That was some weird shit.
The videogame industry is so comically bad that merely not spitting in customers faces results in worship and 75% market share.
nintendo "wins" E3 every year because they show of something reasonably interesting and have a release date. That's how low the bar is.
And more importantly, they tend to release on time and the product is gasp finished and doesn't require months of patches to even be considered playable.
as someone who never-ever plays anything but single player offline
Well that's really it. Ever since they've phased out player-hosted dedicated servers in favor of "matchmaking" it has become practally impossible to play online without an account tied to your purchase. Most games don't even ship the server software any more. It is not enough to crack the games now that they all require authentication on privately owned infrastructure.
Good reason to play single-player games instead though.
I'm fully blackpilled and expecting big publishers to attempt to stadiafy the entire medium in like 5 years
Modding? Piracy? Games preservation? Circumventing regional locks? Eat a dick, you're not going to get your hands on any of those assets, they're all gonna exist under lock and key on a server in some company's basement but they'll magnanimously deign to let you look at them via a shitty Netflix stream for 10 bucks a month
I am really worried about this happening. Besides the fact that it's super fucked up it would mean I basically couldn't play anything anymore. Sometimes my internet is good enough I can pay something like ESO but I've never been able to play fps or anything else that requires instant reaction.
And while most of the world has better internet then the rural US there are people all over who would be in the same boat. I'm sure we don't have enough purchasing power for the game companies to give half a shit though. For all the shit CDprojk red has done at least they really stand by the idea of drm free games.
I can see myself only playing new games if they are open source past this point. The industry is just so bad. Games often aren't even games anymore, just shameless cash grabs and child gambling addiction simulators.
I think that won't happen... Because the ISPs won't let it because THEY want to screw over their customers, dammit!
I’m fully blackpilled and expecting big publishers to attempt to stadiafy the entire medium in like 5 years
To be real for a minute, it very likely won't happen, as the infrastructure just can't support it. It's as Gabe said "Game streaming is great until it becomes popular".
Most games that allow dedicated private servers can do multiplayer with a pirated copy, like Ark, Conan Exiles, IIRC Valheim, etc, so long as the server isn't validating the clients and running anticheat (meaning you can host a private server for yourself and your friends, but probably won't find public community servers). Even some P2P ones can with some workarounds.
Also, they actually make interesting games. Big publishers can't make interesting games because they bloat their games budgets to put in shit that doesn't add anything, so they have to make what's safe.
I propose the following:
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($M) Money-dollars
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($T) Time-dollars
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($P) Pain-in-the-butt-dollars
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($I) Integrity-dollars
:marx-angry: Who needs nuclear power when we can attach a generator to Marx's grave and show him this.
Weird way to use the word dollars but what they're trying to say is correct I think. Piracy doesn't cost money but it does require more of your time and effort, which are valuable
only the initial setup really requires that much time or effort. once you have a vpn, a bittorrent client and a repository you like it's just a few clicks of a button and a search or two away. it takes like 30 seconds for me to go from "i should pirate this" to "this thing is mine now", plus or minus a bit of download time
edit: ofc this is dependent upon having good internet, which is obviously a privilege not everyone has access to or can afford
Yes, the argument makes sense but it's very marginalist and "end of history"-pilled.
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Is Valve doing the DENNIS system on us?
Demonstrate value: Released high quality games.
Engage physically: Created a storefront for games.
Nurture dependence: Made it effectively a monopoly, so we could only get PC games from them.
Neglect emotionally: Not releasing games and filling Steam with awful asset flips, with no quality control whatsoever.
Inspire hope: Released Half-Life Alyx and the Steam Deck.
So all that's left is for them to Separate Entirely.
That would be funny if one day, Valve just said "we've made enough money. We won capitalism. We're calling it quits now." And then just shut down.
I know we're all shitting on Valve here, but allow me to shill for them for just a sec:
They don't release many games anymore, but people seriously underrate Valve's gaming-adjacent software. Steam is a fucking great program that adds a lot of value to the games you play on it - using a controller on a PC game used to be a roll of the dice, now pretty much any game can get pretty much any controller support via Steam's interface. You can get access to previous versions of games if the developers break something, you can stream games between computers, SteamVR has enabled a ton of cool indie games to come out for headsets. All of this functionality doesn't come from nowhere, and it doesn't stay up-to-date for free.
Valve deserves criticism for their huge cut of Steam sales, basically inventing the modern video game gambling economy, and not curating their storefront - but put them up against Epic or Ubisoft or Blizzard or EA and it's clear that there's something about Valve that really is better. Someday Gabe is going to retire and leave his company to some ghoul who will streamline it to be the same as every other major video gaming company, and if I had to guess I'd say that Steam's non-sales-related functionality will be allowed to decline and eventually removed and PC gaming will be undeniably worse off for it.
It would be so cool if steam was a public utility and the stuff for it was all FOSS.
Yeah, I do think what has kept Valve from being like EA or something like that is Gabe. He seems different from most executives, in that he actually seems to like games and tech and has his company make the kind of stuff he wants.
I'm old enough to remember burning frothing hatred of Valve around when steam launched, around 2003? People were creeped out by the DRM and the prospect of creating an account for something to play a game. There was a moderate amount of folks who demanded the ability to play HL2 without Steam, had some forum that's been lost to time.
I remember there was a web comic from around then about how invasive signing up for steam was, like what you want a blood sample too?
Valve had to do... Something to rid themselves of that stink. Some kind of fancy PR or astroturfing.
