It’s a bit more obvious if you’ve played through AW1 and Max Payne recently. AW1 contains a couple of excerpts from Wake’s book The Sudden Stop, starring detective Alex Casey. They are written in the exact same style as Max Payne, and narrated by James McCaffrey, Payne’s VA.
I know. Rockstar acquired the rights to Max Payne at some point before releasing Max Payne 3. Remedy couldn’t just include a character they didn’t own, but they couldn’t stop Sam Lake being Sam Lake either. Plus Casey being the knock-off of two out-of-universe characters is funny.
There’s a portion of the map where you and the gang are wanted dead or alive because of the ferry heist. Entering it for most of the game will get you a maximum wanted level, headhunters will show up, and eventually the game kills you. That restriction is lifted in the final act.
The world opens up once you get out of the snow and settle down in the Horseshoe Overlook camp. You’ll still have linear story missions to do, but you can start those whenever you feel like, and explore as much as you want.
In contrast, the super secret Deadlock has 36k players at this time, with a 64k all-time peak, in the same week that Wukong was released. Something tells me this super secret totally restricted early access might have been a 4D chess marketing move.
The Factorio development blog has a piece on developing Linux-native. Basically there’s ONE GUY who works on the LInux-native version, and it’s a lot more challenging than people think – from managing and linking dependencies, to working around GNOME’s monumentally stupid decision to expect client-side decorations from all apps. It’s simply more worthwhile to ensure that a game works well on WIne/Proton.
After that well-informed take, listen to an actual indie developer talk about why the 30% is worth it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwoAmifo9r0 (it’s a separate but similar lawsuit by a “waaahmbulance-chaser” law firm in the UK)
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
They’re both timed exclusives, and Square have said that they’d stop platform-exclusive releases after those two games failed to meet shareholders’ expectations. Whether they’ll actually go through with it, or get saturday morning cartoon villain yen sign pupils when Sony makes their next offer, I have no idea.
Square Enix is slowly starting to realize that locking out a significant part of its potential customers with platform exclusivity will lead to most of those potential customers not buying their shit. It’s like the first vestiges of conscious thought are starting to appear within their leadership.