Just want to highlight how unnecessarily antagonistic your response was. Not sure if that was your intention, but I don’t care to engage with it. Cheers.
Buying a CD/DVD was never ownership of the media that’s on it. It’s ownership of a piece of plastic and a license to play to the content on the plastic within certain limitations. If it was ownership, you would be allowed to project the DVD on a wall and charge patrons to view it, but legally you can’t, because you don’t own anything but the plastic. Buying a CD/DVD was always just a more convenient version of buying a ticket to a concert/theater to see the same thing. You’re paying for the experience of viewing their artwork.
So, as long as you also agree that sneaking into a concert/theater to view a show without paying also isn’t theft in any way, then I can’t argue.
I wish someone had taught my friends and me how to play D&D when I was 10, but my parents were part of the “satanic panic” generation, and had zero interest in anything to do with fantasy or improv. Once you get out of highschool, finding a night that everyone can meet up for D&D gets exponentially harder, let alone finding someone who wants to put in the time to DM.
And I expect they were a very similar audience. So I don’t think the bar for what to expect was very different. If anything, the bar should have been much higher for the AAA game.
CMV: if No Man’s Sky’s gameplay was identical to Starfield in 2016, people would have been even more disappointed than they were. The only reason people gave Starfield a pass in 2023 is because we’re so conditioned to being disappointed by Bethesda that fanboys shrugged it off, and everyone else just looked at them weird. I legitimately believe NMS when it first released was a better game than Starfield.
Yeah, I was aware of the case, but I’m confused because it does sound like Valve’s policy only explicitly restricts the sale of free keys for less. Obviously, I’m all for Valve being held accountable if they’re actually requiring the game be the same price on a completely different platform.
I don’t think there’s any difference between “justifiable” and “simply because they can”. If they can, then they can. Yeah, I do support developers, but I’d be lying if I said steam doesn’t add any value to my experience. If it wasn’t 30% worth of value, devs wouldn’t choose it. And I’m all for EGS undercutting them to attract developers, I think that’s the right way to combat it.
If there is any regulation that needs to happen to combat monopolies, then I think it’s the same regulation that needs to happen on all content distribution and streaming platforms, which is: there should be a standard API for accessing content in a cross-platform way so that open source front-ends can be trivially developed. If steam (or netflix, or spotify, or google, or whatever) has established too much power, it’s because they’ve locked their users into their user experience, and it’s inherently inconvenient to have to switch between different platforms and UIs. But if regulation forced a common API, and open source front-ends were developed, people wouldn’t be locked into a specific user experience. You could switch between EGS or Steam or GOG or whoever, and the only thing that would change are the games that show up in your front-end of choice. IMO that’s the real way to solve it.
I don’t think “pro consumer” is mutually exclusive with “because of competition”. In fact, I would say the two necessarily overlap. If a company does something pro consumer that isn’t driven by competition, then it’s just charity, not “capitalistic” at all. The point I’m making is that, Epic often seems to be on the other side: taking actions that are driven by competition, but not good for consumers. As I stated above, the linux push by valve is the same fight that Epic is battling in courts vs Apple and Google; the difference is that consumers benefit from the linux push, whereas mostly just Epic benefits from their court battles (and maybe some other companies).
I don’t think steam refund was driven by EA offering refunds on EA-exclusives. It was in direct response to Early Access titles being posted that were just obvious scams, with no recourse once you’ve purchased the game (maybe you read EA as a motivator somewhere and assumed Electronic Arts rather than Early Access?)
I agree valve could afford to take a smaller cut. I do believe Epic is directly to thank for all the Sony exclusive ports to PC.
linux support is 100% motivated by valve’s business interests, but also, it’s good for consumers
I’d need to know specifics about reviews over the years. I don’t read reviews, but I know they have to make a deliberate effort to prevent review bombing. “Curators” are a waste of everyone’s time.
TBH I feel like the Steam UI changes at a glacier’s pace compared to almost any other UI. It’s really not that different from what it was 20 years ago.
Yeah, the key/lootbox stuff is a valid criticism. I don’t like any digital economy that’s clearly fishing for whales.
AFAIK, steam’s price parity policy only requires that free steam keys not be sold off the platform for less than what they’re sold for on the steam store. Which makes sense, as that would open the door to just freeloading your game on the platform. I could post my game on steam for $1,000,000, never sell any copies through steam, then generate free steam keys, and sell them over on my own site for $30, keeping 100% of the profits. If allowed, every dev would just do that, and no one would ever purchase through steam. But it sounds like their policy would allow for a game to be $50 on steam, and $40 on EGS.
Meanwhile, EGS is constantly signing exclusivity deals on their platform, preventing them from selling on any other platform at all, which is very clearly anti-consumer.
The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn’t use “any” steam feature
The fact that the Valve is facilitating streamlined distribution of the game (and any updates) to thousands, or millions of players at the same time alone means they are already taking advantage of steam’s features. That is a huge amount of bandwidth savings and complexity that the developer just doesn’t have to think about.
I would use EGS, but they don’t support Linux. Additionally they are deliberately building a walled-garden version of NFTs where you exchange “Vbucks” for emotes and skins that can work across UE games, thereby encouraging more devs to use their engine, and more customers to play games on their engine. That feels gross, centralized, and anti-consumer.
Steam lets devs use any engine, and enables players to use any OS via proton. Any DRM or anticheat present is up to the devs. Yeah, I have a library that is centralized on steam, and that’s not ideal, but it doesn’t feel like they’re exploiting that…yet. Epic doesn’t even have market share yet and it already feels like they’re exploiting everything they can.
Valve’s push on Linux is THE reason that Microsoft isn’t forcing Steam, EGS, EA Play, etc, to go through the Windows Store, which would allow msft to take 30% of all their sales. Both Valve and Epic are fighting the same battle, just valve is fighting with innovation and pro consumer options, and epic is fighting in court against the same kinds of walled gardens they’re building.
I’m not smart enough to see a world where Linux and effective client side anti-cheat can cohabitate. Nothing can ever stop someone running a custom linux kernel that hides any nefarious code from the games they’re targeting. PC gaming can only head that direction to the degree that they take kernel-level control away from the user.
When it comes to windows, the devs working on kernel-level anti-cheat systems are working closely with microsoft on the implementation. To the point that, if you were to try to reverse engineer it on your own machine, in all likelihood msft could convince a court that you are hacking their system, not the other way around.
Lol I know it sounds like I’m treating it like a job, but it’s more like wanting to travel the world but knowing I’m not going to have time in my life to see everything (which is both a metaphor, and also a thing I would actually like to do that competes for time lol).
We have to prioritize some experiences in life over other experiences we also want to have, and that’s just how it is. So if they could just stop making new things for a while, that would really make my job easier 😝.