Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
Because most of these MBA fucks don’t understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
it’s a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don’t think I’ve bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don’t play a lot of games nowadays.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen much. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
I’m seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there’s no actual law requiring that. It’s just an excuse they use to be greedy.
Review bombs are stupid and pointless. Especially in this case since most players are going through bnet and not steam.
24M active players.
Review bombs and “boycotts” are frustrating because it seems like the average player has the willpower of a hungry toddler. “Hey, don’t buy this game. They make their developers work 20 hour days.” -> “Oh yeah fuck them! …ooh, but there’s a shiny angel wing skin if I preorder? Well mmmmmmm well sure it’s just $90 what does it hurt”
But I don’t know. I’m kind of in a mood lately where I feel like I’m surrounded by overgrown toddlers.
It’s a shame, I liked OW1, even with the tired meta and 6v6 more than I liked OW2.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory, allowing unlocking of skins and content without spending anything extra was a nice balance in my opinion that I wish more games did.
They took OW1 and bastardized it, it deserves the rating it has. It used to be that new versions of games were better.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory
Ehhh, they were basically the same thing as a slot machine. The battlepass is certainly worse, as it just encourages rampant (not so) microtransactions, but just because the current battlepass system is really predatory, doesn’t mean the old loot box system wasn’t predatory at all. It was just less predatory.
It used to be that new versions of games were better.
I for one am very interested to see the quality differences between worker owned game studios and corporate studios. But last I heard they had only just started unionizing.
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
unions are a harder sell in an industry like tech where it’s common to have a diverse skill set spanning work that could arguable each be it’s own union. does a full stack dev have to join the database admin union before they can write sql queries?
those diverse skill sets also make the individual value of workers fluctuate a lot more as well.
I still like the idea of unions but I just don’t know how you can make them work for tech;if anyone has any good resources on the subject I’d love to read more about it
Tech workers in general have been finally making baby steps with unions trying to form at goog and maybe a couple others. I think kickstarter got a union a couple years ago as well… There are some other examples too which is a big change from just a few years ago
Blizzard is dead. At the time they were Activision. Now they are Microsoft. The blizzard that existed to make StarCraft, warcraft and diablo only exists in name.
I don’t know, the World of Warcraft dev team recently unionized and got Chris Metzen to return as creative director. And, personally, as a current WoW player (War Within is great so far btw) the whole feel of the studio is so much better than during Shadowlands when things were bad and I quit the game. I think that Warcraft at least is having a bit of a comeback now.
Overwatch 2 is awful tho
Chris Metzen
I don’t really know details about who does what at Blizzard, but isn’t he the guy responsible for the utter train wreck of Diablo3’s writing? Whoever wrote and approved “How tastes your fear, Nephalem?” did a bad job.
He wrote the setting for Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft. He developed the story for Diablo 1 - 3 as well as most of the lore for the first 3 Warcraft games I believe.
One game was all it took for Big Red to turn from an epic “Not even death can save you from me” into a cartoon villain. Fucker wouldn’t shut up throughout Act 4…
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
