I’m trying to write a story, and I struggled with this, especially when confronting certain realities:
While fantasy, the story is meant to reflect some harsh political realities
Multiple villains are killed, but the heartfelt good guys live.
The ending has everything fixed and everyone’s happy.
I’m aware most stories don’t come anywhere close to a full happy ending like this. Every Batman story ends with Gotham still a miserable shithole. Every noir story ends with the case solved but everyone broken for it and the city still a dystopia. It generally has good reasoning, to reflect harshness of reality, but that’s a realm of fantasy I really want to venture into; one where things just work out.
I mean, I’ll bite: I enjoyed GP for a while, up until MS went firing-crazy and upped their prices.
Until then, I was very aware I rented games and might not get to play them later. Given that I was generally playing games that were new or sampling genres I don’t play much of, I wasn’t opposed to the time limitation, and the low price was reasonable.
Now that their price increased, I ended it. I am not locked into their ecosystem, and in fact swore off it pretty easily due to their changing circumstances.
I would agree the renting situation is poisonous when it comes to housing, because the model has driven the purchasing price of homes through the sky. But that is a situation with scarcity of goods. You can get video games anywhere.
Valve absolutely limits the sale of people’s games.
Usually, this would come in the case of “Hey, this game doesn’t work, we’re taking it out of sale everywhere.” But with Helldivers 2 being so popular and high profile, that wouldn’t have been a good look for Valve. Instead, they limited the zone of sale to prevent customer support complaints.
Sony was limiting where you could legally sign up for PSN and thus play the game, not where you could buy it off Steam. That was a conflict of their own mismanagement and inexperience selling on PCs. Had they been smarter, they would have restricted regions to begin with and there might have been less outcry, but poor planning caused Valve’s parental slap.
You’re browsing Steam. You find “ULTIMATE Inchworm Arena”, a strange but fun-looking online multiplayer arena. You buy it, and download it. The game then says “Welcome to Inchworm Arena! To certify yourself for online play, you must provide One MoistCoin, a cryptocurrency obtainable only in the Republic of Kongo!” None of this was clear from the Steam store page. The developer support response is less than helpful.
Would you continue protesting the developers, or would you blame Valve for presenting this obvious worthless scam game as an offering on Steam? By putting it on their store, Steam asserts some level of responsibility that the game in question is actually playable, and doesn’t contain critical bugs; like failing to start up, or having a user license agreement that its lawyers did not think through.
When this happened for Helldivers, it was Valve that restricted their access because Sony didn’t even know what they were doing on the PC store, and hadn’t thought through that players had no legal avenue to play in some countries. Valve does not want to be put through more cases of user customer support complaining to them, and wants to ensure certain behavior from their game vendors to ensure that doesn’t happen.
As I understand it, there’s not currently a PSN restriction on Helldivers 2. Valve themselves blocked it because Sony was making no promises that it would continue to be a legal and playable purchase in outside countries.
I would guess Sony may still have to convince Valve to increase the game’s availability. To sell a product that will remain usable, Valve needs a better commitment/promise than “We’we so sowwy consumews, we pwomise we won’t do it again.” Probably some kind of contract.
I maintain it was more an issue with basing their fight around spacing, than teaching via popups. I didn’t even mind the many enemies that had unintuitive concepts like feeding them grenades. Once you attune to them, they’re simple enough.
Even after they teach you all that about Marauders, it’s not just a matter of how to shoot them, and when - but when NOT to. Plus hoping for their AI to act reliably as described.
Someday I’d like to hope our game design sensibilities evolve enough that we can stop deflecting every negative review with “git gud”. There are absolutely things that hard games can design badly that don’t add to the overall enjoyment of the game.
One time playing this game, as soon as the meeting aborted, yellow started following me. I tried to head to a task location, staying outside of their range, and they were clearly targeting me. I quickly managed to loop back around them and hit the emergency meeting button, explaining they had followed me. I got them voted out.
I’d love a new Wolfenstein-style game that diverges from the simple divide of giving them helmets.
It’s simple morbid truth that these people are human beings, who have committed their minds to unimaginable cruelty. It’d be fun to have more games about reciprocating that cruelty.
Mortal Kombat’s fatalities gave me a big ick factor when they leaned into cruelty and pain (and thankfully turned towards looney creativity to be entertaining). But I could see the former being a bit more valid when there’s universal reasoning behind why it’s being applied.
I vaguely remember The Matrix had an MMO that apparently evolved the lore in some crazy ways. And I’m going to guess they abandoned that for the new one.
I could in some ways understand their pursuit of emulators when they’re monetizing those same games currently (even if I disagree with their pricing structure on them). What really got my goat was when they went after Garry’s Mod animations, a medium that has promoted their visibility and never conflicted with their software sales in the slightest.
Suppose that on some level, this was possible. You wouldn’t see nice, cozy instances of people who’ve finished their old collection selling them to low-income folks that just got their first Steam Deck. You’d put some games on sale for $10, and an automated Python script would automatically buy them and put them back up for sale for $49.98, one cent less than the new copies being sold.
When literally every single digital copy of a game is “equivalent”, the used games market just doesn’t make sense - although there’s a hundred third-party sites that would like it to work that way so they can take their un-earned cut.