Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.
Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.
“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.
If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.
Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.
To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.
Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.
That’s just how it is.
Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.
Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).
It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.
Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.
In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.
PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.
If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.
“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.
PC/Console games take massive amounts of man hours to make and as I see it the point of Early Access is to give smaller Indie Developers the funds to hire more people and get the entire game made in an achievable time frame (though some of these things still take almost a decade to get there).
It’s a bit like Kickstart, but for Early Access there needs to be enough of a product to appeal to gamers (and hence quite some time invested into creating it up to that point, plus a decent idea and an actual game play which is deep enough and has at least a good enough basis of gameplay design that it’s actually fun to play), which also means scams are far less likely because just getting the game all the way to a level that qualifies it for Early Access is already quite the investment in time and possibly money plus worse comes to worse and the developer stops development immediately after caching in with Early Access, buyers still got themselves immediatelly a small game at a cheap price, though not the “dream” full game they were promised they would eventually get.
Different, high level software designs (i.e. architectural designs) which are normally imposed by the game engine, have different probabilities of the developers who are making the code for those to produce bugs, because of lots of factors including things like of how they approach error validation and handling in the engine itself and in which domains does the engine leave the most freedom to coders and which ones does it leave less - some things are pretty safe to leave in the hands of even bad developers, others are not.
The example of multi-threading in Unity should’ve been clear: put a game engine that doesn’t impose a single thread pattern in front of somebody with little or no experience in multi-threaded programming and you will have a huge rate of bugs (mainly critical race conditions) and as it so happens most developers out there have little or no experience in multi-threaded programming. Yet multi-threading can yield far more performance in modern CPU since they’re all multi-core. For that specific game engine a software architectural choice was made to go with a structure that is not as performance but significantly less likely to lead to a higher bug rate when used by the average coder, probably because Unity targets less experience coders.
Good Senior Designers and Technical Architects don’t design the high level structure of the software for themselves as coders, they do it for the kind of coders that are likely to be coding for it.
Of course the developers themselves also have different capabilities and hence different baseline rates of creating bugs, hence why I said “both”.
The architectural decisions are at the engine level and that stuff has a massive influence on the likelihood of bugs in the code running in that engine.
For example, traditional Unity (not ECS) runs all game code (so the code provided by those coding the game) in a single thread, which avoids A TON of multi threading bugs (as that’s one of the hardest parts in programming to master) but is very bad for performance in multi-core CPUs. Game programmers can fire up separate threads using the standard libraries of the programming language itself and manage them, but everything in the development framework that’s part of the engine pushes them to use that single-threaded model, so only advanced devs bother and only for very specific things.
Also the choice of programming language forced by the engine itself has a huge impact in the likelihood of bugs, but since I don’t want to start a Holy War I’m not going to star pointing fingers at specific languages and criticizing them ;)
The fishy part is the “taking in account the EULA” since EULAs are not legally valid documents in most of the World.
Licenses explicitly accepted by the buyer before the purchase, sure, EULAs, no, since they’re treated as an attempt to, after the implied contract which is the sale, unilaterally change the contract.
The court order makes some sense because that’s basically to do with inheritance and who gets to inherit what, but the EULA “consideration” is complete total bollocks.
I game only on the PC and favor buying games from GOG over Steam, partly since one of the former’s core selling points is no-DRM (also you can directly download the games with no need for using GOG Galaxy and play offline for ever and ever), so I’ll just check the user reviews before buying and if there is some kind of mandatory account creation somebody will have complained and I will simply not buy that game (tends to be a pretty aware crowd on those subjects over there).
I’m reading here of people buying it and then not playing the game because of this and thinking: people doing that makes the decision to add this kind of thing a can’t-lose for the game makers - either way they get paid for the game and the with most people they do some extra money by selli gbtheir private information whilst for other the don’t but they still got a game sale, same as if they had not added this crap.
Best to check a few user reviews before buying and denying them a purchase if they’ve added such crap to the game, IMHO, as that changes the ROI equation and can make it a net negative to have this in a game.
