Valve respects its customers. It is so insane that this isn't a norm; what a world we would be in if all companies did so.
This is not that - Steam has to compete on the free market, there is a reward for making the product everyone else refuses to make. In a post-Deck world, it's hard to believe that moral obligation plays a bigger role than the overall hatred of Windows for seamless gaming experiences.
... the plebs know what is good for them. Horrible Dukes get horses wanting nails.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
"A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants."
The Gaben house is building a secret army, using a technique unknown to us; a technique involving steam.
What universe do you live in?
- Broken games still pre-ordered
- marginal updates sold at full price
- double/triple-dipping with microtransactions and battle passes
- DRM still [predominant and still hurts performance
- every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)
- rootkit as anti-cheat
- offline game that require online connectivety
- online services get shutdown
- LAN multiplayer is a thing of a past
What did games exactly won?
- Paid skyrim mods? It's back.
- MS game sharing thing that rendered GameStop business model useless? IMO a mistake, MS was onto something there.
I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.
Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.
Paradox launcher is alright for example, it adds value in form of mod preset managment and ability to launch straight into saved game.
What ever is in dune: awakening" exists just to tell me about their other games and as a result make game launching longer than it needs to be. Not only that it adds A LOT of friction when I launch it via Remote Play with a controller.
Point is: if you make a launcher make sure it adds any value and not just an advertisementr billboard.
As for store fronts: steam by far has the most functionality among PC storefronts.
Only because new population enters the market.
I pre-ordered a game once. F1 2010. Since then, I have *never* pre-ordered anything.
I also opted out from any game that required a rootkit to play.
LAN gameplay is still a thing in the simracing world.
Again, this only continues because of new players. Any burned player will not fall for the same trick twice.
Yeah, not. I'm not saying is the same people pre-order the same games, but there is not THAT much new population influx.
> LAN gameplay is still a thing in the simracing world.
It's a niche within a niche. Also, I remember a guy named Max had a lot to say about the current state of sim-racing.
DRM is everywhere so gamers have clearly lost
That’s an imaginary issue.
Can you expand on this? I'm not a massive gamer, I thought xbox was doing well?
Didn't they just blow the remaining goodwill they had by increasing the gamepads price by 50% overnight?
It very much isn’t.
Microsoft lost the console wars. Their new generation (Series S & X) sold almost 1/4 of what PS5 did because they basically don't have any exclusive game that you can only play in their hardware. Microsoft invested heavily in their Gamepass subscription (that has more than 35 million users) and they believe that the future is on PC. The newest xbox hardware, a handheld made by Asus, is a PC running windows. The next generation of xbox hardware that will compete with the PS6 will also very likely be a PC. The xbox console is dead.
“Oh, there’s a PlayStation 5 now? Man I gotta upgrade from my PS4!”
Microsoft evidently did not learn from the Wii U.
XBOX cultivates a "gamer" who is heavily invested in the identity and is well educated in the various versions of XBOX and how the naming scheme works and since they are an adult buying the console for themselves they don't need to explain it to outsiders.
If your marketing makes it hard to figure out what is what, well a Playstation $int[max] it is...
I worked at a pawn shop when that console generation kicked off. One day a guy called in and asked if he could bring in his Xbox One. "Of course," I told him, until I had to turn him away because it was an original Xbox.
What a wild world it would be, if Microsoft release a GamesPass client for linux so it can try and get a slice of all this new linux gaming happening on SteamOS.
The ideal would be MS just selling Game Pass subscriptions via Steam but I expect we'll see that happen shortly after hell freezes over.
I still can't wrap my head around why they decided to do this considering they were in a pretty killer position coming out of the PS4 generation. I mean, it's probably a positive for consumers to have more options for platforms, so I won't exactly complain. But I do want PlayStation to stick around as a strong competitor because fierce competition is best for consumers in the long-term.
