Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.
It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.
All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.
That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.
I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.
Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.
Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.
People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.
*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.
There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.
That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.
Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.
Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.
“A man chooses! A slave obeys.” - Andrew Ryan, BioShock
In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.
Probably just not big enough. Pokemon-like games are very common, palworld was just hugely successful and a lot of the media coverage for it was comparing it to Pokemon.
Yeah, it’s unfortunately common to have games running better through proton than the native port. We’ve seen a lot of devs drop their linux port recently because the proton version ran better with fewer issues.
Obviously a well executed native linux port is preferable, but a lot of smaller devs have trouble justifying spending a lot of time working out kinks for a linux port if the game already runs great through proton.
I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.
It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.
Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.