Yeah, he is mainly a cheater on his wife. Not exactly great, but conversations on this sound like by people who never leave their basement and talk to people.
A pedophile predator is somebody who systematically texts underage people, and fishes out the vulnerable ones to exploit their weaknesses for their own satisfaction and exerts control over them. Speaking to a single, depending on the jurisdiction (±1 year), consenting adult (17 is young, but not completely stupid), with slightly flirty messages is absolutely not that. it isn’t even toxic. in fact, it devalues this tag for behaviour which is not cool due to the cheating and a bit skittish because of the age difference, but is otherwise kind of okay. See, next time somebody tells me about a pedophile predator I will be thinking about a conversation between two adults, or almost adult and not nasty abuse scarring people for life.
Have you talked to 17 year olds? They are far from developed in most cases. Anyone even in their late 20s should notice the difference in development and stay clear.
It is reprehensible and disgusting behavior, but it doesn’t mean we should universally apply labels across vast swaths of different issues, as it devalues said label and poisons future discussion.
Simple labels simplify discussion of course, but that runs the risk of losing nuance for the specific way someone was a disgusting creep.
Yeah I do. I disagree with most of their posts, but I agree with the motion that using the same labels indiscriminately is a problem in online discourse.
For example, far as I know so far, I’d call him a pedo, but I am unsure whether I’d call him a predator (of course, language differences apply, too). That’s just because I need words to express the predatory nature of people like Maxwell who prey on teens and YA.
That’s kinda what I meant, there’s too few words to just use the same label across the board sometimes. Doesn’t make something someone does less reprehensible. Rather i prefer to sometimes use full sentences instead of quick labels because it more accurately expresses the matter.
but I am unsure whether I’d call him a predator (of course, language differences apply, too). That’s just because I need words to express the predatory nature of people like Maxwell who prey on teens and YA.
What do you mean by this? Beahm was preying on a minor by sexting that minor and asking to meetup at twitch con. Are you specifically referring to people operating child sex rings? In either case, I don’t think anyone else uses your ultra-specific definition. For myself, and I assume most others, pedophiles are merely a type of predator. For example, the show, to catch a predator, was about creeps sexting kids online. This is precisely what Beahm was doing so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call him a predator.
Not in the jurisdiction he was in, and that’s all that matters.
Also, while sending sexually explicit texts (using only words) is not illegal, I’m pretty sure we can correlate what his intent was. What, do you think he’s going to come out and fully admit he’s a pedophile? No.
Also, nowhere in any of his statement has he clarified that he didn’t know they were underage. If it were the case that he didn’t know, that’s a pretty fucking big deal and he should know how important it is to explain that. He didn’t though.
I hate to get so semantical but using the word pedophile incorrectly just desensitizes the word. Pedophilia means being attracted to children, primarily meaning before or in the early stages of puberty, usually younger than 13. In fact, many pedophiles would not be attracted to someone aged 15+ because they are typically exclusively or primarily interested in prepubescent bodies.
That doesn’t mean this guy isn’t a total asshole, but he’s not a pedophile, and I think anyone can understand an adult sexting an older teen, while still absolutely horrid, is quite different from sexting a child.
Once again, absolutely not defending this guy, I don’t even know who he is… but I think it’s important not to desensitize the word.
Colloquially, it’s a catch-all nowadays. Like I said in another reply, we don’t need to differentiate between lowest common denominators. That gets into sounding sympathetic to these fucks, and anyone who sympathizes might as well be one themselves.
I’ve attended a seminar for child protection before that was delivered by a former cop (that worked in the sex crimes division) and they said the exact same thing - in the context of correctly making the distinction between paedophile and sex offender.
It’s because these companies keep driving up production costs on their own. Their next game has to top their last. At what point do we say that graphics are good enough? Who needs these insane amount of details? Why does a game absolutely need to be 100+GB in size? Is Bloodborne not visually appealing enough? What about God of War (2018)?
