I don’t understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don’t they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn’t feel wasted. And there’s hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don’t like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don’t like the more you’re frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
That is a great question! I’ve certainly asked myself the same thing and the only answer I can come up with in 2 parts.
1: The game is compulsive. While you are playing you want to keep playing. And while the moment to moment interactions are dull (imo) but not so dull as to drive me away. There may be plenty of Oblivion nostalgia keeping me playing.
2: Many of the games problems appear in retrospect. The dumbing down of the subsystems, for example. Much like Outer Worlds; it feels fine while you’re in there but once you stop and step back you realise how crappy they are.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn’t mesh well at all.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
Customers aren’t professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina’s Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.
But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.
So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin’s Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it’s a bad game.
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren’t fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn’t directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that’s just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It’s time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.
IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.
Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.
Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it’s third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I’ve looked what I’ve played so far.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it’s still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It’s like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then… :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don’t care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn’t worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it’s starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that’s a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you’re into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn’t that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.
I think there are too many exceptions to this that the best way to truly know is to play it for yourself. I hated Death Stranding, Control, Days Gone, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fallout 3 and many other games in their initial few hours, but as they opened up they quickly became my one of my favourites. I’ve started my first playthrough of Witcher 3 and in the first 3 hours I’m not yet impressed, but I’ll give it a good chance before dropping it. Not sure if Starfield is any good but given its systems, it’ll probably need some buildup time I guess.
It’s such a bizarre, but real issue. I’ve always been boggled by the idea that you can’t offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. “I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn’t like it, but it doesn’t really get good until you sit through another 10.”
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
I honestly don’t get it. It’s Bethesda. We know them. We know what Bethesda does. Did people honestly expect something different? Did they delusion themselves into thinking it was going to be different?
The game is exactly as i expected it to be. And I think it great.
Once I changed my mindset to “this map of the solar system is really just like a flat plane in Fallout New Vegas, except with extra steps” then I was able to enjoy it more. I think games like No Mans Sky spoiled people in terms of an engaging space travel mechanic, even though Bethesda was honest from the beginning about there not being transitions into/out of planet atmospheres.
The opening story about joining Constellation was pretty weak though.
Yeah I figured it was going to be a Bethesda game, and those usually frustrate me. I didn’t buy it. Maybe in a couple years when the Ultimate Edition is on sale I’ll try it.
I’m over 100 hours into it and have enjoyed every minute. I had to use mods though to make some aspects manageable tho. Like the UI and some bat files to increase merchants money. Little personal tweaks. Well… A lot of personal tweaks lol
I didn’t expect the game to be the best thing since sliced bread. I expected it to be a Bethesda game in space. That’s exactly what I got and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Personally I think Bethesdas approach to their game design is EXTREMELY dated and frustrating. Also they made Fallout 76, one of the most dog shit games I ever played.
They need some new talent making decisions on their games to make them more modern. The problems they have in their games should be inexcusable from a “AAA” studio in 2023.
They’re still using the same engine they’ve used since Morrowind. That’s a big reason their games feel dated. As for Starfield itself it tries to do a lot of things but it doesn’t do anything perfect. Everything it does there are other games that do better.
Yep. I don’t play it either, but it looks great. UE5 can look amazing, but it’s built up from the engine they made for UT in '99. People don’t understand engines.
Apparently you’re not super mad about Skyrim having bugs in 2012 because that was just so unforgivable I’m still mad about it /s
Sadly while I’m sarcastic here this is literally the truth for a lot of people. PS I played Skyrim like 200 hours and saw irritating bugs maybe like 3 times. It didn’t really bother or deter me from playing in any way.
The haters of Bethesda games clearly have never written code. What they are doing in these games is honestly mind-blowing that it could be done so well that the games are actually playable
As a programmer, it isn’t mind blowing. Some of its neat, but pretty much all of it I’ve seen before at least as pieces. It’s also doing a lot worse and less than I’ve seen before too. Bethesda games are not known for their technical capabilities though, so I’m not too bothered by any of the technical stuff. A lot of the design is what bothers me. There’s so much friction for the player that you (or at least me) can never get immersed.
