You know who else curtails developer choice by setting arbitrary deadlines and pushing for aggressive monetization? Game publishers. Pretty sure the devs don’t want their game to be universally hated for lootboxes and bugs.
Except developers don't have the same incentives. Publishers are incentivized by profits. Developers are usually incentivized by wanting the world to see their artistic output.
Of course some of them will do it for money because some people are just like that, but overall the industry would probably be in better hands if the developers got the long end of the stick and the publishers got the short end. Right now in the AAA market it's the opposite and it shows.
Developers are also incentivized by profit when they’re entitled to keep it rather than a publisher, and this is the case regardless of being AAA or not.
And who was the CEO of Bungie during that period? Pete Parsons who had a senior marketing job at Microsoft before joining Bungie. Parsons also had no problem laying off hundreds of people at Bungie while continuing to expand his classic car collection. Dude has big publisher energy all over him. In fact he was the person I was thinking of when I said some people will do it for the money.
Which is a very different market. Mobile game developers couldn't even ask $20 for their game let along $60-$70. It's not comparable to the traditional computer gaming market.
I didn't say that. I agree that the first one counts and that's an exception to the rule. The second you better bring out point by point examples of how DE does monetization as horribly as EA or Ubisoft because I've heard otherwise. And I think with the third the vast majority of people would agree it doesn't count.
Any free to play game operates on the same principles that are as “horrible” as EA or Ubisoft, which honestly feels like a dated point of reference when your phrasing was “feels like you have to pay to have a good time”. First, it’s highly subjective. I came away from my time with Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey feeling like I had a bad time because I didn’t buy their XP boosters, but fans of the game said they never bought one and had a great time, perhaps because they had more fun with the game’s side activities than I did, so they got more XP from content that I was more than happy to skip. I haven’t bought sports games in a long time, but if I still did, I wouldn’t touch Ultimate Team with a ten foot pole; not just because of the business model, but because the fantasy to me would be playing with the real teams as they actually exist; and the parts that I would want to engage with don’t ask any more spending of me. And for as much as you associate predatory monetization with those companies, they also put out the likes of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and work with partners on Split Fiction and The Rogue Prince of Persia, which use very normal and ethical monetization strategies.
For as much as mobile games often can be a different market, plenty of times they’re not. Thatgamecompany may be known for Journey in our circles, but their big hit is Sky: Children of Light, which started on mobile and came to platforms you and I are more likely to play games on. Uma Musume is blowing up regardless of platform, but it’s a gacha that’s typically found on mobile, and Cygames expanded from their mobile market to putting out console and PC GranBlue games. Mihoyo’s games are in both places and found success using gacha. My point in all of this being these companies, all self-published successes, operate in both spaces, because building a game in either place requires much the same skillset, and they’ve found an audience in both, often with the same exact games.
The last thing I’ll say about this being developer vs. publisher is that if you’re successful enough as the former, you often become the latter, like with Cygames or Epic. These kinds of monetization methods are very feast or famine, so you’ll get survivorship bias of some games getting so big that they’re a publisher now, like Riot, for instance, or they get bought by a bigger fish like Microsoft.
There’s even an argument that SKG is a good financial motive for studios. Consumer electronics/entertainment spending is down, and it’s not hard to connect the idea that people are less enthused about video games when they aren’t sure they get to keep them. Which are you more likely to buy: Snake oil from a merchant on a turbo-driven truck ready to leave town? Or multiple panel-certified medicine from an extremely tightly-regulated industry.
Just look at Battlefront 2, arguably one of the best star wars games ever made and its reputation was irrevocably tanked because the publishers pushed the lootbox model on the game.
Not only did they push for it, but they also made the game extremely predatory by requiring players to grind for an excessively long time 40 hours for just one character. It’s nasty work.
The joke of these games is that they aren’t notably more weird than titles Bethesda and Bioware were famous for turning out. Hard to get more weird than Fallout’s more esoteric vaults or Morrowind’s bizarre cults and exotic cultures.
BG3/KC:D have been, if anything, a direct successors to the old classics. They’re faithfully propagating the fundamental ideas these old titles represented in a way the new studios are unable to reproduce.
Also, honorable mention to the poor bastards who released Disco Elysium and then got their studio stripped out from underneath them by their financiers. Absolute gem of a game and you should feel free to pirate it without a twinge of guilt.
I’m not talking about video games I’m talking ruining someone’s life and stealing their intellectual property, the fucking performative humiliation he put those guys through. You think a rich CEO who would fuck people over that hard is really redeemable?
Edit: But no, you’re right that he shouldn’t be murdered, he doesn’t necessarily have blood on his hands like a healthcare CEO. He should simply be torn from his home and have all of his property and assets liquidated and distributed as compensation
I am sensing a lot of anger here and given the current state of the world it just seems so misplaced. Like dude, there is really shit going on with real villains and real people siffering, maybe direct that anger there.
Why the fuck would you think it’s not? There’s a lot of goddamn villains in the world, an entire ecosystem of cruelty where people abuse those who they think are below them because of unchecked wealth and power, and people get personally fucked by individuals of that ecosystem every day. Just because there are bigger fish doesn’t mean small fish are exempt. Don’t presume that a frustration with a lesser evil means a blind eye to the greater ones
“Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all!”
Greedy CEOs, MAGA supporters, Islamists, Nazis, Tankies, all the same. If all of those people stopped existing tomorrow, then the world would undoubtably be a better place. I’m ready to die on that hill!
But is it even evil? Like there were contracts involved with terms and conditions. Its not like some guy with a handle bar mustash just swiped the IP and walked away. Someone agreed to the contract that resulted in the loss of their company/IP and if they didn’t read it or consult with legal lawyer who’s bad guy?
Yes, yes it is! On what world would stealing someone’s intellectual work and booting them out of their own company for the sole purpose to keep all of the money for yourself not be evil? Funnily enough, making people sign unfair contracts is literally the most devilish thing ever. It’s the one thing demons and devils do in pretty much every interpretation they appear in. This is why we need more people like Luigi!
help me understand then, because if its a bad contract you don’t have to agree to it. so in what way are these people forced to sign contracts, and what are these terms and conditions that let people steal IP?
