The author is basing this claim on feedback from FIVE people who have been playing the game. If Bethseda are only expecting a similar number to play it once it’s released, then this is a useful metric. Otherwise it’s meaningless.
The sad part is that this sets the standard (again) that companies can market the hell out of an unfinished game, release it buggy as hell, and still make an amazing profit. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
Eh, I dunno about the rest of you, but after 2077 I feel pretty good. Tuned out Starfield and the initial craze and feel…no fomo. I wait for games like BG3 to come out of early access before playing, and only play the games in early access that are actually worth it, like Sons of The Forest, which was pretty decent even at launch (when the fun bugs are still in, and weapons have not been balanced in the slightest!)
I’m hitting the now old classics, Battlefield 1 is excellent, Inscryption is awesome, and the AA and AAA games I do play are quite polished.
If you can count on games just being shitty at launch, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll play the last of us in a few years. I played Days Gone recently and loved it. There’s enough good games these days to have a packed steam library.
“I do think, though”, he concedes, “we have stumbled, and it feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before.”
“And a lot of this is very mystical because I’m trying to avoid to tell you what it’s like. But it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience”
I’m not really familiar with those games, only with the infamousness of molyneux, but wasn’t the player’s actions leaving behind a pretty clear effect on the world a common theme in those games? That may have been what he was referring too.
It may also be him naming those because those games were the heights that he wants to go back to. The games he had made when he was still relevant must be much more present in his mind than they are in ours.
it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience
Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…
Calling Devolver Digital the “Cult of the Lamb publisher” is like calling Pixar the “Toy Story 4 creators”. It’s not untrue, but they’re also known for publishing a lot of other things. But I get why they picked this game for the headline, it’s in vogue right now.
But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.
The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.
All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.
And Valve is perhaps the best PC store since they have continually pushed PC gaming forward, for example:
Valve Index - still one of the best, if not the best, VR headset out there; it made VR a lot more interesting
Steam Controller - didn’t make as big of a spash as they wanted, but it was really innovative and lead to…
Steam Deck - yeah, they weren’t first, but it’s affordable and made a big enough splash to get big studios to care; now we have a lot more options as well for handheld PC gaming
Not to mention their Linux support, awesome customer support, free dev keys, and Steam Link app. What did other stores do?
GOG - DRM-free is great! But that’s about it.
EGS - free games and lower store fee are cool
Xbox Game Pass - pretty good for users, but it’s troubling long term, and it only works on Windows
everything else - can’t think of anything special here
So no, I don’t think Valve is bad in any way. Quite the opposite, they’re the best behaved games store on PC.
GOG Galaxy is actually amazing in what it accomplishes, GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless.
Gamepass is probably the main competition for Steam at this point. Publishers have been busting to make games run on the cloud, it’s the ultimate DRM, the ultimate goal of the erosion of ownership.
There will be a time where there is a push towards partial-cloud gaming and then fully cloud gaming, and it will be hard for PC gaming to compete in the mainstream when you buy an Xbox dongle for $50 and game as soon as you plug it in. That’s the real threat to Valve.
GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless
They had enough budget to make Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, I think they can handle making a decent desktop client. They just don’t prioritize it.
But yeah, subscription and cloud gaming is where the industry wants to go, and I sincerely hope they don’t succeed.
Then they’re either not meeting the needs of potential customers or not finding new customers.
For me personally, I would buy more from them if they supported Linux with GOG Galaxy. I would but a lot more from them if GOG Galaxy had a good experience on Steam Deck. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s my price, and apparently it’s the most upvoted feature request for GOG Galaxy.
I didn’t have a Steam account until they made a Linux client (they released in 2012, I made my Steam account in 2013). I bought a few Linux native games here and there, and when they launched Proton in 2018, I bought a lot more games. Before that, I mostly bought games directly from indie devs (Minecraft, Factorio, etc), or tried my luck buying Windows games and running them through WINE (e.g. Starcraft 2).
That’s my price. If they want me as a customer, they need first class Linux support. That’s why Steam gets my money, and GOG could win my business by offering DRM-free games on top. But to me, a Linux desktop client is more important than DRM-free, so that’s why Steam gets my money.
