171–180 of 383 posts
Well, there goes GTA 6. Better for my wallet, I guess. Don't want to finance some thugs.
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Rockstar has historically always had anti-worker practices baked in, with crunch culture being the obvious one. They aren't your or their workers friend. They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed. And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
> And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this. Consumers almost never care outside of isolated causes du jour or when it directly affects someone they know. Look at all the self-proclaimed socialists and progressives walking around with iPhones manufactured by Foxconn, a company known for treating its employees so badly there were inquiries into th…
It's the truth though. It doesn't matter if the product was produced as a result of slave labor, union-busting, corporate government coups, extensive pollution, monopolistic behavior, manipulation either of or from the government, theft of natural resources, etc.
People just go 'la la la I can't hear you' and buy whatever they want.
And to some extent I don't blame people for doing that. To really dig into the actions of even a single company could take months of careful research. And given how convoluted the ownership charts can be, you may end up finding that 3/4 or more of what you buy is from a company with despicable practices - I mean shoot look at what Nestle owns.
I don't know if there's a solution. Even if you got people to do all the hard work (ha!), it would be hard for people to get around it.
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Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.
What about Aperture Labs Desk Job as a demo for the deck? Full self contained single player story.
As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions. Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
* I want to keep liking GTA, and to keep giving Rockstar more money, for each new chapter and new console/device. If it turns out that Rockstar was union-busting and defaming, then I really hope that they soon have a we-messed-up moment, and genuine corrective action for whatever went wrong. * Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/pu…
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That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam. And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doin…
As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
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> Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such. So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking ), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them. Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads,…
>Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
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Ok! Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility. The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base…
> They are both still too high. You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.