Oh, it’s petty cash to be sure. If you have $100-ish bucks to throw around, you probably aren’t going to miss much by not doing this. Unless, of course, letting someone else take even one dollar from you in this way is against your religion or something (i.e. the principle of the thing). Conversely, if you need the handful of dollars this makes, you probably don’t have that kind of walking-around money in the first place.
Jesus. This makes it reasonable to just buy $100 worth of your own game every month, just to make sure. Assuming that the number of real sales cover Valve’s percentage and then some. Yeah, that’s a non-zero opportunity cost for you, and additional float for Valve, however petty it may be. But for a small developer, maybe that makes sense.
As a kid, everyone’s parents (boomers) called NES cartridges “tapes”. Considering their generation had a lot of experience with 8-track, cassette, and VHS/Betamax, it kind of makes sense. I guess every generation has this.
I know MechWarrior gets all the praise and hype, but I genuinely love this specific title. It’s peak isometric turn-based strategy and I love it.
Although that may have something to do with scoring that MadCat in the first or second level. I think it’s supposed to give your Commando mechs a bad time, but I lit up the oil refinery next to it and lucked into getting the pilot to eject. The thing was completely salvageable and I absolutely dominated the first half of the game with it. Good times.
It’s even easier than that. Both of these genres have design features that require minimal balancing, making for an even faster dev cycle.
Roguelikes side-step the need for traditional game balance by providing meta progression and building inevitable-death-by-impossible-odds into the core game. For Roguelikes that actually have an ending, all the developer needs to do is provide enough meta progression perks to overcome the game’s peak difficulty, for even the worst of players. Everyone else gets bragging rights for beating the game faster than that. Either way, the lack of balance and “fairness” in the core design are features, not flaws.
Deck builders follow in Magic The Gathering’s footsteps: you never need to fully balance it. Ever. The random draw mechanisms, combined with a deep inventory of resource and item/creature/action cards, make it unlikely that a player gets an overpowered hand all the time. Pepper a few ridiculously overpowered cards in there, and it just feels more fun. Plus, if you keep the gravy train going with regular add-ons, the lack of balance is even further masked by all the possible choices. And yes, some player will min/max a deck at great personal expense and wipe the floor with their opponents because it was never fair in the first place, and doing so is a feature.
Unpopular opinion: a lot of games have an artificial massive skill cliff right at the game’s climax that ruins the mood.
Some people collect platinum trophies and call it done, I hit about 99% and call it done. We are not the same.
Edit: Example - Dark Souls. I flew through the game with a bastard sword, medium rolling and smashing everything in my path. Can’t beat Gwyn because I never learned to parry. Yeah, I need to get gud, but that’s hardly a sane skill progression, even for Dark Souls.