i reduced my plan because of the price hike. Fuck that noise. If the basic plan goes up too much more ill cancel that too. Online isn’t worth too much more than what they have it set at now.
Not sure if this is how it’s supposed to work, but someone bought me premium and I downloaded like all the good games I could fit on my drives. Now I can seemingly play them all without a membership, as it ran out months ago… so that’s neat. Seems like a loophole they might close though.
Does Starfield’s narrative cast Space Britain as the evil empire and climax with you hunting down and killing King Charles, who has been kept alive as a Futurama-like head in a jar?
I’ve only got a couple hours in but if doesn’t I’m disappointed! Keep my space tea tax free!
I very much doubt that people are watching games exclusively though. They are probably working, playing a game themselves (I watch while playing Football Manager etc…) or glued to their phone.
My current job situation makes it impossible to work and watch videos at the same time (mostly)…
It’s a way for me to stress down after a hectic day. I don’t really wanna play video games, but for me putting on a video from a creator, who plays video games ~ there is no new knowledge I need to process, there is no “real world” information that I have to adhere to… it just is whatever… and I can turn my mind off, while Pravus talks about something I don’t really care about ~ so yeah
I have gamepass and I’m happy with it. I tend to dabble in a lot of games instead of playing one game for a long time.
One new game costs $60 to purchase. For me personally there is little chance I will be playing it 4 months from now.
Alternatively I can pay for gamepass and play any of those games for $15 a month. The only situation where this ends up being a worse deal is if I only play one game for more than four months, which so far has not happened for me.
I realize that doesn’t make sense for everyone, though.
The issue for me is that most games I buy are way cheaper, (because of steam sales) and the games I enjoy are rarely on gamepass. So I’d be barely saving money and be playing worse games.
There really needs to be more lawsuits for this type of thing. You bought something and they didn’t make it clear that you were renting it. I get the server stuff but you know what? After you are done with the game it’s time to allow the community to host servers or at least remove DRM for offline play.
The union said that the deal “commits ZeniMax to uses of AI that augment human ingenuity and capacities, to ensure that these tools enhance worker productivity, growth and satisfaction without causing workers harm.”
Under the terms of the deal, wherever ZeniMax rolls out AI in a way that impacts the work of union members, the company will provide advance notice to the union and negotiate its plans upon request.
Additionally, it lays out six “guiding principles” for AI’s use in the workplace, insisting the tech must be fair; reliable and safe; private and secure; inclusive; transparent; and accountable.
This all sounds like the job losses from AI replacing workers will go as planned, just slower.
Unions, in general, seem to be doing a rather naive job of protecting workers from ai across the board.
30% fees are insane. Those cost are passed down to us the consumer. We get shittier game because a third of the profit goes to these marketplaces.
I get the epic hate bandwagon but what the fuck is up with the constant bootlicking? Google sucks for doing this and all the other platforms as well. They ALL employ monopolistic tactics to keep their moats, stop defending them because the circle jerk tells you too.
I’ll happily pay these 30% if it means I get quality services for them:
high speed download servers
reliable cloud saves
automatic, non intrusive updates
discussion forums
easy mod management
friend networking, multiplayer services
responsive and uncomplicated support
(using Steam as an example here)
People always act like those are to be taken as granted, but if you have ever worked in dev/devops, you would know that there’s a lot of work maintaining each one of them.
Also, you can use these services for as long as you want, despite paying for them with a single one-time purchase.
Of course, if the platform doesn’t provide any services or benefits, your point stands. In that case just avoid it.
Apart from the forums, Epic offer all those things and take only 12%. Microsoft offer most of those things and also take 12%.
Hosting a forums platform costs almost nothing. Moderating them like Valve, expecting the game creators to do the work and doing an extremely poor job, with each big game hub filled with toxicity and people earning points for racism and other forms of bigotry, is certainly not worth 18%.
Yeah, I still remember that I completely lost access to my Steam account in the early days. I forgot the password, and the password reset feature didn’t work. I contacted support and they never responded. I eventually just gave up and lost the games in the account. I guess if I had waited long enough they probably would’ve fixed it, but, holy fuck, Steam was really shit in the early days.
To Valve’s credit, my understanding is that the support situation has improved marginally over the 20 years since my incident.
The 30% covers storage, distribution, discovery, and probably more. If you had to implement that yourself you’d wind up with a shittier version for probably more money.
This is horseshit. Apple is making billions of dollars a year on the app store.
Setting a CDN and a document search service take like 5min on Azure / AWS / GCP, and get you 90% of the way there, and your annual bill for them might push into the hundreds of thousands, but nothing close to approaching the amount of money that Google and apple are taking in through the app store.
People really need to stop defending this horseshit behaviour. If it’s so hard to run an App store then why won’t Google or Apple fairly compete against any?
