It’s days like this that remind me I’m not a typical gamer.
When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I’d had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn’t go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out “didn’t make sense”. Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model “failed to monetize” me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.
Reminds me of the “mini-outrigger and story collection” thing with fantasy literature. I’ve gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn’t have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).
With the namedrops in the main stories on things I didn’t recognize and my not being able to keep up with side stories, my interest waned and I moved on. I still haven’t read anything after Peace Talks, and I don’t recall what’s going on in Iron Druid anymore.
I am cautiously hopeful for Life By You. My favorite thing in the Sims was to set up crazy soap opera dramas and see what happens, but Sims 4 sims are so docile and boring, it feels a lot more like just playing with dolls and decorating the house. I'm not judging if that's the part you like, but it's just not for me.
Thankfully paradox are making a contender. Although paradox overdoes kt with dlc, too, but they’re not a scummy company like ea so it should be better. Plus they’re trying to take marketsharr from es so doing the exact same thing would be counterproductive.
Usually Paradox has some content DLC but the vast majority is cosmetic, so you don’t have to buy it but that money fuels their development of future content. Also with every content DLC they almost always release updates and extra content for free for the base game, I feel that Paradox is one of the only companies that do DLCs right.
Also they always allow mods, and a lot of their cosmetic DLCs can be immigrated by mods, so it’s not like they block people from doing what they want with their game just to shove cosmetics.
For me for a game like Sims I need a big variety of cosmetics to keep me playing, new game mechanics are kind of secondary.(Although, if I trust any company to recognize that and adjust accordingly it’d be paradox) But still, you are completely right, paradox doesn’t abandon players that don’t buy the dlc but release content patches at the same time. Plus if you happen to play with other people only one person needs to own the dlc, which is one of my favourite things paradox does and more companies should do.
Also, I completely forgot about mod support. That makes a huge difference, too.
They’re still exploiting their customers who’ve been developing products based on a completely different fiscal agreement; you can’t just change engines after years of work.
The worst isn’t even people currently developing things - it’s developers who already have released products. Imagine if you released something like, over the summer, for example. You’ve been paying the current revenue share, and will continue to do so until Jan. 1, then you’ll start paying the per-install fee. So you’re paying twice for the same customers’ purchases.
I really feel like they're going to lose a lawsuit on that.
Unilateral contracts don't have unlimited power and "we can blanket change what we want to charge you on games already made" doesn't seem like it's going to be enforceable.
I love the rage over this. You’ve all clearly never met most of the people playing this game. They already spend hundreds on DLC, it’s the majority of the game.
Yeah, I know a Sims player and Sims 4 is literally the only game she plays. The way you or me would buy a new game, she buys a DLC. It's like it is its own gaming ecosystem for most of its players.
But it’ll be worse now. It won’t be the same as 4, but free. It’ll be a glorified store with constant popups begging for money
It says a lot that it’s “running alongside” the previous game. You must not have a lot of faith in your game if you’re expecting your sequel to not replace the previous game.
There’s no way they can stop install bombings. There’s gonna be something that they rely on that can be changed somehow, and even if they find a way to perfect it, how could any developer trust that it’s flawless?
This is bad even if everything did work and everything was flawless. They’ve wrecked their trust here.
Godot is also an alternative and it's free/open source so no worries about the company completely changing how they charge you in the future and destroying all the work you have done for years.
Oh the joys of King’s Quest V. The most notorius soft lock is one that happens so fast that you would never suspect it to be a soft lock. Early in the game, the player will come across a scene where a cat is chasing a mouse. Now, this should make the player go “OH NO, THE POOR MOUSE!” and help the mouse. However, the scene is tied to your CPU speed so you have a total of 2-4 seconds to go into your inventory, select the item to yeet at the cat, and save the mouse. Many players will blink and just go, “Alright well that happened.” So, the player goes on and finally gets to a point in the game where Graham gets knocked out and tied up in a basement. Yeah your game just ends here if you didn’t save the mouse because the mouse chews through the ropes. THERE IS NO INDICATOR, AT ALL, THAT THE MOUSE IS THE KEY TO SOLVING THE PUZZLE. NONE.
There is also another soft lock into the end game that involves you having decided to pick up a fishhook earlier so you can use it on a mousehole for a piece of cheese. Yeah, if you don’t do that, you can’t power a wand to use to beat the game’s villain. And you’d probably think; “Oh I can just go back and get it.” Yeah, you can, but if you do you’ll also be trapped in there and your game is over again. So you HAVE to know to get it the first time.
