I have an idea lets make a game that embodied the spirit of the successful versions, lets stop trying to court devil may cry/elden ring fans and get back to making a turn based rpg or similar to ff10.
It doesn’t have to be turn-based. FFXI and FFXII are also great. I feel the bigger issue is that making a story heavy game while everyone else is also making story heavy games makes it no longer unique.
I wouldn’t mind going back to ATB, but I don’t think that would win back an audience except for nostalgia points.
I enjoyed all of them and FFXVI too. I think it’s okay to reinvent FF combat every iteration to keep it fresh. I’m not sure if I’d enjoy a turn based combat today like I enjoyed it 20 years ago.
Love this idea. The turn-based system in FFX was my absolute favorite, and I was really sad they didn’t follow this direction further (even for FFX-II, like WTF).
This stuff is why “it’s optional” and “it’s just cosmetic” are bullshit arguments.
If you can resist the urge, you’re not the intended target. They don’t make record profits from people who can spend somewhat rationally, even though those are the vast majority of users their contribution to profits is a drop in an ocean.
No, the only reason this model works so well is because it’s exploiting the vulnerabilities of a small percent of big spenders.
So, do you consider paying for more rolls part of the fun?
Because the rest, including the hit of endorphin you get for a stroke of luck, could very well exist without it. But of course on EA’s side getting people addicted has no point if they don’t pay virtually unlimited amounts of money for more.
Not this game in particular. I do gamble and love spending a few hundred every year. I’ll regularly drop $10 or$20 on a mobile time killer when I need them.
You do realize this whole thread and post is about gambling addiction yes? You’re essentially doing the “I have a black friend, I can’t be racist!” but for gambling addiction.
Here's a fun suggestion, how about you unlock the desired players by playing the game? Could even put it into an immersive context, you beat brazil and subsequently unlock their players for your team.
What's so fun about buying a chance to get your player? Is it possibly the shiny colors and the happy soundeffects that are specifically designed to make your brain addicted?
Whales subsidize the cost of the game for everyone else. If there weren’t whales, the cost goes up for everyone or the product diminishes. Reality isn’t a magical realm where the company will not use ROI and net profit to determine what to make or how to price things, it’s all interrelated and you don’t get to hold everything else constant when asking for something to change.
you do realize you’re just saying that the predatory business has to be predatory otherwise they couldn’t operate their predatory business, right? It’s like a sheep defending wolves because if they didn’t eat sheep they wouldn’t be able to continue eating sheep.
I’ve spent €45 for a Mario game yesterday. Last I’ve checked that game costs roughly the same for everyone (except understandable variations in regional pricing). Not €45 once for me and $2,000 per week for some guy with an addiction problem.
Yet that game was made, and thousands more that didn’t rely on gacha, lootboxes or whatever.
People with a gambling addiction will find an outlet for it unless they get help controlling it, just like people with any addiction. Addiction is treated on an individual basis, not by banning an activity that the vast majority of the population can partake in with self-control.
We don’t have tons of public numbers to be able to discuss the initial development, licensing, marketing, support and ongoing development, distribution and overhead costs vs initial costs, expansion and MTX income of games at a large scale. But you can be sure the companies that make the games have those numbers, and they’re used for pricing and budgeting of future development. And that’s before we open the can of worms that is discussing how much profit is ethical.
Maybe they could make less money, maybe they could not make certain features, but where does the ethical line fall when it comes to predatory features and marketing? Who needs protection? From who? How do you implement it without infringing the rights of others? Is it ok to let them gamble if there’s a deterministic worst-case scenario? What if there’s a limit on how much they can spend? What if purchases are purely only deterministic, but they’re limited time exclusives that will never return? What about if you can earn them by playing or pay extra to just get them up front or faster? What about if they carve that feature out of the main product and sell it as an additional cost? These are all predatory in some way, but we don’t need to ban them all when a person can make their own value judgments and interact with games in a way that brings them enjoyment. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope to asking why we even let people “waste” money on entertainment.