Mind you, the biggest hindrance the create something special back then was technical, nowadays it’s time: codebases are far more massive nowadays and the work that goes into making assets (sprites, models, audio, animation and so on) that go with the code in a modern game is gigantic compared to back then (or, alternativelly, if done with reusable assets you get just another of hundred of similar-loooking low-buget indie games).
Even something like Bioshock with it’s unique vision was already a massive piece of work when it comes to game assets, though artistically (and as a game too) it’s a masterpiece, IMHO.
I actually made a handfull of games back in the early 90s (a minesweeper clone for the ZX Spectrum done in Assembly and never published, and a Tic-Tac-Toe game for the PC done in C that I sold to a small magazine and did got published) and then started working on game making a few years ago, and definitelly the programing work has expanded in terms of size (with still some down-to-the-metal technically complex stuff like shader programming) but the asset creation work has massivelly exploded (no wonder AAA games have bugets in the hundreds of millions of dollars range).
You can go to GOG, buy some really old game, install it on a PC, play it and after a few minutes go: “How the fk was I so dazzled with this shit back then?!”
At least for me, whilst most such game were A LOT of fun back then, almost all of them feel kinda meh nowadays, the graphics-heavy ones because they look like shit now compared to even games from 10 year ago and the other ones because their game mechanics are so shallow and simplistic (and often oh so reliant on reaction times) compared to even what Indie companies have been doing in the last couple of decades.
Yeah, the memory of the fun that was had survived the passage of time, but most of those games pale in comparisson to games I’ve played in the last 2 decades. Beware of confusing the two like the sterotypical old person who complains “Music was much better when I was young, before Rock-n-Roll”.
PS: I’m not even especially big on fancy graphics but instead prefer complex multi-layered game mechanics, so the kind of games from back then I still can enjoy today are things like Civilization.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this of late, mainly around TV series and movies.
(As a side note my own morality on all of this is comes from having lived my early adult years in The Netherlands: for me all sexual orientations are normal things, same as eye colors, height and so on, so there is no “right” or “wrong” sexual orientation, just like there is no “right” or “wrong” eye color, and sexual orientation is not even important outside a sexuality context)
I agree with you on that: show it as normal and people will start seeing it as normal rather than give some disproportionate importance to what is just another human characteristic that varies from person to person, which IMHO the best way for everybody to treat people equally independently of sexuality - only a nutter would treat somebody differently because of, say, eye color, and as I see it in the ideal world it would be just the same for sexual orientation.
That said, forcing displays of sexuality or sexual orientation isn’t the way to go, IMHO, because it keeps the whole thing in this special pedestal and goes against normalization of it because it does not treat it as normal.
Unfortunatelly a lot of TV series and Movies of recent have forced displays of non-majority sexual orientation rather than just having it as just as normal as all else - say, some otherwise asexual character is made to explicitly be gay or some other non-majority sexual orientation for no actual story-related reason - although there are a few that just portray it as “just another bunch of people” (say, one of the couples in the neighbourhood happen to be gay, and they’re living life like everybody else or somebody just happens to be attracted to somebody else of the same gender and it makes sense to show it as part of the story) which is how it is in real life, at least in civilized countries.
It all feels like the makers are preaching to us through this medium rather than the whole thing just being a representation of “normal life” (in the story setting) with all the range of normal characteristics that humans have (which naturally includes a range of sexual orientations).
(Mind you, I also think unecessary emphasis on the sexuality of straight characters is ridiculous: beyond what is relevant for the story in terms of how it affects how characters relate, I don’t see why straight people’s sexuality has to be highlighted).
I think we should strive to display the variety of the human condition without actually putting things like sexual orientation in a pedestal and treat it all as special (hence, by implication, not normal). It’s not easy though, especially in countries like US where morality has been picked up by Politics and thinks which are absolutelly normal human characteristics have been fetishised beyond all logice and turned into battlefields.
All that said, in story-driven games and other media, were there is emphasys in human relations, you’ll almost always end up with sexuality involved, if only because sexual attraction is a frequent drive for the how people relate and act around each other so it’s a bit harder to have a normal range of human behaviour there without seeming to be forcing anything.