At first it seemed like they were just porting the previous game in a series when the sequel came out exclusively on PS5, as a way to get people into the series and then making them buy their console to play the next game. But now it seems like there's barely any wait between when one of Sony's exclusives comes to PS5 and the PC launch afterwards. If Sony is confused as to why the PS5 isn't selling up to expectations, the answer to that seems pretty obvious to me.
The Blu-Ray drive is basically no added cost since the games were already distributed on optical disks, it’s like how the PS2 was one of the most popular DVD players. The problem with the Xbone was that, at least judging on their marketing at the time, Microsoft was far more focused on broadening the scope of the device beyond games while Sony stayed focused on gaming. That’s why I bought a PS4 despite previously using an Xbox 360.
I worked for a Sony dealer when the PS2 launched, and they wouldn't give us one :-/
What I thought at the time was insane was that they were still selling a 200-disc carousel CD changer, and DVD version of the same thing (same box, different shade of silver grey, different drive mechanism, two chips different on the PCB) - but they had no plans to sell a 200-disc carousel PS2.
Imagine if you could have had all your movies, audio CDs, PSX, and shiny new PS2 games in one big box, tucked away out of sight, with your spiffy new 576p projector and 5.1 speakers hooked up to it!
When Xbox360 and PS3 came out, the format war was only just starting, and the consoles were on either side of it.
PS3 came with a BluRay drive and the games were delivered on BluRay.
Xbox360 came with software support for HDDVD, but the actual disk reader hardware was a DVD reader (famously, a large off-the-shelf part selected at the last minute that required a redesign of the cooling system to accomodate its size), and the HDDVD drive was an optional add-on that nobody bought.
The fact that every PS3 could read BluRay, but you needed a special extra to play HDDVD on Xbox 360 is arguably the main reason BluRay won the format war.
I wasn't an early adopter and only bought a PS3 in 2010. In the intervening 15 years I have bought four Blu-Rays, and been given two more.
I own (and watch) more VHS tapes than Blu-Rays.
I sure did play a lot of GTA4, GTA5, Infamous, and Little Big Planet though.
That's the same Valve that doesn't let me play the games I paid it for unless they are running on its platform? That's how it "respects" me?
Basically just go the the folder and run bin\x64\Cyberpunk2077.exe
The "Launch Cyberpunk" shortcut in the folder starts Galaxy and then runs the game from there.
Games using things like steam input might also require steam to be running so there is some drm free games that might not run also. Some of those will if you move them outside the steam folder / rename Steam.exe. If you leave them in the steam folder the game will start steam for you if when you launch it.
Why? If another platform also disrespects me, does that mean Steam doesn't disrespect me?
Also don't knock those zip files purchased off of itch.io. Sometimes it's good to visit a cottage industry to see what's passing under the radar of the big guys.
Your usual publicly traded (or owned by publicly traded entity) corporation in its accidental intelligence does not
What exactly does that mean, for you?
That's really the saddest thing about capitalism, if everything around us wasn't getting enshittified in the exact same way at least the future would be more alluring.
DRM is the publishers choice, worth noting.
Most media for me is a one and done. A book, a movie, a computer game. Granted a computer games version of "done" might mean "played on and off for a year".
There are exceptions to this - books I read again, shows I'd watch again, but games seem to age poorly by comparison. Original Syndicate or Deus Ex - while playable - is not what I remember it to be and I'd rather keep the nostalgic memories than shatter them with a replay.
This rarity of exceptions means that I wouldn't lose much if my Steam account disappeared - mainly just "whatever I'm playing now". Create a new account and go again, or buy off GOG or something.
However in return for using Steam I get a lot of convenience - updates, propogated save files, easy chat and "Right click -> Join Game" with friends. That "Right click -> Join Game" is almost worth it on it's own for ease of social gaming.
There is no such thing as "owning" a game unless you're the company that developed the game (or bought the company that did).
You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.
Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.
Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.