And yet plenty drugs and medicine are controlled substances because they’d be so easy to abuse or hurt yourself with. We could just assign the same to ingame gambling, no? Since that’s also on an individual basis, handle it the same all around?
So to buy a lootbox:
Go to a doctor.
Doctor prescribes you a daily dosage of say, 1 lootbox.
Each day you can go to the pharmacy and pick up a pack of 1 lootbox code, you can have at maximum a store of 4 of them at home then pharmacies stop giving you more so you cannot stockpile. (going by the pills a friend of mine gets prescribed here)
No, whales subsidize the cost of a yacht for the CEO. The games could be paid just from the money you pay for them, if the companies weren’t continuously being siphoned off the top by C-suites and shareholders.
I don’t think it has a place in a work of fiction like Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe a small reference somewhere. The Russian government is a bunch of cunts, but not every piece of media needs to reference that constantly. I could also imagine that it would be could annoying if you’re playing Cyberpunk to distract yourself from the war as an Ukrainian and then you’re still constantly reminded of it
It can make political points, but the war in Ukraine does not exist in that timeline. So it makes no sense to directly refer to it. And forcing it into only the Ukrainian translation without the developer being aware of it is just unprofessional.
Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.
And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.
The only way they can actually disrupt gaming is by putting out something people want. Once upon a time, Microsoft and Sony seemed like “Bizarrely unfamiliar foreign invaders of gaming” but slowly settled into understanding what their customers wanted.
As the article points out, tone-deaf or imperfect offerings have really bounced off. Heck, this is an age where many of Sony and Microsoft’s signature ventures have failed.
Gamers don’t know what they want half the time. On one hand, posts like these seem to elicit the idea that gamers are united against predatory, bad publisher fuckery. But we aren’t. Activision Blizzard still make the most money in the entire industry shitting out garbage. People line up in droves to play the latest Assassins Creed. And mobile games have never been more popular. Many people play games simply because it’s in front of their face, not because they understand the nuances of game design or have any investment in the industry itself.
And Microsoft isn’t too far behind either of them. Apple makes a lot of money for sure, but it’s not the most, and it’s definitely not orders of magnitude more.
A damn shame. KOTOR 1 & 2 are still, IMHO, one of the greatest Star Wars stories/experiences. I’d really love for something to revisit the time period.
Not a shame, imo. Any remake would ruin it by changing things, I’m glad this has happened as you are right that the games are the best star wars stories. They’re also my favourite games in general, especially TSL.
No, I doubt it. Because they wouldn’t keep it true to the originals. They’d change the characters and the story and cut out sections and add in new things and replace the combat and make it fundamentally not the same game anymore. Especially when it’s not being made by the original makers.
Also, graphics aren’t a selling point for me in games.
Even if the remake was worse in every way, why would it matter when you can still buy and play the originals without any issue? The KOTOR games are some of my favorite video games so I can understand not liking a remaking that (hypothetically) changes some things, but I don’t know why it’d be a positive to not get a new version of it that might have gotten more people interested in the originals.
People do need thicker skin though. So much internet drama is magnified beyond reason by people who can’t just ignore assholes. That’s not excusing the fact that they’re being assholes. Obviously if they would stop being assholes that would be the ideal solution. However, we all know that will never happen. No amount of legislation, moderation, or punishment will ever remove that tendency from people. It is fundamental human nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.
At the end of the day it’s your job to protect yourself in all aspects of life, including online. Stop trying to outsource it to software developers. They gave you all the tools you need decades ago.
It’s not that I entirely disagree, but it’s not a black-vs-white thing. Some ribbing is understandable, after all it’s a competitive environment. But the explicitly misogynist, hateful, threatening and illegal needs to be harshly dealt with, to make players understand that it’s an absolutely 0 tolerance police and you will fuck yourself up if you try.
No player should have to go through having to shrug off rape threats.
