I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?
This thing looks slick. How does it do with sleeping it mid-game session and resuming later? That’s the biggest make-or-break feature for me with any of these handhelds.
Achievements (for me, at least) are just a reason to spend more time with a game that I enjoy. In most cases, I have trouble enjoying a game if I don’t have goals to work towards (either game-imposed or self-imposed). If I finish the main part of the game, and am not tired of it yet, achievements give me goals that I can follow if I want to keep playing.
Definitely agree that there’s too many games that have achievements that are just in no way worth the time and aren’t even fun as an auxiliary goal, though. The best ones are the ones that get you to do things you otherwise wouldn’t (e.g. playing a non-standard playthrough of the game). The lazy ones (‘Kill X enemies, Earn Y dollars’) are just busywork or earned ‘automatically’ while doing other things and add nothing.
Pretty sure that’s an NES - look closely at the controller, it’s got the 2 red buttons which were pretty iconic. That’d suggest they were 5 between about 1985 and 1990, which suggests they’re 40-45 now.
Judging by the CRT monitor at 18 and the LCD at 23, I assume OP is around 40 now. Maybe they just omitted the ~17 years worth of panels where they got out of the house and did something else.
Whether they’re surprised or not, going public with it was a good marketing ploy because I never would have known about the game if they hadn’t, and I bought it. I’m sure many more of their sales can be attributed to the same.
I have played the game. There’s far more pornographic games on Steam. All of the nudity is censored, there are no kids or even characters that could be mistaken for kids in the game, and it’s obvious in its intent - there’s nothing that I’d describe as even approaching titillating; the whole experience is clearly just intended to - and successfully so - make you feel uncomfortable and unsettled. The scene in question - the one that previously had the young girl - is particularly unsettling specifically because of how it normalizes everything else that’s going on, and I agree with them that the scene works better with a grown woman than it would have with a kid. There’s no reason for this to be banned on Steam.
I’d bet some significant amount of the hype was from people thinking “Oh, sick! The Marathon franchise is getting a revival!” without realizing that the new game had essentially no relation to the Marathon franchise they remembered. I don’t know who they think is sitting around thinking, “You know what I want? Another live service extraction shooter.”
I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.
Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.
Oh, man - I can do you one better. I still have one of these, still hooked up and running. We use it as a game server for some low-requirement stuff… currently Vintage Story.
For what it’s worth, this wired alternative is almost identical to an xbox one controller except for the rumble motor, which is markedly lower quality. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s also less than half the price, and works out of the box in all distros I’ve tried.
:::spoiler Dialog “How are you doing? Need some motivation to keep going? How about an award? Here, take this one that says you spent all your in-game playtime in an alien strip club. Oh, that’s permanent, by the way. Everyone on your friends list can see that forever.” :::