"Lets build a demo and then throw it away after a week or so"

Funny thing is that most demos are just delisted. Generally you can go to the SteamDB page, click install and it'll work just fine.

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I find the "tried everything" very funny. They really didn't. Amazon stuff was barely functional at best.

Epic has a similar problem. When they opened their store they had nothing. Then they focused on being interesting to publishers instead of customers, so nobody really feels compelled to give them a chance.

I think the actual bigger problem is that they let Steam happen. For a long time nobody even challenged Steam and just let them grow. When the competition finally woke up, it was way too late. People had built up extensive libraries and Valve had acquired a good understanding of what the customers wanted. Too little, too late is how I would describe Amazon and Epic. They should have been there before 2010, not 2018 or whenever they finally started.

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Interesting is that MR has a much larger player base than Overwatch 2, but OW2 has a higher revenue on Steam. Clearly OW2 is still fairly effective at squeezing money out of their small player base. My guess is that MR managed to pull a lot of player from OW2 that were unhappy about the monetization there, but these aren't the people to get a "good amount" of money from. At the end of the day, live service business is weird. Only a small percentage of players can be "convinced" to spend large amounts of money.

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Fun demo although executing the puzzles themselves is not exactly hard to me. So I was trying to go the optimisation route for a challenge, but that's not made easy because there's no way to predict how code changes actually affect the "size" and "speed". For example, I replaced some code with a function to remove duplication and ... the code size actually grew. What? Also for some reason "and" executes slower than "or". The assume the thing is based on weird LUA internals, but that doesn't make particularly nice a game.

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Nice. I've slowly been going through TR1, so I can continue when I'm done.

I played a bunch of TR1 when it released, but the others I did not have time for.

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Hopefully they won't forget about GOG users like they did the Horizon Zero Dawn remasters

They didn't forget about it, they weren't allowed to put their mandatory PSN login on GOG. Maybe they'll do it now that it's optional.

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Good for them! We can speculate on their motives, but in the end they're doing a good thing and I'm not going to argue with that.

I wouldn't expect any complex motives. For maintaining the market dominance and long term business of Steam, it is bests to reduce use annoyances as much as they can. This would definitely qualify as a user annoyance.

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I recently had a discussion with one of the devs that was convinced that having a Discord was enough to update customers. He could not understand that I considered it disrespectful to not update the people that paid for the game directly. The game now has a "24 month" label. At least that particular game is fully functional.

This is awesome! In a time where it seems like every single company on earth is enshittifying itself to death, we pc gamers at least have Valve doing stuff like this. I know they're not perfect, but still this is a very good thing for us consumers.

That's why it's so hard to compete with Valve. They have both this and a giant slice of the pie. They earned an amount of trust. But will it be forever? If Valve ever gets sold to investors or publicly traded, things will change and not for the better. So fingers crossed that ownership stays with people that think long term.

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Fundamentally it comes down to making things easy. Most people just want to play a game and not be bothered with nonsense. If they can make that happen, it'll be a hit.

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Thank the PC gods that epic are taking this seriously

But are they really? This is not exactly a new problem. In fact, I'd say the problem is as old as GPUs themselves. They just ignored it until it got so bad that it was actively affecting the perception of Epic.

Personally I think the problem is that shaders are not manually written anymore. And the ones generated by these engines are so complicated and allow so many combinations of conditional compilation that compilation effort got out of hand.

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