Learn how to block people and move on with your life.
Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation? Taking care of it yourself is much faster and doesn’t depend on convincing someone else that what’s happening needs to be dealt with. You can block people for having the wrong favorite color if you want to.
There’s too much inconsistency in what people perceive to be inappropriate behavior for a central authority to have the final say on the matter. Moderator action should be reserved for situations that explicitly violate the law, and even that varies significantly based on location and interpretation. It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
I’m not a lawyer but it is my understanding of US law that something like what you see in the video does not meet the legal definition of a threat. There is no indication that the offender knows the real identity or location of the person they are speaking to, both of which are required to establish the intent necessary to define something as a threat in the legal sense of the word. Furthermore, the person speaking appears to be from another country, likely the UK or Australia, both of which have different laws than the US. Is Riot supposed to evaluate this situation based on the laws of the country in which they have their corporate HQ, the country the speaker resides in, or the country in which the listener resides? I don’t think a lawyer in any of those three countries would advise this streamer to press charges based on the content of this video alone which would indicate that this kind of behavior is not illegal. Perhaps it should be, but that’s another matter entirely.
To reiterate, none of this is meant to be interpreted as a defense of what that guy said. It’s just to illustrate the point that moderation is not a simple thing to enforce even in situations where a surface level evaluation seems like it should be. It’s much simpler to mute this guy or leave the lobby or whatever else you feel like you need to do to protect yourself. The unfortunate reality remains that people like this will always be around no matter what system is in place to minimize their impact. That’s not to say that no steps should be taken with that goal in mind, just that when all is said and done you will always bear some responsibility in protecting yourself from content or behavior you don’t want to be exposed to.
If you can play from say the UK, and you pay money for the game or access to it’s Internet or components, they are doing business in the UK, and hence their business, business interactions and everything are subject to UK laws.
Seriously, we let companies get away with too much. If you provide public spaces, you are responsible for some degree of safety in/on them, and that includes certain personal safety, protection from libel, slander and threats. Likewise if you do business in a country and can make money from customers there, you are responsible for adhering to those countries laws. Want to do business in >200 countries? Yeah, you now have to adhere to >200 sets of laws.
Now you could say “But it’d suck if so many companies no longer release their products globally!”. Sure. OTOH, it sucks much more that companies shirk responsibilities constantly. Companies are supposed to be like persons. So like a person, require them to adhere to local laws and show at least some degree of decency.
And no, it’s ridiculous to assume someone should take steps to protect themselves. It’s a failure of society that we have to do that for something as deranged as online rape or death threats. Because we let both the aggressor and the conductor get away with it, exactly in the way you do, by immediately putting the onus onto the victim.
Ok so what exactly is your proposal? We’ve already established that what happened in this video is not illegal based on the laws of any of the countries that the people involved likely live in so what’s next? How do you go from where we are now to the system you want to see implemented?
You’re talking about abstract ideas and I’m talking about actionable realities. The two often conflict with each other. The world you’re describing isn’t the one we live in so if you you want to make it a reality you need to get much more specific about how to implement your vision. It’s easy to say “do more” when you don’t have to worry about the resources required or side effects of what you’re asking for.
Normally I’d agree with the blanket statement that companies are allowed to get away with too much but the way you’re applying that argument here doesn’t make sense. You’re also saying that people don’t have any responsibility to protect themselves and I just can’t agree with that statement. It’s way too idealistic to be applicable to real life in any significant way.
Why do game makers need to be the responsible party? I’ve never played a game that didn’t let you block and/or mute people you’re playing with. That doesn’t make assholes disappear but it stops the problem from impacting you. Why add a middleman to the equation?
Because the devs/mods have the power to at least attempt to remove the person from the game before anyone else has to suffer their comments.
It’s much simpler to let players decide what they will tolerate on their own.
