191–200 of 211 posts
> It serves no real purpose Oh common. You may not like it, but DRM was invented for a reason.
At this point I'm just not buying anything by the dumpster fire that used to be Blizzard.
Most of us don't care and we just want to play vidya games.
Blizzard used to make awesome games that were fun to play. They came up with some of the most enduring game franchises, and their games are still classics. Now, not so much. Actually, not at all. It's all just repetitive shite based on the same old tired universes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty rough for historians, archivists, and curators too. Can you imagine if books became unreadable twenty years after publication because >99.9% of readers will have moved on from the book by that point? Or if every painting, sculpture, photograph, or musical recording self-destructed in the same time period? At this point I think it's fair to say that games are cultural artifacts. We should be at least a tok…
I suppose. I can't say that the interests of these groups are particularly close to my heart. Certainly if I was a game dev I wouldn't be willing to pass up a chance to substantially increase revenue to make life easier for an archivist. To the extent that there is any value in the history of this game, I think most of it will be sufficiently captured in the large amount of video content being produced about it.
On the other hand other services have proven that piracy is most often a service issue. There will still be piracy, but it is questionable if those users were able or willing to spend anything in the first place.
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Doom cost $30 in 1993 ($60 today) and only had a handful of developers. By all rights, games should be costing $150-200 given the complexity and amount of human effort required. Instead, they've cut costs everywhere. When you pay your devs 50k per year while requiring 60-80hr work weeks, experienced devs aren't going to apply. Young, inexperienced devs fill the roles instead and make junior dev mistakes all over the…
You are making a case for why games have gotten worse based on money? Video game comapnies make far more money now than they ever have in the future. The market is also larger than its ever been.
Speaking of markets, doom 1 sold 4M copies. The best selling hardcore gamer game is grand theft auto V with 155M copies sold.
That’s a bit less than 40x the number of sales for doom (next best is red dead redemption 2 at 39M or 10x). 9 people in total developed doom. 1,000 people worked in GTA-V. They also worked many more years.
That’s over 100x more people and probably 500x the total development time for just 40x the sales. If you look into red dead’s numbers, I’m positive they look far worse than that.
GTA-V would need to cost $300+ to match the profit margins of doom if people were getting paid the same. Of course, they get paid peanuts for the “privilege” of working on some megacorp’s game.
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> It benefits the user AND the developer Notably it benefits good faith developers. I.e., the developers we actually want making games. The developers that lose under this model are the ones that make poor quality games. Though I admit it does not solve every dark pattern.
Kinda, but it also incentivizes bad-faith gamers, which in turn disincentivises good-faith developers. There are a lot of games out there with a Perhaps such a system could work if it were based on a percentage of time-to-complete, but I have no idea how one would objectively determine that, especially before sale.
Probably the most famous overtly fraudulent example seems to be "Summer of '58", a game developed by a Russian developer who claimed 30-50% of their players refunded. Here's an in-depth investigation of this claim that finds absolutely no evidence to support it: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-refund-worries-ki... -- it doesn't positively prove that there's no refund abuse, but it makes refund abuse incredibly unlikely. Basically, it's possible to tell if someone who reviews the game refunded the game or not. So for there to be systematic refund abuse, it needs to be people who play the game to completion, then refund the game, but don't leave a review: but this pattern is not seen in any other games where developers report far lower refund rates.
Gamediscover has also had a number of developers share refund data directly for this article and other articles, including developers of short games (some as short as 20 minutes long), and none have had anything in the ballpark of the studios who have made press cause celebre pushes claiming incredibly high refund rates.
One thing to consider about this entire claim: if someone intends to proxy-pirate the video game by buying it, playing it, refunding, and cackling off into the sunset... why wouldn't they just pirate the game, something that is absolutely trivial to do? It's not really coherent to say a huge swath of gamers are manipulative enough to refund, have no moral compunction about doing so, but are too technically stupid to pull it off.
