That’s what you get when you don’t want to pay people for their work and try to keep teams together. The newbies aren’t going to care about the rich history of the games they’re banging out code for at 3 AM on a Saturday.
The usual cycle. They get good, get big, get shit, get insolvent or bought up until there’s no bigger fish anymore (in which case you have to live with shit until they get insolvent after a long time).
It’s what happens when you operate your company with an accountant mentality. The focus is 100% on money, and 0% on creativity.
They always realize too late that customers won’t just give you money, you have to offer them something decent in exchange, but accountants don’t know how to do that, which is why you NEVER let accountant craft the business strategy for a company.
If they try to offer suggestions, you scream at them to get back to their hole and count the money like they’re supposed to, and when their opinion is needed, it will be solicited, which will be NEVER.
The irony is that they actually have some pretty unique and creative ideas spread out in most of their open-world games despite the jokes about how they’re all the same. If they cared about making good shit and not just money, they could have a game that rivals or surpasses Grand Theft Auto.
You cheer this on, but what are the odds that saudi arabia buys them up?
How many things do you want owned by the worst country bar none for human rights? (yes I am aware the US is racing to catch up, but is nowhere near as bad per capita).
I’m not sure how much I should care. I haven’t bought a Ubisoft game in decades anyway. They don’t make anything I need, so it’s not like it’s an inconvenience to boycott.
Where did you read me saying it was their fault, or that I expected them to stop it?
I said neither thing.
All I am saying is it’s something to pay attention to, and its not good when media sources are bought by the saudis.
Why keep this in mind? In case there is ever somewhere that does make this relevant. Like maybe it should be in the eyes of the public more such that its a political talking point so regulating agencies are less happy with letting companies be sold to SA.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat because they’re not as worried as you are about the hypothetical odds of the buyer being Saudi Arabia, and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
You took a leap from someone being excited about a company they hate hypothetically being bought, down their throat
I’m just going to stop you right there. You’re reading in a whole lot of malice into a pretty benign comment pointing out why someone might care in spite of not caring about their games.
and what downstream effects that might have on American culture.
I don’t believe any specific country was named in the context of that point. The USA was only brought up to preempt comments derailing the point of my comment by bringing it up.
You underestimate my level of cynicism at this point. You also underestimate my disrespect for the average gamer. If they’re not lapping up one form of propaganda, they’re lapping up another.
Absolutely the case, but we can’t throw nuance to the wind just because bad things will continue to happen. SA propaganda is definitely note worthily worse than many other forms.
Whats more, I feel that gaming generally is more focused on trying to use marketting dark patterns to encourage spending than pushing any messages typically. This makes them, in my mind, even more vulnerable as they won’t even be expecting it as their viewpoints change over time.
Every now and then someone calls for a boycott, and I say that I’ve already been boycotting them all my life, and didn’t even know it.
Alternatively, sometimes there are calls to boycott something, and it turns out I’ve been boycotting them for years over some old atrocity. For instance, United Airlines gets boycotted regularly, but I’ve been boycotting them for decades, for lots of other shitty behavior (destroying guitars, beating up doctors who refuse to give up their paid-for seat, etc.), as well as having the highest fares in the business.
The Sands of Time series and Beyond Good and Evil are incredible, and they’re on gog. I’m thinking of getting them, but I have no desire whatsoever for anything that Ubisoft, EA or Activision makes.
I found it surreally hard to find new dance game - until I discovered that much of the player community had (I guess?) moved to an open source game engine called StepMania.
I play StepMania happily enough, now. It is nice how many different songs I can now add with community contributed step configurations.
Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.
So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c
All you had to do was make good and fun games. How do you fuck THAT up??? Especially when you were already doing it.
And not to mention…
“Hey guys, what can we make that people really want?”
“I hear people all the time over the last decade asking for a new Splinter Cell game.”
“Yeah, ok, Brad. We’ll call that plan B… Every year with this asshole. Does anyone have any REAL ideas???”
Because fuck gamers, right, Ubi? Expedition 33 showed the world what current games makers can do when pricks in suits arent around to muddy the waters. The quicker UBI folds, and all that talent leaves to make something that they actually want to make the better.
