I want an actual real time strategy game. All popular RTSs are actually just about tactics and micro. I mean every SC2 guide will tell you that up to a very high level of play, if you’re just doing more you’ll be more efficient and win regardless of strategy. Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”? That’s strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players, but thats what’s necessary and optimal for playing SC2 and most RTS games well
I love this concept; I had a friend from school viscerally defend SC: BW as superior to SC2 because in his words SC2 removed skill because of not having the unit select cap that BW did. That’s just less, as you put it, busywork, and then the player is more free to consider army compositions and positioning rather than drawing tons of rectangles. Removing more busywork in favor of actual strategy would be amazing.
Good point. I suppose I was combining the intended definition of micro as in issuing individual or otherwise sufficiently granular actions with the extra categorization of busywork, and indeed in that regard chess is pure micro.
There are types of time management which I think can still be interesting. For example, are you able to afford -- in the resources of time and attention -- optimally micro'ing this important fight? Or are you going to have to yolo it a bit so that you can do multi-task economic tasks at the same time?
Some (much?) of the problem is that (for better or worse) skilled players can and will squeeze the game to optimality in terms of win rate, and that tends to collapse viable tactical and strategic choices. Once those choices have been optimised (the game is largely "solved"), the main way to get better is by being faster, not by being smarter.
Hell, I should be able to upload an economic playbook with hundreds of rules like the one you described, and load it on game start. Then all I have to do is the actual unit movements.
Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.
It’s astounding how much you can “automate” when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.
I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn’t further compress the meta to an even smaller set of “optimal” options.
Supreme commander was what you describe. You setup your factory to make a unit or a set of units and repeatedly build them until canceled or not enough resources. You could zoom out to view the whole map. it was very much a strategy game and not really tactics or micro.
Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:
Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they're not doing anything.
Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that's essentially "all nearby empty resource gathering", so you can queue a dozen workers and they'll distribute themselves as they're created.
Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue "restocks".
Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.
For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:
You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
The auto-rally-point doesn't always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.
But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn't completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the "speed floor", allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.
Because too much of SC2's design catered to the progamer crowd that liked that kind of stuff. They made some things easier from an APM standpoint but intentionally added more things to make the have not APM intense.
They really bet wrong on how popular that approach would be.
Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”? That’s strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players
I agree completely. Related: have you considered turn based strategy games?
I feel like people dont understand, that the RT part in rts will always be the important part.
If you free up macro work, people will micro harder. WC3 got rid of most of the macro demand of SC and in consequence you will lose if you dont micro your units ik battle.
SC1 had build pipe lines and it wad still better to issue commands seperatley, because the player is more flexible.
A strategy is worthless if it csn be executed and the limits of execution create strategy.
Extraordinary pathing and all-select created the a-click deathball, that is one of the most boring ways to see, play and lose to.
That is not true, at least in Age of Empires 2 which is the RTS I’m most familiar. Have a look at the limited viper series to see a good player destroy using only 60 APM. If you make good decisions, you don’t need to click as much.
Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”?
Because while this will make casuals that will play the game for 3 hours and drop it happy, the typical RTS fans will not enjoy this. There is a trade off between queuing a lot of units and having more resources available for other techs. Having units auto produce without any disadvantage is just kind of boring. Then you are just watching the game, not really playing it.
Maybe you should try turn based strategy, if you don’t like real time strategy. In the later, like the name implies, time is the most important resource. You don’t need a lot of clicks, but you need to use it wisely.
Well after their pay-per-download debacle, their latest quarter’s earnings may not be indicative of the shit that is coming down on them. There are dark clouds on the horizon for Unity.
The best programmers there probably see the writing on the wall. The best small game dev studios will also.
I think unity is going to see a big quality drop even if it manages to get out of this death spiral.
And I’m still curious if they’ll get targeted by regulators for the anti-competitive shit that started this (the whole thing was intended to strong arm developers into using their ad platform to get an exemption from the new pricing model and put a rival ad platform out of business).
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Thanks for commenting, it’s interesting to get an inside perspective instead of just speculating.
Out of curiosity, how are they (executives/management) communicating about this whole thing internally? Like are they trying to downplay the impact of that screw up or are they being genuine in how they present the situation?
