crispy4000

Yes, you too can ditch Steam with your indie upstart, and attract millions of daily active users. All it takes is some elbow grease and a winning idea. Good luck out there, you miss all the shots you don’t take! Focusing on macro takes like this is what led to Valve giving the most successful games preferential treatment. Most indies are no better off for it. The small studios are generally not aiming to be the next market leading trend.

Which is them walking back from what it was. Hugely successful PC games exist outside of Steam. Perhaps Palworld could have been one of them if they knew what they had. Knowing that beforehand is a complete crapshoot in 2024. It’s a stupid bet. Sure. In spite of recent layoffs and cancellations, the games are still good and plentiful. The grass could be greener still for all if the client-side cut was less.

Their storefront isn’t a monopoly, but their client is. Enough to the point that if you don’t put your PC game on Steam, its probably sending it out to die on computers. Ubisoft, EA and Microsoft have given in now: they can’t miss out on Steam’s user base. Valve made the forward thinking decision to let other storefronts sell Steam keys, and their client remained the point of contact the vast majority of PC gamers interact with regularly. Naturally that promotes their storefront ahead of all others, as does their client’s economy. It’s why even someone price saavy like you still gives them 20% and not 0%. PC games still are cheaper, generally. But I don’t think anyone here is arguing game prices would go down if the royalty cut was less. Epic’s store is evidence to that, with the largest discounts being the occasional coupons subsidized by Epic themselves. So are the sweetheart deals Valve offers - games that succeed enough to reach those high benchmarks aren’t the ones discounted quickly and heavily.

8k is just noise at this point. I think even PS5 has 8k listed on the box, lol.

Depends on the company, and the project. Certainly the little guys could benefit. Being “smart” can only get them so far when visibility is still such an issue and subscription payouts are less. Few find themselves with a breakout hit. On the medium to higher end, a lot if it has to do with margins and risk, and the lack of ‘cheap’ money today. Would the Mandalorian Titanfall game still be alive if EA could offset more of the license fees? Who knows.

I’ll be basing my eventual PC build off overshooting this slightly. But I’m excited to hear more about the new upscaling solution.

Going for that filmic look I guess. The developers said they were looking into 60fps, years ago.

Time Spent: 20 minutes Rating: ** Interesting platformer where you 'jump' up ledges by warping to them with a cursor. And can attack enemies by slashing through the line of your warp. Your cursor itself can take damage. It feels like a long lost Nintendo DS game, retrofitted for a modern game controller. There's one huge achillies heel: the game runs at a 24fps lock. Seriously. It looks and feels awful by modern game standards. There's no hacks or mods to undo this either. Your character's relatively slow movement ends up feeling even worse. It's playable, but an incredible shame for what could have been.

Impacts what gets greenlit, the scale, what studios get shut down, what gets cancelled, etc. Even if the impact feels marginal on our end, I don't have a problem with people generally being paid more for good work at the same price to us. ... or keeping their jobs...

Probably not true. I don’t think Epic’s capable of pulling many people off Steam regardless of the quality (or lack thereof) of their storefront. Just like Bing isn’t pulling many from Google. On the other hand, you have much better aggregation of game imports on GoG than Steam, but CD Projekt Red also neutered their team there a few years back. Humble doesn't have an app technically. They did have one with a choice subscription at one point, but shut it down.

Just like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo “deserve” to charge us for networking features that are free on phones and PC. Because we’ll pay it on their closed systems… Certianly there’s a middle ground here. One that isn’t detached from buisness fundamentals, but also not far removed from the consumer experience and the health of smaller parts of the industry.

The reality is that Valve's monopoly hasn't been challenged by any company to the degree those have. They're closer to Google's search monopoly at this point. Which is, fine, but can be potentially problematic since they literally have all the leverage they could ever ask for. They sell hardware at a loss or low margins to get more consumers in the door. Valve has just started doing this with the Deck, so good on that. But for the majority of Steam users, a historical-to-physical 30% cut isn't needed to subsidize the cost of Valve's upkeep in the slightest. Leverage can be a problem in this industry regardless. The console manufactures use it to sell online play passes, and get to be the arbiters of who gets paid how much with their subscriptions (hint: it's getting worse). We shouldn't just assume it's all good and fine if they're doing bad things in tandem with their leverage. The smaller publishers and developers often get the short end of the stick. That goes for Valve too, in offering sweetheart deals to large publishers. Criticism of business as usual shouldn't be dismissed as idealism.

The issue I take with Valve’s margins is that by and large, it’s because they were first to the scene. Yes, there is a value add with their efforts with the Deck/Linux, and the way they’ve expanded the storefront. But I’d honestly trade all that in a heartbeat if I could for a Valve that was serious about making games again. This is what happens when competition dies, a reduced focus on bringing homegrown creativity to the table, and centering your business about leveraging others’ work. So of course they’d keep the standard rate that existed before digital distribution. Because they’re first and stayed first, they’re deserving of their cheese. Lol, sure.

They hyped up that Queen’s Blood tournament a lot for how easy it was.

Yes you can. Which is why a movement lock when holding the triggers feels so inhibiting. There’s no reason for it, other than making the game feel harder to play.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** On the surface of things, it hits most things right. Cathedral looks to the be the Shovel Knight of Metroidvanias, and other than music, largely succeeds from what I tried. There's no retrieving lost gold here thankfully, and the punishment is pretty marginal (losing 10%). Controls are responsive and fluid, level design is interesting, health drops are plentiful. Supposedly there's a punishing difficulty spike or two, but I could see myself returning to this. It just doesn’t do anything original.

Time Spent: 30 minutes Rating: *** This one is also hard to judge at first play. It's WayForward putting their Contra chops into a Metroidvania. Visually its expectedly goregous, like Zero Mission mixed with Castlevania vibes. But it's also very bog standard Metroid design, without any cool powerups seemingly. You get better weapons, but they use ammo, which you can get from enemy drops. The controls lock you out of left/right movement while you hold the trigger to aim diagonally. Even mid-jump. They either should have given you 360 aim control like the Mercury Steam Metroid games, or let you still run like in Zero Mission and such.

Nailed the infantry mini-game. I'm glad they're still doing well by the linear parts. It's such a good time.

Forget the other noise, everything concerning Kyrie is truly the worst addition to Remake/Rebirth.

I couldn’t shake the timer with the default set, but had 15 seconds to spare with the offense set, Barrett, and those ranged catapults to deal with the stop magic and stance shifting. But whatever works.

The timing is incredibly tight on the final stage in hard mode. I had to switch from the default unit set to beat the timer. If you’re going to do it, you need to have a plethora of ranged units at the end to avoid stop magic, which is incredibly hard because of what Rock Paper Scissors requires.

That part was better in Intergrade. You won so long as you had more towers alive on your end.

Whatever those catapult things are, set those up in the above middle once you've broken through decisively. If you can do it in enough time, it'll help you beat the timer. I figured out that trick towards the end of hard mode, so it's still possible without for most stages.

The last one is harder. Then hard mode is harder still.