Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.
Hypothetically I don’t see a problem with things like a new entry in Elder Scrolls. The problem (to me) seems more like constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions and for each new console.
Slenderman. The OG. I didn’t like horror of any type and was always so scared. I was in early college years and chaperoning for a church trip and the two kids in my room were high schoolers I was friends with. They wanted to okay it but we’re too scared. Idk what, something about them being too scared to play and making me do it gave me the courage to. Slenderman just looked so goofy in this game. I finally couldn’t take it seriously. These two kids were like cowering behind the hotel bed though lol.
Later it was Amnesia: the Dark Descent. It was tough but I got through it. I played it during 4he middle of the day with the lights on lol. I would pause whenever anything scary happened but I got through it!
Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don’t care about.
I feel you, I’m not denying a correlation between free assets and shovelware but why punish good quality games using free assets? Steam has a pretty generous (relatively speaking) refund policy letting you refund games you’ve bought in the past week that you have played for less than two hours. I feel like most games and especially shovelware games you can know if they’re shit in under two hours. Better to let too many shitty games in and not risk keeping a good one out and let folks get refunds for shitty games than to potentially keep good games out because they don’t meet some weird criteria they can’t quite meet.