“Abusing their dominant position” feels a bit far… the competition is just 💩 IMO. Just the fact that EGS practically gives out games for free, and still struggle to penetrate the market, should tell you all you need to know.
Steam provides discussion boards, workshop (mods), cloud saves, a whole console (deck), frequent games sales, achievements, best-in-class refund policy, regional CDNs for faster game downloads, and the list goes on. They even still support the Steam Link box which was discontinued several years ago.
They pretty much go above and beyond the current offerings of any other gaming platform, and have outlasted failed ones like Games For Windows. In the rare case that they do go out of business, there are steam emulators to run your games as long as they do not implement any additional DRM.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
EGS exclusives are worse, locking a whole other platform out for an entire year. With Steam’s agreement surely you could just run the sale on both platforms at the same time? Anyway, Amazon is well known for doing this, why not take them to court instead?
enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
The 30% fee is a bit high, but looking at everything that it pays for, and the contributions to open source, I don’t think it’s too bad. Publishers are also the ones choosing to price their games high, and to create as many DLCs as possible to increase recurring revenue. The ones who want lower fees already sell on EGS IMO…
I do think the 30% commission is high. But the problem I see now is, even if the gov’t gets involved and mandates their rev share be lower, game publishers will absolutely not lower their prices to coincide with that. Corps know people are already used to paying pretty exorbitant prices, so they’d happily have the government mandate they make more profit while valve makes less without having to do any work whatsoever.
Still is to my understanding. I saw someone else point out in a different thread that if they were taking less of a margin, they would still be blamed for anti competitive behaviour for it, as other sites may not be able to support taking less of a percentage. The whole thing smells odd.
Coop is completely broken without this mod. A friend and I tried to play vanilla ER but 4/5 times the summon would fail, and 5/5 times I’d get invaded immediately.
Installed the mod and suddenly it all just worked.
Did something happen to the game that made it broken? I played this for the first few months when it dropped with about 3 other friends, and we never had those issues then. We would get invaded maybe 20% of the time, but 50% we actually would win, so it was fun.
The servers aren’t the best and it’s a highly popular game. Connection issues during peak times were pretty bad (and becoming a problem again as the DLC approaches) and the way invasions work, as soon as you have a summon you are almost guaranteed be invaded since invasions only get connected to hosts with phantoms (with it prioritizing 2 coop partners) or if they use the Taunter’s Tongue.
Miyazaki is trying to recreate the spontaneous cooperation he experienced with cars pushing cars up a snow covered hill. Honestly, their system is really cool if you treat it like a side thing, adding people when you really need help. Playing with friends, though, it’s kind of shit.
This is going to sound weird but Japanese companies seem to have a lot of problems with multiplayer. Im thinking of fighting games and Nintendo. Which is weird because Korea is big on MMOs and strong networking so I dunno.
One of the reason why seamless coop is so good is you can play with mods without having to go offline and disable anti-cheat. I fully expect their implementation of this won’t allow for that.
The fact that I can’t do something as simple as turning off that god-awful chromatic aberration without anti-cheat banning me for cheating is so ridiculous. It’s so bad that I only play offline and at the moment, Seamless Coop is the only way I can play multiplayer.
It’s so good for more reasons than just being able to use other mods safely! It’s really nice being able to transition between areas without having to resummon, how some progression/unlocks are shared, and that all connected players get to use Torrent and spirit ashes.
The online for seamless coop isn’t actual online, it’s limited to the functionality of the mod and doesn’t use the official servers. You can in principle get cheaters on that, but most people have it setup to only connect to friends. And when you are using mods you are probably just having fun and playing for the memes instead of being a hardcore PvP player.
I personally love seamless coop, I had hoped FromSoft would have made the coop like that from the beginning. So happy mod makers are putting in the time to make it work. I’ve played over 100 hours with my brother and had so much fun. I can recommend mods like The Convergence as well, combined with seamless it’s so much fun.
I’m talking about offline/online generically here, not whether it’s using the official servers. I know it’s not using the official servers which is why you can play with mods
Their anti-cheat implementation could definitely use some work. Either that, or just give players the option to disable chromatic aberration, use ultrawide etc. I played the entire game offline, with the exception of a few specific spots. Sucks.
The ultimate solution is to allow for P2P online with official servers as the default, and just warn people that you might encounter cheaters if you use P2P. Can even go a step further and separate the player pools between unmodded and modded clients. So you can play online with mods, but run the risk of encountering cheaters. P2P should mean you can ban certain people from invading you due to hacks or high ping similar to DSCM back in the day, but in-game.
Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Jeff Braun in Kyoto in 1989. (Image credit: Courtesy of Jeff Braun)
After all the years, i finally see Will Wright as a real person. I only knew his avatar from the SNES game itself, back in the 90s. He looks a bit different than I had in mind. Oh and while I researched a bit, found this one:
Devs should be focusing on their next project and celebrating the triumph that is DE. It’s heartbreaking to see everything unfolded in the years after its release.
This is one of the saddest stories in gaming. Author was depressed and friends help him create a game. Game is considered one of the greatest games ever created only the publisher screws original team out of the rights to the game mimicking the exact type of short sighted bullshit that creatives have to deal within the Disco Elysium world.
Probably my favorite game maybe because of some similarities with the main character I loved the redemption arc. I loved the capitalist socialist critiques. I wish more games would focus on that dichotomy.
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