He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
Im sympathizing with both sides of the conversation. Grand strategy games are so complex and can be supported for 10+ years so it makes sense that they regularly make DLCs to support development.
But they’re not totally optional/unnecessary. The problem is that many games are balanced around the new DLCs that sometimes you’re at a disadvantage if you dont buy them. I remember some drama around crusader kings where some mechanics don’t make sense unless you buy some DLCs
I agree. Strategy game do occupy a weird space, EU4 was a go to game for me for like 10 years. I appreciated the support for the game and did buy the DLC that changed mechanics (skipping most flavour packs). I remember people complaining about janky mechanics without DLC, but I know others would rollback to previous versions.
Funny thing is that despite playing EU4 for years and really enjoying the game. I feel little urge to upgrade to EU5.
That’s like 10 development years worth of additional content. There’s not many games that get that much post release dev time without a valid monetization strategy.
You have a point but the cost of Paradox DLCs FAR exceeds the development time most of the time. You really have to do your research before buying anything
I feel like doing research shouldn’t be an issue for people playing Paradox games, where it takes hours of research in the tooltips just to understand the mechanics.
That said, my research for new Paradox DLC usually consists of hovering over it in the store, ignoring anything with reviews less than mixed, taking interest in those with positive, and reading the first dozen reviews of the mixed ones, and that works well enough.
I think that’s a fair critism, but also it’s not like people get a dlc buying addiction. It’s not necessarily predatory (although it could be if the base game was incomplete and needed to be fixed by DLCs) like gambling is
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the true cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent than Valve.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows.
I don’t know about the exit ramp for a casual user, if you mean ditching Windows altogether, since that’s not really happening. But what did happen - Microsoft didn’t get to own the central position in gaming on their own platform, and Steam is a program that installs other programs uninterrupted - just to take a sense of what rights it has there for almost two decades. They had GFWL, now MS Store, integrated with XBOX, and they still aren’t mentioned as a PC marketplace anywhere besides having a monopoly on Minecraft. There hasn’t been their IE for games, and it’s awesome. I can’t say Valve and MS even compete there, but having eggs in two different baskets is better than having them in just one. Two different monopolies instead of one.
The only time I ever tried loot boxes was with TF2 and Dota2 back in the early to mid 2010s.
I very quickly realized that this wasn't what I was looking for in gaming. These days I mostly play indie games where monetisation is not issue. Even gave up on Paradox because I am not okay with their DLC approach. I don't mind paying for DLC, but one has to look at their release of Cities: Skylines 2 to see that they've really become the "EA of Europe".
I don’t think so. It’s unlikely, but not implausible. I don’t think ICE have a list of “don’t arrest” people, and not everyone knows what every CEO looks like. They might run into him randomly and just act on it.
I don’t think Satya Nadal is going out in public like regular people, but it could still happen.
We do have to hold Microsoft to a very slightly different standard, because they’re a Military Contractor. They’re not going to risk hundreds of billions of dollars to take a stance and make a statement. In that sense, this should not surprise anybody.
It is, though. It’s one thing for some random artist to condemn the current admin, a totally different thing for a massive military contractor to. That is a different standard.
If Trump made himself an AI Trump Mickey Mouse video and somebody specifically asked reanimated Walt Disney for comment, that would be shocking. If a similar circumstance happened to Boeing or Northrop Grumman, then… No shit no comment.
Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck. I have SOOOOOO MUCH SHIT BLOCKED and I still have to see this invasive fucking shit fucking EVERYWHERE IN FUCKING LEMMY. fuck you fuck everyone fuck all this endless fucking fellatio you give this fucking twat. Just shut the fuck up and stop sharing the images and name and giving it attention. Holy fucking shit it’s god damn inescapable.
Man. I’m sorry you are experiencing reality. But like, maybe you should be aware of what is happening?
The fact that you are more mad about reading an article from PC gamer than that hundreds of thousands of people are being abducted says a lot about you.
Some of us used to care and the endless exhaustion is too much. I simply am a person trying to exist, and I only continue to shrink how much bullshit I consume more and more and more since it infects everything.
Not wanting to see horrible shit constantly doesnt equate to not caring.
Sont worry. I’m getting fucked hard. By my government that hates me and by people like you who think they don’t need to even be informed of current events.
The apathy and inaction from you and your ilk is fucking me hard, and has killed many.
Where the Trump-as-Master Chief post is merely cringeworthy, the Homeland Security message is flat-out dangerous. Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it’s also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch of the Holocaust and “cockroaches” in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the “other” so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government’s messaging was not subtle.
You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to “destroy” immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that “Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter.”
Unexpectedly good political commentary from checks notes PC Gamer
It’s another form of kissing the ring. They know it’s bad for business but there’s the implied threat that if they retaliate the FCC will grind the company to a hault.
So it’s a way of reminding them of their loyalty and extending the president’s influence beyond it’s legal limits, very common tactic during the 1940’s of a particular country’s history.
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