I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
Yeah, at the time I assumed that the people intentionally spreading in game were just trolling because there was no actual danger to themselves. Reality proved that tons of people are fine with harming themselves as long as they harm others at the same time.
nah. There’s some footage out there of people going maskless and when pressured to put masks on for their safety, they proudly proclaimed that they currently have it, so they can’t get infected again. This ignores the fact that you can catch different strains and you probably aren’t going to double the severity of your symptoms from having two infections. Infection duration on the other hand might be doubled. Turns out selfish people are very, very often stupid people.
This is why the literal only thing that would work is making it legal to shoot people who are unmasked if they’re coughing (which is insane, but insane is the baseline I guess)
I used to think there was nothing more stupid in zombie movies than uninfected humans just leaving each other alone and killing off the zombies. Why would you bother taking guns from other people when you have so many just lying around after 90% of the people died? If everyone just killed 10 zombies, the whole thing would be cleared up. I don’t think that anymore.
Eh, gaming journalism just wants clicks to get ad-revenue. They would write an article about anything. Gabe waking up in the morning is news worthy to them.
I’m looking forward to the ward between factions posting the two quotes in comments sections every time a game gets delayed for the next several decades
They are objectively less popular with the newer stuff.
Tiny Tina’s Wonderland is at 25% for recent reviews, 70% overall. That’s not glowing. And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott. I don’t think Borderlands has the pull it once did.
Tiny Tina is a spin-off, and I doubt the EULA changes will result in much more than the Modern Warfare 2 boycott. Borderlands 3 still sold multiple millions of copies before it even had its first discount, and over 15 million copies total. It was still in high enough demand after an Epic exclusivity period to get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players when it eventually launched on Steam. It’s one of very few multi-billion dollar franchises in video games.
Also Tiny Tina was actually a fuckin blast to play through. It doesn’t drag like some of the main games do, the humor is actually fun because you’re basically playing a game within a game and it works as far as D&D stuff goes imo.
Also I actually liked being able to customize my character for once. I don’t know about the other voices, but I actually really liked the douchey/cocky voice I ended up going with. There are some fun lines for different quests and such.
That’s a fair call on Tiny Tina being a spin off, but with it and the movie kinda tarnishing the name it seems like a bit of an uphill battle.
3 did well, but the game before and after it didn’t. Add in people having less money to throw at this stuff and it being “a real fans” price, possible exclusive deals, etc. I just think it’s putting up it’s own road blocks constantly. The franchise isn’t hot and it’s fresh off the Borderlands movie joke.
IMO They should fire this wide and fast, keep the price low and sell it everywhere, earn back that trust and good will. Make people fall in love with BL again.
Fresh off the Borderlands movie, they sold tons of their Pandora collection, and concurrent players shot up. It may not have been the movie they wanted it to be, but it mostly achieved the same goal.
And with their new ELUA a lot of people are planning to boycott.
I hope so, but i was expecting more people to boycott Nintendo, and yet the switch 2 was the fastest selling console of all time. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone does the old “I’m sure it’s fine if I get a copy”
I think people on the internet vastly overestimate the support these boycott movements actually have. For every person here or wherever else saying they’re not buying a switch, there’s 10,000 parents buying one for their kids, or people that just wanna play mario kart with their friends.
And typically the boycotters weren’t even the sort of people who were buying a switch 2 to begin with. Maybe there’s a subsection of them that will result in some loss of sales but it would be in the fraction of a percent. There’s no surprise to me when gamer boycotts fail.
With that said, the sales were unexpectedly high. Maybe people trying to get ahead of potential future tariffs were the reason. I thought cost of living was fucked and nobody could afford anything.
I’ll be waiting for the inevitable OLED refresh anyway.
There’s also just a substantial number of people that were just astroturfers, I think.
There’s been a LOT of crazy attacks on the switch 2 to try to ‘justify’ a boycott. I think my two favorite was that the gamechat button noise when you hit is actually saying saying a slur, or maybe that the rumble turns off after a while not to protect your hands from the rumble (which has been found to be bad for you), but because Nintendo cheaped out on a rumble motor that overheated too easily.
The switch 2 joycons don’t have a rumble motor. Like, it’s a whole thing they’re super proud of, because it’s so precise they just use the rumble really fast to play music instead of having a speaker.
Honestly, the whole idea of trying to boycott nintendo has pretty much always been over astroturfed bullshit, or just outright bullshit.
Nintendo gives us so many legitimate reasons to not want to give them money. Who do you think would be behind astroturfing? To my knowledge, it doesn’t usually come in the form of being against one company but in being against a piece of legislation or regulation. People on Lemmy are probably just predisposed to being willing to go against the mainstream when it starts turning shit, or else we’d still be on reddit.
