Definitely earned it, we’re already seeing a wave of indie games trying to capitalize on it’s success.

Some games have a major impact on the game market by creating or popularizing a subgenre. Some previous examples are Slay the Spire, Stardew Valley, and Vampire Survivors. I think Balatro will be the same, and we’ll see a huge number of games over the upcoming years trying to follow in it’s footsteps.

Twitter is by far the larger platform, and small independent creators have to work to promote their game on every platform they can, if they want to succeed. The moral high ground of not using undesirable social media sites is nice, but isn’t fair to people who are partially dependent on those platforms to make a living.

I’m not used to hearing good things about EA, but good for them.

It’s an absolutely massive game, and has been in development for 17 years. They also were pretty upfront with the fact that there would be a price increase at launch. I’ll also mention it’s one of the rarer games where the devs opted out of any Steam DRM, so you can copy the game files and run them on any machine without needing Steam installed. I keep the game on a thumbdrive for playing on my work PC when I have downtime.

All in all I think the price is well deserved, and I hope they do really well.

These cards sound good, but I’m generally soured on Intel as a company. It’ll be years before I feel comfortable buying hardware from them.

30% as industry standard

That’s the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I’m not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it’s hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.

I’ll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven’t seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they’re abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.

Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn’t blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.

Except they’re trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.

People don’t want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite’s success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.

*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I’m 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.

There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.

That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn’t going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.

Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.

Another high quality mobile experience I can’t recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it’s basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.

“A man chooses! A slave obeys.” - Andrew Ryan, BioShock

In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.

I wish Sony would just back off. It’s clear that they’re willing to drag their studios through mud to push PSN and other stupid requirements, and I hope any new studios they try to acquire will be paying attention to that.

Yeah, I’ve gotten sucked into HSR as well (first f2p gacha game that’s ever hooked me), and I can’t imagine having time for another game like it. The daily content isn’t really any trouble to do, but having to do that for multiple games would get old fast. And the monthly content drops can be really substantial and take a long time to experience all the content.

Probably just not big enough. Pokemon-like games are very common, palworld was just hugely successful and a lot of the media coverage for it was comparing it to Pokemon.

It seems cool. I know I don’t have the time to get into a moba (or moba-lite) right now, but I hope it catches on and does well.

As an adult gamer, I have a lot less time for games. Single player games are nice because I can make meaningful progress on a storyline/etc, and even do things like finish a game and move onto the next one.

Playing online pvp games can be fun, but it usually takes a huge time investment to be good. And in the time I have to play, there’s rarely a feeling of progress. Spending 1-2 hours on a single player game and I have progressed in a distinctive way. Spend that same time in League or some other multiplayer game and I have nothing to show for it except a few ranking points.

EDF World Brothers 2 (which is a spin off of the main EDF series) just came out and has fully optional Epic games integration. It doesn’t even download the Epic account software unless you opt into using it.

I’m glad to see they’ve gone back and changed the previously released game to make it optional too.

The gameplay of the EDF games is pretty fun honestly, it does feel different from many modern games, but it’s honestly kinda refreshing.

These scores are lower than expected, possibly due to issues with the console port.

I can vouch for the PC version being incredible though, I highly recommend it.

The missing context here (I think) is that California passed a law saying that digital storefronts (like steam and gog) can’t say things like “buy game” because you aren’t actually gaining ownership of the game, but instead just buying a license to access it. Some people were questioning if this law should apply to gog since their games are drm free and can be freely installed on any compatible devices once you download the installer.

That’s true. The drm-free steam games can usually have their install directories moved around freely between computers, but it’s true there isn’t an installer program provided outside of the steam client itself.

Probably not, sounds like it would apply to all digital store fronts. And a game from GOG could still become unavailable if it relies on game servers that are taken down.

If they did make an exception for stores like GOG, then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm. So you could have some guys labelled “buy” and others labelled “get”.

Part of what was weird is I tried paying with Google Play credit, and it wouldn’t take that either.

I’m not a lawyer: Many companies are updating their terms requiring that disputes are settled through arbitration, usually where a 3rd party selected by the company rules on the disagreement.

It’s meant to protect them from excessive lawsuit payments that can happen when you go to court.

Valve went the other way, and is saying that all legal disputes should go to court instead.

Huh, google play is refusing to sell it to me. Getting a [OR- FGEMF-20] error code regardless of payment method.

Edit: searching I came across a reddit thread, the post is older but all the comments are people complaining about this issue with trying to buy Balatro today.

Edit2: working now for me, about 4 hours after the game went live

From what I understand, it actually started concept development 10 years ago, with 8 years of active development.

8 years of development under multiple publishers will bleed a lot of money. They also hired on a lot of “experienced devs” from different game studios to head the different departments, and presumably paid them well enough to get them to leave their original companies.

The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.

Yeah, but when this happened proton wasn’t a thing yet, and running windows games through wine was very hit or miss.

I bought Rocket League because it had a Linux version, and Linux games were scarce before proton. Epic bought the developers of rocket League, and made it Epic exclusive. People who bought the steam version got to keep it, except for Linux users because Epic cancelled Linux support.

Epic loves to act like they’re anti monopoly, but they only care about that when they’re competing for market share. They’re extremely pro Microsoft and anti Linux.

Also one of the biggest concerns about Valve having a monopoly in the PC gaming space is that they could use their marketshare and money to block rival stores from getting popular games, making it hard to compete and removing user choice. In reality, Valve hasn’t done this, but Epic is leveraging their big pile of fortnite money to do this. It makes people think that if Epic ever gets into a dominate market position, that they’ll absolutely be an abusive monopoly that makes the market space worse for everyone else.

I think Overwatch 1 at it’s peak could be compared to CS2.

Right, that’s why the collective play amount is ~140k when the steam daily is only ~30k

That’s honestly not that good, when games like CS2 are regularly pulling 2million+.

According to 3rd party websites (that may not have accurate estimates), Overwatch 1 had between 600k-1mil peak concurrent players through a lot of 2020/2021. One of those same websites now says that OW2 had about 140k peak players today when combining all players on all platforms. So it would seem there’s been a huge drop in players.

For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.

So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.

Truly the end of an era

With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I’ve heard that brought up, but I’ve never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn’t apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.

Steam also has a lot of other stores selling their games though. Unless epic is giving it away for free, I’m probably going to get a better deal through a fanatical bundle or someone else than I would on epic.

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn’t caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don’t have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they’ve done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn’t favorable to buyers. They’ve created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

WB doubled down, after Suicide Squad failed horribly and Hogwarts Legacy sold fantastically they decided they needed to stop making games like Hogwarts to focus on more live service games.