Not everyone is literate in contract law, so most people won’t notice these kinds of hidden clauses that allow this. In this case it was a combination of signing over the IP to the developing company which they coowned. because that’s pretty standard procedure. Together with the investors managing to get a majority share of the company and forcing the original devs out by vote.
Just one of the reasons why smart people just license out their IPs. This way no one can take it from you. But again, you have to know quite a bit about contract law to know how this works.
So what yoy are saying is, if they had gotten a lawyer and done some research they could have avoided this issue. Now compare this level of injustice to the genocide that has been happening in the middle east, of these two, which deserves my emotional energy?
What had happened to the people in ZAUM (or what was once that studio), is a tragedy, and a huge shame. I’m not even a cRPG/dnd person, but that game has singlehandedly opened my eyes to a whole new world. It’s easily in my top10 games of all time, and I wish we could get another one eventually
Just finished Disco Elysium few days ago, watched the credits roll from start to finish to see all the great people working on it, such a great game…now I am sad for what happened to them, I didnt know that
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
But hosting servers cost real money so creating thousands of them may not be cost effective for spammers. Paywalls are the best defense against spammers. Of course this is all hypothetical. Self hosting will never be mainstream. Or maybe? 🤔
What if we make self hosting super easy? Like select the services you want to host, choose a domain, pay and bam, you’ve got your self hosted instance of lemmy/mastodon/pixelfed and so on?
There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don’t want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).
Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy
We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)
We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.
Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)
Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee
Those are the ones that come up in a search. They’re probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
Sprog, that was it. Yeah. What’s a sprog, anyway? It’s not flagged as misspelled. Yeah, I don’t like AIs that steal content, but funny jokes are fine. Novelty accounts are fine. There were a few people who claimed to be famous people. Maybe they were those people. I never cared. They weren’t anything special to me. I just treated them like novelty accounts, same as anyone else really.
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn’t really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it’s fine. I don’t care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it’s still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
Yeah, I suspect most of /r/prisonhooch is still legit content, but it is kinda a rejection of commercialism. Not much you could sell them. A fermenting tub? The fuckers will use a water butt instead.
New IP comes out, people are apprehensive if they know nothing about it.
Sequel to popular IP comes out, people trust it because they know and like the earlier game, and assume a sequel will be more of that.
And if a sequel ever deviates from the proven model of its predecessors, people lose their shit and send death threats to developers.
That’s why you see so much recycled garbage come out, because trying something new usually results in more risk and lower returns. Not always, but usually.
When you run out of even decent logical arguments you attack the people. This really tells that the industry is afraid of this movement and will use all the dirty tricks they know to oppose it.
Rachel: There’s no way we can link the gun to Maroni, so we won’t be able to charge him with anything, but the fact that they’re trying to kill you means that we’re getting to them.
Hey, what’s this skull and crossbones flag doing here? Oh right. That’s my pirate flag that I fly high as I sail the seas…for no reason…no reason at all. Yep. Mods, it’s just a flag that’s being flown for no reason at all. Certainly not one that needs mod intervention…
Personally, I don’t even like piracy as a form of protest. It means you’re spending time on their game when you could be spending time and money on a game that respects your values. Plus, if you like the game, you’re still spreading positive word of mouth. I don’t need to play Horizon when there’s so much else out there.
Seconded. I feel similarly with some bad audiobooks. I’ve considered seeding them, but then that’s more listeners who might like it and give them money. So I settled for leaving bad reviews and washing my hands of it
I appreciate requiring everyone wearing a good mask while he’s in the courtroom, but I don’t understand how having him in the room to testify would be substantially different from an online appearance.
While playing the single player masterpiece which was God of War, I absolutely thought: “The only way to make this game better is if I had the luxury of buying a battle pass to grind for seasonal cosmetics along with a dozen other people.” 🤤🤤🤤🤑
Larian Studios does technically have a single shareholder in Tencent—which owns around 30% of the company. However, an important piece of context is that Tencent appears to own what’s called a “preference” share, meaning that Tencent doesn’t have voting rights when it comes to Larian’s decision making. The rest of the company belongs to CEO and Founder Swen Vincke and his wife.
Few people do because Larian keeps lying about it. Part of me understands you don‘t go around telling people a Chinese government asset has big money in your company, given the ongoing genocide and all (speaking of toxic work environment eh) but it‘s publicly accessible information anyway. They‘ve been so consistently dishonest about it that I can‘t take them all that serious about anything anymore. Because alternatively to lying they could just… shut up and keep making great games. They don‘t need that sugar coating.
Tencent own preference stock. They could sell their stock, which could potentially harm the company, but they hold no voting rights and carry no decision making power.
I am not a fan of China, nor Tencent, but spewing bile without understanding the context does NOT help this discourse.
Well, penny stocks exist. It’s possible that Tencent suddenly liquidating their 30% share could bottom out the share value temporarily. If the market decided that Tencent liquidating their holdings was a sign that the company was going under, that should drive the price down, correct?
Can’t see how it would harm the company. Stocks and shares are just a way to raise money in a company. I’ll sell you x% for $yk and own that amount now.
Even with normal shares 30% is a minority stake especially if a single entity owns the other 70% (ie. You can express your opinion but I outvote you every time). Unless Larian are planning to raise additional funds by selling equity and need the stock price to remain high for that reason, Tencent are free to sell their portion without any impact to Larian. (Heck a drop might even let Larian buy itself back)
They’re not publicly traded, and the only shares are the ones that Tencent owns. The shares are worth whatever someone buys them for. The price doesn’t fluctuate because there’s no market with which they are traded on
It is true that a non publicly traded firm won’t see an immediate effect if one of the shareholder leave the ship, but businesses work on trust. If Tencent sell its share, it is a sign that it doesn’t trust the studio anymore. Thus, potential private investors, like banks, will be more hesitant to work with them, and will ask for higher rates to compensate for that perceived lose of trust. Thus, hurting the Studio.
Shareholders have a right to sell their shares. If there is no other buyer, then the company will have to pay them for it. They may not have enough liquid capital to pay off 30%. Other assets might have to be sold off, which may make it difficult to operate.