I have played every Bethesda game since Morrowind. Sure it’s a Bethesda game. That’s come in many forms though, and they will say they’ve learned lessons but continue to repeat them. For example, they said they learned their lesson with the “yes, no, sarcastic yes, more information” dialogue wheel. In Starfield it’s technically gone, but dialogue is functionally identical. No one complained because it was on a wheel, it’s because it didn’t provide options.
Bethesda has gone through many forms, so “a Bethesda game” means different things to different people. Starfield they advertised as a return to form (as in, back to the classic style of actually a role playing game), yet it’s probably the game with the fewest options for role play. If you are young (started with Skyrim and later), then I can see not having the experience to know better. For those who do remember them and saw all the marketing of them acting like they cared about that style, it falls flat. It doesn’t help it released after the best RPG of the past decade or more probably, but it comes short of my desires (but not expectations) regardless.
I’d argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best RPG in at least 20 years. It’s been so long since we’ve had an RPG on its level that I had almost forgotten what it felt like. It makes me feel like the original Fallout games (from Black Isle Studios, not Bethesda) made me feel back in the day.
Yeah, it’s quite possibly the best ever. It takes what made classic CRPGs great but brings it into the modern era with everything we’ve learned. Compared to when it came out, it’s probably not the greatest, but comparing them all to each other directly it quite possibly is.
Who are the people who keep donating? Like, maybe around the Kickstarter era around 2010-2014 where all you needed was a popular name to get a huge donation. But after 2017, when everyone realized this game is going nowhere… why is there still support?
Why are people are still buying digital ships and bankrolling them?
Are they in a abusive relationship? Are they okay?
I’m an OG kickstarter backer and I kinda stopped caring a long time ago so I’m not super up to date on this stuff but, last time I checked it was infinitely more profitable for them to stay in development forever than to eventually release the game, has that ever been addressed ?
I don’t know if they’ve directly addressed this, as it seems like a terrible thing to even acknowledge, PR-wise even though it’s true. Though that doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of the game in it’s current state.
Same I was an OG kickstarter and after seeing the glacial development of the arena prototype I checked out. Came back for the persistent universe, it was so buggy as to be unplayable, checked out again (and sold my “lifetime insurance” too, made several times what I spent on that).
I just don’t see this going anywhere as long as Chris Roberts keeps focusing on dumb shit and not the core gameplay. It has become evident that Freelancer being as good as it is was a happy accident.
Freelancer was as good as it was because Microsoft bought the studio, and Roberts was out, they then spent a while cutting it down in scope and trying to fix it.
It took me two hours to read through that thing but it was well worth it. Fascinating article with some great insights into Chris Roberts, and seemingly as relevant now as it was in 2016.
Why SC out of all the space sim/sandbox games? Is there anything that this game has that no other game provides? Something about the community, a combination of features, gameplay loop or something else?
There are hundreds of games in that genre but many people obviously like SC so much that they are willing to spend larger amounts of money on it. I really wonder what it is exactly or if it’s just the general feel that game has. It’s not an easy question to answer from an outside perspective, its hard finding anything about SC at all except about its monitisation.
And again: I’m genuinely curious and not judging. People can like whatever game they want and spend as much money as they are willing to part with. I have often searched for an answer to this, but most articles/videos either say “expensive crap” if they don’t like it or don’t go beyond “it’s a space sim” if they do.
I haven’t played much of it, but what I can say about why I bought the game: Big space ships with interiors (most space sims really just give you a cockpit view) and the game looked cool. I paid $60 for it years ago and hop in it every now and again. You hear all about the monetization aspect of it and it’s not really been a problem for me since it doesn’t impact me in any way.
Thanks for asking a question and not immediately bashing my opinion! It’s not a common response I get with this game.
For me, SC as a space sim offers more of the “sim” than any other game. For example, my recent favorite gameplay loop is being a rescue medic. I have a cutlass red, which is red, has ambulance-like lights, and a med bay. I get kitted up with red armor, healing supplies and tools, and lots of extra food and water. Plus a few guns because whatever injured people is likely going to try to get me too.
