked. Go watch those.
Haelian’s reaction is more informative than just being an average reaction video, because he describes the decision making in the choices Angel1c made.
if you think a 30% cut doesn’t reflect on the cost a player is paying, you’re out of your mind. This is business 101.
Isn’t business 101 charging as much as possible and not passing on savings to customers, and trying to capture as much high paying consumers as possible before being forced to start capturing price sensitive consumers with discounts?
Price of games that didn’t release on Steam seem to reflect that. Even games released by platform owners like Sony or Nintendo first party exclusives and the beloved Blizzard. Isn’t that pricing strategy business 101 as opposed to this belief that savings pass onto consumers? Lowering price right away doesn’t seem like good price maximizing strategy when goal would be to increase retail price consumers are willing to pay over time.
As far as I know, they do - for Steam keys. If you’re selling your game through other stores, not just a Steam key, there aren’t any demands placed upon you. The OC might’ve been talking about that.
I’ve bought most of games through other sites because the games would be discounted lower and sooner than Steam. So it’s more personal experience than theory in my case.
Humble bundles on the even more extreme end of like 8 games sometimes being cheaper than a single title has ever been discounted.
Huh, interesting… You know, I’ve never really wondered about Humble Bundle specifically, but you’re right, they seem to be selling your run-of-the-mill Steam keys, or at least you can activate them effortlessly in Steam. Maybe it’s a case of Steam themselves handing out keys (instead of the publishers) to increase user retention? I honestly don’t know, this is all just speculation.
I actually didn’t click on your link at first, because I assumed it would just show other stores where you could purchase the whole game instead of a key, so I’m sorry that you had to clarify that.
Isthereanydeals is a great resource. I always make sure to look up a game there before buying to check what the lowest price it was ever sold was.
That link was for helldivers 2 which is only available on steam on pc. From what I understand the keys are actually provided by the devs/publishers and steam doesn’t get a cut of key sales.
No it doesn’t. The price parity thing is only if you are selling the game on Steam platform, i.e. selling a steam key, it’s essentially a way to allow publishers to sell the game on their own website, without paying the 30% to steam, but don’t allow them to undercut steam entirely while still taking advantage of their platform.
Games on GoG, itch, Epic store, etc, can have any price they want, as long as they don’t give away a steam key valve doesn’t care what price you sell your game elsewhere.
This is one of the most annoying fake news out there, Valve are going above and beyond what any other store is doing, and they get bad rep from people who have never read their policy, published a game there, or talked to anyone who has.
They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.
How it works on Steam:
User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.
For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.
If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.
I know how Valve’s publisher API works, others are similar in case you didn’t know. But that is only true for games that need online validation of some sort, DLCs for offline games don’t need to implement this.
Valve is hosting the game, providing the storefront and bringing in a lot of customers. If you didn’t think those 30% were worth it you would not have put your game on steam.
Plus all of this is irrelevant to the point that Valve doesn’t enforce price parity.
For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense.
Because they're providing a complete solution.
For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn't complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they're doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I'd consider that fair.
“But throughout that time, I actually had no inkling what game development was actually like. How hard the designers, programmers, artists, producers, and everyone else worked,” he says. “The struggle to bring a vision to life with constantly shifting resources. The stress.”
Then tell us about it. Make it heard where you get Stressed and where you rub up on the state of the art. List off what had to be finished in crunch time. What got pushed by Marketing or Management. Leaving everything up to a nebulous “you don’t know” makes any criticism easily dismissed and reduces leverage against systemic issues.
So I bought the game a while ago, but haven’t really been playing it (I need to get into the right headspace). However, I’ve come to realise something.
This is the first game I’ve bought for over £40 in a while where I haven’t felt scammed or that I’m complicit in something immoral. I feel like they “deserve” the money, which is a strange feeling considering the AAA industry right now.
The game doesn’t even include DRM, not even the “free” one you can enable through steam.
same here. I typically buy games on super deep sales a few years after the games comes out just so I don’t end up disappointed by the product, but this game feels properly polished. a few bugs here and there but none so far that I’ve encountered that are game-breaking
We can’t make art because of capitalism. Fucking sad.
They don’t sell because no fucking company wants to market a product that they can’t milk every fucking cent from. They aren’t producing anything of value, only subscriptions, game passes and addictive gambling loot boxes.
Games as a service is a scam. Stop preordering the latest AAA wank and support indie devs.
More standalone experiences that are unique and creative instead of factory produced sludge.
Bro, most of the games I’ve been playing are ports of older titles, Indie Games, or straight up non-profit fan games (Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers is the kart game of the ever btw)
Is this a single player shooter? I thought it was multi player? And theres nothing wrong with single player shooters “in todays market” look at jedi fallen order great game and singlr player. But a shit game is a shit game single or multi.
“Walked right into that UC ambush, same as us and that thief over there.”