The Valve Index is the least popular VR option and doesn’t rank near the top of VR headsets. Still being beat out by entry level Oculus.
The Steam controller was poorly made flop and has been discontinued. The vast majority of reviews put the controller well below the Xbox controller, which was already PC compatible.
Steam Deck is very expensive and has a very poor battery life. Making the handheld cable tethered. It also went against its open promise by including locked down proprietary software.
Steams customer support ranks the third worst of all top level game stores. Just above Ubisoft and Blizzard.
You mention their Linux support yet the majority of games are yet to be supported and plenty of game will never be supported due to their nature or inclusion of anti-cheat. The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
Steam popularized gambling for children and continue to be one of 2 PC companies that continue to do so.
Valve’s goal isn’t to sell a lot of headsets, but to show what’s possible with high quality VR and encourage more VR games and headsets. Valve’s ultimate goal here is to sell more VR games.
Oculus wants to sell a lot of headsets so they can push some kind of SM interaction and profit from having lots of ads. The priority there is adoption, not quality or compatibility.
Steam Controller was poorly made
No, it was well made, it just wasn’t popular. And again, it wasn’t their goal to sell a ton of them.
The goal was to design a flexible controller to build out their controller API and give an option for a decent desktop mouse replacement for a PC “console” format (i.e. Steam Machine). I think they succeeded at that, but the market wasn’t interested, probably because Steam Machines didn’t go anywhere. It was never intended to replace existing controllers, but to complement them.
Steam Deck is very expensive
It’s $400, which is really competitive. Direct competitors like the AYANEO cost ~$1k twice as much, or even more. The Switch cost $300 at launch (OLED is $350, even today) and wasn’t even competitive with current console hardware at launch, while the Steam Deck is competitive with both price and hardware.
And it’s not cable tethered. I get a few hours of battery life as long as I’m not playing the most heavy games. Most of what I play are older AAA games and newer indie titles, and I get 3-5 hours of battery life, which is longer than my play sessions anyway. If I switch to a modern AAA titles, it’s like 1-2 hours, which is still enough for most play sessions.
Their goal, again, isn’t to sell a ton and corner the PC handheld market, it’s to make PC handhelds popular so there’s more demand, thus more competition, and thus more game sales. They also want to show what’s possible with a Linux-based PC, so there’s a credible alternative to Microsoft (and most games seem to be playable, check out ProtonDB for a larger picture than just Steam’s official stamp; look at Proton DB medals, 77% are Gold or Platinum, which usually refers to “playable” and “verified” accordingly).
Steam’s customer support
You claim it’s worse, but you don’t give examples of services that are better. Here are some examples of worse customer service:
Nintendo estore - no returns
PlayStation store - no returns if you have started to download it, unless it’s faulty (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), and even then you have 14 days
Xbox - within 14 days and don’t have “a significant amount of playtime”
And Steam’s policy is 14 days and <2 hours playtime (so the same or better than above), yet there are countless examples of refunds being issued being both the time and playtime limit, provided you don’t abuse it.
I’m not going to go through other examples because I believe I’ve proven my point, so now it’s your turn: give specific examples of other stores having better customer service than Steam.
No, they’re just one example, and perhaps the most clearly documented one, and IMO the most important one (i.e. the one that most users will need to use).
If you want to discuss another metric, then please do so.
The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
*countless improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck’s hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux graphics driver support, Valve’s contributions and those of their partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop ecosystem even outside gaming. *
I guess that depends on your priorities. It has a competitive resolution and frame rate, is a bit heavy, has fantastic controllers, and has Linux compatibility. It’s also expensive and is best to pair with high end hardware.
So if you’re looking for Linux support (like me), it’s pretty much your only option, unless you’re willing to buy used or accept a lot of compromises. If you’re looking for cheap, lightweight, or compatible with lower end hardware, it’s not going to score well.
But on the whole, outside of pricing, it does a good job in almost every category. If money is no object, the Index is one of the best.
The position makes a monopoly so I would say they are but they remain the good guys because they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices, you can have a monopoly wven if you don’t abuse it.
