Cue the BUT STEAMS MONOPOLY idiots that completely ignore that Valve does nothing to stop anyone from competing with them, its just that anyone who has tried (outside GOG) has only produced anti consumer garbage
People who understand nuance exists in this world. Steams DRM is a VERY RARE check to the internet that you own the game, and its an OPTIONAL thing that developers can choose. EA UBI and EPIC’s versions of DRM is FAR WORSE, and if you really want to be extreme in your hatred of even reasonable level DRM, GOG exists
Steams DRM is a VERY REASONABLE compromise between the interests of the devs and the consumer not wanting to be unfairly punished/annoyed. Steams DRM has literally NEVER caused me a headache aside from ONCE when steam was super new, its a non issue at this point
Yeah, and when I show up to work, regardless of how much I like what I do or my coworkers, I expect to be paid for it, your point is? They created a form of DRM that is the least obtrusive out there, made it optional, and they gave us one of the best store fronts out there as compensation for it. Again, Ubi, EA, and Epic’s DRM is FAR WORSE.
It’s definitely convenient to have everything in once place, and Steam has way more features, but it’s good to avoid Steam becoming too monopolistic. We saw recently how badly that can go with reddit.
Despite the widespread worshipping of Steam and GabeN, I’ve had lots of issues with Steam and Valve over the years.
No, Steam gained its near monopoly through anti-consumer practices as well: being mandatory for playing Valve games, even offline, as soon as 2004; being DRM-ridden; locking consumers out of their right to sell their games on second-hand market; still enforcing an old revenue share system that’s hurting devs; or putting micro-transactions everywhere with their collectible system that you can’t really disable at all. Just to name a few.
Steam is not better than others. You’re just used to its flaws.
The only one that goes on Epic’s favor is the cut, but frankly I think the whole “old revenue share system that’s hurting devs” is nothing more than Epic’s propaganda trying to get marketshare. 70/30 in favor of the devs while Steam handles hosting, community platform, multiplayer and modding tools, so forth, is neither unusual nor ripping anyone off, certainly not worth how maligned it was. I understand devs who prefer Epic’s cut, but I don’t think Epic is doing this out of fairness, nor that it can be relied on if they ever do gain ground.
In the other aspects, it’s either equal or worse. It has as much DRM. Steam provides options for people to trade extra copies they didn’t activate but as far as I know other stores don’t. Neither allows people to trade away activated copies so that’s no points for anyone.
I assume the microtransaction thing is talking about Steam Trading Cards and such, they are a bit of an iffy worthless addition to get people to waste money… but if the person is concerned over how much money the devs are getting, they do get a cut from every transaction, so under that perspective it should be counted as a plus. Which, by the way, is entirely up to the dev to add or not.
I don’t really remember asking for your opinion on what a fair cut should be or what you think is a rip off. But the fact is that Steam takes more money from developers than other powerful competitors around (but 30% is barely enough to get servers running if I listen to you :D ). Okay. Sure. Yes. Right.
The microtransactions are so awful in Steam that with proposed laws in some countries (like the Netherlands) it would make the whole thing illegal. Some of the worst Valve practices already are, like the loot boxes (they’re banned there).
I don’t tell you that you should switch to something else than Steam. I don’t tell you that there’s a better choice (maybe GOG?). But what I’m saying is that Steam is indeed predatory and has been known for its anti-consumer practices, despite what some True Gamers™ seem to believe.
I don’t really remember asking for your opinion on what a fair cut should be or what you think is a rip off.
Too bad, this is a public forum. I don’t need to ask for your permission to say whatever I want. But if that’s how you are going to go about it, then feel free to think whatever you want on your corner.
Yeah, Steam has DRM. Its the least annoying DRM that exists entirely because they gave us one of the best shop fronts that exists on PC as a trade off. And all companies have the right to sell their own games on whichever store they wish. Unlike Epic, Steam doesnt buy the exclusive rights to OTHER companies games, its just their own games. Your imaginary competition utopian dreamland doesnt exist, and you’re turning optional mole hills into mountains in order to pretend the best option we have is bad. If you don’t like collectible trading cards and the least annoying DRM ever created, go buy on GOG, EPIC UBI and EA all have FAR WORSE practices
Avoid it in favor of GoG. Ubisoft can’t be trusted with a single drop of goodwill. As we can see by how they inject their clunky garbage manager even in games they sell through other stores.
I think this is by far the worst generation for gaming.
Obviously from a technical standpoint, it’s great. Fast loading times, better performance, graphical prowess. But in terms of the quality of the games, it’s dire. I honestly don’t understand why I was in such a rush to buy a PS5, because most of the games I’ve enjoyed have had PS4 versions, so whilst I may have experienced that better performance and graphics etc, I didn’t really need to buy a PS5.