I did a little more research, and it tends to be only specific circumstances and shareholder agreements, but there are times when a shareholder can force a company to buyback the shareholder’s stock.
It’s so irritating to see how eager people come to defend Larian on their lies every time someone calls it out. You’re acting like I said Tencent has Larian on the leash. I mean you’re not even disagreeing with anything I said. Tencent holds shares. They are shareholders, as the article states. Maybe read it again? Do you also claim Larian didn’t receive funding from Tencent? Because Larian was very vocal about not receiving any funding, playing dumb when people wondered how Larian even made such a huge game.
Rumors have it Hasbro’s gonna sell D&D and Tencent is the most likely buyer. We’ll see how much of Larian’s soul will be left when they get approached to make a huge D&D mobile gacha or whatever Tencent comes up with.
I’m getting whiplash from your logic. You just accused another user of acting like you said tencent had larian on a leash, which we can all agree is not true. Then you go on to say Larian is going to lose its soul when tencent approaches them with a gacha game, as if larian would take them up on this like Tencent has any say in what Larian does.
Also, Hasbro isn’t selling DnD. Tencent is attempting to buy adaptation rights to the DnD IP, which may not even be true. By all accounts, WotC is the most profitable division of Hasbro. Sounds like you read another headline and didn’t read the article…
No, I am saying Larian will do it on their own accord rather than losing out on money in the end. It‘s a tale as old as the gaming industry. We‘ve seen so many downfalls that parallel this pattern and if they‘re already this dishonest at their peak, then I‘m really worried how bad it will be when they‘re at the bottom. Even CDPR didn‘t show nearly as many red flags prior to the Cyberpunk debacle.
Oh yeah if Habro says so it must be true… boy oh boy.
This is great but my fear is that one day he will go public and not share the profits with the employees. I worked at a company like that. Said they would never sell until they did for a record amount that they didn’t really share with the employees.
“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”
I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.
im not sure what this comment is trying to get at, ive never seen a game franchise more debated than fallout. ive seen every game labelled as someones favorite, including that awful brotherhood of steel game
The fact of the matter is it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean it was a good game or something was done better (which is what Todd is looking for, validation), because some people liked it.
then what is? because 3 new vegas and 4 are all pretty much critically acclaimed, so would we go based off sales then? because in that case the order would be 4 then 3 then new vegas
That's the point, it doesn't matter. Enjoy any you want.
Todd just wants "his" Fallout games to be the most liked, to stroke his ego.
Also side note, sales never works as a metric because the gaming industry is constantly growing, any game released now sells much more than it ever would have 5, 10, 15, 20.. years ago. Regardless of quality.
Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.
that may be your opinion but ive seen people who love fo3 but cant get into new vegas, who love 4 but cant get into 3 or new vegas, who love 76 because its online multiplayer and therefore not as big on the single player entries. theres endless debates about it. you may think its consensus but its not as clear cut as you think
hell theres fallout 1 purists who think that game is the ONLY fallout game
I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.
ive seen it quite a bit. but i think 3 fans are too busy starting up another character to bother with debating 😂 definitely a quiet crowd but not totally invisible
I’ve seen a ton of debate over 3 and New Vegas. People have said New Vegas is too small or too empty. I don’t get that at all, but I’ve definitely seen several people saying so in different venues.
Well, take this for what it’s worth since I’m personally of the 1 > NV > 2 > 3 > 4 > Tactics/76 > BoS persuasion, so our preferences probably overlap and I might not be the best person to speak to why some prefer 3. But here’s my best take at why some people might genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
1. The world is more exploration-friendly.
Fallout 3 drops you near the center of the map, uses fewer invisible walls, and basically lets you run in any direction from the moment you leave the vault. Some of those design choices come at the cost of immersion and a clear sense of progression, but for players who just want to wander and explore, 3 scratches that itch.
New Vegas, by contrast, funnels players through a “racetrack” loop that eventually leads you to the Strip, then sends you outward to deal with the major factions. This structure reinforces the narrative pacing and supports the game’s strong story design, but it does reduce the sense of open-ended freedom.
2. Fallout 3’s dungeons are more extensive.
Most of 3’s dungeons are longer, more combat-heavy, and offer more substantial looting/scavenging opportunities, including bobbleheads and unique gear. While New Vegas has brilliantly written locations (Looking at you Vault 11), many of its buildings amount to one or two rooms, largely due to the game’s famously short development cycle.
For players who enjoy the simple rhythm of clearing out big spaces and gathering loot, Fallout 3 offers more of that classic “delve and scavenge” gameplay, even if its combat system is fairly “mid”.
3. The atmosphere feels more traditionally “post-apocalyptic.”
This one is entirely subjective, but many players feel that Fallout 3’s bleak, bombed-out wasteland better captures the classic “nuclear apocalypse” aesthetic. New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries, but its tone is often more eccentric than apocalyptic. For some players, that makes 3 easier to get immersed in.
For the record, I still personally believe New Vegas is the stronger game. (Outside of “atmospheric reasons") Most of the things Fallout 3 excels at are also done just as well (or better) in Oblivion and Skyrim. But what New Vegas does well, player agency and narrative depth, is something very few non-Isometric CRPG games even attempt, and even fewer do it even half as good. So comparing the two within their respective genre “spiritual siblings”, NV is a exemplary title within its peers, while 3 is kinda just “one of the post Morrowind Bethesda” games (where Skyrim seems to reign as the champion).
Still, Fallout 3 delivers the “meditative, exploration-driven gameplay” that Bethesda built its reputation on from Oblivion onwards. For players who fell in love with that formula (especially those who entered the series with 3), New Vegas can feel like a departure from what they enjoy about the series.
And honestly, that’s one of my favorite things about Fallout: every game is a departure from the last. Fallout 2 shifted the tone dramatically from Fallout 1. Fallout 3 reinvented the franchise entirely. New Vegas reworked 3’s skeleton into something more narrative-focused. Fallout 4 emphasized crafting and building. Fallout 76 went multiplayer. No matter which game is your favorite, each one brings something unique to the table.