They put their money towards suing the shit out of emulation projects and removing ROM sites.
This is compounded by the fact that they won’t even sell you those ROMs anymore. They only make them available to rent in perpetuity. People are rightly skeptical of a future where Microsoft only makes their games available via Game Pass rather than it just being an economical option, but Nintendo is already doing the thing that people are afraid of.
They’re the last holdout that won’t put their games on PC in an era where console exclusivity doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s no reason to play Zelda at 20 FPS and 360p when, at the time of release, my PC was already quite capable of running the game at acceptable resolutions and frame rates. This is just willfully selling people an inferior product when they have the ability to deliver a better one. Then they have the gall to charge their customers, who already paid $70, even more for an upgrade to finally run those games at acceptable performance on their next console. And in case you think this is me justifying piracy, I didn’t pirate the game; I didn’t play it at all.
I’m a competitive fighting game player, and the way they fight against their own fans for trying to compete in Smash Bros. is atrocious.
They sue and go after emulation projects/ROM sites for modern content just as much as Microsoft and Sony do, MS/Sony just get a pass for some reason. Probably because people try to pirate current-gen content less for them, but they do the exact same thing every time it happens. Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part. Also, it must be said that several times that emu/ROM sites were shut down and Nintendo was blamed it turned out it wasn’t actually Nintendo. Same thing with that whole streaming copystrike issue- turns out it was some random company taking down gameplay videos, not Nintendo.
Sony already does this too, yet again they pretty much universally get a pass for making you permanently lose almost all (if not all) your stuff if you let your sub lapse. Even if you resub, you don’t get it back.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Entirely fair. My understanding is that they’re getting better at this, but after the shitshow that was brawl that’s a low fucking bar. I could point out that smash bros isn’t actually Nintendo (it was HAL, then Sora, then Bandai) but like… lets be real here, it’s Sakurai running the show, and Sakurai basically is working for Nintendo even if he isn’t employed there lol.
Nintendo (and, it must be said, MS/Sony) don’t really go after the old stuff for the most part.
They absolutely do. And again, I probably wouldn’t mind if all of the sites they shut down were hosting games that could be legally purchased in a consumer friendly way, but they can’t. Shutting down the Switch emulator built on ill-gotten code is one thing; buying out the legitimate Switch emulator is a super dick move.
Sony already does this too
Thanks for reminding me. I don’t think of Sony much at all, honestly, but they do tend to lock their retro games behind a subscription, some of which can only be played that way. I think they tend to be time-limited and eventually return to sale in most cases? So not quite as bad as what Nintendo does, but still not admirable. I know you went in a different direction with this, but their subscription incentives are theirs to decide; I just hate it when something is only available via subscription when it doesn’t have to be.
In my opinion this is just a bad faith argument. Of course they’re not putting their games on PC, they would cannibalize their own sales. Trying to pretend that you should boycott Nintendo for not actively destroying their own economic model is certainly A Take.
Boycott is a strong word. All of the other reasons I don’t buy their stuff is because of what they do with the revenue that I would give them, but in this case in particular, it’s because I don’t buy bad products when I can instead buy good products. I’m certainly not about to spend $530 plus sales tax to play Tears of the Kingdom at acceptable frame rates on a machine that’s going to sit under my TV collecting dust when I’m done with the game. I already have a PC that could run it if they made it available there, and it would still run it better than Switch 2. Of course they’re doing what they’re doing because it’s more lucrative for them, but if that’s not aligned with what matters to me, then I’m not inclined to give them my money. There are so many other games out there worth playing instead that respect me more as a customer.
No, it’s a sad tale that would be amusing if it wasn’t real people, and has occupied a lot of brain time at 4chan and among gamergate-involved persons. If you want to know more, knowyourmeme has a reasonably objective article.
My understanding is the drama from resulted in him leaving before BL3 was written
Borderlands 3 sold over 20 million, that’s pretty significant even if it is less than 2. The overall quality has certainly gone downhill, but sales is all the companies care about. In my experience boycotts by people who know what’s going on behind the scenes never amount to anything - it’s always the potential buyers who don’t know or care about that stuff that ultimately determine whether a game’s successful or not.
Friendly reminder: A “DRM-Free” game is only as preserved as the hard drive space you dedicate to it. If GoG goes down tomorrow then you are looking for torrents, same as everyone else.