Once all the shopping is done, I load up my cutlass red and wait for someone to submit a rescue beacon. (they can do this when rendered unconscious with a single key press) Once I get one, I speed over (I have equipped a very inefficient but very fast warp drive) and extract them or heal them on the spot if possible, and clear out any enemies in the mean time.
This is some of the most satisfying and rewarding gameplay I’ve ever experienced. Because it’s not a level someone designed, it’s pure emergent gameplay with extremely heavy simulation roots. There is no teleporting in and out of ships. Every door in the ship has a little button I have to press to open it. I have to stay hydrated. The little things add to it. It all comes together to make some of the best content I’ve ever experienced.
And the people I save are genuinely grateful. It takes time and effort to buy a whole new set of armor and weapons and such, so I’m saving them all that time and money, and while obviously not as impactful as actually saving a life, it makes it much much more gratifying than, say, resurrecting someone in planetside or squad or something.
That’s just one type of gameplay. But the principle is the same with other gameplay loops. It’s the most in-depth space simulation I can get right now. Sure, some other games are more polished, have better ship combat, run better (okay ALL of them run better), etc. But none of them have everything that SC does, with the level of realism that SC does, with the in-instance ship interiors that SC does.
As far as buying ships goes, honestly I just like big ships. I used to climb on tractors when I was a little kid. They were so much bigger than me and just looking at them filled me with a sense of awe. This game does the same. I have spent quite a bit on it over the years, but only $10 or $30 here and there, to upgrade existing ships to others. You can trade in ships for other ships, melt them down for store credit, use that to get different ships. I’ve had so many ships just from swapping them around and every time I spend money it’s just the price of ordering out, for a lot more enjoyment than I’d get from a pizza. It eventually added up to several hundred dollars and it was personally worth it for me to feel that amazing feeling of exploring what is essentially a mobile skyscraper or a hot rod or an ambulance or a fortress of destruction. You can earn most of these in game as well. But it’s easier to get that dopamine hit immediately for the price of an unhealthy meal haha. Now that I have that much money invested, it’s still “liquid” in that I can melt down my ships at any time and basically buy any currently purchasable ship immediately with no additional money spent.
Edit: since you mentioned community, the SC community is pretty like-minded. The people I save often go on to be my friends and play with me sometimes. Everyone is very nice. The most toxicity I ever see are people who join the game and shit on it, while insulting everyone else who plays it, then most likely leave and uninstall. These are people who think the game is a scam, maybe they’re original kickstart backers who are just mad about the game or even just bought it to ride on the hate train. (being mad after backing the kickstarter is a valid stance, but I’m not going to get into that here. The only invalid stance is believing other people shouldn’t enjoy the game.) The people who ACTUALLY play it regularly already know what they’re getting into. They have no illusions about what this game is, and because of that they end up being one of the most welcoming communities of any game I’ve played. Everyone’s just here to have fun with cool space ships and each other.
Disclaimer: I agree that SC is a burning pile of spaghetti code that will likely never be finished. I agree that they made promises in the kickstarter that they did not fulfill. I know you can buy thousands of dollars worth of in-game ships for an incomplete game. It will likely never finish. Yet I still play the game. And it’s really fun! Come play with me some time :)
This is actually one of the changes I like least. I love survival games (one of my favourite games ever is Wurm Online/Wurm Unlimited and it’s hardcore) and play modded Arma so I know how fun this level of immersion can be, but it just feels awful in SC. Stock up on snacks and water, go to warp to mission, get sucked out of the ship. Ok start the recall timer… get the ship back, load it up again, warp out and back, can’t rearm or refuel. Welp junk all my stuff again and relog because nothing but my running costs are persistent (nuking any semblance of immersion). Warp timers clocking 20 minutes? Yep you’re playing SC. Guy hotdrops on you while you’re trying to have fun and blows your ship up before you can even see him coming? Very immersive, especially because you know he got nothing out of it other than the satisfaction that you didn’t get to have fun.
Adding food and health bars while none of this rest of this works right feels like shit.
