shareholders…owners… who cares about the vernacular. There’s always the ownership. An organization of any size is only as good as it’s current ownership.
People grow old and eventually die. When ownership passes on from someone who isn’t in it for the money to someone who just wants money… even the greatest of organizations can and will fall. I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
shareholders…owners… who cares about the vernacular.
Turns out, quite a few people when those words are describing very different things.
I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
This is how I know that you don’t know much at all. GabeN has changed valve from being a game developer making amazing things like Half Life and Team Fortress 2, to microtransactions and no games. A continuation of what Gabe is doing is pretty much in line with the rest of the industry, except NBA 2k4 would be the last one and it would have microtransaction DLC for the next 15 years.
I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
Sorry but I agree with the guy on this. It’s 2024, idgaf about valve IP anymore, they can ruin their games with microtransactions and I honestly won’t care. I use Valve like you and the rest of the world use it: buying and managing a collection of games. And right now, Steam has good practices in that regard. I can get refunds if I play a game for a couple of hours and I don’t like it. I can access any of the games I bought, they haven’t gone Sony on me and restricted my purchases. They’ve proven themselves to be good guys in this and I too fear the day GabeN is replaced by some fuck who just wants to get a quick few million, so he shits all over us and our collections of games.
You’re simping for a shop. The PC Shop wars have managed to be even more pathetic than the console wars.
I have Steam, Epic Games Store, GoG Galaxy, Battle.net, XBox, Ubisoft and EA’s thing installed and they all miraculously work since I’m on PC and it’s not a locked down consoles. I get to play games that aren’t on steam!
Valve is the company responsible for unlocking my PC for gaming. Most games can now be played without using Windows and Valve is mostly responsible for that. Because most game developers do not care and would rather force you to use proprietary OS than let you use what you prefer.
I have not looked it up but I do recall proton being a thing way before the steam console was.
Okay I looked it up before posting. The deck was released in 2022 and the initial release of proton was on 2018. Steam has had native clients for Linux and native Linux support for dota for ages too.
It’s true that their recent big push is because of the handheld but it’s also true that they have been pushing for gaming on Linux since way before.
You are absolutely right, I forgot about it. Still, this shows that they have been pushing for popularizing Linux (for their own devices, sure, but in exchange benefiting everybody else) far longer. As any company, avoiding blind trust is advice but they are kinda cool.
In anticipation of their own OS and ecosystem. They are not the saviours of gaming as being professed by so many, they charge 30% to sell there and lock your games under DRM. It’s great Linux has become a bit more of a thing but still far from mainstream outside of custom builds like SteamOS.
Their os is based on Linux, every tool they develop and improve can be used in any other Linux systems. I’m not calling them saviours of gaming, I’m happy that they improved the Linux gaming experience by a fuckton for everyone not only the people using their products.
Linux has always been a thing, gaming on Linux is what was not, and steam has always had support for it, I remember playing native Linux dota back in 2015 ish on uni.
I’ve been playing several games installed through steam offline, so idk about them locking games under drm. For example, stardew valley, grim dawn. Beside that, most other games I play have an online component so I would need to authenticate in some form anyway, like path of exile, last epoch.
They are not saviours, but the competition is so bad that it’s not strange for people to see the difference.
30% seems a lot yeah but I’m not discussing that, I’m talking about them being pro Linux as a policy way before the deck.
Indeed yes, I did mention SteamOS (I think that was the original name). Steam hasn’t always supported Linux, it was years after it’s release (maybe ten?) before they did from what I remember.
Yes it’s good, but my part of the discussion is highlighting they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, otherwise there would be more evidence of it including lower fees, no DRM and and whatnot.
How is Dota on Linux? It’s, well, a bit crap on Mac as the menu bar gets in the way (tried fiddling with settings but doesn’t seem possible to fix it) and other stuff.
Eh, depends. The laptop was not that good by any means, sure, but dota has always been the most demanding moba out of the competition, by far (league/hots). But yeah, then I got a proper desktop and it ran flawlessly ever since.
What are you even talking about? I have all of those installed as well, and a few others on top. I’m incredibly wary of any of them though - I don’t know if GoG will be around in 10 years, I don’t trust epic as far as I can throw them, I don’t want to support ubisoft and EA, and Blizzard has made so many questionable choices that I’m at the point where I don’t want to support them AND I don’t believe they can make good games anymore.
