Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn't your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.
Approaching this from a developer point of view, let's talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.
Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don't know that one of Valve's requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can't count the number of store pages I've seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren't gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn't allow any gameplay at all, etc.
Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because 'the UI can be seen'. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal's Hires screenshot tool. It's incapable of capturing the UI. That's kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying 'You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad'. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: "First player uses keyboard and mouse", because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.
Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told 'oh we can't actually update your account fully to the new country, you'll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information'. So I did that, but oh.. the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I'd already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they'd let me transfer that to the other account.
Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they've already bought.
From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don't particularly like. The trashy meme 'curators' they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a 'review bomb' regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.
But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.
There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven't gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can't have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You're entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying 'If you refund a game during this sale, you can't buy it again until the sale is over'.
People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just 'meh'. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what's on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the 'event' of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.
This is what Steam takes 30% for. Legitimate indie companies submit games and some jobsworth continually rejects it because of incredibly asinine trivial stuff like a word being out of place or literally made up stuff that isn't even real meanwhile companies like this just carry on.
Steam literally has a policy in place that once you pass approval, you can do whatever you want. Why even make them pass approval if they can immediately change it to something that violates their 'standards'?
Galaxies, on the other hand, is a more open-ended gaming world that lets you hunt Rancors, take bounty- hunter missions, craft hundreds of items. build factories, landscape cities, and par- ticipate in a player-run economy. Even if tending flora farms and building sofas aren’t emblematic Star Wars activities, they’re representative of the tremendous freedom you’re given to roleplay a virtual lifestyle of your own choosing.
That's the part that added roleplaying. reality is something like dwarf fortress adventure mode, or any colony sim is far more of a roleplaying game than most 'roleplaying' games, especially at the time.
Thanks for posting that. I had thought about this article a few times over the years. I always thought he did a good job of explaining what made a roleplaying game a roleplaying game. It wasn't that many years before this that 'action RPG' starting being used as a term and half the time 'rpg' was being used to mean nothing more than 'we have levels'
It's because the fanbase is a bit tired of the developers.
The developer already set the tone very early on by being a pompous prick over the whole ban nonsense. No one could prove it but it seemed like certain key remappers (like for joysticks and things like that) were causing the anti cheat to trip even if they weren't being used, just running in the background. The CEO was a real jerk about it on twitter when people asked why there wouldn't be any appeals.
That kind of arrogance and behaviour came out several times. There isn't any reason for the community to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They've been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn't very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.
Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who'd attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.
It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.
If you sell steam keys through your site you can't charge less than the steam price. In order to sell it cheaper on their site, it would have to be a non-steam version and they'd have to serve up the files themselves. If it's a multiplayer game it wouldn't be compatible, they'd need to switch to EOS or something else. realistically speak, developers could probably charge a bit less by providing that their own. it doesn't cost 30% to serve up the files and process some payments.
Steams cut off that, at just the $3 million mark, is $450 million. This is $900,000 per game.
People wonder why other companies wanted to make their own launchers. They leave millions on the table by having steam 'handle' things.
This is also why Valve isn't that inclined to pump out tons of new games.
A game like Palworld, which as of 3 weeks ago, has sold 12 million copies would end up making Valve somewhere in the neighbourhood of $72 million as of the end of January.
No it doesn't. Social media sites that have moderators really need to take a stand about clickbait garbage headlines like this. It's like getting a free t-shirt with a car purchase and claiming that T-shirt costs $40,000. You're buying coins which already cost that much, the coins with or without the mount cost that much. Currently you can buy those coins and get a free mount. Lots to be upset with Diablo and Blizzard, but this is just garbage.
sales are supposed to matter. You aren't supposed to offer a bigger sale on another site than you will offer on steam in a reasonable time frame. Funny that never applied to the makers of the Witcher when they gave that away for free. I never saw valve force them to make it free on steam. What you'll find is a lot of steam's policies only apply to smaller indie devs, not big companies.
So if General motors was using slave labour to build their cars and feeding said labour with baby kittens, would you consider it a review bomb for someone to say 'You shouldn't buy the latest vehicle from General motors because of the way it is made'?
What if general motors came out and said that they think a great start to the day is to wake up and punch a dutchman in the face?
A review is, ultimately, a recommendation of whether or not you think other people should buy this product. If you can't recommend it because of something the company who made it did, to me, it's still a review. Because recommending that product is recommending financial support of that company. Not recommending it, is not supporting them.
For me a real review bomb would occur generally only in a case where a site like 4chan might suddenly spin a wheel of mayhem and pick a random game to just go shit on or something like that.
I'm old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an 'ARPG'. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the 'RPG' label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard's Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.
Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn't really as deep as the rest of them. There weren't a lot of 'choices' to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the 'RPG' label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren't RPGs.
Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren't it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn't exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.
When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn't fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of 'RPGs' didn't because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren't making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.
I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they're getting into when they play it. If I'm expecting Baldur's gate and get Diablo, I'm probably going to be a bit disappointed.