That said: GoG has been doing this basically since year one (I want to say they lost and regained Interplay’s library like five times?). On the one hand, I love that I get that “hey, buy it now or never. Here is a discount code” warning. On the other hand… this feels like I would be calling it out as manipulative FOMO bullshit were it any other company.
Although… it is a pretty safe bet that MS aren’t interested in going back to GoG until the next time their online ecosystem collapses. So probably a “reasonable” bit of FOMO for those who love the SP campaigns of these games.
Short of suing me for it (after finding out who I am and making sure I own the games), how would they do that for non-DRM games whose installer lives on my hard drive and that I can install whenever I want, wherever I want?
Is the “everything is a rental and you use it on sufferance until we say so” bullshit so ingrained now that people are no longer able to conceive of other ways for things to work?
Games are constantly pulled from the Steam store, but that doesn’t result in owners losing access to the game, GOG is no different. The only thing that will happen is they stop selling the game, it’s standard practice.
GOG also offer offline installers that would be impossible for even GOG to take away from you.
There are differences with buisness models. Steam sells a license to use a software. This license can be revoked. GOG sells you a copy that you can download and run any time later without needing it. They can’t take that away from you.
I’m talking about the content on the store. If you don’t download it, then they can remove it and it’ll be gone, regardless of if you purchased it already. That said, they can still do some shady shit with content you physically have too. Sony once put a root kit on their CDs that would brick people’s computers if they tried to rip them to the hard drive.
It will be removed from sale on 13 of December, but everyone who already bought it will continue to be able to download it from GOG indefinitely. Furthermore, GOG has stated their commitment to ensure the game remains compatible with newer computer and operating systems. That’s what the preservation project mentioned in the post is about.
I don’t think so. On my screen I see that post I responded to said this:
The game will be removed on 13. December?
So in my post I tried to explain that the games will still be available to download from GOG, but it will no longer be purchasable. Different people mean different things when they say “removed from GOG”, so I thought this was good to clarify.
It wasn’t really a question in that sense. What I meant by that sentence is that the game is already planned to be removed (from sale), so Blizzard suing GOG wouldn’t make much sense. However that doesn’t mean that GOG/Blizzard can just take the game away from those who already purchased it.
A DRM free store that’s run by the CD Projekt Red guys. It focuses mainly on older games (Good Old Games) but it also got modern DRM free games such as Baldurs Gate 3.
If you’re buying an older game, it’s likely a better option than whatever steam offers as GOG will also try to fix old games that are broken on modern systems.
Yeah normally I would feel the same way about this FOMO style of marketing but normally in that case it’s the company selling it deciding to like remove it from sale to create the FOMO need. In the case it’s another company basically forcing this decision on them so I don’t think it’s bad to let people buy it for cheaper while they still can.
On the other hand… this feels like I would be calling it out as manipulative FOMO bullshit were it any other company.
While I hesitate to type this as it might be perceived as viewing a corporation as a friend, the intent matters, and GOG has a different history than the majority of FOMO abusing game companies. Did they identify that this is probably an opportunity to push some sales? Sure, probably. But I am chill permitting them that right when they’re visibly working to remove FOMO as a commercial strategy.
Say it with me kids: Corporations are NEVER your friends. At best you have mutual interests, for a time.
Just look back to everyone who was all in on Google because “Do no evil” and “They aren’t Apple” and so forth. Unity when they were the underdog relative to Unreal. Reddit when they were the “counter culture” social media. And so forth.
I like GoG a lot and have since they first launched. I also remember the French Monk Incident and so forth.
The underdog is often the one that is most pro-consumer, since that is in their business interest. As soon as the take the lead, the doors to enshittyfication open, because business shifts from getting new customers to not letting them leave. (Of course there are exceptions, but this is the case broadly)
This is true. But things aren’t black and white, there are degrees. For example, there is a big difference between private corporations, and publicly listed ones. The former at least allows for possible decency.
A “DRM-Free” game is only as preserved as the hard drive space you dedicate to it.
You mean, just like any pre digital purchasing game that you own on disks? Or similar to any physical object you ever bought (hard drive space / shelf space), for that matter?
They’re preserving it as much as they’re able to without being a government funded museum.
So we are giving participation awards? GoG use digital preservation as a marketing point. They aren’t doing that. And they are arguably making for a false sense of security (some might go even farther…) when people think that buying a game from a major dev and European publisher is digital preservation.
