Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.
They kept the original title from the video, which is typically ediquette. The long and short of it is: from the perspective of someone who wants access to all of these games on modern platforms in an official capacity, especially for online play, it’s not a good package. There’s a lot of input delay, and the online experience is missing a lot of crucial features, not to mention some audio issues as a result of the emulation methods.
At the very least, this is the case on PlayStation. This same company put out the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary collection, and it had a lot of the same problems on consoles. The input lag in particular was less of a problem on PC. To my eyes/ears/hands, the input lag isn’t a problem in SF 30th on PC, but I haven’t measured it scientifically, nor am I so familiar with those old games that I’d notice something is off; on PC though, it passes the sniff test. It’s possible the same is the case for this collection on PC, which would still suck for console players, but it would at least mean that one of these versions is still good. Also, in the years after SF 30th, Digital Eclipse has focused on the documentary aspect of their work, and Max Dood doesn’t really mention this or care much about it at all, but it is a major factor in the appeal of DE’s collections.
I certainly thought I wanted to play Enter the Matrix but as Neo, but I felt Path of Neo jumped the shark with things like MC Escher, fire ants, and giant Smith.
Heroic has gone pretty well for me. I’ve found a few exceptions that are solved by the same trick though. If you’re running a game like The Thaumaturge, and it doesn’t boot on the GOG version, take a look at SteamDB. SteamDB’s entry for the game has a “depot” for VC 2019, VC 2022, and DirectX 2010. If you run winetricks on The Thaumaturge via Heroic and install those three dependencies, it works.
As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
As one Reddit commenter put it: “I thought Capcom organised this circuit as a marketing tool for the game. Makes no sense to charge viewers to watch it. And esports is, unfortunately, still way too niche for that to be profitable.”
It’s shooting themselves in the foot, not their audience. Their audience has plenty of Street Fighter tournaments to watch.
It wasn’t always worth it back then, hence why it was supported with ads or a subscription. Did you ever patch your game back then? Even that was subsidized by ads; the devs didn’t host the patch files themselves in most cases. Live services, which are unfortunately all too often synonymous with online games, host their own servers, and you’re paying for them with microtransactions. If a game uses the platform’s matchmaking for peer to peer multiplayer, which was just about all of them on Xbox Live in its early days, then you’re using the servers your subscription was paying for. Even today, many still use these features. But you’re correct that the ones not using these features are still locked behind that subscription on consoles unless they’re free to play.
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
Hosting servers isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, is paying for it. It’s easy to forget that that someone used to be advertisers via GameSpy for so many games. Now, on PC, you’re paying for it via digital purchases on the same store that hosts the servers.
Indeed, the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, with its Xbox Full Screen Experience, is essentially what the next Xbox will look like. It’s not dissimilar to the SteamOS interface and Big Picture Mode, which allows you to exit out into full Linux at will. Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft’s own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want. Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.
I’ll grant you that there’s room to interpret this paragraph another way, but it certainly reads to me as though this is it. It can get improvements between now and then for sure, but I think it’s out.
When Microsoft can’t do it on their FSE, it certainly feels special. But no, it’s a bit more than deciding to close something or not. Do you have a Steam Deck or a machine running Bazzite? In gaming mode, check out a game that has one of those stupid pre-launch launchers on it, like most of 2K’s games, and note how it handles that differently from a desktop OS.