If only he could realize why he's wrong about why Steam is the market leader, then he could build something that customers actually want to use. Right now, he's just throwing money away.
What problems does it solve that Steam doesn't do better? If there's no answer to that question, why would I ever shop there? EGS has lots of developer incentives to put games on there but no customer incentives to shop there, except for maybe the occasional extra discount. When that discount comes at the expense of Steam Workshop, Steam Input, working seamlessly with the Steam Deck, or whatever other feature is important to you, it's often not worth it. I can think of a few things that would be important to me that EGS can solve, but I can also promise you they're not interested in solving them. Sweeney thinks people only shop on Steam because they've been shopping on Steam and have a large library there. That's certainly part of it, for a sizeable enough chunk of the player base, but it's very far from all of it.
I think they're called that because they postdate the "looter shooter" that combined Diablo-esque "action RPGs" with FPS games, like Borderlands and Destiny. "Looter" without the "shooter" is a much better name for Diablo's genre anyway, since we have far too many RPGs that are also action games and have nothing in common with Diablo.
I'm still waiting for the resurgence of the style of shooter that came just after those that inspired this wave of boomer shooter; the likes of Half-Life, Halo, 007, TimeSplitters, and so on. I don't know what subgenre will be assigned to those games when they start to come back around, but that style is also old at this point, so hopefully it doesn't also get assigned the label of "boomer shooter", because then it'll be harder for both audiences to find what they're looking for.
Are you sure you're thinking of the right game? This game lists LAN play on its features and allows you to host private servers. It's been on my radar for precisely those reasons.
Yeah, but I want things like auto updates and cloud saves as officially supported features rather than something they can revoke from Heroic at any time.
I want auto updates for my games so close to "always" that you can only tell it's not 100% if you squint a bit. I use Syncthing in other contexts, like syncing emulator saves to and from desktop and Steam Deck, and it's not quite as easy as Steam cloud saves.
Setup is annoying, and feedback on whether or not it's working is a bit rough. I've lost data by misconfiguring it before. You have to run a background daemon on a device where battery life matters, so I tend to shut it off when I'm done. Syncing saves with SyncThing requires knowing where those save files are, whereas being built into the launcher client means they already know where those saves are, and that step is already done.
Neat. I was aware of Heroic before, but I haven't heard of this. This does change the equation for me, because now there's a data point that GOG can use to see where my money's going and how they can get more of it. What can you tell me about their refund policy? Are the results on ProtonDB just as reliable for GOG versions as they are for Steam versions of games? Does Heroic pre-compile Vulkan shaders the way that Proton on Steam enforces it? Whatever answers you don't have, I can do some of my own homework, but I'm intrigued now.
Nah, it doesn't just linearly double like that. If it takes 10 people to build, test, and support the launcher for Windows, it doesn't take 20 people to support Linux, since most of it is going to be the same across platforms. A 1.8% increase in sales also isn't the best prediction. On Steam, the vast majority of their players and revenue are accounted for by just a couple of the most popular games, and a lot of that is dictated by what games are allowed or successful in China. If your game isn't selling in China, your addressable market is actually much closer to being 4.5% Linux. That's not to pick on China, but China is a massive market on its own, and it's the difference between the case where you're selling microtransactions in Counter-Strike 2 or if you're selling a metroidvania.
The question for me is how much less I'm willing to pay for a game that made me wait past GOTY/spoiler season to play it, because I'm not paying $70 for it anymore.
It felt more like a retroactive beta, like taking back a move in chess saying your hand was still on the piece when they realized it wasn't working out.
Worth noting that Peter Moore does not currently have any insight into what conversations are happening at Microsoft right now, but there are some interesting bits in here.
And why do you need a bespoke piece of hardware that costs us, Microsoft, billions upon billions of dollars to install, and you hope to hell you get an attach rate of software and something out of your Xbox Live, your connected service, that would justify the losses, the hemorrhaging of cash that hardware costs you?
That is way more risk for them than it is to just make Game Pass available on more open platforms, and it makes plenty of sense. Sony had something like a $600M profit margin on a $7B investment, IIRC, so those margins are getting slimmer even when you're in a market dominating position like they are.
Somebody gave me a DVD the other day, I have nowhere to actually look at this.
This does reflect what the average consumer is doing, but it's stupid. The movie industry, even more than the gaming industry, are doing their damnedest to make sure I can't ever legally own a copy of the movies I enjoy, and it's doing more to make me stop watching movies than it is to pay them perpetual revenue forever. Perhaps the downward trend in theater attendance is tied to that too, but I'm no analyst. There's certainly no GOG for DRM-free movie purchases, so if there's no Blu Ray copy of it, you're just buying a pass that lets you stream it from someone else's machine that will disappear one day, as Discovery customers on PlayStation just realized.
Gen Z is coming through and they're going, why do I need to spend four or 500 bucks on a bespoke piece of gaming hardware when I've got my smartphone, or I got my PC or my Mac, and I can do things there with a pretty decent controller?
And when consoles aren't so streamlined anymore and the price gap between a console and a half-decent PC keeps shrinking. Because development budgets have gotten so expensive, the most popular games are rarely the most demanding ones out there anymore either, so it's not like there's a lot of pressure on the consumer to get a super expensive PC if they want to play games.