Anyway, I could talk about this stuff until the actual apocalypse, but I’ll end it here. But hopefully this helps explain why some people genuinely prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas.
Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.
But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas
Agreed, there are not very many folks still hard Stanning for 3. Though I think a large reason for that is 3 was superseded by Skyrim, and FO4. While NV fans are still kinda waiting on even a true spiritual successor. So NV fans really haven’t moved on, while 3’s fans have long since gone onto other things.
Plus, the things 3 does well kinda makes you “forget about most of it” after a while. Like, I play A Tale of Two Wastelands pretty often, and one thing that stands out about 3’s world is how much of it is just more of the same. It all just blends together. Eventually, the feeling of a real world breaks down, leaving you with a “lot of gameplay with not a lot of substance”
NV’s emphasis on world building and choice on the other-hand makes you think about the game a lot more, even when you put the game down, you can still “play it” just by thinking about how your choices would affect the long term realities of the world.
So while 3’s fans can basically say “Yeah, I really liked that game, the world was fun and stealing the Declaration of Independence from that robot was funny”, NV fans can have full on years long debates of “Independent Vegas vs NCR vs House”, I’ve even seen some mad lads argue that Caesar’s belief that a sufficiently strong opponent to challenge the NCR would force the NCR to address some of the issues they were having as a country was a good idea. These people are of course insane, but you get my point.
All of this really adds up to the fact that NV built a game that is easy to form communities around, and people are excited to talk about, while 3 kinda just built a really solid turn your brain off game.
Edit: Oh, and yeah, 100% agree. More people should play 1 and 2. It’s hard to recommend for fans of Bethesda games to go back to an obscure game from the late 90’s, but like, they’re so fucking good!
For the setting point, I agree three is more classic post-nuclear-apocalypse, but also that’s a big negative. Fallout isn’t just post-nuclear-apocalypse, it’s post-post-apocalyptic. The radiation should be a lot less prevelant and there should be societies rebuilt.
Three feels like it should be set very soon after the nukes fell. A lot of the narrative and environment don’t make sense with the timeline they wrote. There’s speculation this is because it was originally supposed to be set much earlier, but they pushed the date back late in development to make the story BoS VS Enclave, which wouldn’t fit earlier.
100% agree. A youtuber once summed up the setting pretty perfectly imho. They said something to the effect of
“Fallout isn’t just a post-apocalypse. It’s an example of retro futurism. Specifically, it’s the year 2077, as the people of the 1990’s imagined the people of the 1950’s imagined it. But then, that society got nuked, and the post-apocalypse imagined by the pop-culture of the 80’s and 90’s rose from it’s ashes.”
3’s more standard “post-apocalypse vibes” don’t really nail the vision of the original Fallout. This is especially a negative if you are coming at Fallout from the standpoint of a long time fan. Like I said in my first rant,
“New Vegas has richer world-building, themes more aligned with Fallout 1 and 2, and a more realistic sense of a society rebuilding after centuries”
And yeah, it seems pretty obvious that 3 was meant to be set much earlier in the timeline originally. With Rivet City being the most advanced “from the ground up” society in terms of agriculture simply by having a small hydroponics lab, most of society surviving by scavenging, attempts to cleanup and rebuild at an extremely early or nonexistent stage, etc.
Though I assume that for folks who prefer 3, these are not hills they particularly care about, and that the more generic post-apocalyptic vibes (that were really in vogue when 3 was released) hit the exact fantasy they wanted to play through.
But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with your points.
Very true, and that’s one of my favorite elements of the West Coast lore. Honestly, if I could change only one thing about Bethesda’s approach to Fallout, it would be their dogmatic approach to keeping the world locked in time.
I actually enjoyed the show, and am even trying to remain optimistic for season two, but resetting the world-building on the West Coast just to keep the apocalyptic tone really made me sad to see. Killed off a story I loved that had been slowly building since my childhood.
Bethesda has a lot of lore issues, but their main one is that they set pretty much all of their games far too late in the timeline. If you want to tell a post-apocalyptic story, that’s fine.
It doesn’t make sense for anything to be living in a place where the water has been poison for 200 years. Fallout 3 would fit perfectly before Fallout 1 on the timeline.
They knew it didn’t make sense for there to be like 3 half-assed towns in Boston after 200 years, so they created The Institute. Who are so all-powerful they wiped the Commonwealth of any real progress toward society, yet have no clear goals and are extremely incompetent. Set it around 60 years after the bombs, maybe take out the Synth plot and replace it with actual, nonconvoluted slavery, thus expanding on the themes of 3.
To me, the show is a collage of scenes that I like, with quite a bit of stuff that I really dislike. There’s really cool ideas in it, and I honestly do love how they reference some of the universal experiences that we get when playing those games. But the treatment of the lore, in general, is honestly borderline disrespectful. The nuking of Shady Sands, as you referenced. But also the dumbing-down of the Sino-American War to a simple ideological conflict. Fallout is absolutely about how different groups interact and conflict with each other, but it is not about capitalism vs communism, and the Sino-American War is not the real-life Cold War, it’s a war between America and China over depleting resources. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think they even really reference the war, save for a crashed SOVIET satellite. Awfully convenient to tweak it that way when the show is made by a global megacorporation and China’s all in on the American media market now.
Now, they’ve announced that in Season 2, “…every faction might think they’ve won.” To emulate, “…the story of history depend[ing] on who you ask.” Which, yknow, New Vegas already showed with the vast and varying opinions of its characters, as well as quite literally showing the effect of historical debate with the in-game debate about the Bitter Springs Massacre.
I’m waiting to see how they pull it off, but I can’t see how all the factions could think they’ve won if Mr. House is alive, seeing how you have to assassinate him for 3 of the endings.
Also, Caesar has an incurable brain tumor and you either kill Lanius or talk him into abandoning the front entirely in 3 of the endings. I don’t see how the Legion could ever be doing good. Maybe Macaulay Macaulay “Mr. McCulkin” Culkin Culkin is their new leader.
Apologies for the rant, I’ve sorted through my feelings on the material we’ve had for a while but this show has me hot. That said like yeah solid 7/10 as a standalone show and I would even recommend it to people who would never play the games anyway.