It’s pretty simple to enable mod actions, too. Game devs make a list of rules about what you can and can’t say. You agree to those rules when you start playing the game. Breaking the rules earns you a punishment. If you don’t like it, you don’t play the game. If the rules are unfairly restrictive then people won’t play the game and it will fail. This is how internet moderation has worked since forever.
Yes that is how moderation has worked in some places in the past. It’s also been historically unpaid volunteer work and not particularly effective, especially at large scales. Most of the people here have at least one story about bad moderation on reddit precisely because that kind of moderation is inefficient and heavily influenced by the personal bias of the moderator reviewing a report. You still needed to block people on a regular basis if you wanted to both participate and avoid harassment from a subset of users. That’s how it is all over the internet and there is nothing that can be done to completely remove that element of online activity. Hence the need for thicker skin.
Well yeah, that’s why part of Riot’s solution seems to be adding more mods. I’d be more understanding if Riot didn’t have the resources to add more paid mod support, but I truly don’t think that’s the case. So yeah, pay more mods and use more advanced technology to flag communication, I think that’s an attainable goal.
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t still protect themselves by blocking harassment, but I believe it’s perfectly within devs’ abilities to at least attempt to remove the most heinous bullies from the game.
While that is true in many respects, voice chat is quite difficult to police compared to text chat. I’m not sure how you go about automating or even monitoring that without recording everything people say using your service. Which then brings up a whole host of issues from data storage costs to privacy concerns to consent to record laws. You pretty much have to rely on users to submit evidence of their claims and that leads us back to the idea that users need to expect to have an active role in enforcing any sort of moderation policy.
It doesn’t bring up any issues to record people for moderation purposes, if it’s in the Terms of Service of whatever service/game you’re using. Agreeing to the ToS is a form of contract. CoD’s voice chat, for example, is already monitored and recorded.
Also, as voice recognition with AI is getting better, so will the effectiveness of those moderation tools. Not just in terms of speed but also in terms of cost.
Well, there aren’t. If people sign a contract and aren’t aware of what it says, that’s their own problem. And gaming is a commodity, so it’s not like you HAVE to sign that contract if you disagree with it. Just don’t play the game then.
You can say there’s no issues with that system as many times as you like but it’s not going to make it true. Some people definitely disagree with you on that point and I know that because I’m one of them. You don’t seem all that interested in having that opinion challenged so I’m not going to bother writing out why here but I’ve said more on the topic in this thread if you’d like to understand another perspective more clearly.
nature. Stop fighting a losing battle. Learn how to block people and move on with your life. If you stop engaging they’ll get bored and leave you alone. They thrive on your reaction so stop giving them one.
The problem for developers is that the easiest way to stop engaging is to not play their games. They care about moderation because they want people to continue to play their game.
I don’t know that that’s true. Some games may be worse than others but I don’t think there are any specific games, or for that matter places online in general, where some form of harassment is not an issue. If you want to avoid it entirely then you need to avoid people entirely and that’s not really a teneble solution.
There have been players who got blocked by everyone because of skills and were then unable to engage in matchmaking. I think just banning assholes is absolutely the best solution.
Sure, but who decides who the assholes are? What standard of proof do they use? What happens to people who almost meet that definition but don’t quite? Some cases are pretty straightforward but many have too much grey area for a simple concept like ‘ban all the assholes’ to hold up without a huge amount of effort that often can’t be provided effectively.
Evidence is key and that can be difficult to get. Additionally, players often edit clips to get the reaction they want from moderators or the community as a whole. The video in the linked article could potentially be a great example of this. The streamer obviously wants you to think they were attacked unprovoked but is that really what happened? We have no context for what led to the recorded exchange. Did the streamer refer to him using a racial slur for failing to hold what they thought was the proper position during the round immediately before the video begins? That doesn’t excuse what the player said in response but it does change the context significantly. If you ban the rape guy and then he releases a video showing the streamer saying even more outrageous things do you reverse the ban, ban them both, or give them both a warning not to be dicks in the future? This is not an isolated incident either. Multiple situations just like this happen every day on platforms with any significant number of users. How do you give each one the time it requires to be resolved correctly? Will you have any players left if you ban everyone who offends someone else?
