My issue is not with the DLCs. It's with the renovated push toward pre order, be it with season pass, or subscription or exclusive content. And then there is the annoying thing of pricing, with real prices only being accessible during sales, and new player accessibility even if with real prices.
And this is first because they are a large company now with large shoulders and they don't need cash in advance. Second because they already proved to be more than ready to slash quality in order to shorten delivery cicles and grab quick cash. Their games to often becomes broken with a patch, and this monetization strategy only incentivizes them to continue with this bad behaviour.

To be clear, quality issues weren't to big of a deal in the past, just annoying. They broke the game to release quickly, you roll back to previous patch, and once they figure their shit out, you buy the DLC and play on new patch. I've done it for years and lived happy. Only those who gave in to commercials and bought the DLC blindly would rage out. Then if they took a year to fix it I waited a year and buy the DLC discounted. Everyone was incentized to do things right to maximize both fun and revenues. Classic vote with wallet. But I guess some higherup were not happy with that.

So now with season pass (or subscription, or pre order, whatever) it turns out you already bought something you cannot play. Or that is not fun to play. And since your money is alredy theirs, and they are very russian on their forums when it comes to complaints, the players are only left with venting out with bad reviews on Steam (which is not nice for obvious reasons). Sure with this they get their shareholders happy in the short term. But in the long term is not good for the games (I guess some whitecollar will think that it's not an issue: whe the reputation of the game is broken beyong repeair they will just release Stellaris2 and start over).

If you really like those games, you should understand that it's important to reward them with a purchase only when they do things right (which they are also capable of doing and did many times over), not to buy blindly. They don't deserve that. And you also.

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First you give us the money. Then maybe we give you a DLC. And if we do, maybe it's not broken beyond playability.

This hobby is seriously getting sick.

Why is financing games is so difficult once a company goes public it's not that easy to understand for the end user. Develop, release, get good reviews and have people buy the game worked fine for decades and made this hobby great. I really don't feel the need to change the winning formula. Sorry PDX, but I'm out.

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Quoting: ZeroPointEnergy

QuoteHalf of anti-cheat is making sure the environment hasn't been tampered with, and this is extremely hard on Linux by design

Ah, it's the old problem of Linux not being fascist enough

It's the old story of people that complain that they can't tamper with your system with the excuse to check if it has been tampered.

It's the fake policemen fraud brought into digital world.

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I used to play (and spend) a lot in LOL in the past. But hei, their decision.

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It turns out life is beatiful in Canada. :D

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Quoting: WORM

Quoting: MalQuite the opposite actually. Madbro literally proved to the world that 30% is the right cut. He has shown with his own very feats that it is not possible to offer a better service than Steam with a lower cut. At this point any smart developer should rally behind Valve.

I disagree. Steam has shown that it IS possible to offer a better service while taking a smaller cut, since that's absolutely what they did themselves!

Lower margins? Sure. But a world where 2 platforms compete over users with features and quality of service... and remain profitable enough? Madbro didn't even try it. And not just becuase doing so with less than 30% would have been close to impossible (Steam is not a just a mere client, the client is just what unaware gamers see and every open source community can put together one comparable or better) but because even then in a world with Steam and a -non retarded- EGS, with a lot of investments in features and improvements to remain on top of your rival, the actual margins left for Valve and Epic would have made the entire operation pointless for Epic.

He's maybe a cunt, for sure toward PC gamers, but he is not a fool. He tried to change the paradigm and aimed to build a new walled garden monopoly on PC from which to extract levies, with an alliance of convenience with large and greedy publishers. The Apple model. Which he failed to thanks for (and to) us.
But he never tried to do better than, or comparable to, Steam and to compete. He didn't even try to offer a subpar service while slashing game prices to offer an alternative package to gamers. He didn't because he clearly made the math and knows it's not feaseable while keeping good margins. And if even he can't do it (again, he's not a fool, but a competent developer and businessman), nobody else today can. Maybe in 10 years from now with new tech. But not today.

Chapeau to him for having put the money where his mouth is though. And PC gamers for having shown that they are not gullible idiots like consumers in other markets tipically are.

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Quoting: WORMSweeney is correct. Valve's cut was (and is, to a slightly lesser extent) quite greedy

Quite the opposite actually. Madbro literally proved to the world that 30% is the right cut. He has shown with his own very feats that it is not possible to offer a better service than Steam with a lower cut. At this point any smart developer should rally behind Valve. In a PC market dominated by EGS the only way to prevent people from returning to the high seas is to hand out games for free. And even then it's arguable that in between the two options EGS is where the better customer experience is.

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Timmy "Madbro" Sweeney. I'm kind of envious. I think it's an awesome gamer tag.

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Quoting: ElamanOpiskelija

Quotetoo many "big bets across the company"

of course, it's great to take big bets, as long as others (11%) pay the bill.

moreover it's pretty obvious that if I have many projects going on I need to reduce the workforce. A company wants to hire only when there is no job to do.

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I wouldn't be comfortable with any service managed by Ubisoft.

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