i dont have the have your confidence in Valve. In fact, given some of their latest actions such as the psychologically manipulative money play with Steam cards i would say that my long held assessment of them was more correct than even i had thought. Valve has changed their dynamic so much (from game developer to developer talent vacuum to storefront to hardware) because profit is their highest priority. If the next biggest thing in PC gaming was reality augmented pogs then pogs is where Valve would go. There is a reason that Valve sucked up the creator of DOTA like the very same week LoL came out. Valve has done interviews where they wished they had an MMO. They only reason they didnt jump in with the MMO bandwagon is unlike picking up a mod team (or even crafting a MOBA) there is nowhere near the same level of effort and commitment in making them than what is required for an MMO.
Again i dont have the same view. Sure Valve doesnt take as much as a traditional publisher but they do nothing but put it up on their site. Does Valve offer any kind of marketing outside of listing it on Steam? No. Does Valve do any kind of QA? No. Does Valve do community relations? No. Does Valve handle packaging and retail distribution? No.
Developers choose to because Steam is PC gaming now. Outside of a couple of PC mega-hits, most small or indie developers talk about how Steam is the promised land. The reason for this is Steam is PC gaming. If you want your game sold you need to be on Steam. A couple years ago there was some competition to Steam and while i made the argument that as Steam gathers.. well, steam.. they will become more and more of a monopoly. Now the previous competition (GMG, Gamersgate, Amazon, Gamefly.. pretty much everyone) offers Steam keys instead of a download.
Running a Steam game without Steam isnt what i would call easy. Its more involved than using a fixed exe from what ive seen. As for adding non-Steam games to Steam? Sounds like a win for Valve if you can get all of your software to run in their environment.
Can you provide some examples of Origins using coercion?
If Steam ever lost its appeal to someone locked in to Steam they would be shit out of luck because a) they are going to lose their games if they drop Steam and b) where are they going to go?
There is no effort in that. You will never see your game on a Youtube commercial because Valve is not going to expend the effort and money to do that. Traditional publishers might take a larger percentage but to say that Valve offered a higher percentage out of the kindness of Lord Gabens heart is not true. They take less money because all they do is host the game.
It got there because it arrived via trojan horse and most people in the gaming sphere (both gamers and publishers) cannot look two steps ahead to save their life.
Not really. You needed to install modchips in your consoles to be able to pirate games, while with PC you simply needed to download the games and you were good to go.
This is entirely backwards. PC games have always been remarkably easy to pirate -- pirating a PC game before the popularity of the CD consisted, at most, of writing down some words from the manual and putting some files on to/off of a floppy -- and yet there was a sizable market that paid for them anyway.
I don't agree. Pirating today is much easier thanks to the internet's popularity. Back then most people were buying pirated copies from illegal merchants(as still happens today in some parts of the world) but I don't think people had the means to do it nearly as comfortably or easily as they do these days.
That's an interesting article.
It's not only about ease. Pirating, before somewhere around 2002, generally meant that you had access to the complete product without doing any work; it was exactly as if you bought the game. PC piracy for the last ten years is pretty heavily dampened by the fact that it's a limited version of the product: it's often buggy, there's no multiplayer, and there's no patches. It is inherently more contrived than it used to be.
First, I think that it should be noted that pirated games these days, and in the last decade, are not that different from the source. Bugs weren't really there. patches, and even multiplayer via LAN were possible even for pirates, and before Steam was a thing, it was actually more comfortable to pirate games than to buy them, what with all the DRM shenanigans we had to go through.
That the biggest success in PC indie gaming occurred during Steam's largest growth period and without any interaction with Steam whatsoever is pretty damning to the argument that Steam made indie games financially viable.
There are still plenty of great games released into 2004. I'm not really in the mood for list wars, but I guess I can get into it if you don't believe me. The more I think about it, the more I believe that I'd have to stretch my "golden age" moniker to 2004, really.
Apples and oranges, really. Like the bargain bin deals.
Yeah, but the point would be that a big chunk of those PC revenues (especially the ones tied to that part of "core" gaming we are considering here) were generated precisely from WoW, with a lot of retail products apparently struggling to find an audience.
The thing is, the game isn’t really all that free to play. Here’s a chart from the game’s website showing which features are available to subscribers, which are available to free players who have spent $4.99 or more, and which feature is available to free-only players:
Direct Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/11/21/star-wars-the-old-republic-goes-free-to-play-but-not-too-free/
Really?
