I think the big difference is Valve isn’t really in control of many of the projects they’re funding, they’re mostly just bringing in existing maintainers as contractors and letting them work on what they want.

Chromium on the other hand has always been something Google has explicitly been in direct control of.

How they managed to spend billions on a store/launcher, without bothering to make it a good experience is kinda of impressive.

It’s entirely for Fortnite, they bought entire studios like Harmonix and turned them into Fortnite game mode developers.

They’re fully owned by the publisher Nexon.

extra currency to make kids spend more with 100 gems short of your next purchase.

Valve doesn’t do that in their games though?

Does Valve refuse to allow third party stores to sell Steam codes like PlayStation is doing here?

In the US maybe, $100k is several years wages in many countries.

The profit line being stable isn’t good enough, the line must go up, forever.

Small, unique games suitable for a more casual player base made with a lower budget release on Steam every day, isn’t that also a saturated market?

Idk if they had the time or money to quietly release it and ramp up over time, Tencent was likely asking where’s their return on investment after years of funding and live service games kind of depend entirely on launch success to springboard future development.

Marathon seems pretty good imo, it’s problem is it’s trying to be a more hardcore extraction shooter than the ones that already exist which is gonna make it too niche to sustain a large US-based studio like Bungie.

Eh, even if PC/component sales drop to zero, PC will still be the biggest platform with hundreds of millions of active users.

So you paid for them on PS5 but pirated them on PC? Great job telling Sony you don’t want PC versions.

The HDMI forum is made up of those TV manufacturers, so I doubt they’d help push an open standard that’d earn them less.

How is sending someone a file gonna help me access their games?

Can you use Heroic with multiple accounts? Because if not that’s meaningless.

See that’s kind of my point, when we’re on the 100th “oh just use this other external service/software”, most users (myself included) are just going to stick to the simple solution that just works.

Being able to just access family and friends games straight from my library without wasting all that time having to ask beforehand, manual downloads and file management/transfers and lack of cloud saves like it’s still the 90s is worth whatever moral cost you associate with using a piece of proprietary software.

For most people, that’s not the case if the alternative solution is worse or less convenient.

Every piece of free software that has ever attained some level of mainstream success and popularity has done so by offering a better product, not something worse with the excuse of “well at least we’re not proprietary”.

You don’t just pass the exe though, modern games are huge with a lot of files required. With Steam it’s a 2 step process:

1. I look in the tab in my library for games in my brother’s account I have access to with family sharing.
2. I download a game from the list.

That’s despite the fact my brother lives in the other side of the country, and it offers me all the Steam features I make use of like cloud saves as if my account had bought the game.

With GOG it’s

1. Find the right webpage for my brother’s games (you can’t see them from within the GOG client for some reason.
2. Ask my brother to download the installer
3. Get my brother to send me the installer file over discord
4. The installer is too big
5. Say nevermind just give me your login info
6. I try to login to his account with the GOG client
7. Ask my brother for his 2FA authenticator code
8. Finally login, and can download the game
9. Remember to turn off cloud saves so you don’t override your brother’s cloud saves.

Based on a true story btw.

There’s probably things we could’ve done that would’ve made it easier and less steps, but it still wouldn’t have been just as simple as what Steam does, and I’m missing cloud saves and I’d have to do several of those steps again if I wanted the game on say my Steam Deck as well as my PC.

then you either use a third party remapper or you simply add the shortcut in steam

If I’m just going to use Steam or extra software to compensate for Steam features, I might as well just use Steam.

Family sharing isn’t just for your local machine, I have family who live in the other side of the country.

Offer a good service and people will buy from your store, most customers either don’t care about DRM or care somewhat but don’t want to inconvenience themselves with a worse product for it. GOG have to catch up to Steam with stuff like family sharing and controller support for me to consider buying stuff there.

IIRC it still requires an EA account for online play, but not if you play offline.

It Takes Two actually removed the EA App in a patch a while back.

I think they allow studios they only publish for and don’t own like Hazelight the freedom to remove the EA App DRM now, but EA won’t pay for the dev time for their back catalogue.

People aren’t playing or paying for stuff in Skate. The player count drop off has been substantial.

This encouraged others to post further reviews and comments related to Kirk (and not the game).

Do we have any proof those reviews were from people following that curator? I imagine that information has also been posted elsewhere online.

Do you think off topic reviews or curator recommendations should be allowed for things you approve of? Say if a review points out the developer is a secret fascist?

Yes, I also blame the poor indie dev who barely gets enough money to keep existing

Oh please, moderating a forum unpaid for 5 mins every now and again is so easy it’s how this whole platform and Reddit function. If you’re truly an indie dev without the resources to moderate your own space, Steam allow you to simply close the forums and forbid discussions.

Phil Spencer merely did what his higher ups told him to do, she will do the exact same except caring less about video games.

There wasn’t ever a time you could build a better or even comparable PC for the same cost as consoles in modern gaming history. It’s always been something with a higher entry cost and the cost benefit coming over time with cheaper games and no mandatory subscription.

Yet PC gaming is now the “mainstream”, with it being the biggest platform globally.

Some games have been targeted by Steam curators

Curators are hidden by default, only people who follow the curator see curator recommendations. They also don’t affect store visibility or the review score in any way,.

The problem is not even that Steam forums are a cesspool

Steam leaves moderation of forums to the developer/publisher to moderate as they wish, as if they interfered you bet they’d get complaints about Valve stepping on their toes. If a developer/publisher decides they want to allow hatred in their Steam forums, you should probably blame them.

Both act like Steam currently, they don’t have paid moderators but leave it to communities to moderate themselves.

Social media is an apt comparison, as Steam is at the size where human moderation isn’t really viable so they’d have to use AI like everyone else in that space.

And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos shout into the void than have to type “unalive” in the Steam forums.

Not to mention if Valve moderated every game developers would complain about Valve stepping on their toes and moderating their forum in a way they dislike.

I mean, look at this game Tyrone vs Cops 2. Is this OK?

It’s probably filled with vile stuff, so I simply won’t go there. There’s awful stuff to be found everywhere on the internet if you seek it out, you can just not go there.

Every platform of Steam’s size or bigger has mostly replaced human moderation with AI at this point because it’s the only way to moderate at that scale.

And I’d rather a few anti-woke weirdos get to post their by default hidden curator reviews than have to start saying “unalive” in Steam forums.

Steam discussions can be moderated in any way a developer/publisher wants though? Their choice to not do so is weird to blame Valve for.

Minecraft is an infiniminer clone, it should be shut down ASAP.

From what I understand Epic gave them a blank check for the development of the game, which is great when it comes to developing that game for the creatives involved.

But they did expect some sales revenue after release so they could develop other games and because Epic aren’t a very good publisher (not just in the forced EGS exclusivity, but the lack of marketing and physical console editions) their business plans likely got very shaky.

They also likely have the most non-union employees of any game company.

Global Offensive is still playable (at least the core gameplay) in the csgo_legacy branch of CS2 on Steam.

The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.

But Steam didn’t kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.

And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.