Alternate option: see if the performance of the various cloud gaming providers meets the mom approval factor. She’s not playing anything the extra latency is really an issue with, and you can then avoid the hot, noisy, expensive gaming laptop category entirely and just get almost ANY laptop your mom likes, instead.
I’m talking about smaller studios but even for big studios, guaranteed income instead of gambling can be more interesting for certain projects.
The logic is still the same.
It’s like selling your product at Costco instead of Walmart. Costco will rent you the space to sell it for a certain amount of time and you are gambling on the fact that you’ll make more revenue than the rental cost you, Walmart buys your product and sells it for more. Hell, Walmart even pays for exclusive products as well so the example truly fits. It doesn’t prevent companies from selling other products at Costco, but it gives them a guaranteed income from one source.
The analogy I used makes more sense with indie games because I’m talking about having a job (small scale), but the same logic applies to companies.
A company like Lockheed Martin will do R&D to come up with new engines and hope to recoup their cost by selling the technology later on, they’ll also sign governmental contracts with guaranteed payments as the project moves forward. You need a mix of both.
That’s the thing though, you can make an excellent game and never recoup your cost just because you didn’t get the luck of the draw.
Do you know how many games released on Steam this year? 18k. How many did you hear about? How many were successful? How many were good but didn’t get the coverage they needed? Hell, sometimes you have indie games that will suddenly become successful years down the road. It’s. Just. Gambling.
Even for a well established company, sometimes one in the hand is worth two in the bush.
We see big studios that made successful games going bankrupt every year, don’t you think a studio like that would have loved to have an income guarantee so they could finish their next project instead of closing their doors?
If they want to be guaranteed to be able to operate, they should join the communist movement. Monopolistic capitalist business practices aren’t the way to go. If we’re having a capitalist market, it had better be a free market, which is to say one with sufficient consumer protections so that customers can make free choices about who to give their money to for a certain product.
Oh so a free market where companies can decide to sign exclusivity contracts isn’t ok but a free market where everything is released on the platform that you like is ok.
Sufficient consumer protection would see Valve being broken apart as a preventive measures because they’re in a position where they can sway the market any way they want and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Funny how you guys never talk about their monopolistic position in the market, right?
If Aldi only sells apples and Walmart only sells pears, that’s not a free market. That’s two monopolies. Drag doesn’t get a choice who to buy apples OR pears from.
If Aldi starts selling pears too, that’s not a monopoly. That’s customer choice. Drag can choose to shop at Aldi because of their lower prices and better customer service. Drag can vote with drag’s wallet. If Walmart has a deal with the pear farmer not to sell pears to Aldi, that IS a monopoly.
Drag doesn’t want to give any money to Epic. Put the game on GOG, put it on Itch, hell, put it on Origin! That would be great for consumers! A monopoly isn’t.
Bullshit. The only way it ruins PC gaming is by forcing you to use a launcher that isn’t Steam, you will never complain about all the games that only release on Steam.
18k games released on Steam this year, how many did you hear about and how many were actually successful?
There’s tons of good games that just won’t sell enough for the devs to recoup their cost just because no streamer decided to play them. Go read on indie devs communities what the experience is like when releasing a game you put your heart and soul into only to get no coverage and no sales.
Try to come up with something a bit more original. You don’t give a crap about exclusives as long as they’re on the platform you like, it’s pure hypocrisy.
If the launcher somehow forgets what games you have installed you have to redownload the whole game again, no simple “scan to find installed games” (No, tricks to do it don’t count)
They got caught sniffing your steam friend list
Scummy “Reviews” system where you have to choose between refunding the game or hoping to have a chance to review the game
"Review” system so barebone you can’t even write your own reviews but pick from predetermined ones
"Customer support" so dogshit they can’t even help you if someone hacks in your account (Steam does it pretty well)
The list goes on… There you go your “try to come up with something more original”
You’ll defend every shit out of this because you like to suck lil’ Tim cock :)
I too have basically all of them. A few have caught my interest on PC. More than a few were a big pain to get working on Steam Deck even with Heroic Launcher.
Never understood this shit, create a account and download a launcher to get a free thing that you don’t own in a shitty platform, that’s piracy with extra steps.
It’s nice Bethesda wants to pull a Cyberpunk, but Starfield at it’s core just isn’t as good. I’m all for some redeeming updates though, because at least there would be something to come back to
I should probably pick this up when it’s on sale. I bought it on release after playing CyberPunk with ray tracing and asked for a refund after playing for 20 minutes because it just looked like garbage in comparison.
Part of the reason why Bethesda games visually looks bad is because their tied to the hip with creation engine for modders to use. Part of the reason why bethesda games have soo many mods is because of how much of the games engine is open to modders to modify.
I agree. I was fine with it for Skyrim and Fallout 4 but after getting used to how gorgeous CP2077 was, the difference was jarring for a AAA title in 2023.
The thing is, cyberpunk also has mod support, and it’s pretty good, I use a climbing mod, a drone mancer class mod, and before the 2.1 update it already had a metro system via mod.
This is the point though. They have beefed up my Epic Games library to the point where if I got banned from Steam, I would have a viable fallback.
That cannot be understated. It has a network effect and makes adopting it as a new platform versus a legacy one with two decades behind it, far easier to adjust to.
I love that at least someone is really trying other than MS with their poorly supported windows games store attempts.
It will always be weird to me that microsoft sells some games both on the microsoft store app and the xbox app, but other games exclusively through the xbox app.
I’m thinking even farther back to their wretched Windows Live and then Games for Windows Live platform (now dead). MS is one of the biggest companies on earth and couldn’t find a cohesive way to migrate that game ownership forward.
I just like to own the things I own. And I’m more worried about someone hijacking my account because they want some bullshit inventory item or something than getting banned for something toxic. Account theft is sadly still pretty common.
The same applies for Epic as well regarding piracy. Again it’s just a matter of diversifying.
If I had to rebuy 100% of my games, Id never adopt Epic at all. Atleast this way the library has something of value as an alternative without costing me a fortune.
Absolutely. But if someone got you in one of those steam inventory scams or stole your access token, it sucks if you lose your entire game library and have all your eggs in one basket.
So having a bunch “backed up” so to speak with Epic gives some peace of mind. VAC bans aren’t common for most users, but they do make mistakes sometimes.
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