What position are they taking advantage of? If they ask for a smaller cut than 30 percent they get botched at for being anti competitive and being too cheap to try and compete against. They ask for more than 30% and they’re price gouging. Sure, everyone who works there is happy and sleeps in piles of money, but they can’t do anything about it without turning into more of a monopoly. As it stands they at least blow money on potentially cool things in R&D like the steam controller, steam box, and Steam Deck.
What do you actually want Gabe to do? He’s already far and wide the industry leader in employee compensation, and he can’t take a smaller cut without becoming a monopoly. Yeah, he could donate loads of money to charity, but his giant stack of cash also keeps his private company lush with funds to continue paying his employees if anything dire does happen, instead of doing like everyone else and laying off people.
The speculation is free buildup and helps create demand anticipation. Leaks and speculation like this are great advertising. It only becomes bad when the leaks and speculation created are better than what the actual product is, or a lot worse than the product is.
If the speculation was going around that it would be backwards compatible with all former Gameboy cartridges and include free downloads of any Nintendo games older than 5 years, Nintendo would quickly release the real specs/info.
But an online only game like team fortress? It doesn’t jive well. You can’t keep the servers going and the security and the anti cheat updated on a game that you pay once for unless you want the support and the game to be worthless two or three years after it was first released.
Your idea is great for single player games and noncompetitive team games like borderlands online play, and i own tons of games like that and its 90% of what i play. Not for games like team fortress, LoL, and Fortnite. For the latter games, it would mean support and servers would shut down while lots of people would still want to play them.
I played LoL quite a bunch over decade ago. Thousand+ hours over three years, probably. I spent a total of about $40. Had Hundreds of hours in on team fortress and never spent a dime.
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
Yeah. I don’t really know much at all about how or why people are buying the stuff or the digital cards or the whole booster pack things that steam does. There’s a ton of little pictures I have, and for whatever reason tons of people buy them if you want to sell them off. Mostly 5 to 25 cents a piece. I’ve never messed with it.
There’s a lot of old games I still own or fondly remember across a lot of generations that got really expensive now. One of my favorite rpgs for ps1 was Lunar:Silver star story, and it goes for over $100 still.
Then of course on snes was Chrono Trigger. If you have that game and the box it’s worth $500 to $1200. A lot more than that if it’s an unopened copy.
I don’t remember needing a constant internet connection to play hl2. I just remember needing it after the initial install. 20 years was a long time ago, so I don’t remember if it was the first single player game that had to be activated online first to run or not. I remember a lot of cd keys and ban type stuff for multi-player games pre hl2, but I don’t recall any single player ones.
Yeah, but now at least the games still go on sale for a cheaper price and there isn’t a rare game that you can’t find anymore and if you do it’s $130.
Fun fact: if you want Harvest Moon for snes the game will cost you about $400. Good condition with the box and papers will go over a grand. Snes Aero Fighters is $1,500 for an ok cartridge.
It could last a very long time, though. It’s a privately owned company, so if they keep it that way, there’s no board to satisfy with big payouts and stock holders to appeas. There’s a lot less bullshit to deal with when you’re a private company.
Also, drm and online registering is way older than steam.
The best drm was back on floppy drives. You needed a piece of tape to cover the square hole so you could copy the game for your buddy. Lol.
Here’s the thing about SV: There’s no “losing”. No a right way, or a wrong way to play.
You have the time limit of the day, but there’s no time limit of the game. If you don’t plant a lot or make much cash for an entire in game year, it doesn’t matter. Just go fight in the caves, or fish, or go around talking to people and getting relationships or whatever. The day is in a hurry, but you don’t have to be in one.
That said; your direct complaint is “I have to do it myself?” Well, yes. There is a somewhat driving factor in the game, and that is that just like in real life, you’re trying to do work now, so you can do less work later. The driving factor of the game is completing the stories and also upgrading your stuff so the work is easier.
But again, there isn’t much of a time limit.
Also, it’s a farming game. Did you not expect to farm?
For sure, and my backlog is huge. I have tons to still play. I’m just now getting around to gta5 on my steam deck. I also just finished re-playing the original ff7 with some mods that made it look way nicer than back when I played it on my ps1 in the 90’s. I could go another 5 years without catching up to 2020 if I wanted to.