Yeah, I totally concur, a lot of the stories they want to tell fit so much better closer to the bombs.
I also think Bethesda’s need to make sure every story contains the core elements of Super Mutants, the BoS, Deathclaws, Radscorpions, etc is another key issue they have with the lore. When I played 1 and 2, it felt like I was seeing just a small slice of a world that could have any number of crazy new things in it. But now that it’s basically the same thing coast to coast, the world feels stale and predictable.
And you pretty much summed up all my thoughts on the show. The ‘collage of fun scenes’ made it enjoyable. But it was also beyond disrespectful. Throwing away the world built up in 1, 2, and NV just to make it match the key elements of 3 and 4 is… super fucking shitty.
And I really don’t see how they can make it seem like every faction in NV can think they won without also completely invalidating the significance of the choices in NV. But I’m honestly already resigned to Bethesda just killing off that as well tho, so I hope they at least still have a fun collage of scenes.
You’re absolutely right on your point about the core elements. They think that the Fallout universe needs a Triforce, a Master Sword, and a Ganon. But it’s just not that kind of series. The iconography is so much less important than the themes. It feels like they’re jingling keys in front of us sometimes when they show off BoS and Super Mutants (who were supposed to be dying out).
Funnily enough, the only icon they use that would feasibly be in every part of the US was Nuka Cola, and they retconned its design…
Oh, just saw your edit, but no apologies necessary. If the small essay I’ve written between all my comments is any indication, I just like talking about fallout. So thanks for the rant actually!
As someone else who prefers 3, I think that it’s more fun to explore and generally has a better atmosphere. New Vegas has better writing but the world feels empty. 3 more fun to actually play. Honestly, I’d probably take 4 over NV for the same reason.
1/2 I haven’t managed to get into. At all.
ETA - I was also never really interested in the wild west as a setting, so NV has a bit of an uphill battle from the start.
Fallout 3 is the better exploration game, New Vegas is the better RPG. Now, I love Fallout 3 and I think it has the best world design in the series (lore not included), but I get a great deal more enjoyment from leveling a character toward a specialization and seeing the different ways my small decisions affect the world than I do from dungeon crawling.
New Vegas has me covered there, its perks are really fun and a large part of its many quests have 3 or more solutions (or an alternative quest). Contrast that with Fallout 3, where perks often don’t do more than raise a skill and the quest outcomes are largely binary between angelic and pure evil.
However, if I want to scavenge through the wreckage of a dead world I can think of no finer game than Fallout 3. It really just seeps atmosphere from every pixel.
I don’t think it’s better than NV as a whole, but there are things it does do better. Probably the biggest is the random events. They have a lot more variety and interaction then NV. You might end up with a BoS Remnant group spawn and a Deathclaw, and they’ll just start fighting. NV doesn’t really have this. It’s much more contained and scripted.
In this way, 3 is closer to 1 and 2 than NV is. A large part of the first two games are the random events as you travel the world. NV is almost entirely predictable, with the same things always being at the same spots. 1,2, and 3 are fairly unpredictable while exploring. Landmarks will be the same, but what you see along the way usually won’t be.
Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.
Your doubt isn’t a factor, it’s just how the game works. Unless both 10 years ago and 1 year ago you replayed them on a computer from the late 90’s, you didn’t get as many random events as were intended. The very fact that you think random events were such a small part of those games also confirms you weren’t getting as many as you were supposed to lol.
playing unpatched vanilla Fallout 2 will likely REDUCE the number of random encounters (and the time you spend on the map screen, lic) because the game originally tied the travel rate to your hardware.
There’s a reason why most fan restoration patches include logic to increase the number of encounters, to make the game play more like it was when released.
The reason is because they tied to travel system to clock speeds, and modern processors cause your travel speed to be too fast which the random encounter timing system doesn’t account for. People were complaining about this 15 years ago, the problem only would have gotten worse since then.
The GOG versions do not include any fixes for the encounter system.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong
I wouldn’t ignore it at all, in fact, what they might even be experiencing is the games intended encounter rate which as I told you, is much higher than you think it is. A lot of modern Intel CPUs, especially in laptops, have efficiency cores besides their performance cores, and sometimes have insanely low base clock speeds, we’re talking as low as 200mhz. Given the games age, it’s very possible the game was scheduled on an E core and also wouldn’t boost the clock speed, resulting in the behavior they describe.
if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s
That’s not a possibility. The developers specifically designed the system with lower spec systems of the time in mind. They actually designed it in such a way that the encounter rate would be reasonable compared to their idea rate on systems with clock speeds as low as 200mhz (Just like our friend above).
Now that user will be experiencing more encounters than even the average player in the 90’s, but it still wouldn’t be outside of the realm of what the devs decided was intended.
Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced?
Well it’s clearly not a cap if you’re seeing people having more frequent encounters than you are.
And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
Because they tied the encounter system to CPU frequency and the highest consumer CPU frequency at the time was like 500mhz. Why on earth would you assume that the developers designed the rate not around what hardware was capable of at the time, but what would be capable 15 years later?
You’re suggesting that the developers got into a room together and said “Let’s design this so that it won’t play the way we intend for it to be played until 15 years pass”
By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty. I just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?
If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty.
I mean some napkin math and averages would tell me that your base clock speed is roughly 8 times faster than the fastest computers they would have tested on. Is 8 times faster truly enough to bring the random event rate to “near zero”? Problably not. And with an old game like this it’s not as easy as just comparing clock speeds because it depends on which CPU you have, do you have Ecores? If so is your computer scheduling it on those or your p cores? And in either case is it using base clock speed or boost clock speed? How do your drivers fit into all this?
There’s also the fact that while the encounter rate is tied to CPU speed it’s not a 1:1 relationship either. The encounter system also factors in tiles, and in game days.
that they built and tested the game on higher end machines than many of their customers had, and that faster CPUs resulted in the correct encounter rate while slower CPUs resulted in dozens.
Like I’ve already said, they accounted for lower CPU clocks at the time. They designed the encounter rate for clock speeds between 200mhz and 450-500mhz, the whole range for the time. You’re also acting like fallout 1 wasn’t a cheap side project half made for free by people working off company hours. It wasn’t some big budget release. Or as if Fallout 2 wasn’t an incredibly rushed game shoved out the door by a financially failing company.
