I get the feeling the part of capitalism Phil Spencer hates is the part where consumers can take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the product.
Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse. Maybe steam keeps winning because they’re not actively screwing over their customers.
Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.
Wolfire originally operated Humble Bundle, and they have a very legitimate case. Steam uses anticompetitive pricing policies that makes it difficult for other marketplaces to compete.
If anticompetitive means “it’s your choice to enter into an agreement in which we host your game for 30%, and distribute it on our platform, with unlimited patch updates, and unlimited user downloads, and a fuckton of features like community forums, guides, groups etc., also if your game is good we will promote it free of charge”
Then I suppose companies like Epic who choose to run at a loss, as opposed to providing a good service, have no chance, and Steam is anticompetitive.
The counter narrative exists though, Steam is just a good service, and if you want to compete with them, you need to provide a good service, like GOG.
The Platform Most Favored Nation policy employed by Steam is the one at issue in this case. And yes, it is anticompetitive. It abuses userbase size to prevent alternative marketplaces from providing fewer services for smaller cuts
Again, it just sounds like Valve is offering a good service and other companies don’t want to compete. If it’s Valves fault for providing a good service and lots of users choose to use their platform instead of others, I fail to see what they could do to rectify that.
Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it’s very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won’t be able to match Steam’s services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams’ userbase.
I mean I don’t know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn’t take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn’t like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn’t roll over and take it from Valve either.
Doesn’t even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.
Just to play devils advocate, what do you think Valve should do differently?
After learning more about it, I’m understanding the problem is that Wolfire (and every other developer/publisher) has a contract with Valve, in which they aren’t allowed to sell their game on another PC market for a cheaper price than Steam.
Though, I wouldn’t describe that as anticompetitive, rather, neutrally-competitive. Valve is offering a level playing field, they can take it or leave it. This is a fairly standard practice among businesses (though I understand this does not make it right).
If valve wanted to be anticompetitive they would dictate that games published on Steam are exclusive to Steam on PC.
What Wolfire wants to happen is for game marketplaces and game services platforms to be decoupled. Right now Valve has vertically integrated the two. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.
If those services were charged separately, so that the costs of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don’t offer those services, you open the market to more competition.
So Wolfire’s idea of being anticompetitive is to restrict how many features a platform may offer?
Honestly, it just sounds like Wolfire has an axe to grind. Steam doesn’t price in the features it offers, their 30% cut existed a long time before most of this stuff was added.
Something like this will never be implemented. Consider the outcome: Steam decouples the marketplace from the extra services, so they create a separate application and offer it as a free service, and creates a link between the two services. There are a hundred ways around this, and all of them inconvenience the consumer.
I’m at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading the legal briefs that summarize the matter, or articles that dig deeper than this one.
Maybe I’ll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.
That us all fine. David is alleging that Valve is trying to restrict other platforms wolfire can sell their cases on. Valve needs to compete, not threaten to stop distributing a game if they don’t like how it is selling elsewhere.
I can’t believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren’t perfect. It’s difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.
I love this new narrative that undercutting the competition’s pricing is anti-competitive and not just winning at the competition because the other teams don’t want to improve.
Ironic for a company that published indie hits like Terraria and fresh mainstream games like A Tale of 2 Sons.
This does not reflect the whole gaming market but rather the failure of publishers to innovate well and make new things people like. Big publishers are risk averse and it's a common path them as they get bigger, and care more about shareholder value or venture capital. They won't take risks, and can't accept failures so they retrench. It's not a recipe for success as that end of the games market is already dominated by big publishers churning out annual versions of their mass market games.
A publisher like 505 r ally only has two possible futures on this road - go bankrupt as they can't compete or get bought out by a big fish who want their IP.
It doesn't say much abou the games market as it's actually very large, vibrant and varied. A publisher like 505 is not on the vanguard of the games market and like most people I had to look them up to even see which games they had published. This is just yet another company being mismanaged into oblivion and well beyond its hey day.
Yet it still managed to be fresh and, in my opinion, make the next big leap in what rpgs are capable of. Sequels aren’t really the problem, and I don’t mind them really—in a vacuum. The bigger problem is what ‘sequels’ are in corporate speak; making minimal effort and doing the same things over and over again, trying to profit off of name recognition alone. They don’t see a franchise and think “Great, a chance to dive into this world and see all it has to offer and what makes it tick,” they see it as a chance to make maximum $$$ while not feeling like they need to do much.
Right, but from the perspective of a gaming company CEO, it being a sequel is everything. You have to remember, these people are incredibly uninformed and shortsighted. Think of the dumbest person you’ve interacted with ever, and that’s about as intelligent as the smartest CEO. They see that Baldur’s Gate 3 sold well, and all they learn from that is that sequels are a profitable endeavor. They couldn’t care less about any of the context that makes it a good game.
Ideally AI could be used to reduce the amount of work required to produce AAA assets, and allow that time to go back into quest design and world building. Or just reduce development time so we can get great games more often.
Yeah, another tool like licensing a game engine or procedurally generated content. It will still require a lot of review and revision, custom work to overcome edge cases, and direction to meet your goals.
Just like automating a agriculture, manufacturing, photography, and food production.
The biggest issue is that due to how capitalism works the reduction in labor effort means people lose out on income instead of society as a whole benefiting through being able to have more free time.
I’m more worried about it being a traffic simulator more than a city builder like the first one without any expansions. I would like to design a city I want to live in. It’s good to be honest about performance at least.