How would you feel if Crunchyroll started arguing they were the good guys because they were releasing Witch from Mercury for 100 USD?
Now for the fun part!
Or similar to any physical object you ever bought (hard drive space / shelf space), for that matter?
Yeah. As in it is “preserved” up until someone does a cross country move or merges their life with a partner who doesn’t see why you need to have every single Blizzard Battle Chest on a giant shelf in the living room.
You mean, just like any pre digital purchasing game that you own on disks?
Yes. Because bit rot is a thing and people need to be aware of that and actually preserve that data. Hmm, I wonder who could help with that…
They’re preserving it as much as they’re able to without being a government funded museum.
Good news. You don’t have to be a government funded museum. In fact, governments are kind of an active threat to these because they are in a REALLY grey area legally. And publishers (like CD Projekt…) tend to go after them both legally and not legally.
I very much disagree that just having a copy of a game is games preservation but it is part of it. And orgs like The Internet Archive are preserving both the media itself AND the media and culture about said media. And they and their associates put the legwork in to reach out to people who have those big boxes or scratched up discs and preserve things BEFORE it is time to make room for the new baby. And they don’t have fancy deals with publishers to help market for donations. They have to ask.
Are you blaming them for not preserving things more than actual physical objects that you bought are preserved in your house? The whole root of the matter was people complaining about companies obsoleting or taking away games they paid for. What GOG is doing counters just that. It is now once again in your hands and your hands only to preserve and maintain your property, and if the data gets corrupted, you only have time, physics and yourself to blame.
I couldn’t care less about anybody creating some kind of eternal video game archive for archaeologists of the post apocalyptic world to find. I care about if I will still be able to play the games I paid money for in 30 years, provided I keep the data and hardware. How would that last part be the store’s responsibility?
I “blame” them for marketing themselves as a “Preservation Program” when they really aren’t doing anything more than the other stores (in that regard. They are doing amazing work in modernizing some titles… which is arguably not preservation either but that is a different mess).
It’s not McDonald’s responsibility to store large amounts of data either*. So does that mean Ronny Mac should be talking about how buying a twenty dollar Big Mac is preserving video games?
*: also… it kind of IS GoG’s responsibility in this case but that only lasts until the company/site is shuttered. Which is another issue with GoG being about “preservation” when their first responsibility is to make money for CDP.
But the average steam library (from just asking chatgpt because i am lazy) is 30-100 games for a “normal” user and 200-300 games for an “enthusiast”. Assuming 10 GB per game on average (which is woefully small these days) and you are expecting people to spend 1-3 TB of storage on just their game installers alone. AND that is assuming none of those installers get updates and people need to figure out which ones (most of us who lived through The French Monk incident can attest to that).
So what happens is “oh, someone else will back it up” and so forth. And it means EVERYONE is grabbing torrents for Spec Ops The Line and not just the people who didn’t think to buy a copy while they could.
Lawsuits for what? They never promised any customer that they would immediately deliver a working end product. As far as I can make out, they offer early access to an in-development product, with your purchase going toward funding development. It’s more akin to a donation with strings (access to the product).
I’ve literally never paid for Star Citizen. Not sure how I’m supposed to be a sweaty fanboy…
It’s a large scoped game, and from what I’ve seen, they’ve slowly been turning it into an incredibly feature-filled game that goes beyond the scope of what most other games deliver.
Lmao because morons like you keep calling it a scam despite it making massive improvements. They could have cut and run 40 million dollars ago. You just want something to hate on and it’s genuinely pathetic.
You want an actual scam game to bitch and moan about? Go winge about The Day Before. That one actually took the money then shut down their studio like proper scammers. Don’t see them sticking it out while crybabies write up shit like you every 4 months when they get bored.
I’m sick of literal children saying “Don’t release the game if it’s not done! We’re tired of buggy messes!” then a week later saying shit like “Wow this game is still in development? They should release it already wtf.”
You gonna join the losers that made death threats to the Cyberpunk 2077 team to release their game early? Fuck off. The only people still crying about Star Citizen are the ones that bought a ship to find out their garbage PC can’t even run the game or worse - they’re console owners.
I own an Xbox and have zero interest in playing Star Citizen. Still gonna tell everyone it’s a scam and all your bitching can’t change a thing about it lol
My hardware is twice as powerful as anything that existed when the game was supposed to release. Still runs like dogshit. I log in once a year to see if the game is still trash. The game is still trash. It’s not a literal scam, but it might as well be because Chris Roberts hasn’t been able to actually complete a game since Wing Commander. Which I loved, and unfortunately that spurred me to flush $40 in the toilet.