I’d sooner believe that the game working differently at different clock rates was an oversight rather than how they intended for it to work.
It was neither. It was simply an engine limitation they had to account for best they could because the first two games were functionally just tabletop RPGs under the hood that ran on a modified version of GURPS and relied on dice rolls for practically everything. As with anything else in life they designed around the problems they encountered at the time, not some hypothetical distant future scenario they’d have no way to predict.
It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.
They didn’t intend for it to be based on clock speeds, they were bound by it. Your subjective opinion and personal taste is what made you feel like you got the correct encounter rate, not developer intention, which as we’ve discussed, would be impossible.
Like what I think you don’t get is that it’s ok that you prefer an encounter rate lower than what the devs intended. They wanted the world to feel dangerous and hostile, and gave you the option to alleviate the encounters through acquirable items and skill point allocations. You prefer the scripted content and want the random encounters to stay out of your way for the most part.
The old Fallout games were meant to feel punishing, to a sometimes unfair degree. That was the style at the time and you’d be surprised just how many games were like that. It was a different time. To circle back, that’s why there is in fact so much debate over all these games. People like different things and the Bethesda games are far, far more forgiving than the originals. Thats why some people like you play the classic games and enjoy the lower encounter rate, and other install restoration mods to restore the higher one.
I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.
You call it “tedium”, the developers and many classic FO enjoyers called it “immersion”, “living world”, and “fun”.
Wasteland 2 came out 16 years after Fallout, so naturally they aren’t really peers and their design philosophy will be a lot closer than to modern games in that they’re more forgiving.
Wasteland was more of a predecessor to Fallout 1, as the developers were big fans of it and they thought of Fallout as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Fallout was also designed to be far more punishing in its early game with a steeper power curve, and had a higher focus on the player being a singular, fish out of water character, rather than a capable party like in Wasteland. They also wanted to put more pressure on the player, hence other mechanics like the time limit.
I also faintly recall the creative director of Fallout 1 talking about replaying Wasteland more recently and mentioned needing some kind of limiter to play it because of some issue with movement and other calculations being tied to CPU and/ or FPS. So it’s possible Wasteland has a similar issue, though I wouldn’t know as I’ve never played it.
I only played about 5 hours of Wasteland 1, but in what I’m sure is a DOSBox container that it comes in via Steam, the encounter rate was once again very similar to my experience with Fallout 1 and 2 and other CRPGs. I’m glad you enjoyed the game that way, and I definitely learned that it was at all influenced by CPU speeds, but I’m still not convinced that I got an unintended encounter rate given how reliably I and others come across it that way, unless you can cite a Tim Cain video about it or something.
Spot-on. 3 absolutely follows the world design of 1 & 2, but it scales it down to a city area instead of part of a state.
I’m a huge New Vegas fangirl, but I will say that the random encounters have kept Fallout 3’s world surprisingly fresh. I’ve burnt myself out on the 30 side quests, but if I just go explore then I usually see something new every playthrough. Hell, 3 was the game that really cemented Bethesda’s status as environmental storytellers with a real knack for making a space point toward its previous purpose. Back before they dropped so many skeletons in random places that it became a meme in Fallout 4.
New Vegas simply does not have that type of design. There’s many more avenues to explore in quests and many more quests, but you can tell they focused the dev time almost entirely in that area. 10/10 tho, would recommend.
Not quiet at all. Lots of people loved 3. I’m old enough to remember when NV was the red headed stepchild of the series. I don’t think you’ve picked up on the fact that New Vegas is a cult hit. It didn’t become “everyone’s favorite “ for close to a decade at least after its release.
“What does FO3 have over New Vegas”? Well at the time New Vegas was regarded as a cheap knockoff of FO3. It didn’t do much to innovate from FO3 and played like more of a Fallout 3.5 which people resented. It also had a less bleak and more “Zany” tone to it than FO3 did which people weren’t a big fan of. Also by that point Bethesda had a bad reputation for releasing buggy games and NV somehow managed to be buggier and more broken than any Bethesda game had been, and what’s worse is it was never even to this day fixed as several major components of the game remain completely broken without fan patches.
I have seen debates of both 3 and 4 over New Vegas. These arguments tend to come almost exclusively from newer fans. Anyone who played 1 and 2 first, especially back in the day, tends to have a much less favourable view of the Bethesda Fallouts. But there are tons of Bethesda-first fans who came into Fallout after first playing Skyrim, typically. The 4 fans either love the base building or tend to think the other games are “too old looking/feeling”. The 3 fans… I don’t even know, that game is pretty terrible I think. But they tend to argue the design of the world in 3 is better to explore than New Vegas.
I haven’t personally heard anyone argue 76 is the best Fallout, but I’m sure someone is out there.
3 was the first one I ever played (after Oblivion tho to your beth point) and it was so radically different from anything I played before that I just fell in love.
New Vegas didn’t capture that same feeling in me, I like it but it just didn’t hit me the same way.
Fallout 4 I enjoyed a ton because of the base building and refinements on scrap usage for modifications and such, with mods like Sim Settlements it can be so damn cool.
The thing with 76 I’d only guess is literally the ability to coop.
Basically the only negative things I can say about NV is that they’re really heavy handed with forcing you to go through the map in certain direction/order. Though it still opens up in the second half of the game.
I mean, I love NV and think it’s by far the best 3D Fallout, but it’s also got a ton of performance and bug issues. Partly due to the engine they were working with and the insane development cycle, but still. The game isn’t without issues. It’s famously unstable and buggy if played without mods. I also think it needs mentioning that a lot of the assets look out of place, because they are. The game had such a short development cycle that a lot of them are just reused FO3 assets.
I love it, but there is a reason so many people recommend something like the Viva New Vegas modlist even for a first playthrough.
Makes you think of what could have been, if they’d done the new Fallouts as tactical/Turn Based RPGs, rather than first person shooters - although the new Wasteland games do a pretty good job of filling that niche.