It’s about trust. I trust valve to allow me access to my games more than I trust the others. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the others, where did I say that?
Valve are major players in Linux being a viable option for gaming and actively fighting the Microsoft monopoly for PC gaming. Not in line with other players in the industry.
They are actively developing proton as well as their own controller support for any games within their platform.
What is the rest of the industry doing in line with this?
I played Dota 2 from its first beta release, and many years after. Eventually stopped about 2 years ago. In that time I put 4 digit sum into that game, and received nothing that would give me any gameplay advantage. I did it to support the game, that also worked on Linux.
I understand that MTX are not ideal, but there are very different approaches to them. And at least in Dota 2, I can and did support it.
That is fair, Dota 2 is cosmetic only. TF2 on the other hand, is selling items with stats, mostly sidegrades rather than upgrades, but they do play into a certain kind of play, which does make it a de facto upgrade if your style of play matches the items use case.
Hope you enjoy your Steam game library being ripped out of your hands or a forced subscription or recurring purchase or mandatory timed video ads showing up whenever someone who can make decisions for the future of the Valve LLC believes that is the right decision.
The fact is, whoever has possession (e.g. OWNERSHIP) of the decisions for a company can choose to do this, to not do this, or to do something else, or nothing at all. Inevitably decisions by whoever owns that control will change from the predecessors and eventually someone or some combination of someones constituting the deciding majority will sell out. No one lives forever.
Epic Games Store, Gog, UPlay (or whatever ubisoft’s is called), Origin/EA Downloader have all not done this and yet they’re not controlled by Gabe Newell.
Fact is that steam, no one else, started the road down the licensing and not ownership of games path we are firmly on with regards to PC.
Most PC’s don’t even have a disc drive any more, it’s all downloads.
And Gog is the only one that still allows ownership and not licensing of software.
“hurr durr nobody else has does it yet so clearly it can never happen”
Nobody else has 70%+ market share. The others are all competing for a bigger slice, they can’t afford to be predatory.
The market leader can and the rest will follow suit. Haven’t you seen overdraft charges (just now having laws change…decades after becoming a problem), minimal interest rates on savings accounts, ads in streaming services across the board (netflix wasn’t first but the second they did it prime announced it), a reigning in of account sharing based on IP addresses for streaming services (happening across the board after a couple of big players did it)…
I get that you just can’t imagine a world where your game library is RIPPED out of your hands after a 30 day notice of service changes… i’ve seen it happen time and time again for various platforms and games. Digital services can and will fuck you eventually.
Signed: Hellgate London lifetime subscription holder
I’m sorry my opinion and analysis of these things is different than yours. I guess the difference between you and I is that i’d rather us both have a chance to voice those opinions rather than simply silence what you do not believe in.
I’m not following any dogma or parroting a political party line… i’m not being a fanboy either (which is very dogmatic.) Are you?
An LLC or any other corporate structure can have shareholders. It all depends on the structure laid out in the organizing documents. You may have meant private companies don’t have shareholders, but even that isn’t the case.
They’re talking about being a publicly traded company. Of course every company has stakeholders. Of course everyone who works at Larian likes getting paid for their work.
Not in the rare cases when the company is owned by someone who cares about the product, who resists investor pressures. To some extent Larian, Valve and Nintendo manage it so far.
Decline through endless profit chasing only seems inevitable because profiteering investors are so thoroughly present in nearly every company.
And as far as legally playing their old games in the modern era, your options are to find an old physical copy or subscribe to a subscription service. There is no option to buy games individually. Even back when they did that, your purchases never carried over to their next console. They're awful.
They also straight up refuse to discount anything meaningfully ever. And actively harass anyone streaming gameplay of their games without their permission, and are extremely litigious about emulation that's clearly established as perfectly legal, among a bunch of other shit.
Nintendo accosting influencers who stream games is in this legal grey are. The people Vice gaming spoke about how their legal department cautioned streaming games. They said at the time there is no case law that covers this issue. And it is not known who how the courts would rule.
That's why "to some extent". Nintendo does some unsavory moves, but I'm not sure the point of it is profiteering, especially when it comes to taking things out of sale.
But you can't deny that they put out games of consistent quality, and not overly monetized.