The point is, policing people’s behavior is very challenging. There are tons of ways to abuse any system you can design unless you record literally everything your users do and that comes with it’s own set of moral and logistical issues. The simplest and most universally applicable solution is to enable users to block other players themselves. Making that impact matchmaking is kind of dumb in my opinion as it just opens up the potential for abuse as you noted. Set up a few very simple ground rules and then let players sort out who they want to be able to communicate with based on how they treat them. That’s the only solution I can see that is realistic and sustainable but it requires users to take an active role in maintaining the community, which they should be doing anyway if they want it to be the kind of place you’re describing.
I only play online games with friends because I don’t feel like dealing with fuckheads in my spare time. That does mean there are a lot of games which are probably cool but I won’t play because they are meant to be played in lobbies.
You don’t know what is true? That people can’t stop playing a game? That developers care about players quitting their game? It’s trivially easy to play video games and avoid trolls. There are single player games. You can play only with friends or family. You can play live service with lots of solo-oriented content and mute the chat. It’s not a hyperbolic choice between playing video games or avoiding all social interaction in life period - that’s a very “terminally online” kind of perspective. Normal people reduce toxic interactions where they can, they don’t think, “Welp, I either put up with constant bigotry and rape threats in this totally optional entertainment or I have to move out to a shack in the woods.”
For most people gaming is a social activity. The popularity and prevalence of multiplayer games vs single player games bears this out. Playing single player games is not a viable solution to avoiding harassment for people who are interested in the social and/or multiplayer aspects of gaming. Muting people who are dicks is a viable solution and that’s exactly what I’ve been advocating for in this discussion. Many others seem to think they shouldn’t need to be involved in the process and game devs or other communication platforms should do all the work for them. I don’t think that’s a realistic suggestion.
What is your source on multiplayer games being more popular and prevalent than single player? Because a cursory search only turns up the opposite preference. You’re ignoring the parts of my argument that don’t suit you as well, like playing only with friends, so I don’t think you’re really being an honest interlocutor. That leads me to believe you are probably a player that bullies other players, which is why you’re so strongly anti-moderation.
statista.com/…/us-single-player-vs-multiplayer-fr…“According to an October 2022 survey of PC and console gamers in the United States, over half of respondents stated that they spent about 75 to 100 percent of their gaming time playing alone.”
midiaresearch.com/…/single-player-vs-multiplayer-…“57% of gamers prefer single-player over multiplayer games, compared to 22% who prefer multiplayer games. While the overall preference for the single player mode holds true across all age segments, the degree to which the single player mode is preferred differs significantly with age.”
I cannot get behind the sentiment of “online communication is awful so we shouldn’t even attempt to do anything about it.” Yeah at some point you have to learn to shake it off to protect yourself, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make any effort to moderate online spaces as well. Don’t give assholes quarter in your game if you want to retain your community.
You can’t remove the suck from people, but you can remove the people from your community.
I didn’t say no attempts should be made to improve things. In fact in one of my comments I explicitly said the opposite. I’m saying people need to be both realistic in their expectations of what any moderation policy can achieve and proactive in the pursuit of their own online safety. Moderators will never be able to fully eliminate this problem because it is an inherent part of the behavior of a subset of humanity and humans are involved in the activities where this harassment takes place.
If you expect every person you meet, online or in person, to respect the rules you are going to be disappointed. By all means, make suggestions for improvement. But understand any solution will be imperfect and accept your role in dealing with those imperfections. To put the sentiment in a more succint form, get thicker skin.
Moderators will never be able to fully eliminate this problem because it is an inherent part of the behavior of a subset of humanity and humans are involved in the activities where this harassment takes place
I’m not suggesting they can, I don’t think anyone is.