30% fees are insane. Those cost are passed down to us the consumer. We get shittier game because a third of the profit goes to these marketplaces.
Whilst that may be the case, every single day one launch on EGS and other stores (GOG, Microsoft, Steam) launch at exactly the same price on Epic despite the lesser cut. Not one single title I’ve seen launch at a lower price on EGS.
I feel it’s naive to think that is, the consumer would ever benefit from a lesser cut, the fat shits at the top would just keep more.
The publishers could already set the prices lower on EGS by default with the 18% difference being put in consumers pockets making EGS a more enticing place to buy games for now, instead, they want to sell games the same price on EGS vs all other stores they offer titles on pocketing the difference.
EGS Exclusives even launch at the standard pricing despite the money they used to receive up front from Epic and the lesser cut. None of this grandstanding is a benefit to me as a consumer and I won't give a fuck in supporting Epic/Tim until it is.
Man, just imagine the shitstorm if a game launched at $50 on Epic, then a year later increased prices to $62 everywhere due to Steam's terms and conditions so that the dev could maintain the same profit from steam.
Of course that will never happen because there's zero consumer benefit and instead they just launch at $60 on Epic. If that did happen and the savings were benefiting the consumer then Epic might have a point.
The price is the same because of a Most Favored Nations clause in Steam’s ToS. Publishers have to sell it at the same or higher price on other platforms to keep their product on Steam, which is the lion’s share of the market. This is part of the accusation in the lawsuit: programming.dev/comment/5159579
Now you could argue that even if it were removed, publishers would still sell at the same price and keep the extra profit, but that’s just hypothetical at this point.
How do you compare it with other platforms if it’s exclusive to EGS? For timed exclusives, it would mean the price would have to go UP on EGS when the Steam version launches, which seems like pretty dumb marketing honestly.
I know I’m playing devil’s advocate defending Epic and publishers, but I don’t see how defending rent extracting monopolies is any better.
I don't even think Sony's MFN is an issue as Alan Wake 2 is $10 cheaper than on consoles, a boon for the consumer and something I could get behind, but no.
Vbucks aren't even lower cost on pc where 100% of the sale goes to Epic. No 30% cut there but prices are the same.
I'm all for supporting the message that Tim is trying to portray but they're so inconsistent with the way they manage the business I can't for the life of my accept that they're being honest.
They briefly cut the price of vbucks on mobile when they pulled the stunt and could easily do the same on pc permanently. PC Vbucks aren't transferable to Playstation wallets so they should be able to do something.
The consumer would benefit from a higher quality of games, since they would become more lucrative to make and the available budget after a successful title would be higher.
There’s also the indie scene that would benefit from every dollar. A 30% middleman tax can affect a lot more than just the price.
Cutting ceo pay is a good idea too but one problem doesn’t forgive another and regulating soft monopolies would be a first step in that direction anyways.
I don’t get wolfire’s point here. Yes steam takes a hefty 30% cut but game developers are free to sell directly if they want to. Unlike apple who have completely locked down the iOS app ecosystem or Google who allow sideloading but scares and warns people against downloading apps from non Play Store sources, steam does nothing to hinder games not sold through it. If there was a competitor who was as good as steam but took a smaller cut, then that competitor would have been the market leader in place of steam.
Exactly, I mean you can even add Non-Steam games to Steam. Yes, you don’t get achievements that way and there’s no support for workshop or big picture or the community plug-in, but you can launch the game from the steam library.
On another note, can Steam, even for a small payment of 2 dollars, add those functions for games not bought in the Steam store, but that could have been bought through Steam? I really want to have TW3 with achievements, but don’t want to buy it again.
I despise this decision. I should be able to tailor my experience to my liking, especially since I don't play games online. What's the harm in letting me have a joypad with six buttons on the front? It's literally what Capcom fighting games are designed to use. Why can't I have a D-pad that works well with fighting games? The Xbox Series controller is better than last generation's joypad (and much better than the generation before that), but for some of us, it's still not good enough.
Also, it's unlikely that 8bitdo will buy a license to make controllers for the Xbox. It's the least popular console of this generation. You're charging for the right to make controllers for a game system that's well behind its competitors. Why do that when you can make controllers for the Switch or the PC, where you can sell more product at a lower cost? It's just... stupid.
Why wouldn’t 8bitdo buy a license? There are one 3 gaming consoles, so being 3rd really makes no difference. And MS/Xbox still has a huge impact on the gaming industry.
I’m not defending the walled-garden decision, but the Xbox market is not small and this is unlikely to prevent controller manufacturers from supplying controllers to Xbox customers.
8bitdo (and the other major 3rd party controller makers) have a license. Their controllers are even advertised on Microsoft’s site - e.g. www.xbox.com/en-US/accessories/…/sn30-pro
@ArugulaZ points out correctly that this controller does not with with Xbox - it’s for mobile. Oops. There are some that do though - see later replies!]
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