I have a lifetime boycott of all things Ubisoft for this very reason. I bought game after game after game from the late 90’s until early 2000’s. 100% of them were legal purchases and with the CD in the drive… "please insert CD " error
Then I became the lead developer for gameloft.com and saw how completely incompetent the French leadership of the company is. Absolute morons to the highest levels.
Never another penny shall be conveyed to Ubi from my holdings.
edit: You wanna know what I’m talking about? Ok. They import the director from France. He does not speak English, he does not speak Quebecois, which is very different than Parisian French. He has no knowledge of the games industry whatsoever, but is a cherished family friend. He cannot communicate with anybody in written or verbal ways. He shows up for work at 10am and takes 2 hour coffee with other “leadership” and then lunch. Then he comes back from a 2 hour lunch, and him and come C-Level turnip laugh at his Billy Bass for 30 minutes. I am not making any of this up. This man installs a friend he met into the position of Executive Producer. The man’s previous experience was managing an Esso gas station. No embellishment. So I’m the Sr dev and I’m the fucking acting director, account manager, game designer, executive producer, producer, technical producer, project manager, director of production, developer, creative director, QA lead, every god damned thing just to get some corny-ass games produced.
edit2: Laughing at a Billy Bass. A Billy. Bass. Singing. Fish. Laughing at it uproariously.
They just have too many employees and costs. The way they’re organized, they’re stuck with gigantic budget, milquetoast, broad appeal games just to attempt sales they need to break even, with all the inefficiency that comes at that team size… unless they fire a ton of people and split up the rest.
My observation over the past decade is that “medium size” is the game dev sweet spot. Think Coffee Stain, Obsidian, and so on.
Most likely they fucked up their report and they’re using the rules of the exchange to suspend trading until they fix the mistake. But Ubisoft has been running on fumes for some time now, shitting out the same 3 or 4 games over and over again so I doubt their financials are that great.
(Side note: this isn’t actually true - toilets swirl in a particular direction based on the design of the bowl and water jets, not whether or not they’re below the equator)
I saw what I imagine is a tourist attraction demonstrating that it’s “true” but you can definitely see them rotate their arm in opposite directions. They unplug a sink that that carry across the equator.
They naively expected publishers and developers to give a shit.
But after that failure they worked hard for years and contributed and donated to open source projects.
That allowed Linux to become a true competitor in gaming space with zero vendor lock-in.
Whatever their reasons were, the results are objectively positive for nearly everyone.
I doubt it. On the Windows platform, Valve has to do what Microsoft decides. If Microsoft decides all apps are required to go through the Microsoft store app then Valve would be toast.
Good reason to have an independent gaming OS, I suppose 😉
If Microsoft ever pulled this play at least EU probably would like to have a word. Microsoft already got kicked in the balls over here for such moves, and it hurt.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well,” said Mr Newell.
“Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.”
I don’t think that was Gabe “hating” Microsoft; I think it was him recognizing that the Windows Store/appx stuff that Windows 8 pushed was a threat to his business model.
Yes, this is exactly the analysis that I read back then. The Windows Store presented a clear and present danger to Valve’s business model, so it seems that he concluded that the best way to attack it was to make Linux a viable competitor. That’s some long-term thinking right there, which seems to be rare in corporate leadership for a while now.
There was no mention of motive, just of the consequences. Microsoft going the Apple/Google path was/is an existential business threat to a company like Valve. Microsoft’s coming up short on MS Store mitigated the risk, but still you have a platform that is geared toward Microsoft subscription revenue.
Just because those business concerns factor in, doesn’t detract from the positive ways that it has gone so far.
95% of users are on Windows. If MS one day again decided they’re going to try to limit apps to their own store, much like they did with Windows 8 (which is what kicked this whole thing off) or like Android is suddenly doing right now, Steam will be absolutely fucked without an alternative. So SteamOS exists to give them that parachute. They can keep the freedom of PC without the dedication of creating an entirely new desktop OS.
He doesn’t want his company to be beholden to another for it’s future.
Look at all the issues phone app companies have when Google or Apple just kills their businesses on a whim with a tweak of their terms of service language.