If you expect every person you meet, online or in person, to respect the rules you are going to be disappointed
I don’t, but I expect if someone starts yelling rape threats at a restaurant that they’ll be kicked out, rather than the waiter saying “well why didn’t you just move to another table?” The rules are there for a reason, there should be consequences if they are broken.
I understand the comparison but you can’t exactly mute people with minimal effort in real life. Additionally, the threat of rape in person is significantly different than anonymously online from a legal perspective because the person making the threat knows who and where the target is at the moment the threat is made.
At a high level I don’t disagree with most of what you’re saying. The point I’m making is that there’s a pretty large gap between “something should be done about online harassment” and “this is our plan for stopping online harassment”. Most calls for action appeal to the first without much concern for the second, and the solution is the difficult part, not identifying the problem.
It does talk about some steps they’re taking right at the beginning. I missed those initially because on mobile it looks like an ad before the actual article starts so I skimmed over it.
Given the choice between an online community with assholes being moderated away and an online community without asshole moderation, I’m going to choose the one where assholes get warned, muted, and banned.
My favourite subreddit had a rule, “Be Civil”. I much preferred that sub over ones that didn’t have that rule (or one like it). Too many people don’t know how to behave in public forums, and those people make the internet a lot less pleasant. See Facebook and Instagram comments if you’d like some examples.
I don’t play many online games, except with friends exclusively, or where there is no chat (especially voice chat). If there were games that had moderated communities that banned assholes, then I’d be more likely to venture into that world…and maybe I’d even start turning on my mic.
A competitive gaming community is different. You want players who are invested in winning. It’s more fun when everyone is playing hard. I’d rather have someone yell at someone who threw a round than no one say anything and have that player throw more rounds.
People are so coddled these days they have all the tools at their disposal to avoid “toxic” behavior and yet they won’t mute the person and will complain as if there was nothing they could do to escape the harassment of words on a screen. If someone is taking getting to you then you can mute them.
As for your statement on toxicity preventing you from playing multiplayer doesn’t seem true. There are plenty of games where you will never see toxicity and you still don’t play any of them so that can’t be what’s stopping you.
Yes. Players who are invested in winning. Not players who have poor emotional regulation or social behaviour and are invested in being assholes.
It’s called sportsmanship. Yet some online games sound worse than middle school sports games… probably because, for years, nobody got punished for acting like a middle schooler who can’t control their emotions or behaviour.
As for your statement on toxicity preventing you from playing multiplayer doesn’t seem true. There are plenty of games where you will never see toxicity and you still don’t play any of them so that can’t be what’s stopping you.
I’m fascinated by how you know so much about the games I don’t play! Lol
You said you don’t play many online games with Randoms because there aren’t games that moderate their communities. But there are plenty of games that moderate their communities so how is that hindering you from playing? It seems you just prefer to play single player or multi-player with friends. Which is fine but you are speaking about distrastically changing the culture of a community you don’t even interact with on the slim chance that they entice you to join.
To your point on sportsman ship. Yeah I would prefer if every good player was not a dickhead but I care about teammate skill before team mate attitude. When you are playing competitive games it wastes everyone’s time to play dumb or play wrong. If someone joins a ranked cs lobby and tries to only knife they deserve to get flamed. As long as people aren’t breaking the rules regarding hate speech I don’t care how mean or rude players are in competitive play. I personally don’t flame but I don’t mind that others do it raises the stakes and puts pressure on players which is a good thing. When I get flamed and I feel it’s annoying I just mute the person and continue.
I’ve played games that overly moderate the communities speech and it leads to not one talking and it feels like playing single player as everyone may as well be a bot.
As long as people aren’t breaking the rules regarding hate speech
Hate speech and threats of violence are what the article is about.
So if you agree that rape threats and certain words (that constitute hate speech) are ok to ban, then you’re in agreement with the article and other people saying “People shouldn’t need to grow a thicker skin”.