Yeah I can agree that it sucks major ass right now. The idea is cool, but it does get very annoying when re-buying stuff after dealing with bugs. One change that could fix all of this is getting to take out insurance on not just your ship, but your ship and everything in it (not including, like, ore or something. Only stuff you can buy.). So if I ever claim a ship, I could make that specific ship come with a specific set of armor, specific personal guns, ammo, medical supplies, and even food and water.
I do like shopping for stuff. But if I already know what I’m buying, especially if it’s the same stuff every time, I’d like my ship to come with it.
On a side note, drinking while in the pilot seat should be automatic, or at least very easy. I get so thirsty just sitting in my seat flying or idling/waiting.
But the idea of having to tend to bodily needs is something I definitely agree with and think is fun for a simulation, at the base level.
Edit: on many of the bigger ships, like the mercury star runner, there should certainly be waste recycling to provide you with water. It has toilets. It’s meant to sustain life for a long time. It has a bed and a fridge. There’s no reason to not let the ship help keep us hydrated.
I agree with you in concept, but I think certain suits wouldn’t make sense with that functionality. The skin-tight EVA suits with the small helmets, that have just a few minutes of oxygen I feel wouldn’t have the room/capability to allow the user to eat/drink hands-free. But there are several suits that are bigger, and designed for extended exploration sessions that have tons of oxygen storage and larger helmets/built-in backpacks that would absolutely have other life support like food/water built-in.
The smaller suits are designed just in case you need to EVA, and many ships have dining areas so you can pop the helmet off and enjoy a meal in comfort.
Well, thanks for that in-depth answer. It’s nice to talk about the actual contets of a game for once, instead of only talking around it like it’s usually the case nowadays.
It’s very interesting to hear about all this. I actually think there are a lot of games with far worse monetisation (think all the Airplane/Train simulators where you can buy singular vehicles for hundreds of dollars).
I’ll probably won’t play it tho, I don’t have the money, Conputing Power, or time lol
That’s a great observation about you hanging out around tractors as a kid and having that sense of awe. I had a similar thing as a kid with my grandpa working on semis and old cars. I really hope they do pull the game off despite my brain telling me this is all a house of cards. But exploring ships and space is so damn fun, this is the closest game to that. Tried all the X games and Elite and everything in between and SC, broke as it is, still has me holding out hope. At the very least if they never make it to a full release I hope someone else tries something similar. Starfield is fun but not scratching the same itch.
Have they stuck to a control scheme? I feel like every time I log in I have to relearn how to fly my ship and I get bored and then come back after a big patch and its different again.
I bought a super base version when they finally released some shit thinking it’d actually come out. That was like 16 maybe? Check in every few years and am always amazed at how little they’ve got done since the last time. It’s obviously vaporware. I hope someone starts a nice class action lawsuit against them. It’s fraud at this point.
I do the same thing and have tons of issues with how they’re making the game. That being said it’s far from vaporware. The experience is pretty jank at the moment but 2 years ago when I played a lot it was stable and you could sink a lot of hours into an actual gameplay experience, which is far from vaporware from my understanding. Theoretically you still can but I’m waiting to play until it’s more stable. It’s still alpha yeah but when it works it’s an actual game, albeit far from expectations and promises.
People should absolutely criticize the development but calling it fraud seems a stretch, they clearly have a product it’s just like 6 years away probably from being what they talked about 6 years ago lol. It seems more like mismanagement and development bloat. The insane backers notwithstanding. Even if they dump development now I had some fun times with $45 spent. It’s certainly an interesting experience to behold, I just think the hyperbole around the game can be ridiculous. My two cents.
No they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a .sh that installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Lol, Epic cut Linux support when it bought Rocket League.
But you are right, no one even tries. Everyone wants to have Valve’s income, but no one wants to do the legwork of innovation that Valve does. If someone would compete with Valve where they don’t already have a massive foothold, there might be some better results. For example, Linux. If any of these funding-gorged companies were to put serious money into competing with Valve in the Linux space, it’d be a real competition. Then you could leverage your stake in that to compete in different sectors. But the Linux market is small, and averse to paying for things (userwise) so not much to gain. But Valve understands that if gaming parity with Windows happens, then it will have a compounding effect. It would unshackle the PC market from Microsoft. It would make spending funding on a gaming device that DOESN’T have to have Windows involved a much more appealing prospect. Hell, the phone gaming market. No need for these re-skinned Skinner boxes when you can have the actual PC version on your phone. Whole new market, right there.