Even when you care about a product, at the end of the day you still have to put a price tag on it, and you'll still have to give fair shares to all the people who worked on it, while saving up as much as you can to invest in more well cared products... without making it so expensive that not enough customers will buy it.
Caring about the product, investing on it and producing something that is actually good and that people place in high value (so they are willing to pay more for it) is not incompatible with maximizing profit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Larian is profitting quite a bit from all the good publicity (imho, well deserved) they are getting for not having gone down the road of predatory monetization tactics.
Probably they would not have been as successful if they had. So I'd argue they are maximizing profits in the best way an independent game studio can.
Choosing to not participate in Subscription services at the moment is likely also in their best interest, profit-wise. Particularly at this point and with this momentum they are having.
Caring about the product is not incompatible with making profit, but it is incompatible with maximizing profit, because then your design priorities must shift to emphasize functionality and entertainment to cutting costs and expanding monetization opportunities.
It's easy to see in gacha games. Even the best of them have to have to obstruct fun to make money, from the way they limit gameplay options so that people will gamble for them to the way that they gate progression behind repetitive daily grind so that people will keep coming back out of habit and FOMO.
Even beyond the monetization itself, great games require a willingness to take time experimenting and polishing, time which would seem like wasted wages to more money oriented companies. Sometimes it pays off, like Larian, but sometimes it doesn't, like the old Clover Studio.
I'm not convinced that the gacha model works for every demographic. And even if it did, I'm sure it's much harder to be successful selling that kind of crap as an independent studio with no prior experience doing that. Maybe exploiting the D&D / Forgotten Realms franchise would have helped.. but after the OGL fiasco (which is a good example of how profit was affected negatively when D&D fans cancelled their D&D Beyond subscriptions on the wake of new plans for monetization by WOTC) I'm not really convinced the game would have made as much money as they can with this different focus.
Reputation also affects profits. And long term, I'm convinced Larian approach will prove to be more profitable than it would have been had they chosen to enter the wide and unforgiving world of competing RPG gacha games by introducing "yet another one" in a market that is increasingly tight, and with a public that is getting more and more tired of it.
Yeah, Diablo Immortal / 4 or probably even Fallout 76 made money with those tactics... but I don't believe those profits are gonna last that long, or reach an overall total as high as could have been when you think long term. They have managed to get a lot of people to stop caring about those franchises, so I'd argue they are actually burning down their golden goose just for a short big burst of cash, instead of actually maximizing the profit they could have made from the goose had they been taking care of it while steadily producing golden eggs people actually wanna buy...
Im still deciding if I want to do another playthrough before 2.0 though. Maybe I’ll actually play SE through past the first rocket launches and that should give at least another 800 hours.
I saw Alan Wake II is also recommended to be run from an SSD. I don’t play the latest titles so my question is, is this a new trend or has it been like this for some time?
It’s recent. Previously many games were also targeting PS4 and Xbox One, which used slower hard disks. But that is now becoming a thing of the past. Now we should expect more games utilize faster hard disk speeds.
It is, and arguably a very good thing. SSDs vastly improve loading times, so there’s fewer occasions where your character awaits a slow elevator, or shimmies slowly through a crawl space. Or, just have you stare at a loading screen.
Not to mention the issues in multiplayer, where 7 players on SSDs need to wait for a hard drive player to load the level before they can start.
Either they will pony up the cash or resort to piracy. But in regards to the second option: All publishers and storefront loose without regional adjusted pricing for the regions.
Be very keen to see steam OS everywhere, there’s a vetted interest in valve getting this widely adopted (more devices running it means more eyes on steam and more potential sales)
I’m keen to see the hardware variations device manufacturers come up with when they can just throw steam os on them and it all “just works”
Erroneous bans, they intend to reverse them once AMD implements a fix:
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban. @AMD
I’m not really looking for spoilers so I only took a quick glance, but it looks neat. I heard the main quest line wasn’t that long so I’ve been avoiding it; however, if there are that many powers to unlock, it can’t be too short. I’ll probably resume those quests tonight.
They become semi-side quests once you reach a certain point in the main quest line. Technically, I think you only have to collect just one to three of them to finish the story. I’m not 100% sure though, I too have been too distracted by non-mainline quest thingies.
I just did my first one after about 50 hours and I really hope there’s not many of them… I didn’t know what I was doing or if I was doing it right untill I passed it.
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