Can we not find a “good enough” acceptable baseline and just work with that? This infinite growth is annoying as both a developer and a player. Like okay, ooooh, you can render each individual hair on someone’s head and they each have their own physics. Congratulations. How’s the story for the game? Ah, broken to the point of unplayable, but you pinky swear a patch is coming.
This. I genuinely believe that in the near future indie games will be the sole torch-bearer for what I would call “traditional gaming”. Tighter, more focused experiences with no microtransactions or sanitized, inoffensive bloat. Games that are offline and don’t require any server handshake to function. And as the technology available to them advances, it will enable indie devs to be more and more ambitious with their vision.
I feel like this is already the case, and has been for years. Few AAA games interest me these days, especially the ones coming out of the biggest studios like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, etc. The only recent one was Baldur’s Gate 3, but that by itself is an exception to the norm.
Most AAA games are just complete soulless profit generators. It often feels as if any fun and experimental things get taken out because it would involve too much “risk”, and stand in the way of earning money, instead of trying to make a good or fun or unique game. Instead they are just being made for as wide of a mass appeal as possible, allergic to anything that could make the game a little more interesting and niche.
Things got very dire in the '10s, but there’s been a bit of a course correction in recent years, at least with EA. It Takes Two and the Star Wars Jedi games were microtransaction free and wonderful experiences. Only It Takes Two could really be considered weird and quirky, but it was phenomenal. First party games are also typically exceptions to the modern AAA paradigm.
I wonder how long EA will put out more interesting stuff for given Wild Hearts and Immortals if Avenum both flopped. Star Wars will always be a guaranteed seller though.
My understanding is that Immortals of Aveum was the first output from a pivot of the genuinely terrific EA originals brand that gave us the likes of It Takes Two, A Way out, Unraveled, and lots more. It used to be a program that helped indie devs publish their games with EA only recouping their costs. Immortals of Aveum, ironically, had none of that magic. It was basically a Marvel story baked into a CoD campaign with magic instead of bullets.
Ideally, this will tell the suits that this pivot was a mistake and they’ll go back to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But they’re much more likely to overmonetize everything into oblivion while laying off massive chunks of their workforce.
It seems most artforms reach the point where the tools are available for the indie efforts to be as good as the corporate stuff.
Games seem to be rapidly reaching the tipping point, and then all the big players have to offer is throwing more money at projects with no guarantee they’ll be as enjoyable.
I still play Dishonored every year. Those are not realistic graphics in the slightest, but it still holds up pretty well. Why? Style. I would 100% take a “lower” graphics game with style than a 100GB game with exquisitely modeled sandwiches.
Stylistic games also age better than realistic games in my opinion. Look at other 2012 games like Mass Effect, Far Cry 3, and Borderlands. Mass Effect and Far Cry went more realistic, and I think they suffered a bit for it in the long run.
Not saying Dishonored didn’t age tho. It does have that 2012 feel, lol.
Borderlands is another good example of this. Cartoony but fun gunplay and fun dialogue made the games (mostly) good.
I think games in that sort of style that don’t aim for realism typically have the best long term play. Jet Set Radio is another series with that sort of non-realism style and has aged fantastically.
Borderlands even looks great on potato settings, , graphics are nice and all but being able to tell what I’m looking at is more important and sometimes that said gets lost in the highest graphics range.
No offense but 100gb really isn’t that big in the year 2023… I keep seeing people complain about this and I just don’t get it. 5-7 years ago? Sure. That was unusual. Now? Nah.
I mean 4k HDR Remux files are often upwards of 80gb, and that’s just a 2-3 hour movie. Games can have hundreds of hours of content and also have high quality textures/HDR/HQ Audio/etc. Is it really that surprising that a bunch of games are 100+ gigs?
Let’s say you buy an Xbox Series S. At the current going rate of games, you can fit four, maybe five games on the thing, assuming you don’t play older or indie titles. You can buy an external USB hard drive, sure, but you can’t play games off it. You’d have to awkwardly shuffle games around any time you wanted to play something else. Wanna expand it with storage that can actually be played off of? You need to pay the same cost as the console for proprietary storage.