Finally, think about this from Valve's side -- if a huge % of <2 hour games were being refunded, why wouldn't Valve adopt the apparently easy proposal of allowing short game developers to set a flag that alters their refund %age? Doesn't Valve's choice not to do this suggest that they don't really view it as a common thing?
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Pretty sure then as a tax paying citizen that I'm responsible for drone assassinations etc., so by comparison the entire Blizzard drama would be pretty low on the priority list by that logic.
The logic remains valid, and according to your interpretation stealing a car seems "not a big deal" because it comes after a murder. (They are disconnected events, so to relate them is just a mental perspective - their gravity is independent. There is no «priority» forgiving your actions, it is no excuse).
In my above example I would be guilty of both murder AND stealing cars, so yeah, I think the murder part would be a much bigger deal.
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> On Steam if you don't like a game, or if it doesn't work for you, you can get a full refund no questions asked as long as it's within 14 days and with less than 2 hours playtime. There's a hole here: that 14 days is from time of _purchase_ not _access_. I preordered _Humankind_ a month or two before launch, because it was listed as supporting MacOS. At launch, it didn't. It didn't get Mac support until 3 weeks late…
That doesn't sound right. I've pre-ordered a game via Steam and gotten it refunded after launch many months later. For pre-orders, the refund clock starts ticking at launch... unless the game includes early access.
tl;dr: Steam didn't know anything about the devs releasing the Mac version late, so the "14 days from release" didn't line up with my expectation of "14 days from access".
Details for posterity:
The game was set to launch on Aug 17. On Aug 3, the team included a footnote at the bottom of a news announcement which said Mac would be delayed by "about a month":
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...
(There was also a pinned discussion topic about this at the time, which has since been de-pinned. It didn't have any more details than "see the announcement".)
A month later, on Sep 15, a beta for Mac was announced:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...
Another month later, on Oct 21, Mac support was still in Beta, and M1 was still TBD:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1124300/announcements/detai...
If you want to see the dumpster fire of poor communication and frustrated customers at the time:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/discussions/search/?q...
I asked for a refund on Sept 11, some 4 days before the beta announcement, and was denied the same day. I followed up via email for details, but was basically told the same "nope, it's been out too long" story in longer form. (At the time, there had been _zero_ word from the devs about Mac support, despite the initial "about a month" estimate, so I lost hope it would happen in anything like a timely manner.)
It looks like people were able to get refunds later that month specifically due to the lack of M1 support:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1124300/discussions/0/2963922...
I guess I happened to fall right into that dead zone between everyone wanting to believe the devs were running just a little behind, and people at Steam realizing there was a legitimate problem. I was cranky about it at the time, but months later I get that there was probably not going to be any other outcome. I certainly don't ascribe any malice, nefarious plotting, or ill intent on the part of Steam or the devs ... but nor would I say that I think either responded in the interests of the customers.
If I could get Steam to improve from this I'd love for them to track platform-specific release dates, and be more strict about developers claiming support for platforms which don't actually run the game ... but I'm not going to hold my breath.
As for myself ... as much as I believe in the idea that preorders can be used to help fund games, and help keep devs employed by not reinforcing the cycle of crunch-then-layoff, I admit this experience (and other preorders-go-sideways experiences like Homeworld 3, FF7R) has kindof soured me on it. It's fine as an abstract concept, but it's at odds with the reality of date-driven releases (as opposed to quality-driven). These days I'm more likely to just add something to my wishlist and check back some time after release day to see if there are any dumpster fires.
D2R at launch was bad. Everyone, including Blizzard, admits that. But, after launch it's been pretty good. They are releasing the first balance/content patch in over 10 years and everyone is pretty hyped about it. With regards to the whole "30 days offline" thing - this was well known way ahead of launch. This is how all Blizzard games have worked for many years now. When they cancelled TCP/IP local play support the…
> With regards to the whole "30 days offline" thing - this was well known way ahead of launch. If this was true, wouldn’t it be listed on the sale page?
> Internet connection, Battle.net® desktop app and Battle.net® Account required to play.