Unless you’re against hate speech, but in favour of threats of violence, but I don’t think you are just because you didn’t explicitly say it, haha
I’ll try to be more specific about why I disagree cause I think my original comment did a poor job.
The article is basically someone tweeting an extreme situation at riot games acting like they so nothing about that kind of behavior. That’s not true I’d bet my left nut that guy would have been banned if the player had just muted him and reported him. They say oh i cant mute because then i need to communicate as if they have any need to communicate with a player making those kind of threats. It doesn’t make sense even with 100% perfect moderation you should would still need to mute the player and report.
Riot then is forced to respond by increasing how much they moderate speech. Introducing a bunch of new moderation and saying trust us guys we understand banter and won’t go overboard. But that’s exactly what will happen with all these extra tools and people start moderating. the bar for what is considered mutable will keep lowering. As long as this mentality of “never mute anyone and ban anyone who upsets you” continues then moderators will cater to their thinnest skinned players. At some point you need to realize you have to mute players who upset you and not engage with them.
If you want to kill communication in your game this is the right step to take. Reactionary measures are never a good sign. At someone point people need to mute and move and let valorant moderate their game without every toxic moment treated as common.
League is not toxic in communication anymore it’s toxic in players mentality and intent to ruin the game but it will never outgrow the toxic rep it earned thus people will treat every instance of toxicity like a common event.
After writing this all out I think I’ve convinced myself out of my position but I’ll leave the rough draft of what i wrote. Maybe you’re right that more moderation is a good thing. I can see chat being over moderated from the increased scrutiny. I can’t see a world where competitive multi-player games are a safe space for all types of people. Muting will always be necessary to curate your online experience.
Steams cut off that, at just the $3 million mark, is $450 million. This is $900,000 per game.
People wonder why other companies wanted to make their own launchers. They leave millions on the table by having steam 'handle' things.
This is also why Valve isn't that inclined to pump out tons of new games.
A game like Palworld, which as of 3 weeks ago, has sold 12 million copies would end up making Valve somewhere in the neighbourhood of $72 million as of the end of January.
There’s nothing stopping game companies from selling through multiple storefronts, or even direct to customer with Steam’s cut removed.
The fact is, players are happy to pay a premium so that the games live in their steam library, are downloaded via Steam’s delivery network, and integrate with steam features.
The fact is, players are happy to pay a premium so that the games live in their steam library
i don’t think you can make a statement like that, that is so untested. If capcom were to start selling games at $70 on steam, and $50 on capcom.com things might be different, we can’t really say.
Exactly. Steam provides a service to these companies (a pipeline to customers) and they don’t want to pay.
They are free to make their own, like epic, ubisoft, origin, etc. have, and I am free to continue to use Steam, which I prefer because it provides a service and it works and I feel is a superior product.
Another thing is the infrastructure that Steam provides to get the games to the users and support them costs money. If Capcom wants to build the infrastructure themselves it will cost them more. they will have to charge $100 (exaggeration) and they will only be serving Capcom games.
If you sell steam keys through your site you can't charge less than the steam price. In order to sell it cheaper on their site, it would have to be a non-steam version and they'd have to serve up the files themselves. If it's a multiplayer game it wouldn't be compatible, they'd need to switch to EOS or something else. realistically speak, developers could probably charge a bit less by providing that their own. it doesn't cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.
it doesn’t cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.
No, it doesn’t. It also doesn’t take $5 to make a cup of coffee, or $10 to make a plate of pasta, or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video.
But unless you’re proposing ending capitalism to fix the problems with valve’s pricing model, there won’t be any change to it any time soon.
The only thing that will get valve to have more competitive pricing for video games publishers is if they have actual competition that can siphon away games from their platform. It’s not valve’s fault that everyone else has made inferior products.
And there’s nothing forcing you to publish on steam. If you don’t think 30% is a fair exchange for handling file distribution and payments, you can handle your own file distribution and payments. Your game isn’t forced to be on Steam.
or whatever Netflix charges every month to serve up mundane low quality streaming video
Netflix isn't the service I'd point the finger at for low quality streaming video. That would be Amazon. They don't even have the problem that Max has where it always starts low and then evens out by the time the recap is done.
