He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
Im sympathizing with both sides of the conversation. Grand strategy games are so complex and can be supported for 10+ years so it makes sense that they regularly make DLCs to support development.
But they’re not totally optional/unnecessary. The problem is that many games are balanced around the new DLCs that sometimes you’re at a disadvantage if you dont buy them. I remember some drama around crusader kings where some mechanics don’t make sense unless you buy some DLCs
I agree. Strategy game do occupy a weird space, EU4 was a go to game for me for like 10 years. I appreciated the support for the game and did buy the DLC that changed mechanics (skipping most flavour packs). I remember people complaining about janky mechanics without DLC, but I know others would rollback to previous versions.
Funny thing is that despite playing EU4 for years and really enjoying the game. I feel little urge to upgrade to EU5.
That’s like 10 development years worth of additional content. There’s not many games that get that much post release dev time without a valid monetization strategy.
I think that’s a fair critism, but also it’s not like people get a dlc buying addiction. It’s not necessarily predatory (although it could be if the base game was incomplete and needed to be fixed by DLCs) like gambling is
Anytime I’ve ever complained about lootboxes/gacha/gambling mechanics, I’ve not been excluding valve. That said, there is a contingent of people that likes to chime in to conversations about steam to say people shouldn’t use steam because valve does lootboxes, and I don’t think it’s terribly relevant in those conversations.
If you take a look at all the loot box mechanics out there honestly theirs is the least bad. STILL BAD and shouldn’t be a thing, but they’re way less in-your-face and also you can sell the boxes that you get for free just by playing and use that to buy games.
I understand your outrage but silence is not consent. It is fear. Apply that phrase to any other situation where consent is required and that would be considered victim blaming.
Now M$ COULD be fine with this, we truly don’t know, but they could also be afraid of how the administration would retaliate against them if they spoke up. I do agree with you when you say these companies are cowardly.
I don’t really care. Idiots are easily parted with their money. Thats their fault. I’ve played CS for decades and never paid for a chest or whatever. Never had an interest.
After they start and get addicted. You’re not ill when you start . Unless you have something else going on not related. You have full power not to start. Just play the game, kill the other guy, have fun with your team. Thats all you need to do in any game. Thats all I’ve ever done in a game like CS. I don’t even notice all the other stuff. I play the game.
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
I often see gambling ads on my local TV channels that are from the government basically saying if you’re going to gamble at least gamble on stuff we profit from instead of giving your money to an out of country company. Is it fair to say it’s the same for valve doing good work with bad money that people would have spent gambling anyways? Idk i’m connecting the two but they might just both be bad XD
The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.
Yeah it almost reads like Microsoft has endorsed the Trump administration and its marketing. Like a forced brand crossover. These things aid in the far right pipeline. Has young men thinking hating immigrants is as cool and mainstream as Halo.
I assume that part of the prompt is tying back to WW2 era propaganda and a lot of those posters have yellowed with age by the time they made it into the dataset.
Yeah all AI images have a bend towards warm yellow hues. So much that If you keep feeding the output of AI back into AI it just gets more yellow over time. It’s probably something to do with training sets taking in movies and social media posts where people prefer to show themselves in “golden hour”.
… Did they not realize that the UNSC is an authoritarian fascist organization, and the Spartan program was originally aimed at fighting “rebels” who wanted to have control over the planets they lived on?
Literally the MC was kidnapped and experimented on to become a killing machine for the military junta for the express purpose of murdering colonists. No pay, no benefits, no end of contract.
Just like with Starship Troopers, satire like this goes flying over people’s heads so low and fast, it breaks the sound barrier and loosens dentalwork.
Yeah. I’m waiting on them to show ICE agents as helldivers or something. That IP could not be more clear about it’s parody of the far right “freedom” quislings.
I’m actually starting to think it’s on purpose. Just like with spam email with misspellings and the kind of ear-marks that warns off smart people, the only ones left to click on “win a free iphone” are easily duped. Going after people that are drawn in by iconography and optics, but fail to understand nuance and the substance behind them, may be entirely the point.
I’ve been saying it for months, but fascists are “stupid” for the same reason Nigerian prince emails are always poorly written, and full of spelling and grammar mistakes…
Trump’s tweets make a lot more sense if you view them in this contey
Valve has one for the few lootbox systems that you can actually get value back out of outside the game. While they deserve all the same criticism of every lootbox game, they probably also deserve some praise for that.
I’ve been a fan of Halo since CE, so many memories and custom games, I got legendary editions and autographs from chief and cortanas va’s, in no way are the white house’ shit posts diminishing all of that, after all this is just the churned SLOP of some intern. I sure as shit won’t be buying anything Halo or XBOX, spineless corporation…I saw this one post DHS about Destroying the Flood??
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