Damn, that’s unfortunate. I’m glad Steam is cooperating though—a lot of platforms would try and bury this.
I hope this ends up being a blessing in disguise for them. Heart-wrenching to lose 10 years to a project and see little return because of a bug you’re not even responsible for.
The article says that Valve is only going to make the game a Daily Deal for a single day. The polygon commenters have it right, why not make it a week?
Why not buy 138,000 copies, one for each user that wishlisted the game, and give those out gratis? At $15 per copy, that's only 2 million dollars. That's a pittance for a company the size of Valve.
I think they should make it a daily deal, but not for a week. They should also eat the discount cost, which they apparently aren’t doing, and entirely waive their cut.
What I think they should do instead of extending the deal, is reset the games launch.
There is absolutdly no reason Valve couldn’t re-launch the game, along with all the algoritm benefits an unbugged 1.0 launch should have had.
Also, you seem to have missed that the article says they are contractually obligated to complete their current WIP game. Valve giving them a bunch of money would not give them time to work on further updates for Planet Centauri before then.
The economics of our world are completely controlled by middle-men. This is how much power we have delegated to them. There is no free market, just a series of publisher deals that put producers of value into a casino to decide if they get compensated for their labour.
Why it happened I can’t say, but I know what caused the failed launch - the game has an early access date and release date both in 2016. Steam didn’t send the mail that the game had released when it left EA because from their point of view, it had already released nine years ago.
Other games that have recently left EA have their release date update to the date they leave EA. No clue if it’s something that (should) happen automatically, or if it’s something the devs missed.
Valve contacted the French duo behind the space exploration game this month to tell them that the platform failed to notify the users who had saved Planet Centauri on their wishlists.
Kinda. Same as me, they know why the launch failed - no notifications - but don’t say anything why the notifications didn’t get sent.
Steam has a section for the developers for setting up the release date. It specifically states that you need to be careful with it, because two weeks before that date you start getting visibility on the “upcoming releases” list, and will then show up in the “new releases” section, and once that happens, you can’t change it.
And Planet Centauri is showing their official release date as being “3 Jun, 2016”, not the 2024 date they left Early Access as it’s supposed to. So did they mess that up and the notifications were actually sent, but they went out nine years ago? Or did Steam glitch when this game specifically left EA, not updating the date and not sending the notifications?
If it did, were other games affected?
In an email to Permadeath, Valve said that Planet Centauri’s 1.0 launch suffered from “a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent.”
One of the polygon commenters had it right: Valve should put the game at 30% discount for a week, where said 30% is their cut, so every sale in that meantime goes straight to the devs
Was reading the article and decided to pick up the game to help out the devs, apparently I bought it when it first came out back in 2016, I thought it sounded familiar.
It was a great game, and one I need to play again.
That’s definitely not the norm for indie devs on Steam. They are heavily reliant on wishlists because it automatically notifies when the game is released and on sale; it’s why the call to action for indie games is to wishlist it.
so a strange, grandfathered loophole. Doesn’t help the new subscribers, and there are plenty of reasons to cancel Game Pass besides the steep price for Day One games. But sure, I guess there is probably a narrow raft of subscribers that will stay happily subscribed, thanks to this loophole, despite the price increases across the board.
My understanding was that all plans were going up in price. Evidently, this grandfathered plan is not. I’m just not sure how many people are left on that plan, it can’t be many if they are continuing to allow it
This is not a “loophole”, but normal business. Game Pass is not the only service who keep the old contract for current subscribers. This way people think twice if they cancel, because they would “loose” the cheaper price and day one releases and so on, its the same contract as before, which is a huge difference to the new.
Usually this sort of contract only applies for the term of the subscription, and then the company can change whatever they like at the end of that term.
The article even specifies that the grandfathered plan only continues to exist because Microsoft is “allowing” it.
When asked, an Xbox spokesperson did not confirm how long legacy Console subscriptions will remain active for current subscribers.
So I get what you are saying, but in this specific case, there is no legal reason why Microsoft could not force current subscribers to move to one of the new, more expensive plans. They are just being nice to some of their most loyal users, for some reason.
polygon.com
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