Steam’s main thing is that they have recognised that killing the golden goose is a bad thing for everybody. They have consistently played for long term growth and profits, over purely short term gains.
Steam has made mistakes, but their demonstrated values have been shown to be mostly compatible with mine. I can work with that.
Also, them being privately owned means that they are less have seagull investors swooping in and demanding short term gains now now now.
I’ll check it out, next time I get a chance to fire it up. Unfortunately, I hate the teleport mechanism of vr games. I love hurtling through the water. Unfortunately, that also makes me motion sickness. I’m slowly training myself out of it, but it takes time.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
The steam deck rode the balance point between cost, heat, and power extremely well, in my opinion. It was cheap enough to justify the cost. Its battery lasts a respectable amount of time, and it’s computing power was enough.
I can see how it could have been improved much, given the tech and use limitations.
We get a maxima in solar storm activity. This can cause solar flares that can knock out satellites. They can even mess with power transmission lines, if they hit hard enough.
So it won’t affect you, if you don’t use power, or data via satellite.
I think the key difference is that it’s “easier” to apply a meta to a RTS game. In shooters, the meta often involves quick reflex decisions, where to hide, where to shoot etc. This is hard, and requires practice. It also means there is a significant number of players not applying it, or doing so sub-optimally.
With RTS games, the metas are easier to apply. This means that, in human Vs human games, the newer players often get flattened. It also means that far more complex metas can be developed and applied.
Shooters tend to back load the difficulty curve. It’s easy to get into them, and not do badly, but hard to do well. RTS games tend to front load the difficulty. You need to get over the initial hump to get “ok” with it. Once over the hump, the curve smooths off and you get good fairly rapidly.
One of the big differences between nerds and normals is that nerds enjoy punching through that wall. The difficulty is seen as a challenge, not an impediment. Most people want a faster feedback loop on the dopamine reward. FPS type games deliver that extremely well.
Early access is extremely effective, when used correctly. It lets smaller studios get an income stream a lot earlier, which helps significantly. It also lets them form a tight feedback loop with fans. They can find out what works and what doesn’t. Some examples of it working well would be Rimworld, Kerbal Space Program, and Factorio. All released as amazing games, primarily due to early access.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies seem to be abusing the idea right now. Particularly bigger studios.
Valve are the only ones confident enough in their systems to do that. Valve’s mindset seems to be that trying to lock people in is a losing strategy, long term. Instead they are just making sure that their offerings are better than anything else available. If done right, it has all the advantages of locking people in, with none of the downsides. It also combines with the perceived openness, which gains you a lot of credit with the geek community.
Microsoft are too reliant on lock-in to risk opening it up.