What have you all been playing! Still on my usual binding of Isaac and helldivers grind, but I’m also getting back into elden ring to get ready for the dlc coming later this year! 🤩
I'm back into Final Fantasy VII, which I've never finished before. I've been playing this game off and on over the past several years, and boy is that a rough way to play it. It's very difficult to remember what I was supposed to be doing next, because that game often gives you one line of dialogue about where to go and then has no in-game reminder of it. As a result, I've got a walkthrough handy to reference whenever I'm lost. I just got to the bottom of the mountain after the snowboarding sequence, and those parts of the game where you're trying to navigate the pre-rendered backgrounds are where you can feel its age the most. I'm hoping to finish this one up in the next month or so, ahead of the possible Rebirth PC port that we might be lucky enough to get this year.
I'm replaying Horizon: Zero Dawn on PC ahead of the Forbidden West release as a refresher on the story, though I'm not going to play the sequel on day 1. They made me wait several years for it already. They can keep waiting for my money until it gets a sale down to about $40, maybe this summer. I still really enjoy the combat in that game, especially on higher difficulties, but this is a game that still feels like I'd enjoy it more if I could select missions from a menu rather than going through the open world trappings. It may have made these games cheaper to develop at the same time. Oh well.
I finished The Outer Worlds and its DLC. I highly recommend it. I feel like this game gets overlooked often enough. Did you wish Starfield was better? Play The Outer Worlds. Did you want another Fallout: New Vegas? Play The Outer Worlds.
Now that I've finished The Outer Worlds, another Obsidian game, I'm back to playing some Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I only progressed one quest a little bit this past week, but I want to keep pushing forward and finish this game before Avowed comes out.
Other than the above, still more Skullgirls grind. My pushblock guard cancel skills have atrophied, and I need to run some drills. Also, Peacock zoning, even when I know the answers, is tough to deal with.
I think the last console game I bought was Metroid Dread, but I leaned physical for those as well, because their digital storefronts are a single point of failure. I've witnessed first hand a friend of mine getting frustrated with a now-sunset Xbox 360 store, a problem I could see coming a mile away even when I was in high school when the console launched. On PC, if Steam disappeared tomorrow, I could pirate my entire library. If GOG gives me a week of lead time on their store going away, I could legitimately back up those games.
Digital is more convenient. I have shelves of old games and consoles that I'm working on culling rather than expanding, especially as someone who tends to move to a new apartment every couple of years. Physical often tends to be a false sense of security in the modern age of day 1 patches and other kinds of server dependency. DRM-free is actually what you want, unless you really, really enjoy the tangible aspect of the game. Outside of nostalgia, I don't think it matters to me.
That’s no excuse to try to get a user’s account banned.
I'd say it is. They highlight the part of Steam's rules against harassment, and while that's always subject to interpretation, they feel that this counts, and I'm inclined to agree.
The steam group had like 1000 people now it has almost 200,000 after the whole debacle.
Before this group blew up, YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers were already making their bullshit conspiracy theories. People try to paint this as Streisand, but that's ridiculous. The Streisand effect is trying to hide something, which you still seem convinced they're trying to do despite highlighting their clients on their web page and getting listings in the credits of the games they work on. What it looks like to me instead is that:
sensationalist YouTubers paint this company as the devil
this curator is made in response
it gets a natural, human reaction from the people targeted by this group
the YouTubers from step 1 use that reaction to mean whatever they want it to mean
In no way did I foresee a way that this group didn't continue on the same trajectory with or without Sweet Baby responding to its existence.
SomeOrdinaryGamer made a good video highlighting stupidity from both sides.
I've seen one video from SomeOrdinaryGamers, and it was too many, but he's cited in this article as perpetuating the bullshit conspiracy theories, so I'm good.
Phantom Fury - Release Date Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Phantom Fury releases on Steam April 23rd.
Valve COO on Epic's Tim Sweeney "you mad bro?" when launching the Epic Store (repost, clarified was internal email) (www.gamingonlinux.com)
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
Vampire Survival Game V Rising Launches Into 1.0 This May Before It Hits PS5 Later This Year (www.gameinformer.com)
The hit survival ARPG has been in Early Access on PC since 2022.
God of War (PC) is now available on GOG (www.gog.com)
Final Fantasy XVI PC Version In 'Final Stages Of Optimization,' Expect A Demo Before Release (www.gameinformer.com)
Multiversus, WB's Smash Clone, Is Coming Back This Spring (kotaku.com)
Microsoft Will Be Debating Right Now Whether Xbox Consoles Have a Future, Says Peter Moore (www.ign.com)
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of March 10th
What have you all been playing! Still on my usual binding of Isaac and helldivers grind, but I’m also getting back into elden ring to get ready for the dlc coming later this year! 🤩
Physical or Digital?
Title says it all lads....
How A Small Video Game Narrative Studio Wound Up At The Heart Of A Massive, Anti-Woke Conspiracy Theory - Aftermath (aftermath.site)
Sweet Baby Inc doesn’t even remotely do what many think it does, but on the modern internet, that doesn’t matter
Sweet Baby employees incite harassment campaign against Steam curator (archive.ph)
DL: nichegamer.com/sweet-baby-employees-incite-harass…