I’m not saying Metacritic is the end-all be-all, but it does confirm the most commonly held opinion about the popularity of the modern games. You may think that there is a real debate here but that just isn’t the case. 4 and 76 are pretty firmly the less well received of these games.
Idk, The Elder Scrolls’ fandom debates a lot too. There’s still people fighting over whether the Stormcloaks or the Empire were right in Skyrim, or whether Morrowind or Oblivion are the best in the series
I could argue that there are more Fallout games than just 1 and 2, and that we should probably admit that if Fallout 2 gets to sit at the “true Fallout” table, Fallout: New Vegas should probably get a chair too. A bunch of the original Black Isle developers who worked on Fallout 2 helped make it, and it continues the same regional story and factions. But then again, maybe having the Fallout 2 developers is not enough to make something “truly” Fallout. Maybe it is the isometric (actually skewed trimetric) view, classic CRPG style. Although once we open that can of radroaches, we get a whole new pile of questions.
So maybe we can swing the other direction entirely and say there are fewer “true” Fallout games, and that only Fallout 1 really qualifies. That does have some logic behind it, since the original creators, Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson, left during Fallout 2’s development. Their absence changed the whole design philosophy, shifting the tone, with way more pop culture references and absurdist writing, de-focused the tight world design of 1 so we got a ton of fluff dungeons and encounters, and gave us a more scattered writing experience thanks to the team being split up to work on different sections of the game (Tell me San Fran feels even remotely in the same universe as New Reno). Honestly, the jump from 1 to 2 kinda reminds me of the jump from 3 to NV. They feel the same on the surface, but are radically different experiences once you actually play them. But even then, Fallout 2 still uses the same engine and gameplay loop, so you could just as easily argue it stays true to the original formula.
But if that’s the case and we double down on the ‘gameplay matters more than the writing and development teams’ point of view, then Fallout Nevada and Fallout Sonora belong on the list as well right? They are fan-made, sure, but they run on the same engine and play almost exactly like Fallout 1 and 2. So now we are up to four “true Fallout games.” So our definition needs to rules those out to get back to “only 1 and 2”.
So maybe the fan-made games do not count because they are not official releases? But if it being an “official release” is the only rule, then Fallout 76 suddenly joins the “true Fallout” club too, which probably tells us that the bar has to be higher than that.
So if we say that a “true” Fallout game needs a mix of all the things above, like the original devs from the original studio working on the original engine with the original tone and the closest connection to the original story, then we come full circle and land right back at “Fallout 1 is the only true Fallout game.”
No matter how I slice it, I can’t find a definition that only includes Fallout 1 and 2…
You know… thinking about it, I guess the only constant of every single Fallout game since 2 has been that fans of the previous entry look at it and say “this is too radical a departure, this isn’t a true Fallout at all!”
It’s absolutely fun with friends, we put in around that many hours and then haven’t played it much since, but for the $10 we paid. It was well worth it.
Gaben will then slowly drop his head and whisper into the microphone with a wry chuckle - “You fool. You have just activated my trap card.”
Immediately, the Half Life 3 release will drop. Gaben has been holding it back, continuously updating for decades, awaiting exactly this moment. The judge, completely flabbergasted at the proceedings will immediately declare a mistrial. Legal scholars will then study the “Gaben defense” for decades.
Forget HL3; where’s HL2: Episode 3? I wanna know what the fuck happened to that garden gnome I carried all the way from the beginning to the rocket at the end.
If this happened I think Gabe would just say “it’s not happening, not at least the way you all want” and then we get some half life cyberchip augmented reality game in another 15 years (it is good though)
Valve has always been pretty awful at granular privacy. For the longest time, no settings between “hide literally everything” and “broadcast to everyone I know every time I purchase or play anything.”
Still no setting between those two options, but at least it’s on a game-by-game basis now.
Also the fact that on the steam deck there is no choice to add a pin before purchases is mind boggling to me. Hand it to a kid and they could run up serious bills.
As a matter of principle, I don’t save my credit card number anywhere. It’s a little more tedious when I make a purchase, but I’ve got my number memorized anyway, so it’s not a big deal, and it’s definitely more secure in that respect.
I leave my credit card stored with some places, but I specifically don’t leave it on steam just to add a speed bump for me to avoid buying a game unless I really want it. I tend to add games to my wish list, then sort of impulse buy if they go on sale for really cheap, or remove them later if I’ve decided I’ll never get around to playing them.
I’m not too worried about security, worst case I can get a new credit card number. But it seems like steam and other online retailers are pretty good about not leaking your credit card number.
Also in several games my ability to join friends in-game broke if I turned my profile completely private. As soon as I set it to friends only I could join them again.
People do not understand that company name means nothing. The OG people who were the heart and soul of Blizzard are long gone. Blizzard is just a name now.
Orcs and Humans were put into direct conflict by the opening of a portal by evil wizards. To fight for their homeland doesn’t make them scumbags, just brave fighters doing their best to follow orders, stand in the right places at the right times, and chop down whatever stands between them and safety.
God that would sound so dystopian and futuristic…but to be honest, most articles about AI today would sound like that back then. Damn people would freak out about privacy.
Legit, I’ve never heard of anti-competetive practices from Valve. Anti-consumer? Sometimes, yeah, though they do a lot more right than most
The argument seems to be that “30% cut is too high” but it’s not like there aren’t other options if you think that’s too high. Epic loves to pay for games to be exclusive there, humble and gog exist, one could even go the retro route and set up their own website (though that’s prolly the dumb idea), itch.io comes to mind…
If Valve HAS done some shady shit to ensure their major market share I’d be down to hear it, but to me as a PC gamer since '10ish (and had PC gamer friends since 06) it seems they got there through being a not complete garbage heap of a company that actually improved over the years on user feedback, which is supposed to be the good example of capitalism innit?