I didn’t need to buy my PS5 either, but my PS4 was a much older device I’d bought cheap from a co-worker and I felt like it was getting slow.
The bonus of having both is that the PS4 is comparatively light and compact, so I can travel with it, and for the two PS5 exclusives I have, there is an option to remote play the PS5 on the PS4, so I’m generally happy with my purchase.
All that notwithstanding, I’ve got an Xbox One X and I’ve seen no real need to upgrade that to a Series X. There are no Xbox exclusives for the Series X/S that have been driving forces.
This generation honestly feels like it lacks direction. The consoles are more expensive and are huge devices, with controllers that now cost more than games. With the original scarcity of the newer consoles, nearly four years into this generation, new releases are still available for the older gen. I feel like we’re reaching a point where console evolution either needs to take an enormous leap, or we just stop seeing console generations altogether.
Pokémon. You get to choose from Charmander, Bulbasaur, and Squirtle for your starter. And everyone you know will judge you for which starter you picked.
Idk, on Android you can run Pojav Launcher, but I don’t really know much about x boxes. Probably a mistake to buy such a closed ecosystem in the first place, from the little I have heard.
At ten I was coding basic stuff and figuring out lan networks to play multiplayer games in the early 90’s. An average 10 year old is very capable of figuring out tech stuff.
Eh… Like I said, I was doing a bit more just to play with friends. I guess these days it would depend. If you did the install and introduced it as the method for launching the game I don’t think they’d even question it.
Almost definitely. When they did the initial release, it could have easily been a flop, and if it was a flop, it would have been pointless to have gone in planning to repair and sell refurbished units. Now that sales are showing its a hit, they are taking the time to invest in changes for more long-term support.
Self-tapping screws made sense for a product in an entirely new product category without knowledge if it would be successful or not. Torx screws that slide into metal threads makes a lot more sense for what is expected to be a product with long shelf-life.
The only thing is, the refurb market can’t be that great to pay for this change. You might not think it, but changing to better screws and adding the metal threads is crazy more expensive.
Crazy more expensive for raw profits - per unit, it’s basically negligible.
You could say this if s consumer focused effort to achieve market share or sell more games, but I choose to believe this if just what happens
Personally, I think this is just what happens when you have an employee run tech company. They lose out on like 0.05% profits, but more then make up for it through game sales and reputation
I mean realistically, this is probably a few cents a unit. Across hen million units, that’s real money. But quality pays over time. They lose out on quarterly profits, but they don’t worry about that bs - they’re not publicly traded, and they’ll make way more on a 5 year timespan
Fair point, although I’d argue that this is probably a cheap and standard extra step
Molds and turn around time are definitely expensive… But much cheaper if you wait until the next version that probably will have different mount points for the newer internals
I’m not saying this isn’t worth praising, I’m just saying this is exactly what integrity and giving your employees autonomy looks like. You come back for version 2, and you take your lessons learned, you explore the improvements that you thought up during the last version
It’s just basic craftsmanship, but that has unfortunately been smothered in most places these days. You have to be big enough for this to be an R&D effort you can afford to fail, but small enough no one has bought you up to wring you for value
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
Yes! I almost always change a few of the buttons when I get the chance. Extra points if the game is nice enough to let you know when your changes conflict with other presets.
A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have “keyboard and mouse mode” or “console mode” if the controller is used.
I’ve got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.
Yeah, but if that’s the only way a game developer implements it, they’re tying themselves to Steam. I mean, if I were a game developer, I wouldn’t want to do that, as it’s a lot of lock-in.
I think that Valve’s service is a pretty good one, but they’re taking a 30% cut for doing a number of things for game developers. If they become the only game in town, it’s possible that they might start taking more than 30% and those developers are going to be kind of stuck with that.
It’s common across games, so it doesn’t make sense for game devs to reimplement the wheel, but I’d think that putting as much as possible in the game engine would be a reasonable place.
Not being able to bind the controller on PC is even more insane to me. Why can I change my entire keyboard layout but not change the controller AT ALL?
I get that you‘re frustrated for more reasons than a freshly released game has bugs but this is literally the first time I hear of bg 3 being not completeable. What specs are you running on?
You just have to use your judgement and laugh at what you find funny on your own, if you need peer pressure (opinions of others) to find something funny then it’s not really funny to you and maybe isn’t even funny for many people to begin with.
This might be controversial but maybe many Sitcoms that do this were never funny in the first place and used laugh tracks because try as they might they had to force people to find it funny via artificial peer pressure, that either constitutes of a crowd being told to laugh on cue, or a recording of them doing so, which is what a laugh track is.
