You could create the best launcher in the world and people would ignore it because they don’t want multiple launchers and their library is already centralized on Steam.
As much as I agree the 30% cut can be a bit steep, I do appreciate that part of it is going into ongoing R&D like Steam Deck and Proton benefiting the whole gaming industry. I’d like to think of it like Valve are investing into PC innovation similarly to the way Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo do for their new consoles.
But unlike valve the console R&D is limited to the consoles themselves. Valve is working to improve gaming for Linux in general and foster a more open and consumer friendly console system.
If you have to choose an evil monopoly hell bent on world domination and bloodshed you might as well choose steam at least they are owned by a private individual instead of a hive mind distilled from the pure greed of capitalism.
I’ve had this conversation so many times and some people just can’t imagine that they might be paying more than they need to just so Gabe can collect yachts… People feel they’re getting their money’s worth because everything they’ve ever bought is priced based on the fact that there’s multimillionaires and billionaires higher up the chain…
AFAIK it falls to a lower percentage if you sell more copies. As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that. I can’t remember the last time i aplauded ea or ubisoft or epic for doing something like that. Oh yeah… it was never. Id sooner applaud Microsoft for investing into a non lucrative venture like accessible gaming accessories. But they aren’t on the same playing field… so from them, I’d expect it.
If i were a developer, I’d let valve eat the 30%. The amount of customers they bring to the table, deal with chargebacks, host the files. That shit isn’t free. Epic has to take such a low amount because they don’t have as many users and can’t produce such sales numbers and don’t have to deal with as many chargebcks and don’t have to waste as much bandwidth hosting the files.
Again, they can afford their R&D while paying their employees more than the industry average and while making the owner a multibillionaire, they 100% could afford to lower their cut without any negative impact on everyone but Gabe Newell.
The lower % starts if a game sells enough copies to make 10m$, Valve has made 3m$ at that point.
Stop defending the people that make you poorer, they’re not your friends, all billionaires exist at the expense of our wealth. All. Of. Them. Are. Evil.
Well I guess I’ll just stop buying things then because all Im doing is contributing to some billionaire’s cocaine fund. This is capitalism. I learned to live with it. When the time comes to sieze the means of production and give power back to the proletariat, I’ll be there to help. Until then, I’d rather give Gabe my money so he can shove more ships up his ass than give it to Sweeney because at least Gabe will throw a penny back into linux gaming. Ill take the crumbs if I can get them because Im not a 21 year old student with a burning desire to change the system anymore.
And those “reasons” were plentiful. Most importantly is their market share. From a purely business perspective, if a distributor has 200% more users and charges 100% more while offering the same features, they will be the better choice - purely from en economical perspective. 30% is ok because you will reach a larger audience and if so many publishers disagreed with Steam’s cut, they wouldnt all come crawlin’ back would they? In other words, the market dictates the price and the market has decided that price is 30%. It doesnt matter who does or doesnt defend it. Thats what it is.
As to why I dont mind the fee as a consumer; valve invests its earnings into linux gaming and does cool shit like that.
You’re also talking like they wouldn’t have as many customers if they reduced their cut which is completely ridiculous. More profit would go to the people actually doing the work or prices would go down.
Stop defending the billionaire, you’re making a fool of yourself.
Despite the best efforts of major publishers including Activision, Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Bethesda, and others, not to mention the far better deal offered to developers by Epic, Steam is more dominant than ever—and in the end, they all came crawlin’ back.
They’re all crawling back because they did not give it their best effort. They just wanted the full 100% of the sale revenue without doing the hard parts. To be fair to EA, for the first few years, it looked like they were actually going to try.
its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.
and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.
Eh, it’s so easy to hop between streaming services that I don’t have the same hangup there. You subscribe for a month, watch what you want to watch, cancel, and then go to the next one. You can always resubscribe later. When you buy a game on a given storefront, you’re stuck with their feature set forever.
Until I hear that they have dumped the requirement to log into Ubisoft Connect or Uplay or whatever they are calling it noe, then Ubisoft will remain dead to me.
Makes me sad. I really enjoyed the Assassin’s Creed series and have waited for Shadows for what feels like a decade now.
I was really confused by your responce thinking it was meant for someone else toll I reread my comment. I’m referring to the “ubisoft game” that we all know and are bored of
But the nerds around here put him on a GIIIANT pedestal.
It’s OK to make fun of Gabe, guys, he doesn’t care about you as he tries to figure out which of his six or seven yachts to ride around on this weekend.
To be impartial, he has a fishing yacht, hospital yacht, research yacht. Seems like these are probably floating businesses? Anyone know in what capacity he uses them?
Does bezos lease out his yacht to customers to help pay for itself or are these literally just sitting and being maintained for personal use? I guess i dont really know much about yachts.
Steam getting better isn’t linked to anyone becoming a billionaire. That sentiment sounds like people can’t stop looking for things to blame Valve for.
Is it too difficult to accept that every single company failed in competing with Steam? I’d say they didn’t even try their best (especially Epic). Must’ve assumed that just serving a website with a web app is all they needed to get as rich as Gabe.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It's really, really good.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.
Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.
Right now I'd say on that continuum it's probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that's not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn't there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Tedious: too long, slow, or dull; tiresome or monotonous
I think what you were going for was challenging and/or punishing. The first game explicitly has ends to each city type, and I certainly wouldn’t describe watching the city steam a man alive to get the people to tolerate you putting sawdust in their food “dull”
Even if you just want to chill you can easily use cheat engine to give you infinite resources and it’s still challenging and captivating believe it or not. I played through all the campaigns that way and enjoyed them all. People really need to give a shot to cheating in single player games they’re iffy about, sometimes it can create the experience you’re actually looking for
Completely agree. I played through a few times and lost each time, but wanted to see the ending of the game so I turned on cheats for extra resources and still found it difficult, but overall I was able to beat the game and enjoyed it! Especially when life is busy, I see no issue with the occasional “cheating” in single player games to get the experience you want!
It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.
I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.
I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.
The new one is more focused on the district level though right? IE you’re not building around the generator, just where to build new generators, mines, etc?
Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.
There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.
And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”
I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.
I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”
It’s currently free on psplus so I wanna try it. I’m always iffy on those games cause just learning the mechanics can take so long and I just wanna play already
What this post doesn’t tell you, dear reader, is how Frostpunk will kick you in the dick repeatedly and you’ll learn to like it. It is a fascinating and difficult game, and not one to take lightly if you struggle separating digital game characters from real life empathy.
As much as I liked voice acting in Disco Elysium, I didn’t like the narrator. He kept stammering (not sure if it’s the right word… kept making unnecessary pauses) and it was really tiring).
I love how people obviously have no idea how Lemmy works and they’re just ok with ignorance. The reading comprehension is a train wreck off the charts.
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