It absolutely is.
Is this controversial? You’re paying for the storefront.
You aren’t even paying anything, you literally just give them a cut of your turnover when you don’t sell anything they carry the costs of it.
You give them a cut of the turnover on their site(steam). Important distinction. A developer can generate steam keys for free and sell them elswhere, as long as the price is the same as on steam.
Ah, Cosmoteer. Extremely fun for like 10 hours, then you realize there is nothing left to do. I guess that dev has made a fortune off of it though, so hats off to that guy.
Honestly that sounds fine. It’s okay if a small game is only entertaining for 10 hours provided the price is reasonable. We shouldn’t expect every game to be an infinitely replayability mill
wasn’t portal just a mod? very short game, but has some of the most memorable moments in all of gaming
It confuses the hell out of me that we don’t say that about any other media.
“This movie that I spent $18 per person on only lasts 97 minutes what a rip off.”
Its still being updated and you can play for looong when you like building ships until your CPU melts.
Yeah, but you are then building for the sake of building. The crew limitations are a pain, so is getting the resources for the ships. If you are a purely combat player, having to mine asteroids for 95% of the time to get a bigger ship, or to get a necessary reactor isn’t fun gameplay. Then you build three large-ish ships and you cannot crew them all at the same time because people don’t want to work for you. Especially when you are a completionist and want to “finish” a system before heading out, you quickly stop getting fame and either need to jump to a higher difficulty system (which your ship won’t survive unless you know the “meta” well), or resort to more mining instead of the fun stuff.
Edit: all of these are choices made by the devs. In combat, you can take over a ship that has an airlock after you destroy the bridge. You cannot then scrap it for valuable parts, since scrapping captured ships nets you no materials back. It is viable for the very first or second sector you go to, when you don’t have factories (and finding a ship graveyard and scrapping for metal feels worthwhile) but you quickly outgrow it.
You can disable the crew limitations also you can have multiple ships. I usually play with one factory(for mining and processing), one starbase (a gigantic storage, waaay bigger than the ones from the game) some smaller ships for defense and quick intervention(often nuke carriers) amd one or two really big and heavily armored Fighters (record enemy destruction was 0,5seconds with a 20 rail guns offensive)
Most things you complain about can be changed in the options or with simple mods, you don’t even need to mine, you can just buy stuff. Also capturing enemy ships is unnecessary for farming, just drag the mine tool over it (or install a mod that lets you harvest them for no resource penalty)
The higher level systems aren’t that hard, you just need to upgrade your ship and larn how to combat with them, every ship plays different. Best way to survive is to outrange the enemy and be fast backwards to keep distance. (rail guns and rockets or lasers or everything)
It’s also just the standard for selling your game on a big storefront.
A few indie devs who hated the idea of storefronts because of the bad taste of Apple self published only on their website. When they finally (after years) switched to steam, every single one of them shared how they got like a multiplier of sales.
One indie dev shared how he made more in revenue in a month on Steam than he did in a decade of self publishing.
That’s life-changing.
Apple is the same deal, though. There’s a reason there’s a lot more solo devs/small teams making money on iOS than Android. Their ecosystem doesn’t do all the work for you, but it absolutely provides a lot of help. You might not like, for example, the Human Interface guidelines, but the enforced consistency in behavior makes a lot more people a lot more willing to buy things.