Not sure about hate, but the entire Steam Machine thing happened because Microsoft was making noise circa Windows 8 that they were going to take the platform more closed and require sourcing software from the Windows Store, which would shut out things like Steam. So they said “Okay, we’ll make our own operating system with blackjack and hookers. We could take the PC gaming market with us, and we’ll even come for the living room console market and threaten Xbox while we’re at it.” And if anyone in the world is going to get that done, it’s Valve.
Indeed. I would say the Gabecube is essentially just another PC and a little overhyped already. It‘s SteamOS that deserves a lot of praise. Especially with the upcoming desktop version.
I won’t be getting one (because I don’t need one right now) but I’m hyped for 2 reasons.
First is getting a company to come out with an official Linux gaming OS. Not because I want some kind of a corporate OS-s but because bigger game developers have a reason to target Linux as they will see there’s not only a market but a supported market.
And the second is standardized hardware for a Linux platform. It will make game development easier because you can target specific hardware and (together with the previous point) specific OS to make games for Linux. I can’t find the link anymore but a developer once said that the majority of their bug reports came from Linux while Linux was also the smallest platform they supported and most of the probably comes from the fact that you can have so many combinations of hardware and software that offering Linux support costs more than offering Windows support. If that can be reduced to specific hardware and specific OS that would give more of an incentive for developers to try out supporting Linux (even if it’s only SteamOS on a Steam Machine).
I don’t care what Steam Machines and SteamOS can do when they release, I care what they can do 5-10 years down the line. It’s all about getting the ball rolling and once it’s rolling it’ll get to the destination, making gaming on Linux as good as it is on Windows, on its own. I know, I know, gaming on Linux is already pretty good. But gaming on Linux is still dependent on Windows and if MS wants they can screw proton over (for example making UWP mandatory) so getting native games on Linux should still be a goal. And there’s also the lack of official support from other companies in the gaming space. The most obvious is most popular online games not working on Linux due to anti-cheat but there’s also the fact that some more niche peripherals are hard to use due to no official drivers. It took some tinkering to get my Thrustmaster steering wheel to run, which instantly is a no-go for the average gamer. We’re like 90% of the way there to make Linux a great platform for gaming but that last 10% is going to require collective effort to achieve and that’s really difficult to achieve.
That guy was roasted on Twitter for that comment, and rightfully so. Most bug reports came from Linux users because Linux users actually know how to file them. Windows users are learned helplessness little rats, they see software as black boxes and developers as evil wizards who don’t talk to anyone. Complaining about software to them is speaking to the Eldrich gods and risks burning their retinas and throwing them into madness by their answer.
Linux user knows that software is just something people do, and if you ask nicely and comcompetently, then a human being will try their best to assist you. Above all, Foss users are drilled that if something doesn’t work, report it so it might get fixed in the future. It’s part of the collaborative effort into software openness, bug reports are free QA. Unlike proprietary culture that sees bug reports as customer support requests.
It was a most poignant situation because, as reported by another developer who blogged about Linux support positively, all of the bug reports filed by Linux gamers are about bugs that affect everyone playing the game and not Linux specific support requests. Since Linux users know how to file bug reports and have done so before, they are usually of higher quality than Windows users bug reports who don’t know how to extract information out of their system or might not even have the tools to do so.
Had to look up the tweet specifically for this. So here it is
It’s not actually bug reports and it wasn’t the majority. It was automated crash reports where over 20% came from Linux which at that point amounted to less than 0.1% of the sales and most of them were driver related issues. That issue is hopefully solved as driver support has gotten better over the years, but it had nothing to do with Linux users reporting more often or being more thorough in their bug reporting.
Complement with the alternative view offered by the developer of ΔV: Rings of Saturn. Also, there’s a lot of erased responses and contradicting tweets he made.
Yes, I recall that one developer saying that Linux users provided ultra-detailed, highly technical bug reports that helped immensely in finding and fixing bugs for everyone, or something like that. I think they even said that Linux users were in a way providing free QA.
Edit: ah, yes, I see you linked the positive post below. Thanks!
I would bet against this. I think people who buy a steam machine (and same for steam deck) will know what they get into.