Monopolies aren’t based on the mere existence of competition. It’s based on power and market share. Eg, Chrome has a monopoly. Firefox, Safari, and a few niche browsers exist. But Chrome is the utter vast majority of the market and has pretty much all the power on dictating web standards as a result.
Microsoft had competitors when they got sued for their IE + Windows monopoly. But they had an utterly massive amount of the market share and used that to push their own browser.
The worst thing about Stadia was the squandered opportunities. Had Google actually put some effort into marketing it, it could have really succeeded. The tech behind it worked amazingly well. I played Destiny 2 on it from launch to the service's shutdown, and it was a fantastic experience. The latency was nowhere near as bad as people (who often never even tried the platform) would claim, and it was also the best place to play Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, as it was somehow the most stable version of the game. Streaming to YouTube worked very well, and some of the integrated features with YouTube (where viewers could interact with certain games) were also kinda groundbreaking.
But somehow, Google couldn't be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn't make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that. They refused to inform the public about what the product is or how it worked or what stood it apart from its competition, which led to bad-faith reviews and rumors being spread about the platform, ultimately leading to most people who knew about Stadia being wildly misinformed on it.
It's such a shame. I absolutely loved Stadia. It fit my needs perfectly. None of the other streaming platforms I've tried have even come close, even today.
Yeah a product like that needs a Big Personality to be a sort of spokesperson for it. To go around and do the press circuit, and be the face of the product. Get memed, etc.
My guess is it was just a bunch of well meaning nerds behind this one, and no one wanted to actually go out there and bat for it.
But you don’t need PS+ for Spider-Man and Horizon? And you could buy and sell the console + games after playing the two games you wanted to play on the platform.
It’s not as convenient as just streaming the games, but it is possible.
I wouldnt call a PS4 e-waste, if the PS2 is anything to go by it will end up cycling about for a long time in some shape or form. Seriously PS2 parts are a solid mix of old new stock, newly manufactured parts, or spares taken from scrapped dead consoles.
Regular use is irrelevant so long as it doesnt end up in a land fill, what matters is that they get some continued use and survive in solid enough numbers.
Eh, I will still be able to play the base game of say far cry 4 or assassins creed black flag. I have the disks, and even then you could always buy the versions that have all the dlc. Nobody talks about the fable 1 dlc but they existed.
Unless its a multiplayer focused game there will always be games to play on it, even if ya dont get the DLC.
Would’ve loved a streaming platform that doesn’t cost a whole console in a year in subscription fees + makes you pay for the games
Stadia's subscription service wouldn't have cost more than a console for several years. It was only $10/month, and also not required to play the games or use multiplayer.
It would've taken over 4 years for Stadia Pro's subscription costs to reach the price of a PS5, not even including a PS+ subscription. And during that time, you'd have been able to claim ~150 free games. Realistically, Stadia had the potential to be more economic than buying a console.
I got one, was super disappointed with the functionality and didn’t like it at all. Returned it in less than a week. I got it after it’d already been steeply discounted and was so glad I hated it and got a refund when they killed it…
After committing to several Google services only to have them shut down I wasn’t willing to risk it again.
Did they refund the subscription fee? If I knew they’d refund it all, I might not have cancelled my pro preorder.
I was willing to potentially be let down again but once I heard you had to buy almost all your own games (again, if you already own them) to play them on the service I cancelled. I was aware that they’d give you Destiny (a game I have zero interest in, especially with a controller) for free. I didn’t seem worth sinking money into the service.
The subscription fee was for a gamepass-like access to a catalog of free games, so they didn’t refund that. The subscription fee also wasn’t required for playing purchased games (although it was required for 4K quality).
especially with a controller
I mostly used keyboard and mouse with the service, since the games I like to play tend to work better with keyboard and mouse. I had a dinky underpowered laptop but was playing AAA PC-oriented games through the browser interface. It was great.
I’m on GeForce Now these days but I find that it doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as Stadia did.
It was not advertised as a game-pass like catalog when I was cancelling my preorder. I literally cancelled because it wasn’t that. It was Destiny and 4k 60Hz with TBD games coming in later months.
