Good luck with that.

They didn’t do anything more than a handful of idiots no one wants to deal with is going to be bothered by.

Just going to throw this out there for fellow introverts.

They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.

Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.

This is stupid as hell.

Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.

Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.

“You can’t put it on the internet anywhere in the world because we own the rights in one country” is some deranged bullshit.

To be fair they did that because law firms were seeking out frivolous arbitration bullshit to try to extort them into settlements.

But their market dominance is definitely primarily about how much better they are than anything else.

I know the first one was only ever intended to be a tech demo, and it did a really good job for that, but does this one feel like an actual full-fledged game?

Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).

The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.

And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.

Because a well done, complete code project benefits more from continued small additions than a well constructed, complete story.

The triggers are why I’m paying to upgrade. They make a big difference to the feel of combat.

This is about consoles.

I don’t think it’s really that bad, because it enables them to sell the upgrade for $10 without just being a steep discount path for new purchases.

I’d much rather previous owners be able to upgrade for $10 than new buyers be able to get it for $20. Funding a remaster on new customers instead of double dipping is way more fair, and price conscious customers can still likely find used physical copies cheap.

A wall of TVs for proper sports viewing.

The wisdom of crowds only works when the inputs are independent.

People are meaningfully biased to conform to group opinions.

Probably a bucket hat to keep the sun out of my face while reading in the backyard.

Your game doesn’t sell at all because Steam adds massive value. Steam is the reason PC gaming is what it is.

Retail gets paid for a reason. Distribution has huge value. There isn’t a game out there that doesn’t make way more money paying Steam a 30% commission than they would by not taking advantage of their massive reach.

Steam taking 80% would be a much better offer for developers than Epic taking -50%. You’d still make more on Steam.

Is it really unreasonable to explain that nothing you do on a work computer is private, though?

Obviously you don’t want to do any of that. But if you have a reasonable set up, you can when you need to, and telling people not to do shit they shouldn’t on company hardware is a good thing.

There have been games that showed hints of stuff you could get to, but I think BOTW was the first major open world game that actually universally followed that rule and didn’t have invisible walls all over the place.

Like Skyrim there was a lot you could “climb” by abusing the mechanics and spamming jumps until you got lucky, and everything existed in that sense. But it was glitches, not part of the mechanics. BOTW having points of interest almost entirely discovered visually was unique.

I would say the defining characteristic that sets Breath of the Wild apart from its contemporaries is its “chemistry engine”, as they call it.

It’s traversal. The interactions were cool, but mostly about the puzzles.

What BOTW changed was how exploration works. You see a landmark in the distance, start moving towards it, and figure out how to get there. There’s nothing you see that isn’t part of the traversal system. There are no invisible walls. Some things are absurdly high to climb, some things are slippery, etc, but everything you struggle to traverse is clearly a product of the systems the game uses and makes sense.

(The problem was none of that exploration got you anywhere interesting, but the core element of “everything you see is a destination” is the thing about BOTW that was groundbreaking.)