The companies that innovate tend to lead. And those who follow the coin and not the music, do not.
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Weird because I provided actual services and functionality that steam provides in exchange for that cut, and your response was that me mentioning devs do have other options isn’t “understanding criticism”
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.
‘There’s other services.’
But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.
’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’
Do you think it’s simple for a developer to create a friends list network, host/moderate community forums, host/moderate a mod website integrated into the game, achievements syncing, ability to share the game with friends, and integrate VR functionality for the above, on their own dime?
These are recurring ongoing costs for server and continued developmental changes, you are severely underestimating the time and money cost to create/host/maintain all those services?
You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.
Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that’s where the products are, and products are there because that’s where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.
The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that’s not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn’t rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn’t want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn’t get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always ‘accept this or pound sand.’
I’ve got a 7900XTX Ultra, and FSR2 does literally nothing, which is hilarious.
100% resolution scale, 128 FPS.
75% resolution scale … 128 FPS.
50% resolution scale, looking like underwater potatoes … 128 FPS.
I don’t know how it’s possible to make an engine this way, it seems CPU-bound and I’m lucky that I upgraded my CPU not too long ago, I’m outperforming my friend who has an RTX 4090 in literally all scenes, indoor, ship, and outdoor/planet.
He struggles to break 70 FPS on 1080p Ultra, meanwhile I’m doing 4K Ultra.
I had no idea it was a problem on Radeon GPUs. I saw a few people complaining about not seeing the stars, but I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about since it was always fine for my Nvidia card.
There is no need to do so. "Currently, on the Alpha and Public Test Universe (PTU), all ships and vehicles are given a basic insurance plan that does not expire to facilitate testing. At this time, it requires no upkeep or fee for players to acquire basic ship loss coverage."
I don’t care how you spend your money, but you were the one arguing that the game is only 35 dollars and that almost all your ships were in game and flyable. So it certainly seems like you have spent more than that. So it certainly seems this game is much more expensive to the people that are still most interested in it.
The fact you need a 4090 to touch 120fps on 1080p in 2023 is disgusting. That should be the minimum target fps for mid range hardware at the least.
Meh, game is bland anyway.
Ok sure, 1080p low settings, I can get away with a 4080 if I have an i9 13900K. 1080p high? Yeah, not even a 4090 with a 13900K will get you near 120fps.
It's shitty code bound. Sometimes no matter how powerful your hardware is, software will perform poorly because it just doesn't scale. Writing complex software like game so that it can fully utilize current hardware AND actually run faster with better CPU/GPU can become very difficult once a certain complexity threshold is reached. It's easy enough to do for a small linear game even if it has exceptional graphics, but an open world sandbox game like ones that Bethesda makes is a completely different story.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible of course - Bethesda absolutely should have made a better job, but it's by no means an easy task.
I was able to get a consistent 70+ fps with most things set to medium, 1440p with a 3900x and a rtx 2080 with dlss2 and a mod that helps performance without any noticable dregredarion I can tell.
Only this motherfucker could make a blockchain based product in 2023 and think he’s still ahead of the curve (and not, y’know, turning up to buy tickets on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg).
I don’t think it has a place in a work of fiction like Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe a small reference somewhere. The Russian government is a bunch of cunts, but not every piece of media needs to reference that constantly. I could also imagine that it would be could annoying if you’re playing Cyberpunk to distract yourself from the war as an Ukrainian and then you’re still constantly reminded of it
It can make political points, but the war in Ukraine does not exist in that timeline. So it makes no sense to directly refer to it. And forcing it into only the Ukrainian translation without the developer being aware of it is just unprofessional.
Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.
And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
You’re leaving out what’s really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It’s an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
The pricing incentivizes “live service” or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than “buy once” games.
Their pricing is based on "trust me bro" currently, since they don't have details on how it will work. They say it was installed i number of times, therefore you owe them j. No need for a bot farm when they can just lie, since we have no way to verify their numbers.
Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.
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