I only had a gaming computer and a Shield TV so Stadia would have been pointless for me unless it was in the living room with a controller and some interesting games.
I pulled them all from Google Takeout. Most of them are unusable unless I figure out how to convert them to a state that can be read by other platforms, but at least I still have them, for such a day.
But somehow, Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. They ran 1 Super Bowl commercial which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to the average viewer, and then basically zero marketing after that.
Google is really bad at marketing despite being an advertising company. Most of the products they’ve launched then shut down I just never heard of, despite finding the ideas behind them really enticing after the fact.
In my experience it was pretty shit. While visiting family in Minnesota, I got a better experience using Steam remote play to my desktop in Seattle than I did using Stadia, both in terms of latency and visual quality. I’m sure it would have been better living in California or New York, where you’re closer to a datacenter. But Doom Eternal was just unplayable for me.
Despite Google being heavily invested in the advertising space, they have always been terrible at advertising their own products. It almost seems like the top brass don’t actually care about their non-search products at all.
Google couldn’t be bothered to advertise the product at all. Except, apparently, to me specifically. I must have seen the same handful of Stadia advertisements literally 100+ times while watching YouTube. I got very sick of it after a certain point.
The PR guys are just trying to change the discussion around the problem notice they don’t talk about the microtransactions issue and talk about how adding them is some great value. There is no honesty in that message just corpo ass covering.
This information now makes me wanna buy that game. Like so many, I don’t mind paying for entertainment, I just don’t want to be suddenly without access to the game. Activision is so stupid.
Yeah, if I get it, I’ll probably buy a license and then play the cracked version. However, I’m not likely to go through the effort, so I guess we’ll see.
I guess it depends on what reviews were reading or even if you were reading them. I will give it to you that it rated pretty highly but I'm fairly certain most of the reviews I read at launch talked about the bugs, some even mentioned how pointless the open world was since it was just pointless set dressing.
This guy unabashedly loved the base game when it came out. So yeah, I don’t really trust his opinion, but it’s not inconsistent for him to praise new content for a beloved game.
That’s my thing with RPS. They have extreme opinions and while I do disagree with their statements, they’re always entertaining and I always go, “I see your perspective”.
I like it!
They’re also the very few game sites that give attention to indie games, or write creative pieces about specific elements in games. The author Sin Vega does great long form articles about interesting game mechanics.
Have you played it? Aside from the horrible buggy condition it launched in (most of which is fixed now), it's still an absolutely fantastic game. The story, the music, the character development, are all spectacular, IMO. Honestly, it's in the top 5 for me.
I thought it was really shallow. Nothing seemed to matter, the city was supposed to be one of the main protagonists, but it was just cery shallow, driving is the least fun i've ever had in a game like that, to the point that i never drove anywhere, npc's where a joke, so was the police. Most of the time it was just a Bethesda like "collect garbage and shut up" game. The music and artstyle i found fantastic, the sound design in general was very memeroble, but the game felt shallow and dead.
It feels exactly like Witcher 3 with cars, guns, and less janky combat. There’s a lot of people who think Witcher 3 is the best game ever made. I think CP2077 is better than Witcher 3. Of course, I’m that guy who doesn’t really love Witcher 3.
Of course, my favorite games are Bethesda “collect garbage and shut up” games. I play them for the story (feel like I’m getting judged for reading Playboy now)
I have tried to play Witcher 3 in several different stages but I just get incredibly bored and drop it. I genuinely cannot understand what people see in it.
Good thing I didn’t let that lead me to ignoring CP2077 because I liked it a lot. It does have the pointless crafting grind from Witcher 3 but if I just ignore that it’s fine.
I am just one people, so I only speak for me. What kept me engaged in Witcher 3 was the dark and interesting world and the stories the game tells. I really love that about the game! I recommend playing Witcher 3 and Dragons Dogma back to back: one has this rich and interesting world with so many interesting stories and people in it and the other has this great combat system I’d love if those games had a baby!
Basically me, too. I can do 4 or 5 playthroughs of Skyrim and enjoy the hell out of it and want more, but I only reached “late-ish-game” in Witcher 3 once in 4 or 5 attempts… and even then burn out.
