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I can log on to anybody’s computer in the world, install Steam, and have full access to my entire game library.
I can make almost anybody I know (with limits) a “family member” and share my library.
I can stream my games from my computer to my phone.
My steam deck lets me play my entire library anywhere.
I see no personal benefit to using physical media anymore.
I guess a disclaimer would be that I trust Valve but you truthfully, I don’t trust all game companies/vendors.
The home version of pong when I was 4 years old.
My friend’s dad owned a small local cable station so he had access and money to get all the latest crap.
I remember he also had a brand new beta max, and I was just this innocent 4 or 5 year old kid and I was asking why the time was flashing and the adults didn’t know. So I just walked up and programmed it. They praised me as being a literal genius and I was like you idiots It’s just a fucking clock.
It’s funny, I bought an s9 plus at launch and was recently “kicking tires” thinking of upgrading.
Looked at the recent crop and from my judgement, they’re about 15% better than this one for the things that matter to me. For only $2,000 CAD
Looks like I’ll be having the screen and battery replaced and keeping this for another 7 years.
Sonic games, I’m referring specifically to the first one and that era.
My friend and I rented a Genesis I believe it was, specifically to play this, we thought the graphics were awesome, the speed was amazing, the t3ch show off was cool, the game had novelty.
But really from a gameplay perspective, I simply do not understand what people like about it.
The whole thing was just run as fast as you can down this path, you have no idea what’s coming up. There will be multiple opportunities to take different paths but you don’t really have time to make a judgment call, so you flail at the controller and end up hitting a hazard. You start the level over and over and over again and you repeat it until you understand which way to go and then you complete the level.
Now you’ve run into every single gotcha and you figured out some optimal routes, now you can play it all without dying a lot.
Why would anybody want this?
This is where I’m often torn. My sentiments lean fully to the principle of the user owning his/her purchased software.
But I want Valve to have my money and I trust them, because their entire business model is giving me the power to play my games in the most ways possible, and in ways that having the OG installer on my Desktop can’t do.
I can stream my entire 900 game Steam library to my phone and when my Deck gets here I’ll have access to it all there as well. Muahahaha. Take my money. No GOG RAR Installer is going to give me that, ever. This doesn’t seem to get talked about enough. Valve adds so much value, they make it so I don’t even want to pirate.
I try so hard to be a rational consumer and not an emotion-driven zealot for any company or product. I just look at Epic and what they tell and show gamers/devs/publishers about who they are as a company. They don’t hide it.
Epic doesn’t seem to add any killer (and at times rudimentary) features while they focus their pitch down to more money for publishers now but we own your soul; By comparison Valve says here’s a robust and trusted, feature-rich platform you can deploy upon and we’re improving it constantly.
Valve engages in continual expansion of their Steam ecosystem (look at the Deck alone and how much value that added overnight); Valve does continual short-lived research projects like the Steam Link / Steam Controller, which don’t survive as stand-alone products but pound one novel killer-feature after the next into the platform; Epic treats their product like an afterthought and their customers as wallets.
This is really what is at the crux of it. I am not sympathetic to Epic’s way of doing business where the customer is last, the developers and their art are the pawns, and publishers are plied with sweet, predictable short-money in exchange for souls.
I’ve seen enough enshittification to know at this point that doing business with a bean-counting, value-wringing company hurts us all, and perhaps I’m out on a limb here but I feel like this sentiment is becoming highly solidified among many.
For me it’s entirely self-centered and I’m dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.
Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it’s really hard to take anybody else seriously.
It’s just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it’s said deadpan. They don’t even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.
I mean it’s so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they’re not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.
GOG is great, it’s a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don’t like to splinter my collection across different services so I’m mostly avoid them but I can’t say anything really negative.
Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don’t. There’s lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I’m just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don’t even hold a candle.
Oh wow, I wasn’t aware of that!
I remember initially falling in love with the concept of the game and the humor and the graphics, but then feeling absolutely crestfallen that I couldn’t accomplish anything in the game!
But then I had my very first big gamer epiphany - you need to be aggressive in Z! So not only was it one of my big surprise favorites, I had one of my most rewarding aha! moments as a gamer with it
I’m not trying to be Mr Snappy but I think I paid a dollar for it too, and I feel I overpaid by about 99.9 cents
Edit: I can see why other people like it, but I found it to be utterly monotonous and just shallow, wanton destruction which didn’t appeal to me
Edit 2: I should be fair to the game, it was technically very well done (ignoring modern crash problems), the destruction was pretty cool, I thought the graphics were neat, and it offered was a variety of things that many people would enjoy. For my taste there not a enough world design, too much copy/paste, and the story/missions were perfunctory. For me, it had many good ingredients, but it didn’t make a stew. It comes down to personal taste.
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There’s lots of different approaches, but I’ve had the same problem.
Steam lets you exclude tags, but they limit how many tags you can exclude so it’s basically a useless feature.
I go to steamDB and it has a ton of sorting options, including being able to exclude “Lovecraftian”, “visual novel”, “dating*”, etc
There’s also a great browser extension for Firefox which is my preferred browser. It enhances the Steam homepage (depending on how you configure it) and lets you do lots of things like quick-sell cards and other stuff.