No. It’s easier to go after the “good guys” than the bad guys because they’re easier to beat. They won’t use all kinds of slimy, underhanded tactics to fuck you over.
Edit: I don’t approve of the lawsuit against valve, but that’s the way of the world. Scummy companies and people have many tools they can use to drag you down to their level.
Oh fuck off with the good guy thing, it’s a private company trying to make money, there’s no good people when profit is the goal, there’s no good billionaires and Gaben is one.
No, they’re still overcharging us if they make enough profit that the boss could become a billionaire while the employees make more than the industry average.
I don’t know what goes though people’s mind to get them to defend for profit private companies, they’re not there to be your friend, they’re there to get you to take the money you earned and spend it while gaslighting you into believing that you get your money’s worth.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but Valve is actually one of the few large tech companies that are providing an actually good service (Steam). People should be allowed to make money by providing value to their customers because that’s the motivation of building such services and products in the first place.
The hatred should go towards the companies abusing their position and violating customers and then just cashing excessive amounts of money for a crap product/service that has no real competition. If Valve had started making their competitors lives harder, by generating lots of nonsense lawsuits for example, they should absolutely be blasted down to hell by everybody. As long as they are just earning lots of bucks by providing a service people want to use without restricting using other services and playing with healthy rules otherwise as well, it’s all fine and everyone working on the great service SHOULD earn more than average.
Why do you think they’re able to make that much money? Not by using their position as the store where the majority of people buys games from?
There’s no good guys when profits are the goal. They might provide good service, the only reason they’re doing so is because they see potential profit.
There’s a major difference between making more than average and being a billionaire. You know what’s the difference between making 500k a year and making a billion a year? About a billion.
I mean Valve has a game store called Steam, but what’s the actual position they have? There are competing game stores - both digital and physical - and Valve isn’t trying to run their competition out of business with shady business tactics? Just by being good at something and therefore running a successful business shouldn’t be illegal or hated by itself - it’s the way the business is being conducted that actually matters. Gaben is free to have yacht or two as long as his company is being run with a healthy mindset, their employees are being paid a fair salary (which I guess is another discussion in it’s own who decides that) and they are not screwing their competition nor their customers up.
They don’t need to actively run out their competition because they already have enough of the market that they’re the default option. Just like Microsoft doesn’t need to try and actively stop MacOS or Linux from existing.
I don’t care how many yachts Gaben owns, he’s free to do whatever he wishes as long as he provides me a great service that I’m willing to use money towards.
And Microsoft did try really hard back in the day to make Linux go away. Luckily OSS community was already large enough that they were able to fight the legal cases and the whole thing didn’t dry up. Nowadays Microsoft endorses Linux because they decided they can squeeze value out of other people’s free work for themselves (and because pretty much the entire server industry runs on Linux anyways).
Steam didn’t get to where it is because of market abuse but because of providing a good service, or at least a service that was better than anything else at the time by far. Valve are reaping the rewards now, but are also still providing an arguably better service than it’s competitors. It’s a bit odd that you want to punish a company just for being successful.
Valve isn’t perfect and they’re profit driven, but they’re privately owned and the goals isn’t maximizing profit, which isn’t something you can say about most of their competitors.
I’m all in for punishing all billionaires and you’re very naive if you think their goal isn’t too maximize profit. If it wasn’t there’s no reason why they would accumulate enough surplus for Gaben to own six yacht, they would instead reduce their 30% cut and pass the savings to everyone and we would have cheaper games.
Yes, the profit is excessive, but it’s because they have a good product where the competition has not really been putting in much effort and letting Valve get away with it for so long.
Valve’s goal isn’t to maximize profit because they don’t have shareholders that demand it. If they really wanted to maximize profits then there’s a whole lot more to squeeze out of Steam and the games they made. And yes I agree Valve can lower their cut and still make bucket loads of money, but I highly doubt that if they did reduce their cut it would actually lead to cheaper games except for a maybe a few. Because just like Valve, the devs and publishers are profit driven and why would they turn down a potentially bigger profit?
I guess steam could have avoided making billions if they had never improved their launcher since Half Life 2. Not improving products and keeping it as crappy as possible so people stay away from it is one business strategy of ensuring people are deterred from using it.
Shame they kept improving and made something people want to use.
Running a crappy service nobody wants to use is more effective. Even better if it is so bad the company goes bankrupt. That’s how to successfully avoid money.
Okay, but is Gaben more deserving of this than white replacement supporter, anti-trans fearmonger and apartheid diamond mine baby Musk? Than makes people piss in bottles in warehouses Bezos?
Is what steam does more predatory than basically every major music publisher (the big three), than MPAA? Than OpenAI? Than Meta? Than the streaming services? Than Nintendo? Than Apple? Than Google? Uber?.. And so on and so on.
So why pick on Valve? I’d go after fucking taco bell before Valve. Make it make sense.
Shame you’re getting so downvoted. People are so determined to believe in good philanthropic billionaires that they forget the system that allows the accumulation of such ridiculous wealth doesn’t work for nice philanthropic people. It was like this with Elon musk, before he sacked his publicists (my guess) before the cave diver thing. People were saying he was going so save humanity or some shit. All he’s done is fuck up twitter. Same with this guy. I use steam and I think my steam deck is a cool little machine but that doesn’t inspire me to tongue the sweaty arsehole of an obscenely rich guy.
Even if you believe that all privately owned capital is intrinsicly evil, you still ought to go after companies from most to least problematic within a specific category, no?
