191–200 of 211 posts
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At that point I'd feel entitled to keep the games I bought by pirating them.
It doesn't matter how entitled we think we are, pirating won't give us access to e.g. online play or Steam Workshop, which are critical to many games.
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As consumer I very much agree with you, but as game developer 30% is abysmal amount of money. Imagine you're indie developer or owner of a small 3-10 people studio that finally released reasonably successful game: 1 - Let's say you invested $100,000 of your own money for vertical slice and managed to find a publisher to give you $200,000 to complete the game. 2 - Ignore that you had some failed games before, but this…
I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.
Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access…
It interests me that it needs to be an "or". A HL3 team could essentially function as an independent studio using the Steam platform, with some funding thrown from Valve. Assuming the ROI is positive what exactly is holding them back?
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> I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community This is probably true on balance, but needs to be tempered with the reality that they also pioneered or popularized many of the worst parts of modern gaming. Always-on DRM, paid DLC, loot boxes and exploitive monetization, esports gambling (indirectly, they were complicit until legal pressure forced them not to be), FOMO monetization, "early access" and…
Valve did not do anything for Always-on DRM other than allowing it to exist on platform. On Steam itself DRM barely exists.
I think it's funny that this is passed around as a great example of how to run a company, but I really don't think Valve are producing much.
I can play any PC game I want and I don’t have a single windows install anywhere in my life. They made, beyond all the other contributions, Linux gaming a reality.
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Valve did not do anything for Always-on DRM other than allowing it to exist on platform. On Steam itself DRM barely exists.
Steam's DRM may be trivial to circumvent technically but the legal situation is clear: you do not own what you buy on Steam, you cannot resell it, cannot gift it to your friends once you are done, you cannot leave it to your heirs. And no, you don't have any guarantees that you yourself still have access to it tomorrow.
Unfortunately legal situation is not that different on any platform. GOG gives you offline installers and avoid technical DRM measures in all games, but that's about it - all other things you listed are still missing.
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For me I cannot play team based games where you are punished for leaving. Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise. Also, I am no longer a 20 year old with no responsibilities and sometimes things come up where I would need to leave the game. I guess I am just getting older now and no longer play 20 hours a weeks of video games, bu…
Being punished for leaving is the standard for almost any competitive team based game these days, because if you don't do that then people leave on a whim and the game is ruined. > Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise. It works approximately the same irl for board games or sports. If you just walk off the court in a basketball…
There are two things. First, it is not about maturity it is about having other responsibilities in life. If my kid needs something from me I am going to drop the video game and help my kid — it’s called having a dependent for a reason. Second, I have less free time as I get older so why would I spend precious little time I have being socially locked into a situation I am not enjoying?
You seem to be projecting that if someone cannot commit to a competitive activity/sport they are somehow immature, but in reality lots of people cannot or do not want that in their life.
My comment was not saying that Deadlock is a bad game or somehow invalid, my comment is that the type of game Deadlock is does not mesh with my tastes/life.
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Being punished for leaving is the standard for almost any competitive team based game these days, because if you don't do that then people leave on a whim and the game is ruined. > Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise. It works approximately the same irl for board games or sports. If you just walk off the court in a basketball…
> It's funny you mention age, because I have essentially the opposite take. Ditching a match for a game you like because that particular match isn't going well is immature; I'd expect someone older to handle themselves better than someone younger, not throw a fit. There are two things. First, it is not about maturity it is about having other responsibilities in life. If my kid needs something from me I am going to dr…
> Nothing is worse being stuck in a game where you are not having fun and you are forced to keep playing or be punished otherwise.
Sure, needing to take care of certain responsibilities is fine, but ditching everyone else in a game because you're temporarily "not having fun"? Yes, that is immature.
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On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either. 30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.
Nothing of what Steam provides costs 30%. Discoverability and free marketing only provided to games that are already successful and have hundreds of wishlists. That's only possible to achieve if you game already have it's own following and community. 12+ years ago if you released on Steam it was a big deal and platform provided traffic to everyone, but today it's flooded with games so basically you're on your own. Th…
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> (see Tyranny of Structurelessness, etc.) so I am also skeptical that a company may have continued with this practice I have always been disappointed with people making claims that explicitly imposed bad hierarchy is inevitable, because of a vague complaint about implicit hierarchy. It feels like they are using this to justify imposing a bad hierarchy from the top down, for the benefit of the people at the top of sa…
I don't think that's people who refer to Tyranny of Structurelessness mean. At least I read it more as that you can't just declare 'there be no hierarchy here' and be done. Unless you carefully engineer the system, the implicit hierarchy will reclaim the void and, all else equal, an implicit hierarchy is harder to undo because it isn't supposed to exist. In political terms: if all you do is kick the ruler out, you ma…
As a society, we have codified "business douche" structures as inevitable. It is fair to ask who benefits from this. Usually it's about people installing themselves as the top of the hierarchy, hoarding money, power, and status.