Almost like it was being developed not for the day it began development but for the future when they intend to release it. Almost like optimizations are the last stage in development.
You’re a fucking moron just blabbering about shit you don’t understand and I’m glad you can’t do anything but whine and piss yourself about how your $40 hasn’t given you the best game your little brain could conjure up. It’s been a decade. Grow the fuck up.
I did and it was as worthless as yours. It set out to have an extremely wide scope. It’s not feature creep if it’s intended from the fucking beginning.
That does make sense considering every other developed country has free healthcare and literally 100% of their young men spend every waking hour playing video games.
The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.
I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.
My brother plays games with in app purchases and he claims to know people who have spent $100K on their profiles. I think building a fire using the cash would be less wasteful
I play hearthstone and spend more than that every 3 months to get a complete set of the expansion (well actually now that I think about it, it’s about $150 every three months or so).
I play a lot so my value to time ratio is pretty good but yeah…I don’t really buy any other games.
I don't get any ads (Fennec + uBlock), but half into the article, a newsletter pop up showed up and the website scrolled back to the top. I closed the website immediately
The irony is that if we didn’t have the tracking scripts blocked then they might actually receive the metrics about how we close their website as soon as the newsletter popup occurs, leading them to fix or remove it. Probably not though.
EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand how artists subsist at all. You’ve also confused the word “incentive” with “motivation”.
Look, I understand that money isn’t the primary incentive for (hopefully all) artists. But I don’t think a system where you effectively cannot make a living as a full-time artist is beneficial for society either. Since you’re an artist, can I ask how you subsist without an alternative source of income?
Commissions don’t give a damn about copyright. The end product is made specifically to please one person and reproductions are already worthless, since only Jimbo wants an impressionist picture of Blue Eyes White Dragon wearing a tutu. Jimbo ends up happy, since he got his picture, I end up happy, as Jimbo pays me for the time it took to paint it, and anyone else that manages to copy it can be happy as well.
I’m happy that you’re able to work on commission, but with all due respect, your logic is somewhat specific to your chosen medium. Various other forms of art—novels come to mind—would not be so unaffected.
Not only would they, they already are - that’s what crowd funding like Patreon is for, and it’s also how it gets used. There are hundreds of thousands of sites sharing “copyrighted” material produced for supporters, and yet no artist bothers going after them, because it’s irrelevant. The people who want that content enough to pay for it do so, anyone else is just tagging along for the ride.
that’s what crowd funding like Patreon is for, and it’s also how it gets used.
The vast majority of books are not crowdfunded lmao
There are hundreds of thousands of sites sharing “copyrighted” material produced for supporters, and yet no artist bothers going after them, because it’s irrelevant.
The real advantage of copyright to authors is not to prevent any and all unauthorized reproduction of their works, but rather to distinguish genuine reproductions in the marketplace. Authors don’t give a fuck about free online “libraries”, but you best believe shit goes down the second bootleg copies appear on shelves at B&N or on the Kindle Store. Consumers expect purchases made in legal markets to benefit the owner (ideally the creator) of the work.
For the record, I don’t particularly like the concept of copyright, and I really don’t like current copyright laws. My only concern regarding the complete destruction of copyright is the immense difficulty in determining the creator of the work that it would obviously create. There is absolutely no obligation to provide attribution for public domain works. You can even claim to be the creator yourself, if you wish.
I think probably the obligation, or rather, advantage, of attributing original creators for public domain works, is: how else will I find more of this work that I like? It would probably also still be frowned upon to just take a work wholesale and post it without crediting the creator, on the basis that it makes the creator harder to find, and makes work that you like harder to find. Whenever somebody ends up trying to pass off something without the author’s name, there’s usually someone close behind asking who did this, tracing the lineages of the media.
Agreed, there are clear advantages to giving credit when both parties are acting in good faith. There is nothing stopping me from claiming that I wrote Macbeth and asking for donations on my Patreon so that I can write Macbeth 2, save for maybe Patreon’s ToS (I haven’t read it). In the absence of all copyright law, I could do that with any work, including ones published this morning by an artist struggling to get by.
well yeah, my point is more that with macbeth, nobody would believe you, you’d obviously be full of shit. that might not be the case with artists struggling to get by, but I don’t really see that as being fixed by the current system, or really, by any legal mechanism, unfortunately. in the current system, struggling artists get sacked by that shit all the time when people steal their art and paste it to merch on redbubble, and can make money basically for free. bigger corps can just steal shit basically full throttle, if not in actuality, than in likeness, and, through monopolization of the mechanisms of distribution, like with music. the struggling artist becomes the exploited artist. streaming services become competitors on the basis of content rather than the features of their platform.