They literally just waited. It's the same strategy with everything else - horse armor was a punchline when it was introduced, but within a couple years tiny DLC packs were being done by everybody and nobody thought it was weird anymore. Introduce loot boxes and everybody complained, but eventually they lost patience and it became the new normal. Deus Ex sectioned off a sidequest for ten bucks and people lost their minds, but now that's completely standard practice among major releases.
they still kinda do? steam deck coming out soon and everyone seems to love it in advance
Its the most powerful handheld graphics wise (by a significant margin), and it is inexpensive. Also, for linux gaming, it should increase the amount of linux gamers several orders of magnitude.
I mean the gpd win 3 is out already, and is quite a bit more powerful than the steam deck on the GPU front. It's just very expensive for what it is, more than double the price of the steam deck
They should be roughly equivalent on the gpu, no? Steam deck is running an rdna 2 gpu cores vs the gpd win 3's intel xe graphics.
it's unoriginal sure but it's a lot cheaper which i think is the main reason its so hype lol
Yeah it is a lot cheaper, like half the price of the latest gpd win 3. But the gpd is quite a bit more powerful, but not enough to justify the price lol
25% more powerful GPU for double the price lol
Yeah, Valve is uniquely good compare to other game companies because it seems Gabe Newell is actually personally embarrassed by the idea of releasing garbage and dropping all support out of nowhere. Even though the Steam controller was a flop sales wise, they continue to support it extremely well. Even though the Steam Machines flopped, they continue to support them extremely well and they get regular updates still. The Vive was the first vr system that actually worked properly and didn't have major issues.
Fortunately they can subsidize this stuff from the cut from every sale they get from the Steam store. It seems every company that doesn't make trash products all have that in common. Management that is personally embarrassed by the idea of making garbage, and the ability to subsidize their main products with some other product that is basically a money printer.
For instance, Fujifilm is the only digital camera company I know of who seems like they actually try, and they are heavily subsidized by their instant film selling like crazy.
Yeah, now everyone is scrambling to enserf themselves to Microsoft to the tune of 14.99 USD.
It's often a decent deal but right now for me it's a subscription for playing F:NV, a game that I already own but am too lazy to go dig the disc out of storage.
:shrug-outta-hecks:
A subscription for a service that crashes my console every so often. It's great!
In retrospect I'm seriously wondering how much of that was astroturfed.
I think they just made a lot of good PR moves early on after running up against a lot of outrage over their always-on DRM client model, with their regular big sales that got meshed into events and minigame things. They've gradually gotten worse since then, but they still haven't really crossed any major lines that would turn people against them.
What's really funny is the sheer frothing hatred a bunch of nerds have for Epic, who go so far as to performatively buy games on Steam when they're released for free on Epic. It's kind of weird that Epic hasn't managed to gain the same sort of following with their model of giving away 1-3 free games every week. Their storefront is worse (by design, since they've actively removed features since it first launched and it's complete garbage compared to the dev asset storefront that's also in the launcher), but the overall client is just as bad as Steam and nowhere near the flaming trainwreck that is uPlay or Origin, which both completely fail to do the one thing they exist to do (download and run games) regularly.
Haven't looked into it for a while but one of the big problems with epic was it would scrape your computer for everything and regularly/constantly send that information back. That's the reason I refuse to touch it. But if you're using windows that's already happening so not sure what the average person's problem is.
People didn't care about Tencent ownership until the whole Epic store launch somewhat coinciding with the anti-China propaganda in the west.
Epic was never going to develop a following now that people automatically think anything to do with China = bad. Unlucky for them because the money flowing to small devs is a great improvement from Steam.
But gamers will jump in front of a bus before admitting that dirty Chinese money is arguably being used for some good initiative like funding small indie exclusives, you know curse you it was supposed to be a free market etc and then they would wonder why almost every indie dev prefers Epic deals compared to Steam.
Well HL3 is a meme probably older than most people on reddit so there was always a lot of nostalgia for it. But people got older and nobody realy cares anymore, certainly not genz and beyond...
Then there was DOTA2 being the default DOTA 1 successor and all those lawsuits that people rightfully felt Blizzard/Riot were being stupid greedy fucks trying to contest it. Valve isn't great but is not the worst. They earned a lot of credit due to how well they handled DOTA 2 over the years, compared to LoL and the shitty Blizzard moba, DOTA 2 was always 100% F2P, got regular updates, they cared about the competitive scene and never tried to cash grab except through cosmetics.
That DOTA 2 boom happened right alongside the rise of AAA "live services" bullshit battle pass DLC deluxe piece of crap premium editions on top of $60 base game so it is kind of understandable. They got huge without doing any of that except cosmetics and TI related stuff.
But then they started releasing shit and disappointing games like Underlods and the shitty card game and their image never recovered because people believed the myth that Valve was a great game developer when most likely HL was a one hit wonder and Dota 2 only exists because of icefrog is a genius.
Well, they weren't a one-hit wonder. TF2 used to be fun. And Portal and Portal 2 are some of my all-time favorite games ever.
Right I forgot about TF2 because I never played it. I was going to mention Portal but it is on the same HL universe so I thought it was hard to judge but yes Portal games were well received too.
Half Life Alyx came out last year to great reviews . I don't think it makes sense to call them a one-hit wonder considering Portal, Team Fortress, Counter Strike, L4D
HL Alyx is so freaking good, it makes it hard to play other VR games because you get frustrated at how they all have the same problems that Valve solved in their game.
Like...1999? I mean there was the TF2 debacle and Steam and then the TF2 hat shop...
Why did it happen or why did it stop?
Well, it happened because Valve used to consistently make high quality games, and Steam used to actually be a good service. It stopped because Valve just kinda stopped making games around DOTA 2, and it really stopped when Half-Life 2's writer posted a "fanfic" that was blatantly just what the storyline of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 was supposed to be, which caused many people to see that as the final nail in the coffin for any hope of Half-Life 3.