It’s different on PC and PS5 since you can upgrade storage relatively easily but even then, a 1TB NVMe disk can hold a maximum of 10 games at today’s storage requirements. Want something bigger? Get ready to shell out some serious cash.
Storage has not kept up with file size. And to be fair, 4k HDR Remux files are just as bad. You can’t tell me the average person can even tell the difference from a 1080p WebRip (a fraction of the size) and one of them. Not unless you’ve got the high end hardware to make use of it, and I highly doubt the average person is shelling out the $5000+ required for that to be a thing.
They should just collectively say no. My company tried to bring everyone back to the office two years ago and people just didn’t show up. They’re not going to fire everyone. Now we have 100% remote as an official option for those who want it.
The smaller the company the easier this is to organize but sometimes that’s not even necessary. No one told us to do that but enough of us decided to on our own that it might as well have been organized. We’re talking thousands of employees here. That collective response instilled more company pride in me than any corporate initiative ever has.
It makes sense. I respect the hell out of the guy for being honest and true of his morals and standing by his community, but I'm sure he knew what he could get into by doing that, and he took the shot anyway. I hope he's just been shuffled around elsewhere and still has a job.
Triple AAA games are usually very polished. But polish doesn’t make games fun. Polish is important with accessibility, and it’s easy to see why accessibility is important for a big studio casting a wide net.
But fun? That comes from creativity and innovation. Big studios are averse to risk taking, and struggle to attract creative individuals, because the corporate culture seeks to stamp out individuality in the name of process and procedure.
So yeah, more evidence of this. My money is going to Indy devs who prioritize fun over polish. (But polish is good to have too).
Agreed. I think it’s why TV exploded so much and led to things like Netflix making 1 billion shows a year. Breaking Bad showed people you can get away with deep stories with engaging character development on the home screens imo. Or that’s when I saw the change or awakened to the tide.
Edit. I think we are also seeing it become exactly what it left the movie industry for though. Wonder what our next medium will be they exploit to death with mundane entertainment.
When PUBG was just coming out, it was absolute jank city and I LOVED IT. I was driving a motorcycle and my partner was in the sidecar, and we were suddenly jettisoned into space, apropos of nothing… flat ground.
We laughed but it was also a bit sad, as only about eight other people were left.
We fall down from space and land… and we don’t explode. We don’t even bounce. The motorcycle is on fire. We have taken no damage. We get off the motorcycle and walk away, laughing our butts off.
I believe both are pretty important, at least to me. I highly value accessibility as someone with various disabilities and particularities and limited concentration, a game that is accessible to me is easy to start playing and for any amount of time so I can stop and afk as needed. It also means difficulty and quality of life options and features so I can choose how I want to play and play efficiently at my own pace. However if the gameplay/fun factor isn’t there I’m not going to enjoy it regardless. So both are very important in my experience.
Yeah, I think also worth remembering that people love games that serious gamers consider beneath them. I love indy games but I also understand why AAA games are fun, simple handholding game play is great sometimes.
Tommy:
Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting.
Ted:
I’m listening.
Tommy:
Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted:
Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy:
'Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter.
Ted:
What’s your point?
Tommy:
The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer? “Building model airplanes” says the little fairy, but we’re not buying it. Next thing you know, there’s money missing off the dresser and your daughter’s knocked up, I seen it a hundred times.
Ted:
But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?
Tommy:
Because they know all they solda ya was a guaranteed piece of sh*t. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me.
I remember being so psyched about the original Serious Sam that I pirated a copy to play right away, and then bought a boxed copy as soon as I saw it in Best Buy.
Love me Serious Sam. Really wish Croteam wouldn’t try to be a AAA studio. SS4 only real issue was it was an optimized mess. Great game mechanics, great levels, great music, great writing and VA work, but uglier and more stuttery then their previous games. They switched to using Unreal Engine for Talos 2, so I’m guessing they prioritized on just making the game rather then trying to make their own game engine, which had previously been a point of pride for them. Really looking for to their future games. Expecting a Talos 2 expansion before a new Sam game, but looking forward regardless.