I appreciate the sentiment, and small-time artists do get way too much shit, but you are somewhat underrepresenting the mechanisms we have in place. YouTube holds the ad revenue generated by disputed content in escrow until the dispute is resolved. DMCA requests, as much as I don’t like them, are rather effective in this day and age.
bigger corps can just steal shit basically full throttle, if not in actuality, than in likeness, and, through monopolization of the mechanisms of distribution, like with music.
In this particular context big corporations have to be the most careful because they have the most to lose. Remember the Obama “HOPE” ad? This thing? All of these were serious Ws for relatively unknown photographers.
I mean, if we’re sort of going by DMCA requests, right, there’s upsides, but there’s also downsides. They get abused all the time, and there’s not a clear example in the public consciousness as to what constitutes fair use, so they can even be misused in good faith. Larger corporations can also have bots, or armies of hired outsourced cheap labor (usually in combination with each other) handing out youtube copyright claims left and right. The next step of the youtube claims system, specifically, is that you have to go to court, if you want to contest the claim, and court usually ends up in favor of the larger parties, either because they have the capability to have an out of court settlement, or just because they can hire the best lawyers, and it’s relatively hard for most artists to fund what might be a protracted legal battle. I wonder whether or not the effect is that it’s overall to the benefit, or not. Are these examples you’ve provided, are they representative, or are they examples of survivorship bias?
I dunno, I don’t have access to the numbers on that one, and it’s kind of hard to take artists at their word, because the plural of anecdote isn’t data, and because lots of artists don’t inhabit that legal grey space of copyright infringement, either out of just a lack of desire, or out of a self-preservation instinct. Then plenty of artists are also woefully misinformed people that blame the copyright-infringing artist for their copyright-infringing art. I think I’d probably want to prod a copyright lawyer on their take, as they would tend to see more of the legal backend, the enforcement, but then, there’s a little bit of a conflict of interest there.
I also think that on the basis of just like, moral arguments against copyright, we could make the argument, right, that the obama hope ad was extremely popular because of the circumstances around which it arose, rather than because of the specific photograph used. i.e. it wouldn’t be as popular if not for being a ripoff of a photo that was commissioned from some guy and then pumped out and thoroughly marketed and memeified. Sort of a similar argument to how piracy doesn’t really transfer over to sales, that there’s not an equivalent exchange going on there. The sales of the copy, or, the sales of the modified version, don’t transfer to the original, is the idea. But then, it’s kind of an open, hard to answer question, because it’s pretty contextual and it’s hard to read in hindsight. If the sales do transfer over to the original, if we get rid of the copy, then I think that crediting the original artist is probably the best thing you can do, because that drives more attention to the original, if the original is what people really wanted. That’s sort of like, a limiting mechanism for how popular a thing might get on the merit of something else, as I see it. You could legally enforce that, and I think it would probably be a pretty good move, but you also kind of end up swamping yourself with the same problems that any legal enforcement mechanism will have, of being heavy-handed, grey, primarily only able to be wielded by the powerful, so I think you could also make the case that whatever the public would enforce would be fine.
It wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t need to sell the things you make and could just give them away.
So copyright is only useful to protect your profits. There are many people who put effort into many things not because they expect to make money but because of the act of doing it.
Just something to think about, not really sure what point im trying to make
At least in the US, we have a lifetime for exclusive rights, at which point the material moves into the public domain. It really seems like a good system to me.
It’s not a good system to have it be 50 years past the death of the creator. Having access to content in public domain has historically caused art to flourish by serving as a base for creators to build off of. But for the past few decades companies have been plundering from public domain while not contributing anything back.
Our original copyright system in the US gave a baseline 17 years of copyright, with an additional 17 years extension that you could apply to. 34 years is a perfectly fair span of time to get value out of your creation because nobody is going to wait that long to get access to art they want. But it also ensured that the public domain continually had new content added that wasn’t completely antiquated. This is the system we should be pushing to return to.
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more.
That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.
It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.
And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.
Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.
And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.
They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal.