Have you watched any of the feature highlights and accompanying dev talks? Visually speaking, the game looks worse in a lot of really bizarre ways, but the actual city simulation gameplay looks like it’s been much improved. There really wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but they added a lot of the depth that’s been seen in older Sim City titles, as well as what looks like an actually currency based economic model, as opposed to the shallow approximation of an economy that existed in Cities Skylines. They also added the frankly crucial changes to traffic AI that was added to CS1 via mods, into the base game. It looks like as far as the city simulation goes, CS2 will be a solid improvement and there have been a couple well known CS1 YouTubers that seem to confirm that.
That being said, I fully expect this game to look rough and maybe perform even rougher at release, but it does at least look like I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone buy this at launch unless they pull some big improvements out of their asses which judging by this statement, they don’t plan to, but it is also releasing on gamepass…
Nope, I don’t follow any gaming media other than what I see when browsing all in Lemmy. I just noticed a new Cities Skylines game under Steam’s top seller list so I only know what I saw from the previous game. My main hope is I can make walkable cities.
“You can also create dedicated roads that only allow buses and service vehicles to operate on them, and tram tracks can be built separately bypassing road traffic altogether.”
“Walkable areas in the city can be created using the pedestrian street along with the pedestrian path and bridges. The pedestrian street prohibits all other vehicular traffic except for service vehicles and delivery trucks bringing resources to local businesses.”
I would love to see the equivalent of the Harry Potter game but set in a small hobbit shire with the ability to travel to human cities and elven and dwarven cities.
I don’t get why people liked the Hogwarts game (I’m assuming that’s the one you’re talking about). Exploring Hogwarts was cool, but after that they were just wasting your time with the same few activities spread across the open world to make it not be empty. It was so boring. Then the lockpicking game that didn’t need to exist made things worse, and no one caring about you breaking into their homes or walking around Hogwarts after curfew… It all felt so lifeless after the first hour or so.
Hogwarts itself they made feel alive fairly well until night time, which you’re not supposed to be allowed to walk around during. (The groundskeeper literally tells you to though which makes it all even worse.) Hogwarts and Hogsmead are where it stops being even slightly interesting to me though. The flight mechanics were really boring. They were so bad they couldn’t make quiditch work and just gave a lame excuse about it being closed.
Idk, it just felt like the epitome of an over-managed game where some manager wanted all the bad parts of modern open world games from eight years ago (many of which have been ditched by modern open world game makers) without any thought of how it works in their game. This is all without the Rowling issues and the use of goblins.
Eh, I just found it relaxing. I was a fan of the wizarding universe but not a die hard fan, so little details like being able to explore at night didn’t bother me. I just really liked the detail of the world, running around and looking in all the building and finding the neat little magical creatures and flying objects.
I didn’t mind the flying, I wasn’t doing it to beat high scores in racing or become quidditch champion. I just used it as a means to explore the world.
Definitely wasn’t a fan of the lock picking, probably would have been better if they should locked that behind three different spells you had to learn at different points.
I’m a decent fan, but I guess my issue was I’ve been playing games for a long time. I have spent many hours in open world games, and I’ve seen them evolve. I absolutely hate 99% of them now. The issue is they create so much space that the developers need to fill that they end up spending very little effort on any bit of it. They create a handful of systems that they can scatter about so there’s something to do everywhere, even though it makes it so there’s no particular place that’s unique anymore.
When I was younger and time didn’t matter as much to me, I looked at the hours-to-complete metric as a good thing. I now see how flawed that was. Now I look more towards entertainment-per-hour. The longer your game takes me to complete, the more enjoyable it needs to be throughout. I don’t want to spend 300h doing the same five tasks over and over. I’d much rather a 3h experience that does something unique.
That said, I do agree Hogwarts Legacy had great art direction. If there’s one thing they did well it’s that. It’s just that I felt I had seen it all in a few hours. When art direction is the only thing you’ve got going, what happens when I have looked at your piece of art enough to see all the detail? That’s not to say art focused games shouldn’t be made, but they shouldn’t be made to fill hundreds of hours. I think the game would have been much better if they focused on just Hogwarts and Hogsmead and made those full experiences.
I haven’t played many “open world” games, but I think this captures my general feelings for them.
Like, the new 343 Halo Infinite game’s campaign… it just kinda feels like wandering around a big map doing nothing in particular. I couldn’t get into it.
Compare that to what Bungie has been doing recently with Destiny … much more interesting, much less filler/go do this to keep you busy stuff.
I never played the game but these sound like criticisms I would’ve made. Sounds like it would have been much more fun if they made night exploration more tom clancy style spy/sneaking missions using magic and environmental objects to cause distractions and sneak about. And if they got quidditch right, it would’ve added much-need replayability (and possibly multiplayer) similar to blitzball in ff10.
I also heard the combat was very simple and repetitive. I could understand if they were trying to focus efforts on other hand systems but it sounds like they just skimped on development efforts across the board.
There was an old Gameboy Harry Potter game I really enjoyed that was basically you performing the major Harry Potter plot points (sneaking around, buying stuff, talking to people). The combat was kind of the Pokemon style turn based thing where each side had a health bar and so many moves. Very neat game.
Not surprising that DC is pushing back on this, although I'm not sure if there is anything they can do if Willingham is right and he can put his characters and world in the public domain. Although I suppose they could just send out cease-and-desist notices to anyone trying to use the property and hope no one challenges it.
The original run was creator-owned so he has the right to release it to the public however I am not sure about it now as fables continued on under DC Black Label.
Didn’t a mod get it kinda working not that long ago? The trains were still moving and the stations were there on release, CDPR just put walls up or disabled the doors to the stations/trains. They’re a little jank to ride but it was doable. Felt like CDPR just decided focusing on cool cars was more worth the effort
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