Because it wasn’t a game, it was a gamified data collection app. If someone actually wanted to make a game with this concept, it could turn out well, but that was never Niantic’s intention.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
I just had a revolutionary idea: what if every time you reach a new point in a game, it showed you a certain sequence of icons related to that point in the game. Then, if you ever want to play that part of the game again you can just insert that same sequence of icons into an option of the game and it’ll play from there.
Then people could also share the sequences they discover with their friends, allowing said friends to skip part of the game if they want to.
Specially for devs in countries that don’t have tax treaties with the US, if you’re buying it in the US. They’ll refund you fully but still have to pay 30% of the value to uncle Sam.
When New World came out, ignoring all the other issues, a lot of the people who were playing it really wanted mounts. They said it was absurd the game didn’t have it. I missed being able to move faster too, but just by looking at the game I could tell that the only thing stopping me from getting to max level in three days was that it took time to go from point from the quest givers to the quest locations and then back. If it had mounts that would completely break the progression and they would need to make us have to kill a lot more enemies or collect a lot more items to complete quests or get exp.
I heard they added mounts in a recent update. I wonder how they ended up doing it. A couple years later getting to the end game pretty quick is probably no longer an issue so they may have done nothing.
Valve is also a privately owned company, meaning that every decision they make will always affect Gabe, and not someone different every week like most other companies. Valve needs to think long term while their competitors need immediate effects.