In fact, I’m fairly certain you’re allowed to do both: sell your game for 25% less while hosting and processing yourself. You just can’t sell your steam codes for less.
Gaming on the PC around the 90s-2000s was pretty rough. I remember installing a game from a CD, typing the key on the back of the CD, and installation failed because I needed different sound drivers or something. I remember most games on my janky PC would be a gamble if it worked or not, even if it met minimum specs.
I remember still facing that issue in around 2010s even with Steam, and then seeing how slick installing apps were on the iPhone and it just “worked”, and wishing PC games were as simple.
PC gaming is great now. It’s been a long time coming.
Steam offers many services to users and developers more than just being a simple storefront. They didn’t become top dog by virtue of being early, there are plenty of competing launchers that do not offer even a tenth of what steam offers.
I feel like a lot of people, myself included, forget that there’s all kinds of software and such available on steam. Their main thing is games, but they have stuff like Blender (which is free), Vegas Movie Studio or whatever it’s called, and a bunch of others. Don’t they also have movies, or am I wrong on that one?
Hrm, depends. Usually in modern online payment systems it should be impossible for the debitor to have the CVC of the card and hence leaked information could not make actual payments from it, but it could spam the card’s number with bogus payments to continuously keep it being blocked.
In any case if you’re affected I would recommend asking your bank how to proceed, just to be on the safe side.
On the other hand, when steam had a leak a few years ago (where you could see other people’s account details after logging in instead of yours) my credit card got exchanged automatically by the bank, as they saw that I had used it to buy games on steam - even though in this „leak“ only the last 4 digits were leaked and nothing more
That’s not a requirement. You can make payments without one though the odds of approval aren’t great. If the actual real card numbers got leaked, you need to cancel that card. Also if they actually leaked REAL card numbers, Epic is going to be in deep shit with the card brands.
This article has no real details though so we’ll see. I kind of doubt this is legit.
I guess the answer is money, but why would you do any handling of card details in-house. Having a third party process transactions passes to some degree ensuring security onto said third party.
I’d still doubt any risk of full card details being leaked unless the hack goes much deeper than just Epic.
For me I started using a service called Privacy a few years ago and haven’t looked back so far. It’s changed how I handle all online transactions. It let’s you create virtual cards that are either good once or forever and once it’s used by that merchant it’s tied to them. So if someone ever did try to charge you that wasn’t that exact merchant it gets blocked. You can set daily, and monthly limits as well and pause the card or close it whenever. So I would use this virtual card for the payment on epic and then this happens and all I do is close it out and open a new one. So far I did have 1 place that had my card charged from a place that wasn’t them. The cool part is you know who almost screwed you because of the card thats being used. It was a local pizza place and I called to let them know they probably got hacked.
No, when you store your card, it doesn’t actually store the whole card details. It communicates with the payment processor and when the card is approved, it gets back a token that says “this card is valid”, so in the future they just have to send that token and the payment processor says “yup I know the card you’re talking about”.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to be. You’re really not supposed to store card info yourself.
That’s the ideal, but not always the case. Last time I read the PCI rules, merchants could (still) handle/store card details just as they could before the hands-off approach existed; it just required someone to attest that precautions were taken. I’m sure you can guess how foolproof that is.
I remember all the marketing and promises for Black and White 2 that were never realised. It doesn’t feel like they really managed the first sequel, let alone another one.
I’ve been trying out The Universim recently. It has a lot of the same ideas, but gets rid of many which I felt didn’t work. Most notably, there is no creature bound to your will. I think the game is better for the omission. Version 1.0 is slated for January, and is supposed to include interplanetary colonization.
There are so many games to play, it makes no sense to release crap unless you’re in it for making money. Then you can release whenever and someone somewhere will buy it. See MW3.
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