That is, for digital storefronts, start with the likes of Epic or in a broader digital gaming space in general, Microsoft or Ubisoft. Go after Steam when you’ve cleaned up the rapists, backroom dealers and collusionists.
You think humanity is unable to take care of two things at once?
You think Epic is worse when Valve has 70% of the market so they’re in a position to ruin everything in a second? You realize that the PC gaming market is dependent on the goodwill of a single guy?
Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.
I gotta keep it real with you: Nothing about the trailer looks interesting to me. My viewpoints on Doom are pretty colored due to Mick Gordon’s claims and the poor combat and traversal loops in Eternal.
Looking at the trailer and reading the article, it’s clear they’re going back to the doom 1 roots with the way the projectiles feel like it’s a 2D top down shooter.
That’s the way it’s supposed to feel imo, and I dig the direction they’re heading and the combat definitely felt like oldschool 2D top down shooters were supposed to feel: Dodge everything, never stop firing.
What I didn’t like about Eternal was being forced to use specific weapons to kill certain enemies. For me this kind of shooters are all about use “the right tool for the job”. If I fancy using the two barrels shotgun from start to finish, just let me do so.
For me Doom 2016 was a hugely more enjoyable experience than Eternal. 2016 is arguably one of the greatest linear single player shooters ever made. Eternal felt like a chore once you had all the tools unlocked and I lost interest shortly after. I could have lowered the difficulty so weapon selection didn’t matter, but that was clearly not the design intent.
Ultrakill does the “swap between weapons quickly for interesting combos” much better IMO – it’s not necessary but it’s a value add and it’s super fun to pull off.
I lowered the difficulty, and I were able to kill bigger enemies with the weapon of my choice. But they became bullet sponges. There’s no fun in that. I too prefer 2016, I like my shotgun.
Sounds more like an “easy mode” thing. Have certain enemies immune to certain guns on the harder difficulties. Want to just use the shotgun? Play easy mode. Want to be more strategic? Play a harder difficulty.
Okay, so while you can’t literally use nothing but the SSG for the entirety of Doom II (especially since you don’t get it until MAP02), you can comfortably use it at least 90% of the time on UV. Shells are plentiful throughout the game.
That isn’t the point. The point is you shouldn’t feel shoehorned into playing a specific intended route. Doom is about turning off your brain and slaying.
I dunno, I’m someone who was fine with the changes to combat introduced in Doom Eternal, but was honestly really turned off by how much id was kinda huffing their own farts with the story. The first game had Doomguy punch any attempts at exposition. The second turned Hayden into an Angel, the AI friend into God, the demons are extraplanar aliens that are being used for energy by the angels, and now the Doom Slayer is some destined force of cosmic balance. The little bits were of larger lore were kinda funny in the first game, it became flanderized in the second, and now for a prequel I’m worried id’s managed to fit their entire head up their own ass trying to convince everyone how cool their space marine is.
Yeah, the exposition was part of what made DE weaker to me. Too much plot lead to losing the plot. The gameplay was fun enough overall, and I enjoyed a lot of the changes. But it was also too fuckin much keyboard ballet and pattern recognition for my tastes. If I want to kill something in a way that’s not the prescribed way, I want to be able to do that. But it became a formula and that’s not a playstyle I like because it bores me. It becomes math homework. Couple that formulaic approach with the fuckin massive swarms of unrelenting enemies and you end up having to fight like a robot. I preferred the 2016 mantra of fight like hell.
God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.
Yeah that feeling of spacial awareness as you’re kiting around groups of enemies. Helps to have simple, easily identifiable level geometry for that matter.
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.
It makes sense to delist games you can’t play in another country due to not being able to make an account so that someone doesn’t buy your game and then go for an automatic refund after finding out they can’t play it, but still a dick move.
Sony's always kind of been uncool like this. Before, all PSN games weren't available on PC, so it didn't affect regions that couldn't register for PSN.
They signed a contract with Sony saying they’d require PSN to play the game. They knew this would be a requirement. It’s not like PSN suddenly isn’t available worldwide. They were fine with the deal until players got upset and now they want out of the deal to save face.
The problem was never the PSN requirement, it was dropping it on people months after launch. No one would be pissed if it had been enforced from day one.
They don’t want out, they want sony to wise the fuck up and get with the program.
All I’m saying is, this isn’t some planned-in-advance good cop bad cop routine.
Agreeing to terms isn’t the same as watching your business partner mismanage the customer base to the point your lunch goes up in flames.
Sony is the publisher. Launching the game in countries that don’t even have PSN is 100% on them. Sony is taking action that makes no fucking sense in context, no matter what Arrowhead agreed to.
Lay with dogs, get flees. I don’t pity Arrowhead for signing an anti-consumer contract with an anti-consumer company for money and then realized it hurt their image with consumers. This is the consequences of actions. Maybe their next game will be self published. That was always an option. They didn’t pick that. They picked this.
Yes, you’re right. Arrowhead aren’t playing good cop. They deeply regret their decision. As they should. They ruined an amazing game by giving control of it over to Sony. I still agree with the OP. Fuck Arrowhead for ruining an awesome game by giving Sony control.
Your approach to discussion is similar to that of a wrecking ball.
Next time, just add a single sentence along the lines of “still glad seeing everyone involved anti-consumer bullshit crash and burn”.
That’s still a valid take. But you’re not gonna see the improvement in the industry we all want realized without caring about the nuances, or acknowledging how and when most people actually care.
I think the reason I’m most glad I’m not a lawyer is bc then I would believe that that tiny text is a meaningful gotcha that some how justifies Sony being stupid. No, it wasn’t required bc you could play without signing in. Tiny words don’t define reality.
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