Escape from Tarkov has been very successful with their own site and launcher. I don’t see it ever going to steam and it’s regularly in the top 10 of twitch
No, it’s saying if you make a good game and launcher then you don’t need to rely on one of the storefront that take 30% like epic or Valve. Idk what GoGs cut is but I’ve also never bought anything from there
Thousands fail every day on the platform as well, is that survivorship bias as well or just evidence that trash fails and quality succeeds regardless of location
Wolfire Games created the original Humble Indie Bundle, but they’ve been divested from it for a few years now. From Wikipedia:
The Humble Bundle concept was initially run by Wolfire Games in 2010, but by its second bundle, the Humble Bundle company was spun out to manage the promotion, payments, and distribution of the bundles. In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary.
The comment above that Humble’s the ones suing Valve here is inaccurate.
No, humble bundle isn’t run by them anymore. They haven’t been run by the wolfire guys since 2017. If I’m wrong and they are then I’m probably not buying anything from humble again.
Suing valve. Like, valve is the only company I’m okay with having the amount of marketshare they currently have. I’m legit worried that if they go too hard on the lawsuit, it could result in the monkey’s paw curling (“I wish valve didn’t have so much marketshare” “granted: steam has been spun off into its own company. Without steam, valve goes under and “steamcorp’s” new management goes public”)
I think there was some cross-pollination for a couple years beyond that. Sounds like they sold Humble off to be its own thing, but the Wolfire guys were still running it until 2019 (see Wikipedia quote below). Either way, they’ve got out of Humble well before they filed this suit.
Rosen and Graham, the founders of Humble Bundle [and the CEO and COO, respectively, of Wolfire Games], announced in March 2019 that they have stepped down as CEO and COO of the company, respectively, with Alan Patmore taking over the company operations.
…unless you have a policy that requires other marketplaces to sell at the same price as on Steam, undercutting the ability for “better deals” to exist at all.
Which is what the lawsuit is actually arguing is going on.
Hah if 30% is deemed too much the apple app store and pretty much any retail is going to be next. Steam is popular because they don’t pull this nonsense. At 70% growth p/a why bother too
I’m also curious what the allegations are. The only ones I ever heard were from Epic, which was basically making a big fuss to promote their own competitive platform (which was so shit it didn’t gain any traction apart from the free games).
I’ve tried all the online stores ever since the cloudification (remember Impulse?) but none have ever been able to compete with Steam in terms of features and value to the customer. Steam didn’t get to the top by being anti competitive, it got there by being competitive and offering a better product to all stakeholders, not just to shareholders.
And as you mentioned, there is plenty of competition for Steam. Don’t like the monoply? Get it on GOG or Itch instead.
Valve devotes only a small percentage of its revenue to maintaining and improving the Steam Store, and dedicates very few employees to that effort.
Okay yeah I was annoyed that it took Epic’s store to make Valve update their ancient UI, but Proton has gone a long way to improving my opinion of them (and it’s open source to boot).
Also is a shame that the court won’t have the background to know that invoking EA’s complaints about anti-competitiveness and price gouging is so completely laughable.
PMFN (Platform Most-Favored-Nations clause): Valve forces publishers to price games on other platforms at the same price or higher than Steam. This is an anticompetitive monopoly because publishers can’t sell the game at lower prices on platforms with a lower cut than 30%, which would improve competitiveness. Very valid point
Keys that publishers can sell on other storefronts are limited. This point is moot. The fact that Steam allows you to activate a product that was purchased elsewhere and then use their infrastructure to download the game is way more than they have to do. They can completely make the rules here as this is basically a free service that you get from Valve.
Some murky points about Valve policing review bombing that isn’t explained properly.
If 30% we’re too high, surely just by offering a competitor that takes a lot less if a cut (say, 12,%), developers would flock to thst competitor because it saves them so much money, right?
Not even just that. They approached games that has already promised not to be exclusives, including kickstarter games that had already been funded with that promise, as well as buying games and removing them from other stores.
They were paying to have the games removed from better stores so they wouldn’t have to compete. That is an example of anti-competitive practices, not just making a better product and charging more for it.
People don’t hate on Epic because their store has content. They hate on Epic because they tried to buy market share with exclusivity deals. Nobody wants PC gaming to turn into the streaming services.
yeah, i think the 30% is fair enough, given the amount of stuff you get as a user by using steam, like
good cross-platform support
a working friendlist and chat system
remote play together
the workshop and community features
profile customisation stuff for those that like it
whishlists and gifts
i honestly feel like while they’re a monopoly, they don’t do anything other companies can’t do, their cut goes to fund features others simply don’t provide, so it’s entierly fair for them to be more expensive than the competition
Valve hasn’t done anything shady, but monopolies are still bad and unhealthy. Both things are true. And there are no other options for less of a cut if you want to actually make sales, pc gamers won’t purchase from other platforms.
Monopolies are bad, but is it a monopoly if they naturally gained market share because their product was first and better?
Honestly I’d be fine with them removing the “PMFN” clause, but I’d rather it be a law that it can’t be enforced because you know Valve isn’t the only one to include it. But even if they did get rid of it, I don’t think they’d see a major shift away from their platform.
Yes, it’s unhealthy for the undustry even if you enjoy it today. Gabe newel is old. He’s going to retire soon and likely sell the company. You won’t like what happens after that, and the fact that so much of the industry is provided via their product means they have a lot of agency to tighten the screws.
“OH but then we’ll just use something else”. That’s not how the monopoly works, you might, most won’t. Most of what you want won’t be on the something else.
Yes. They sued Valve with allegation that they are too successful by providing good service. Sure 30% is too much for some developers, but solution is quite simple… don’t sell on Steam. Problem solved. Go to Epic, GoG, bunch of others. Hell every company now has its own launcher and store.
What’s saddest of all is the fact they are willing to throw millions on this litigation instead of spending that money on improving the service. They claim it’s for the good of all users, but their actions tell different story.
Or even just make it more expensive on steam, if you really want 100% of the revenue for every sale. Pass the cost of using steam on to the user and offer the game on other (worse) markets at a markdown.
There could be a clause in terms of use that Steam won’t allow developers to make their games most expensive on Steam, or at least cheaper than elsewhere.
Pretty much. Meanwhile other stores engage in actual behaviour that deserves an anti-trust lawsuit like buying up developer studio’s and making their games exclusive to their own platforms. Or paying devs to make games exclusive to their store temporarily. You know, things that actually screw the consumer over.
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