The emulator is more likely that the Switch 2 was supposed to be released this year and ended up getting pushed to next year. This means they have to support the Switch fully for another year and it’s a harder sell when it’s easy for customers to make a choice between:
A Switch and 3ish games
Or
A Steam Deck that can play all the Switch games for free
When these are both the same price. The fact that instructions were easy to find and follow didn’t help.
It appears to be part of a series of fake DMCAs. Some asshat has been going around dmca-ing sfm, Gmod, and tf2 maps under different names with a lookalike email domain.
The fact that DMCA requests don’t have to be signed with an asymmetric key that lets you validate the company that sent it was actually behind the request is some of the dumbest shit.
We’ve known how to use certs online forever. Certainly well before the DMCA. Why the fuck wasn’t that a provision?
Oh right because our politicians are tech illiterate apes.
They’re like Japanese Disney. They’re nothing without their IP and they know it.
They also know that the only reason they have DK as a character is because Universal dropped the ball in protecting their IP. If they let Garry’s Mod casually have a “Mario” character in it, it dilutes their ability to legally go after some other studio who straight up makes an unofficial Mario game.
It started after Satoru Iwata’s death in 2015. He was a notorious true gamer/engineer before CEO and his vision was always long-term. The two who have replaced him since have decidedly chosen the short-term route for fast profit vs long term consumer binding.
I guess a zombie game where you play the 24 hours before patient zero gets sick, like an evil medicine lab simulator who got a 24 hour deadline to produce the first viable zombie or get shut down by the evil investors
I’d be careful to read too much into this. If they wanted it to be successful, it would have been Raid: Shadow Legends or Genshin Impact level promoted, especially with $140M sunk in dev.
This seems like they had no confidence in the finished product so they didn’t even bother to market it, just shat it out to app stores probably to meet contractual obligations and it will be gone soon.
Either that or there is some behind the scenes nonsense happening preventing it from being marketed. Think something like Will Smith having it in his contract that it has to release and giving him 25% of sales, for example.
But for something to cost that much and bomb that hard, it’s essentially impossible without them basically cutting their losses before launch and expecting it to fail. It’s the mobile game equivalent of the “lowest grossing movie”, basically something that was only released because it has to be, and not a true reflection of product quality. Like I’m sure it sucks, but is it THAT much worse than 99% of mobile trash? Probably not.
I swear to god, every time i hear about conservatives getting upset about gay and trans rights I’m more convinced it’s projection. They want to have the freedom to follow their own preferences but have been taught by someone in their family and/or society that certain preferences are completely unacceptable. Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy. All this because they want to explore their sexuality but they decided the social price is too much. Not allowed to have what they crave, now they just scorn those that are brave enough to face the storm they themselves avoided…or they just hate people having freedom. Probably both.
It’s only anecdotal, but a lot of the people I know who were hateful like that while growing up actually did come out as LGBTQ+. Some were trans, some were gay, some were bi, etc.
Some of them are just a-holes though. One dude complained about a gay classmate. He never liked it when I asked him why he was thinking about what the other guy was doing with his bits so much. I’ve always thouht it was a fair question. I never did get an answer, though.
I think they want what trans, gay, lesbians, etc have. In terms of resources, jobs, money, social contacts and status. So, just like it happened with religion, they highlight the difference between you and them. Tribes created. Now it’s a Us against Them where them are different, so not human, inferior. If they are not human we can do whatever we want to them. And the rights start to be eroded. People arrested. We can go further down the line but you know what happens next. The Them get eliminated and the Us get the resources. We’ve seen this happen for ages.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Reality itself is defined by interpersonal trust. What’s true today is simply dictated by people above you in The Hierarchy, and your job is to make whatever mouth noises justify them. If they weren’t right and better and handsome then obviously they wouldn’t belong in that high position. It is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require an objective means of evaluating claims. In their worldview, that is not what claims are for.
This constant quest for logical explanations is a category error. Logic is not what they’re doing. They think the whole world runs on who-says. Like if they get their guy to be the head scientist, he could make the sun go around the Earth.
