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And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?
More comptetion wouldn’t just benefit consumers, it would benefit devs. A dev could shop their game around go with a store front that suits their needs better.
Your lemonade stand would be more like if there was a stand on every block: By virtue of the scale of their business they could afford to undercut any competition that tried to start up. If they did that they could be slapped on the wrist for being anti-competitive.
Cough Walmart cough
Walmart has been accused of selling merchandise at such low costs that competitors have tried to sue for predatory pricing (intentionally selling a product at low cost in order to drive competitors out of the market).
In 2000, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection accused Walmart of selling butter, milk, laundry detergent, and other staple goods at low cost, with the intention of forcing competitors out of business and gaining a monopoly in local markets.
Crest Foods filed a similar lawsuit in Oklahoma, accusing Walmart of predatory pricing on several of its products, in an effort to drive Crest Foods’s own company-owned store in Edmond, Oklahoma, out of business.
However, in 2003, Germany’s High Court ruled that Walmart’s low cost pricing strategy “undermined competition” and ordered Walmart and two other supermarkets to raise their prices. Walmart won appeal of the ruling, then the German Supreme Court overturned the appeal.
Walmart has been accused of using monopoly power to force its suppliers into self-defeating practices. In 2006, Barry C. Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (a think tank), said that Walmart’s constant demand for lower prices caused Kraft Foods to “shut down thirty-nine plants, to let go [of] 13,500 workers, and to eliminate a quarter of its products.”
I’m pleasantly surpised the “Steam Circle Jerk” group hasn’t shown up to defend Valve. Valve more or less controls the digital distribution of games, to point that if a dev’s game isn’t on Steam; they are taking a massive loss in potential revenue. We are being asked take Valve on a good faith that they won’t rat fuck the consumer.
As you correctly pointed out, Valve’s main purpose to make money. Private or public, it’s only matter of time before a company rat fucks the consumer. More competiton is always better for the consumer.
I present Gleaner Heights, a cozy farming game that amps up the darkness.
Witness the double lives of townsfolk, their plottings and betrayals. Help them or destroy them as you see fit.
Discover the haunting past of Gleaner Heights, from its early days to the terrible events that occurred just prior to your arrival. Confront the supernatural horror that lurks in the bowels of the earth. Break the cycle of destruction…or inherit it.
I checked out Exodus. The lore behind the game looks fascinating however my concern is how the devs are going to handle time dilation and your choices.
If my character takes off for a decade, I expect some sort of noticeable change. Buildings a little grimier or nice and clean. Creating new models and maps to reflect the time dilation and the choices you make is going to add a lot of extra dev time.
It’s just wild to me that a game straight out of a TTRPG is “light on RPG elements”.
Character stats is just something DnD came up with and everyone goes “character stats = RPG”. DnD had character stats because Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson all played table top war games before creating DnD.
Some of my favorite TTRPGs, don’t have character stats; looking at you Under the Autumn Strangely, Dread, 10 Candles, For the Queen, and that one game were I play tested characters playing Truth or Dare.
At the end of the day, playing a TTRPG is about telling a story. If the Chinese Room can tell a great story with light character customization. I will take that.
But Shadows & Silk has been made in conjunction with the rest of Bloodlines 2. It’s been designed to be experienced at launch. This is not “new”; it’s effectively part of the base game. But it’s been purposefully siloed away to encourage players to shell out more cash. It’s just a bad look.
This sums up my issue with this DLC. The two clans were part of the dev time when it came to developing Bloodines 2.
Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article. They recently claimed credit for the campaign that saw payment providers pressuring the online storefronts to remove content the group deemed unacceptable.
It’s not hard to empathise with the folks behind Itch for being placed in an impossible position, but their lack of forewarning has left creators blindsided and in some cases, seemingly without income. “I wish we had gotten some warning from Steam and Itch,” wrote game developer Robert Yang on Bluesky, “but we already know it’s Collective Shout + payment processors waging culture war against LGBTQ people and sexual expression. I guess there’s nothing else for Steam and Itch to say”.
Personally speaking, I’d be willing to extend that good faith to Itch.io themselves, but they aren’t the one holding the gun to their own heads here. That’d be financial companies, pressured by Collective Shout, who themselves have ties to an organisation whose CEO once described gay marriage as an “unspeakable offence to God”. It’s not difficult to imagine what kind of expression these groups might decide to deem as unacceptable next.
Collective Shout is a self-described feminist non-partisan organization, but has alleged ties with anti-trans and conservative organizations. The group has developed a reputation as a sort of puritan crusade that targets everything from Detroit: Become Human to Tyler, the Creator.
This one quote tells me what kind of people Collective Shout are. First, Collective Shout will go after the low hanging fruit and then will move to LGBT themed games.
I think a better example would be net neutrality. The whole purpose of the payment provider is to move money from Person A to Person B. Just like how ISP is meant to get you from Website A to Website B.
It would be like your ISP going “Woah there buckeroo. You can’t go to Duck, Duck Go to search. We only let you go to Google.”
And I will be that sicko.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.
Solitary confinement or have Ol’ Musky live like the underclass.