This is one of the few games I keep installed and jump back to just as a chill game that requires no intense planning or strategy. The mechanics are simple, well executed, and easy to pick back up after not playing for a while. So many games have tons of complex mechanics that are fine when you’re playing it, but hard to remember if you haven’t touched it in a while.
It is intentionally vague, because companies want to be able to weasel out of any and all accountability whenever possible.
But Mastercard isn’t off the hook either way even if we accept the rules as they are currently. Before this incident, Mastercard has been starting to censor adult content in general with rules changes. To the point where there was already a petition on the ACLU site about this exact type of censorship.
Mastercard is trying to weasel their way out of this particular instance because they didn’t directly have a hand in this video game situation, even though they clearly would agree with it based on other recent changes. They’re trying to play both sides by assuming that people didn’t know they were already doing these things.
What I see is Mastercard hiding behind their generic rules for processors and being fine with the processors taking unilateral action that could damage their brand.
Mastercard should demand they rescind the decision based on a flawed interpretation of their rules since the content IS NOT ILLEGAL where Steam provides it, or drop those processors entirely due to the brand damage their unilateral decision has caused. If Mastercard lets this sit, that signals that they agree with this decision, regardless of what they say, and they should be treated as such.
That’s almost surely a result of how Valve works internally for approving projects. They operate with a flat management structure. With no bosses or managers, the employees themselves choose which projects to work on. The philosophy is that Valve only hires the best, and they should operate at their best doing what they enjoy instead of simply being told what to do.
Every employee at Valve is given the freedom to join whatever project they choose, or to create a new one. They are encouraged to work on what they feel if the most important project to the company and what will have the highest direct impact on their customers.
If the Valve employees wanted to make Half Life 3, they would. At this point the joke is that Valve simply can’t count to three. It feels like they want to keep that joke going more than make another Half Life game. Half Life 1 and 2, them Episode 1 and Episode 2, Portal 1 and Portal 2, Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike 2. Several of these have had other interim releases, especially Counter-Strike, but those were always based on the previous game and not a totally new game from scratch, much like the Half Life Episodes.
Steam can 100% enter any market they want, especially something entirely digital like online payment processing. That’s pretty closely related to what they do already. They just have to have a reason to want to do so.
Steam makes a reported $3.5 million per employee from commissions alone. Possibly as much at $19 million per head across the board. To put that into perspective, Facebook, one of the most profitable companies on the planet, averages a net income of $780,000 per employee, and Apple at $476,000 per employee.
Steam may not be as large as those companies, but they’re so effectively streamlined. So much of their profits come from existing systems that only need minimal maintenance as opposed to needing to constantly develop new products. It is a well-oiled money printing machine at this point. And nothing they do is based on any sort of speculation bubble threatening to burst at any point.
I don’t even understand how they give a shit. Seems like the perfect place for shareholders to want them to make as much money as possible, it’s a limited market.
I mean that would save millions and millions of dollars right off the top. Between salary, bonuses and stock were talking hundreds of millions in some cases. Maximum shareholder value increase.
It improved a bit, and then the studio began working on an overhaul internally to provide what the game should have been, sort of No Man’s Sky style… but they were shutdown by Bioware.
There’s a lot of reasons it ended up the way it did, development hell and poor management mostly. Hell, the flight mechanic, which had been added and removed several times in development, was core to the released game, and easily the best part, apparently wasn’t even decided to be a necessary feature until Patrick Soderlund, former head of EA studios, was very disappointed in a demo BioWare had shown in early 2017 that the team decided to add flying back in.
One of the core pillars of the game was essentially added just to impress an executive and keep the development going versus being canceled. Flight like in the game requires the entire map and structure of the game world to be different. If you can fly,. you now need to take advantage of the vertical space, something that simply doesn’t even get considered in most games. A mountain you can climb is not the same as needing to fill in an entire mountain range and canyon region with content.
Played for about 2 hours yesterday and that’s exactly what is happening. The game prevents you from plopping your space right on top of another base but the blocked region around it isn’t very large.
No it’s exactly the same, you just notice it more because of the different context of a limited fantasy realm versus open stellar exploration.
Oblivion and Skyrim also have a bunch of procedurally generated content. But it is more easily ignored, because these are dungeons and caves and not numerous planets where you are walking for upwards of 15 minutes or more across open terrain to visit the same dozen locations. And having dozens of loading screens to stitch each small segment together.
Starfield as a concept doesn’t work with the engine, because the engine is incapable of adequately creating an open environment at that level. If it could, they would have given it to us instead of Skyrim in space. We got Skyrim in space because that’s the limit of the engine. Bethesda’s insistence of continuing to use it, and claiming that it’s not an issue, despite the clear deficiencies in the released product, is a slap in the face to every player. It’s the definition of “You’ll take what we give you, and like it”.
The graphics aren’t the problem. The Creation Engine is not just graphics, it handles everything about how the game works. How the AI works and responds to events, how NPCs handle tasks even when not actively interacting with the player, etc. Graphics is only one part of a game, and that’s not the source of the issues.
Oblivion Remastered still uses the Gamebryo engine from Oblivion for everything with one exception, Unreal now handles the graphics. That’s why the game is nearly identical to the original in every way except graphics, it is.