And people wonder why LucasArts titles are more fondly beloved over the earlier Sierra titles.
King’s Quest VI, if you wait a few minutes on the strting beach, there’s a 5-pixel momentary glint that turns out to be a coin. If you leave the beach beforehand, it’s gone forever and the game is in an unwinnable state.
That game was horseshit and I really want to give it another go
I always forget about the coin because I learned my lesson from all the bullshit one screen items from Space Quest IV as well. Also, I’d like to mention the game that was programmed to never let you get the true ending due to legal issues. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream could never be truly beaten for the best ending in the French and German releases. Mainly due to the character Nimdok’s storyline being entirely centered around Nazis and the surgical “experiments” that happened. I’m not here to dwell on that, but what I am here to dwell on is that when the game was released, French and German players could not get the true ending due to CyberDreams forgetting to check off the trigger for Nimdok succeeding in his game. So, the game was always in its fail state up until 2013 or so when it was finally released on Steam and GOG. The game was in an unwinnable state for those releases for almost 20 years. No revised version with a fix was ever issued until the worldwide release.
Seriously steam really needs to add a quality gate, the amount of garbage they have in the store is absurd and eventually it’s not going to be worth the tiny fee they make from these games.
I dunno. I kind of remember when it was hard to get on steam. I wonder how many cool games we have now that we wouldn’t have had of they had to go through some sort of arbitrary checkpoint. There always seemed to be some controversy over who and what got in.
Do those trash games even matter? I feel like I basically never see them unless I go looking for them specifically. Steam is far, far better at content discovery than Google Play is, despite both platforms having an abundance of shovelware.
The content discovery on steam is being built up by massive community effort. It’s maybe difficult to find the most egregious asset flips, but it’s trivial to find tons of rpg maker games or similar, especially with the discovery queue.
I disagree. They’re pretty good about not shoving shovelware in your face. I don’t think games should be prevented from entry to the store just because they’re perceived low quality. Where would you draw the line?
Then find a way to purchase or otherwise create 2 out of every 10 assets you do use. You likely need some level of customization to make your idea a reality.
I feel you, I’m not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you’ve bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they’re shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don’t meet some weird criteria they can’t quite meet.
Adding minimal requirements isn’t going to block any indie game the average gamer has heard of. In fact blocking asset flip games may actually help devs get more exposure in the new release lists. Heck just banning people that upload only asset flip garbage would probably be a big help.
They do have a $100 submission fee, which the developer can recoup once they have $1k in sales. So that alone cuts out a lot of the nonsense since low selling games won’t make enough to be worth the effort.
Maybe there’s an argument that the fee should be higher, but at a certain point you’re just making releasing a passion project impractical.
Member since 24 July 2004 here. Doesn’t feel like 20 years, but it’s also hard to imagine having ~5Tb of installed games across multiple launchers just… available. Plus emulators and other resources. Steam was a pain in the arse at first, but they made it work, and they saw beyond the limitations of dialup tech. I was all for it at the time because I had one of the few Coax connections (NTL at the time, later taken over by Virgin Media) which at that point I believe was 10Mbit… Of course, nowadays we have Gigabit FTTP rolling out throughout the UK, so this seems really quaint, but it’s pleasing to see how far we’ve come.
The US coverage still sucks. Sort your shit out guys, you’re 20 years behind the UK, and we’re a good 10 behind Norway, Hong Kong and others thanks to Twatcher.
I’m always shocked at how behind the US is in some areas of tech despite having so many of the big tech companies located there. Like you say their internet coverage and terms of packages, like still having data limits in 2023. Also the fact that they still sign for card payments in shops, when we’ve been though both chip and pin and contactless since that method was common.
Yeah - I don’t even cary cards with me any more, it’s all on my phone. Including many store cards (Coop, Texaco, Shell, McDonalds…) which automatically pick up without me doing much - I scan, it works.
The only thing I can think is that the US is such a fractured environment with Federal, State and Local government, each with different jurisdictions, rules and taxation, that trying to get it to work would be beurocratically difficult. But at the same time, it’s so ruled by corporations that surely they’d want to push the easiest way - flip your phone out and wave it to pay, easy and secure, so make it happen :D
Nobody is claiming that, the claim is merely that a lot of the games under $5 are shovelware. I’m sure you could take it a step further and try to remove shovelware, but that’s gets really subjective really fast.
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