And the device is focused on gaming and the games will probably run worse on that hardware if one installs Windows. Therefore I think that people who want to use Windows will not buy a steam machine.
I would be surprised if the average person knew how to install an OS. The OS generally comes with the PC so the average user never need to install an OS. I imagine the average user doesn’t even have a USB stick to turn into bootable media and that’s just the first step. You have to know how to turn it into bootable media (the easiest way expects you to already have Windows) and then if the BIOS doesn’t automatically boot into it you have to know how to go into the BIOS to change the order and then you have to get through the installation. No average user is going to get through all that. Anyone doing that is already capable of installing Linux themselves and they’re probably more willing to give Linux a try because they can always install Windows if they don’t like it.
I can’t remember how many OSs I’ve installed at this point, and if the amount of frustration I feel when Windoes does an update and decides it’s time to ask half or more of the Starting for the First Time! questions is at all indicative of the fear and dread someone who has never installed an OS in their life before feels, these people would rather return the machine than pay $200 for Windows+installation, and installing it themselves is out of the question. I might be surprised, but the average user, even the average gamer, is unikely to want that hassle.
The actual software target is their Steam Linux Runtime container. So all you need to install is the container environment, and if your 3rd party OS does that for you then you’re already done.
Pretty spot on, it was so worth it to remember, that Valve actually seemed to remember.
Their first go at it was “make a viable platform and the developers/publishers will make the effort to come over, and hardware partners will step up with offerings because of Valve’s brand strength and fear of the Microsoft Store screwing everything up”. That didn’t work, and Microsoft Store also didn’t pan out as far as Valve and others feared, but they have been kind of screwing up the platform particularly for games as they chase other things that would be subscription revenue instead of transactional revenue.
Valve learned they needed to work harder to bring the platform to the Windows games, so heavy investment in Proton. They learned that they had to take the hardware platform in their own hands because the OEMs aren’t committed until they see proof it can work for them. They learned that the best way to package their improved efforts was with a “hook” with mass-market appeal, enter the Steam Deck, recognizing the popularity of the Switch form factor and bringing it to the PC market at a time no one else was bothering.
So now they have a non-Android, non-Windows ecosystem that covers handheld, console/desk, and VR with a compelling library of thousands and thousands of games…
They’ll sell games for 227, 375, and 510 UbiPoints^TM^. The UbiPoints^TM^ are only redeemable on their online shop, and are only purchasable in units of:
$10 for 50 UbiPoints^TM^
$50 for 275 UbiPoints^TM^. That’s 10% more UbiPoints^TM^ for free!)
$150 for 938 UbiPoints^TM^. That’s 25% more UbiPoints^TM^ for free! Our best deal ever!
Why is it necessary to go on the attack over a past attempt that didn’t work? That’s how innovation functions. Sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you don’t, but everyone learns from the process.
They get paid to spread FUD, lots of actors would prefer the current approach with Windows to continue, pcgamer included (just disable ublock and watch the advertisements they run, you will get an idea on why they don’t want a successful prebuilt).
Thank god one can see how it will work right now, just try to game in any desktop Linux, it works wonders.
Cause if you dont give reality checks, you end up with shit like Theranos when idiots run wild with hype and hope, and fall to their knees with mouths wide open before even knowing WTF is going on or if it works.
Valve did such a good job learning from the original Steam boxes too. The controller was weird, but the best parts lived in in the Steam Deck and the new controller. The incompatibility issues with the original Steam OS showed how critical getting Proton right would be to the Steam ecosystem. Multiple hardware configurations for each SKU made it harder to verify compatibility, so now they have just 1 for each hardware type. A dedicated Steam Link box was kind of a waste, but now Steam Link works great on Android TV, Android phones, and on Steam itself. And then they built Remote Play Together on top of Steam Link, which is amazing.
Many other companies just abandoned their failures, but Valve took the time to analyze the “why” and salvage the good parts to them. No company is perfect, but kudos to them.
The article is hardly attacking Valve. Just acknowledging how they got here with a bit of good nature ribbing. Nothing wrong with being able to laugh at ourselves.
I mean, they claim there’s one, but evidence says otherwise. Them spending a lot on their shitty arena shooter with boats didn’t make it any higher quality.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne