It’s a bunch of bean counters seeing trends in the markets, seeing others cutting jobs and following suit.
Bull, bear markets, trends, the whole thing is fucked.
It’s spoken about like it’s some mythical, mysterious thing and the government can try to rein it in with their levers if they must as a last resort, because we mustn’t interfere with the markets unless the outlook is bleak.
Give me a fucking break. Is anyone buying this anymore?
The old rich fucks and their old rich fuck friends and their old rich fuck companies, investment firms, hedge funds, whatever else their wrinkly old hands can get on they will move in their directions as they choose.
They don’t lose at this game and they’re pulling away at an outrageous rate, they’re killing us and the planet while they’re at it. They don’t even have to. They don’t even fucking have to. The people who have the shortest time left here are trying to suck the most out of it before they leave and leave way less of it for the rest of us.
I don’t know when others will start getting mad, but it’ll probably be too late.
This is what happens when you stop focusing on building immersive VR gaming experiences and go towards mobile quality graphics and stupid metaverse / workplace productivity improvements. When will these companies ever learn to focus on the games? Sony learned it with the PS3, MS with the Xbone, and now Meta.
I am a VR fanatic but even I won’t buy a Quest 3 because there’s just no quality VR games that make me want to upgrade. The fact that no game has yet matched Half-Life: Alyx in terms of immersiveness is just sad.
A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.
Doesn’t matter. It’s still competition. They motivate Valve to create a better store and keep it that way. Since that is Valve’s unique selling point and what distinguishes them from the competition. Therefore I believe devs should make their games available on every storefront. Not just the best one, to give customers a choice.
Steam was great before epic and has been adding killer features since before egs came along. EGS tactics to win over steam users is to be anti competitive…
Like Walmart coming into a town to compete with the stores already there and then putting them out of business? Then moving onto the next town to compete again?
competition is good when the rest of the competition is able or good. EGS is so shit it has to buy exclusives and give out free games and it still doesn’t work. There has to be some equality in quality to have any chance of making steam better otherwise they just exist to make anti competitive moves, what is steam supposed to do? Also pay for exclusives?
When their launcher is literal malware or they engage in anti-consumer practices like exclusives, no, they are not good for the customer.
(Not that any publicly traded company can be good for the customer, mind; by definition they can only be good for the shareholders; any benefit they might accidentally provide to the customer or to society is an inefficiency that will eventually be corrected through enshittification. The only reason Valve isn’t entirely harmful is that they aren’t publicly traded yet.)
The only thing Valve has done with Steam that apparently is anti-competitive, is actually having a decent product with good features and no one else is capable of actually delivering parity with it to be a viable competitor.
A natural monopoly is a far cry from one built through anti-competitive practices, and easily toppled by competent competitors.
Perhaps if Valve’s competition was competent, there would be better options.
True. But Google became the number one search engine by creating a better product and basically got a natural monopoly. And now look what kind of monster the company has become.
Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean it will stay that way in the future. Therefore I rather not see Steam be the only game store left in the pc gaming space.
Well no. Google used to steal results from other search engines initially.v And then suppressed search results for competing products for at least the last 20 years.
Then get mad at the weak-ass competition. Start a fire under their asses to make something that is actually just as good, if not better.
Punishing the one good product for being good is just gonna lead to there being no good products and only shitty ones just as much as your slippery-slope scenario. 🤦♂️
But they haven't crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don't force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don't force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it's things customers value.
When they started, they did used to force you to use products edit: aside from their own games(fair cop), some 3rd party games like Lost Planet also required it.
Certain games, and not just valve games, you'd buy in a store and the disc would force you to install and create a steam account to play the single player offline game.
They're a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn't force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That's what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there's no other storefront that wouldn't be a worse value if it was free isn't Steam doing something wrong.
Looks like it was a console exclusive before it released on Steam, if you're talking about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (which is the only one I can find by that name).
Do you have more information about the release? Or perhaps it's a different game?
They didn’t force any game to use Steamworks, developers and publishers chose to use it because it offered a lot of good middleware. And of course it requires Steam to use Steamworks.
To be fair I think Polygon have misunderstood the email.
Calling it "second run Stadia PC RPG" implies Microsoft thought it was going to launch as a Stadia exclusive for it's first run. This was back in 2020 when Stadia was still a thing, and trying to sign up exclusives.
That doesn't mean Microsoft underestimated it, but that it thought it'd already have had a run on Stadia which would make it less likely to be an important title for Microsoft.
Their publisher also expected the game to have about one-tenth of the actual players. I don’t think anyone knew how big it would be.
Absolutely.
The $5M also refers to what they thought Larian would want for it to be included on Game Pass.
Yes and that’s precisely my point. Because they didn’t see how successful the game would be. Otherwise, they would have thought of a much bigger number.
I’ve no interest in the Diablo series, but am I the only one who hates streaming as a measurement of success? It’s like the gaming media equivalent to when journalists report on Xitter hashtags… it’s just the easiest, dumbest metric available.
Probably because companies do their best to hide most metrics of purchases and players. Remember when some smart fella used the hyper accurate steam achievements to be able to derive how many people owned a game? Steam patched that out and now the best metric is based on number of review scores but that depends on the game, genre and score rating etc…
Diablo is on Battle.net, not steam. There’s no way to see player count, and viewer count does typically corelate to player counts. It’s not one-to-one, but it isn’t useless.
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