So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
I agree the genre isn’t exactly for me, but I don’t think that’s really relevant. Stardew Valley and Sims more or less fall in the same genre and I loved Stardew Valley and could see the appeal of Sims. I don’t have an issue with those games being on the list but New Horizons just felt shallow. Outside of collecting things for the Museum there really wasn’t anything that engaging. I remember also checking if I’m just playing it wrong and the sentiment from the AC vets was that the gameplay of New Leaf is better.
I did a quick check to see New Horizon is still in the same state as I remember and some people are claiming the 2.0 update made the game better so I guess I’ll give it another shot one day. Maybe my opinion is dated because I haven’t really played since 1.3 update.
I’m going to give my probably controversial opinion. I don’t think Animal Crossing New Horizons should be on that list and the main reason it got critical acclaim is because it released at the height of Covid. Had it released any other time people would’ve seen that it’s a shallow game where in long term it’s mostly a repetition of the same menial actions. There’s nothing wrong with repetition, but having to check the store every day isn’t exactly the peak of compelling gameplay.
IMO the issue isn’t WotC, it’s Hasbro. WotC is their golden goose and they’re squeezing it for everything. I haven’t checked their recent earnings calls but I wouldn’t be surprised if WotC is still their only subsidiary where the revenue isn’t declining.
His question was not clear to me which is why I stated I didn’t understand what he was asking. And then expanded what I meant by exclusivity to see if that answered his question. And while I didn’t have time to go find the sources especially since finding the source for the other publisher IMO isn’t worth the effort (mainly because searching the web for anything very has become next to impossible unless you know exactly what you’re looking for). The Ubisoft one however is really simple, anyone with basic googling skills could find it.
If anyone is here in bad faith it’s you. You instantly assumed I’m being disingenuous and come attacking me without even doing a basic check to see if you have anything to attack.
I’m not sure what you’re asking so I’ll just expand on what Epic did. Epic made a deal with Ubisoft where Ubisoft releases their game on their store and on EGS but not on Steam despite all previous Ubisoft titles being on Steam. I remember there being another smaller publisher who made a deal with EGS and released their game on other storefronts (I think it was EGS and GOG but it also could’ve been the MS store) but not on Steam. I would consider that exclusivity targeting specifically Steam.
I’m not saying you should, I’m saying it doesn’t make them villains or a bad company.
I think it does. Instead of competing they chose to try and force customers to use their platform by buying exclusivity that specifically targets Steam. From the perspective of the customer they took the worst possible approach and, along with how Sweeney has talked about people like us, treated customers like a cattle to be herded, as if we couldn’t think for ourselves and would throw ourselves into EGS if our games went there.
But the end goal of EGS wasn’t just to make them more money, they offer every developer more money when they publish there.
That is the PR they sold that the money goes into the hands of the developer. That is true only if the developer is also self publishing. Actually that extra money goes into the hands of the publisher and then it’s up to the publisher to decide if the developers get any more money. And once again, from the customers perspective, we barely get anything out of that goal. Games don’t get cheaper for us, we don’t really get more games because of it. The publishers simply get more money per sale. They don’t even get more money (except for the exclusivity money that Epic threw their way) because you sell significantly more copies on Steam because unlike Epic Steam doesn’t treat its customers like cattle.
The underlying motivation for creating EGS in the first place was the recognition that Valve does not need to be taking a 30% cut of every game sale to provide the services they provide.
So to prove that Valve doesn’t need to take a higher cut they make a store where they take fraction of the cut Steam would take but also offer a fraction of the services Steam offers? I think that would be an argument if they offered at least half of what Steam offers but they don’t even do that. They made a barebones store for a barebones cut, that doesn’t show anything.
We already know lowering the cut doesn’t make us pay less. All it does is put more money into the pockets of the publisher.
And I very much doubt Valve’s cut is a reason indie game can’t be profitable. There are asset flips going up on Steam on a daily basis. If asset flipping wasn’t profitable we wouldn’t see them propping up like mushrooms after rain. When asset flips are more profitable than an indie game there’s something wrong with that game.
I’m pretty sure some of them are objectively broken. I had a mission where the mission givers partner was seeing someone else and I had to figure out who. The process of figuring out who the person was was pretty cool. Outside of some vague physical traits my leading clue was the mystery persons partners job position. I had to look up every restaurant, break into every single restaurant, find all the people who worked that position, find where they live, break into their apartments to find who their partner was and if they match who I’m looking for.
Eventually I was 99% sure I got the right person, but I needed proof they were seeing each other. I combed their entire apartment, found nothing. I combed the partners apartment, found nothing. I checked their workplaces, found nothing. I tailed both of them the entire day, still found nothing. I even checked their mailboxes and found nothing. I literally ran out of ideas how to solve the case because I found nothing.
Turned me away from the game because I got this cool investigation with some really out the box thinking, and then didn’t get rewarded because I didn’t find that last piece of information.