I don’t think your idea precludes the idea conservatives are bitter about their own self-repression. The social cost of exploration being too high is flip side of the strict adherence to hierarchy for world view. If there wasn’t some emotion to tap into the narrative wouldn’t land nearly as well as it has
I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.
The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.
It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.
The thing is it’s only just tangentially related to trans rights. I mean they’re making a character creation screen and they do need to know what pronouns to refer to the character as in game dialog as the player is playing it. So they need to know that for the game to work.
These fools seem to want Bethesda to add logic to restrict the pronouns on the character creation screen. So it’s not that they’re angry that Bethesda made an effort to be inclusive. They’re angry that Bethesda didn’t put in an effort to explicitly exclude trans people.
That and I think they’re just generally triggered over the word “pronoun.” Triggered by words that describe words. There’s something very wrong with these people.
Have you read Terry Pratchetts book Thud? It touches on that briefly. For what its worth i agree with you. Nothing else makes sense. Especially when so many vocal homophobes get caught having same-sex fun.
People will eventually stop giving a fuck. This same shit happened in 1954 w/gay people. Gay people started suing and winning, and society moved forward.
We’ll likely see the same thing. Generally, it has to get worse before things get better. Back then, it started when scientists got fed up with getting their buttholes inspected by “security” to make sure they weren’t gay today (embellishing a bit here, but the gist is that they got fed up with the constant fear mongering and told the security teams to fuck off).
I’m sure we’ll reach a fever pitch and then someone will tell them to fuck off, as is usual. Then everyone will forget about it, save for some older folks.
Check out the Lavender Scare: the prosecution of gays and lesbians in the federal goverment by David K Johnson. It’s an uplifting book on how social movements get going and how it provides a sea change for society at large, even straight folks, in this case.
To be clear, there’s 50 years from 1954 to when gay marriage was first legalized. And 40 years ago, we even thought we were done with the whole abortion debate. Don’t even need to get into how long it took for people with Brown skin were legally treated anywhere near equal. BLM was how many years after the Emancipation? And still opposed by people who “want to leave it all well alone”. It’s a big deal that it takes that long to enact minimal change (considering we have a seated SCOTUS Justice who said we need to reconsider the constitutionality of gay marriage)
The real problem, perhaps, is everyone coming to the defense of the modder, even here. People saying “just let people do what they do” (see highly upvoted comment here). If the intolerant side “do what they do” and the rest of us get bored or sick of the human rights side, then it takes 50 years, or 100 years, or more to make meaningful change.
Rather than go against the grain, they lean into the hate side of it. “If i can’t have that, you sure as hell can’t–and if you do, you’re gonna pay dearly” seems to be the philosophy.
Making a game mod that only effects people who choose to install it seems like a poor strategy for achieving that.
Well the updates to Skyrim, Fallout and lack of modding tools for Starfield seems to indicate that it is now a reality. I seriously cannot fathom why they would sabotage themselves like that. It’s absolutely obvious since at least Oblivion that mods are lifeline and reason for success of Bethesda rpg games yet here we are.
No, not really. After Starfield released mod scene EXPLODED capital letters, there were hundred new mods every day. However, without proper tools 95% of those mods are very simple reskins and modders got burned out and bored on this fast. Now we are 8 months after release with still no tools and that enthusiasm is largely gone. Part of it will still be back, but the best moment to establish a vibrant mod community has passed.
But the point of Bethesda isn’t to sell their games. It’s to sell GamePass. Nobody has to play Fallout, they just have to want to play Fallout enough to buy GamePass.
Unless it’s either PS5 or Xbox exclusive (not both), I don’t think that’s true. Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t collude to prevent launch on PC. That’s extremely illegal, even for companies that are masters of dodging antitrust laws.
The most realistic explanation (IMO) is that Rockstar did their research and found that most PC players also own a console, and will very likely buy the game twice in the long run.
Or if we’re being charitable, maybe the game needs more optimization work before it can run well on the Steam deck, and they want that working before launching on PC.