It’s incredible that you can say this and not understand that this is exactly why the relationship is coercive and gets abused.
Plenty of horrible things are legal; that is not the measure of what is good. Our entire economic system exists to benefit those with money. It’s always been that way. Can you guess who it was that decided we should have a political system that gives power to people based on how much money they have? It wasn’t poor people. Capitalism inherently drives towards monopolies.
I’m so worried about what will happen to Steam when Gabe dies. I really hope he has a successor picked out who is as ideologically stringent. Otherwise I’m going to lose a huge library.
I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:
In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”
Does it though? It seems like Valve is targetting the fact, that you can’t run the same game on a different platform for different amounts. So if Valve gets 30%, and some other store gets less, then they ask you to not run it cheaper. I.e. you can’t sell on both stores for $40, and then set a permanent -30% sale there.
Yes, that is problematic. Not by itself, but coupled with a large captive userbase it is. As an example:
Let’s say you want to start a game marketplace, which simply runs a storefront and content distribution—you specifically don’t want to run a workshop, friends network, video streaming, or peer multiplayer. Because you don’t offer these other services, you keep costs down, and can charge a 5% fee instead of a 30%.
With Steam’s policy, publishers may choose to:
List on your platform at $45, and forego the userbase of Steam
List on Steam and your platform at $60, and forego the reduced costs your platform could offer
Obviously, pricing is much more sophisticated than this. You’d have to account for change in sales volume and all. Point is, though, that publishers (and consumers!) cannot take advantage of alternative marketplaces that offer fewer services at lower cost.
The question the court has to answer is whether the userbase/market share captured by Steam causes choice (2) to be de-facto necessary for a game to succeed commercially. If so, then the policy would be the misuse of market dominance to stifle competition.
And I think Wolfire might be able to successfully argue that.
This… misses the point? Of course the can not sell on Steam. That’s always an option.
The antitrust aspect of all of this is that Steam is the de-facto marketplace, consumers are stubborn and habitual and aren’t as likely purchase games less-known platforms, and that a publisher opting not to sell on Steam might have a negative influence on the games success.
If that consumer inertia gives Steam an undue advantage that wouldn’t be present in a properly competitive market, then it there is an antitrust case to be made, full stop. At this point, the court will decide if the advantage is significant enough to warrant any action, so there’s really no need for us to argue further.
But I really don’t like seeing Wolfire—which is a great pro-consumer and pro-open-source studio—having their reputation tarnished just because Lemmyites have a knee-jerk reaction to bend over and take it from Valve just because Steam is a good platform.
As I said, no need for us to argue further. The lawsuit has grounds, even if you don’t understand why. Read articles and legal briefs on the matter if you would like to learn more.
What right does valve have to discriminate against devs and publishers who are selling their game on other platforms? They have to compete for their business, not punish them for having a game that is more successful on another store that gives a higher revenue cut to the dev and a lower price to the customer.
They usually sign an exclusivity deal in exchange for funding the development of the game. David is alleging that steam pressured him in ways not covered by steam ToS. It’s not like valve funded development of receiver.
I think the reason why valve is doing this is because people might buy a game at a higher price, either on Steam or another storefront, and then complain that it was cheaper on Steam or another storefront and start demanding refunds or demand that Valve reduce the game’s price on steam.
What do you do then?
If you don’t address it, you’re automatically seen as the asshole even if it was the developer’s choice.
You can give out refunds, which makes you look like the good guy, but that also looks bad to companies like Visa or PayPal (my understanding is that large numbers of refunds tend to look bad to payment processors, even if the refund was initiated from the company and not the consumer). Granted, Valve is a big enough company that they shouldn’t have issues with that kinda thing, especially since they already offer refunds, but my understanding is that it still doesn’t look good to payment processors and can make them upset.
You can ask the developer to reduce the price on steam, but what if the dev says no?
You can force the dev to reduce the price, but now you’re even more of an asshole.
You can lower the cost on your storefront and cover the difference yourself, but now you’re potentially losing money. That, if I’m not mistaken, is actually anti-competative from a legal standpoint.
You’re kinda screwed if you’re trying to be the good guy.
That’s not even getting into how bad it looks if it’s cheaper on steam than somewhere else when you have a marketshare as large as Valve’s.
This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.
Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.
I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
David said in a blog post that the suit is specifically alleging price fixing tactics for other platforms that aren’t key sellers, but sell the whole game. Whether that holds up in court - we will see.
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