“That’s Solomon Freestar! The true High King of Skyrim!”
And the dragons are just space ships and the souls you absorb are just… uh… radiation I guess from damaging the reactor. Or the magic space civilization from Starfield originated from here, so that’s why everyone has magic.
I’m not backing down from the space ship dragons though, that part is just brilliant.
Calling DA2 serviceable is probably some of the highest praise it’s received. The game is steaming dookie. It took out every single thing that made Origins a masterpiece and gave us a dialogue wheel and an entire game made of 5 copy+pasted rooms. Also a nonsensical main plot with no real player agency and the most forgettable ending of all.
DAI is mid af but it looks like a God damn masterpiece next to DA2.
If they hadn’t reused the maps it’d been remembered as one of the greats.
I also thought the balance on Nightmare or whatever was an atrocious mix of ubertank enemies and getting one-shot by rogues but the actual story and companions were fantastic.
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, he could have indeed been a well meaning mage just trying to live under templar thumbs? Instead of also being exactly the smoking gun?
The Orsino fight doesn’t make much sense if you side with the mages - there was no reason for him to go Akira monster when he did. Even BioWare acknowledged how little sense it made, in a conversation you can have with Varric in Inquisition.
Listen, it might’ve looked cheap as fuck, but I found a certain charm in the “every dungeon interior is just one of three dungeons with different parts blocked off”. Plus the combat flowed really well. I played that whole game through like… 5 times. One right after the other.
If you play it after coming off Mass Effect 1, the “every colony bunker or mine is one of three options” regardless of the planet just becomes part of that Old BioWare’s aesthetic.
Great ideas, cool combat system, great art style and graphics, ruined by writing that was somehow chaotic and utterly predictable at the same time and stupid ass kill ten rats/fetch 10 letters filler quests.
Marketing is a big money drain for a lot of games too. Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V are two games with marketing budgets big enough to finance a dozen other games. I guess a new title like cyberpunk would need more marketing (still not $142 million worth of marketing) but GTA was already a well established franchise that probably didn’t need as much marketing as it had.
Even games like call of duty and assassins creed which have a core fan base that can expect a new game on a regular basis don’t need to market as much as they do.
I think marketing is always important no matter how established you are. Coca Cola aren’t skimping on their marketing budget even if they’re the most recognizable brand in the world.
It’s about constantly reminding everybody “hey, I exist! Don’t you want to buy me?”.
I was just talking about this the other day. I think Coke and some companies have reached a saturation point that makes advertisements useless.
I dont know if we have any data to model off of, but I’d love to see if their profits dip by any meaningful amount if they stopped advertising for 3 months straight. Let the movie theaters, and the restaurants, and the culturally embedded soft drink preferences do their thing and see if the dial moves.
I don’t think they would keep investing in marketing if they didn’t know if it worked. I’m just guessing, but I believe there’s a noticeable bump in sales after a successful marketing campaign.
And that’s what I think they’re failing to measure. I think they’re unable to accurately divorce the increase in sales from other incentives/market forces, and so they’re just doing what they’ve been doing regardless of actual merit, or the merit is being improperly evaluated
Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be marketing at all. Just that marketing budgets for many AAA blockbusters have become so bloated, they can account for nearly half of the development cost. As someone with very little knowledge as to how games get made, it seems like some of that money could be better used
I think I played maple story in like 2007 and it was garbage then. My excuse at the time was I was broke, and there weren’t many good free games out. Path of Exile wasn’t until 2013. Same with Warframe. Huh I never realized those came out the same year.
I get that, but to me it all feels like cookie cutter material. Maybe I’m not searching right, and maybe I haven’t discovered enough, but I can’t help but feel extremely whelmed.
In terms of exploration, it’s very similar to No Man’s Sky, another boring space game. Every planet has similar terrain, similar plants and animals, similar goals, and similar structures. The differences are ambient light shades, colors and patterns on the plants and animals, and clutter in the artificial areas. The player can go scan life forms and blast bad guys. That’s about it.
But I don’t see how it could be any other way. How else does a studio scale up a galaxy such that every one of the 1000-odd planets is its own unique, interesting, engaging snowflake of a setting without spending hundreds of employee-years on each one?
Maybe AI will be the answer, but I’m not holding my breath.
Skyrim and fallout were also complete Games when they were released. However, they were buggy disasters. It took tons of modders to fix them and make them what they are today.
And bethesda didn’t have to lift a finger.
… but don’t let me get in the way of that blind loyalty of yours. You’ve got that “new game honeymoon” thing going on. You should enjoy it while it lasts.
Isn’t that kinda the entire point to Bethesda games and has been since at least oblivion? The modability of their games has long been their big selling point.
If the selling point it’s that they require mods to work correctly, and they don’t pay those that out in the countless hours to make them, they shouldn’t make games. Period.
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