The bugs aren’t even the main problem. The problem was that the game was marketed as “every single decision you make could have massive impacts on the story” and it turns out there’s only one mission near the beginning that can change depending on what you do leading up to it and that’s it. You can make the game completely bug free and it wouldn’t change that the game did not live up to the promises.
That being said, I did enjoy kinda enjoy the game once I accepted it for what it was. Someday, I hope to play the game they were talking about when they were promoting this one.
It is still one of the best games. It didn’t work on outdated consoles, that was the only flaw to complain about. Oh and it wasn’t gta, but that’s a positive in my book.
The Unity train wreck is such a beautiful example of shitting where you eat.
All they had to do was to shut up and do nothing and everything would be fine.
Instead, they were greedy af and their continued fall would be almost entertaining if it didn’t highlight how shit the industry can be.
well technically, if they shut up and did nothing they’d go under. unity operates at a loss right now. if you’re interested in what actually went down in the talks when they cooked this bullshit up, this is a good read from a tech investor who has some insight into unity leaderships new business model while being entirely unbiased:
It’s extremely expensive to build/support an engine used by millions of devs, across 25+ platforms (+ multiple device generations), producing 100K+ games/yr across various art/render styles
Unity has a small army of 3K+ engineers working on it
~80% (est.) of Unity users don’t pay anything for the service. Unity’s ads business (highly profitable) funds the engine business
The engine business is not profitable standalone
It’s not sustainable
The strategic question for Unity was always: assuming the low cost of the engine, what other developer services can we provide to developers to increase average revenue per user (ARPU)?
The runtime fee was a shock to me: only a year ago this option was completely off the table
So what changed for Unity and why now?
The macro enviornment has resulted in hiring freezes. For a seats license model like Unity’s, this means poor revenue growth
GenAI will result in smaller teams building AAA quality games. Smaller/efficient teams = great for studios’ profits but bad for Unity’s seats model
Apple privacy changes (ATT/IDFA) pushed game monetization towards IAP and away from in-game ads. Hurts Unity’s ads business
Dev adoption of Unity cloud services like Unity Gaming Services, DevOps, etc likely hasn’t been strong enough to make the engine biz profitable
I don’t know shit about it, but I’m guessing the ad business isn’t really standalone itself. Guessing it’s the ad service that kicks in for developers that don’t pay for the engine. If that is true, it’s stupid to expect both to be individually profitable. It’s also likely the ad business wouldn’t be profitable if it didn’t have all those indie developers that have it incorporated into their games. Really sounds like a working system just wasn’t profitable enough, and they needed more blood from the stone.
it’s mostly the very large mobile apps like genshin impact or whatever it’s called that actually payed the fee, the vast majority of small and indie developers don’t usually make enough to even qualify for the pro plan. Unity’s seat model was always insanely underpriced for the value the engine provided - 3K senior software engineers @ $200K cost maybe 600 million dollars a year, and maybe 20% of users payed anywhere from three hundred bucks to a little over a thousand for unlimited engine access.
Lastly, the installation threshold won’t be retroactive, so only new installations made after the policy’s announcement will count toward reaching the Runtime Fee thresholds.
Second-biggest chunk of the console market, effectively necessary for the PC market, gobbling up studios and publishers like fucking Galactus, and these empty suits still treat “making less money than the number we pulled from our asses” as losing money.
“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.
That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.
It’s also soon to be astroturfed to hell and back with “omg let people enjoy things” and the “stop having FUN” comic any time people mention how dogshit this is.
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
Haven’t heard of paralives. The one I’m familiar with is “Life by You” from Paradox. I’m hoping for cities skylines integration, which is why I have my eye on that one, even if it is a different developer it’s the same publisher so there’s hope…
(Sorry if you briefly saw a billion duplicate comments from me— Memmy suddenly crashed and when it reopened it seems to have just kept reposting again and again. I think I deleted all the copies now)
RIP Maxis. Who knows what kinds of awesome stuff we could have had. Oh well, at least Cities Skylines 2 is on the way. Haven’t played a Sims game in a long time but had such a blast with the earlier entries in the series.
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