With GTAV, the original release was 2013, the next gen was 2014 and PC 2015 so I forsee it being the same and being even later.
The upside was that the PC port was really good at release and I’m pretty indifferent to if I pick this game up in 2030 when it’s actually a good value on PC.
Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.
This is the real disease:
because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.
Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.
But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.
Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.
It’s the same shit across every industry. Successful company goes public, investors demand yearly double digit growth, and after a few years they are imploding.
Investors do not care about the future, sustainability, or anything except immediate profitability. What you described is exactly what happens, in gaming and everywhere else. It sucks.
This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices.
Two decades ago, games were $50 which, due to switching to discs, was a price reduction over cartridges, so this point in time is a bit cherry picked. But even rolling from there, a 300% hike in base prices would mean games cost $200, and that's just not true.
That wouldn't be the base price; the base price is $70 for the biggest games. I think people are also a bit liberal with labeling games as "incomplete", when really they mean, "this game will have DLC after the fact because it's the best way to make games that take years to make without laying people off". And just to take a brief look along some games in my library, Cyberpunk 2077 would cost a maximum of $100 with DLC, by the time Guilty Gear Strive is sunset (if it runs for 5 years) it will still be shy of $200 in a worst case, and I'm seeing far more games without DLC than with DLC.
So don't play those games. The only way that's "almost all games" is if you're looking at the mobile market. Once again, still not included in the base price.
50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.
The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.
I don't know where your information came from, but a lot of it is very wrong. I thought maybe you might be from some other country, but that would mean it's a country that uses dollars that are stronger than US dollars, which I don't think is a thing.
$50 was the standard set by PlayStation for its biggest games, which N64 couldn't match due to cartridge costs, but this standard carried over to the next generation and continued very, very briefly into the life of the Xbox 360. By 2006, all 360 and PS3 games were $60.
I bought many PC games on disc back in the day. Call of Duty 2 (not Modern Warfare 2; Call of Duty 2) was $50. You can see here via the wayback machine that a week after its release, Modern Warfare 1 is $50. Here's the PC version of Flight Simulator 2004 and the first Knights of the Old Republic for PC at $50 in December 2003. I remember there was a push to make those $50 games into $60, and the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 could sort of get away with it back when others couldn't. After buying Call of Duty 2 on disc for $50, I got the $60 version of (original) Prey, because the $60 version came on a DVD instead of several CDs, and installing games from 5 or 6 CDs was a pain that I was willing to pay $10 to not deal with back then (it also came with other collector's edition stuff).
Steam still does, and always has, taken a percent cut from game sales and not a flat fee. They priced it at 30%, because that was better than brick and mortar retail. These days it starts at 30% and follows a sort of regressive tax system once your game is super successful so that you're not as tempted to leave Steam for other platforms.
EA pulled their games off of Steam because 30% of a lot of sales is a lot of money, and they wagered they'd stand to do better if they made their own storefront, but after the first couple of years, they stopped trying to make a platform to compete with Steam and really only cared about keeping their own releases there for that 30% cut that they no longer had to pay to someone else.
That last sentence is so spot on. After reading a topic yesterday, I was trying to think of one time a game company went public, and it ending up a good thing for the gamers in the long run. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to hear it.
Check back in on Devolver, Paradox, and TinyBuild in 10 years. They're scaling up to cover the market that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and Take Two abandoned.
Considering their policy doesn't allow for other stuff like this, yeah I am not surprised.
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Reminds me of the time when a Spiderman mod removed the VERY few instances of a pride flag in a recreation of NEW YORK CITY and a Skyrim mod that removed any potential gay romances that only occur when wearing a very specific amulet (including a single dead skeleton couple off the beaten path.)
Those got booted as well cause.....come on now. Its blatantly targeting a group of people about their sexuality and gender who have BARELY any presence to begin with in these games.
Starfield is even more egregious as its LITERALLY just a menu option and the rare use in dialogue....
Really pathetic and sad people would even feel the need to make them to begin with. Let alone feel the need to upload them to a platform.
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