Here’s the key point and why we stopped using them, things aren’t funny, people think certain things are funny, and they also think plenty of things are not funny, and like it or not people are not always going to find the same things funny.
I always thought it was because the earliest stuff was actually filmed infront of a live audience (Like a theatre) who did laugh, so when switching to non-live-audience stuff, the viewing public would be ‘put off’ by no laughter, so they injected it with canned laughter… then as time went on they realised this was rubbish and stopped it.
But maybe I’m just missing the joke in the previous two comments, I dunno.
In the earlier days it was like that but as time went on it became a technique known as sweetening to make the joke seem funnier, sometimes they would even use it to fill in silence or dead air since that was frowned upon (I wonder why people said TV rots your brain for the longest time… can’t be related to any of these practices could it?).
The beginning part is essentially saying that if people need laugh-tracks to find things funny they are dry and humor-less, a joke at their expense but also at the same time it’s 100% sincere, a person who can’t find things funny without others lacks a sense of humor.
Steam Deck is shaping up to be the “Nintendo” of handheld PCs. Not the most powerful thing on the market, but cleverly put together with its own bespoke software that allows users to customise and tweak games at the system level via quick access to its features. Having windows on the other machines makes your access to games better but means you have to dig harder or install extra software to do what the deck does. To paraphrase Sega’s 90s marketing, It Does what Windon’t.
Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.
I think it’s a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand… but there hasn’t been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.
Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It’s got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur’s Gate. And it’s reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn’t get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it’s gotten lots of buzz.
I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of “free” (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.
For me Half Life: Alyx was not even the best VR game but maybe one of the best games i played in my 20+ years gaming experience. It really shows how great VR can be if developers put an immense amount of time, effort and love into a game. Other honorable mentions: Pavlov VR, Blade and Sorcery (especially the Star Wars mods) and War Thunder
It might be nostalgia speaking, but I think the real issue is that a 20 year old game can actually be this good and popular. How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)? Doesn’t that say that game companies in general have dropped the ball on game design, focusing on graphics and money over content and gameplay? As I said, it might just be me stuck in my wonderfully comforting blanket of nostalgia…
I think it's almost definitely nostalgia speaking.
Granted, by the point Oblivion was made I was the nostalgia guy talking about how Bethesda games kept getting smaller and less ambitious. Most people saying that then did so because they were coming from Morrowind. Not me, I am a proper dinosaur and I was just pissed that after Morrowind dropped everything interesting about Daggerfall to make a console game they just kept moving further in that direction.
Was also not a fan of Fallout getting turned into Oblivion 40K instead of a proper turn-based CRPG.
Which goes to show this conversation isn't new and gaming is old enoung now that it has gone in cycles.
I mean, seriously, Daggerfall was continent-sized and was using procedural generation to make dungeons and build dialogue and quests and essentially reimagining how games could be made in ways that wouldn't resurface until what? No Man's Sky? Oblivion is bad Lord of the Rings. If anything it's the awkward middle child now, because man, the Imperial City in Oblivion feels hilariously tiny and basically deserted against modern RPGs. There are five people running loops and having canned conversations. Coming from Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk to this is... a bit of a shock.
"Why is an old game good?" feels like an odd question. It would be silly to ask that of any other medium, wouldn't it? The most beloved classics being beloved isn't an indictment of modern stuff, especially when cherry-picking the greatest hits and ignoring how many flops existed back then too.
Clair Obscur came out the same time and it’s probably the best RPG I’ve ever played, and I’ve played every noteworthy one in the last 40 years at least. GOTY at the LEAST.
I hear this rhetoric a lot, which shows me that a ton of people have a much harder time than me finding the good stuff, even though there’s so much of it out there.
I mean I am all for criticising creatively bankrupt mush like Ubisoft et al pushes out and Call of Duty 420: Black Ops 69 or FIFA or whatever but we can’t pretend there are literally no good games being released nowadays either. Just now we had a month with both Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released within weeks of each other. BG3 and Alan Wake 2 releasing in the same year was just two years ago.
There are plenty of not just good but great recent games.
How can it be that it is more enjoyable than anything else I’ve bought over the last year (at least)?
Possibly because you’re buying the wrong games? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a massive nostalgia-on for Oblivion, and I picked up the Remaster, and it’s cool…
But there have been a lot of great games so far this year. Just this month alone, Blue Prince and Expedition 33 have both been fantastic. Both better than the Oblivion remaster imo.
The Indiana Jones game is cool. I haven’t played Split Fiction yet, but it looks really good as well. Just to name a few.
Edit: More that I remembered: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii. Wanderstop is pretty chill. Xenoblade Chronicles X was finally released on Switch (game map is like 5x the size of Skryim or something…). Atomfall. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is pretty cool if you’re into that kind of thing.
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