I have a lot of problems with them too. I gave Game Pass an honest shot once, but could never get any games to run or install properly. Can’t imagine the normal store front is any better.
There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon’s web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.
I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.
So make something new. Microsoft is in desperate need of defining series rather than Halo and Gears of War, both of which are the types of games he’s criticizing here.
I believe it means base price and not sale prices. It’s fine for a game to go on sale for lower than Steam, but the base price can’t be $60 Steam $50 Epic as an example.
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t mind rentals if they are what you are intending. I miss being able to try out a game for a few days for a few bucks from renting it.
I don’t care for it in streaming, though, as when it’s a perpetual subscription I feel much more obligated to play the subscription games than those I’ve traditionally purchased to get my money’s worth. I like playing things when I feel like it. It doesn’t help that each time I’ve tried using Game Pass it’s taken hours to get it properly working and the games to function
Much like Darkest Dungeon, game development is a dynamic and challenging effort where tough choices must be made using imperfect information. Making and releasing a game is an uncertain endeavor, with treasures never guaranteed. But that uncertainty should lie in the marketplace, not with fundamental business terms around which a project was built.
We believe Unity has made a grave misstep in introducing a poorly thought out fee mechanic and then compounded that threefold by making it apply to games that have already been released. We are sympathetic to the idea that companies must sometimes change how they operate, but these changes should be carefully planned, communicated, and enacted in such a way that partners may choose whether they wish to accept these new rules for their next projects.
We built Darkest Dungeon II using Unity, and a large part of our decision to do so was the relative cost certainty around the license and subscription model. We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on licenses, and far more than that in engaging Unity to help us with parts of development. It is hard for us to imagine building another game with Unity unless we know we are protected from the possibility of massive changes to how we pay for that technology being introduced at the whims of executive management.
Part of game development is knowing when a mechanic is not working and then having the courage to swallow your ego and undo the mistake. We call on Unity to recant this blunder.
This is the mobile game rather than one for console. There could be one for Switch 2, but they haven’t even finished the DLC pass for 8 yet so it’s likely a ways off.