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In many ways it’s more restrictive than before, albeit better for the intended use case.
I had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out.
There will be a lot of people facing problems like yours with actual family members living abroad, and others will face issues with sharing with friends abroad or friends that used to change often or paid sharing that changed often.
I am a cynic so I think it is mostly done to hinder paid sharing and sharing with friends and family abroad is collateral damage.
A second use is probably that child protection is now pushed away from Steam and more towards the parents. I think that was necessary because European countries and maybe others were putting Valve under pressure and they do not want to implement a real age verification (they should imho). Now they can just say: “Kids should not have free access to a PC to be able to make an account, parents need to do that for them and restrict access age appropriate, it is not our concern anymore!” I have my doubt that will be enough for the EU though, but might buy them time.
I think many people haven’t realized the downsides of this yet and only see where it benefits them. We will have complaints about the one year cooldown soon.
If you buy Backpack Battles you can get a copy of Slay the Spire for free … just sayin’. I mean I am totally not hoping for a lot of people to hop on Backpack Battles, so I will have a lot of people to play against forever. 😏 It has a demo, so no blind buying necessary. It is Early Access but worth every Cent in my eyes.
The more control over your privacy the better.
I was once (long ago) sick on Monday and my employer called me and told me that I should be able to come to work when I was able to play World of Warcraft on Sunday, because he looked my character up in the armory and saw me getting a boss kill or something.
I was sick, because I had my wisdom teeth removed on Monday morning…
People can get in all kinds of trouble because of their gaming habits. A game critical of religion or religious, a game about sexuality and/or gender, a political game about dictatorship or capitalism or unionizing. A historical game about something your country doesn’t want you to know or a game that mentions Tian’anmen and Winnie-Puh. A game from a Russian developer that fled Russia when the war against Ukraine started and you are a gamer in Russia who wants to play it.
Good if Steam allows more control over our privacy, it took them long enough.
That’s why the kid was distressed and the relationship with the father went south, because he said “no” and tried to help his child. That’s the point when kids start to sell their belongings to school mates, steal from parents purses or take their credit cards or spent all money they make with a job on the game and even when they have no money to spent, their minds are in the game all the time and family life is 99% fighting about screen time.
This is not solely about parents not restricting money, this is game developers and publishers hiring psychologists to find ways to make their games as addictive as possible vs. normal people and their children, a multi billion industry vs. ordinary customers. To blame this solely on parents is just wrong.
They probably allowed the kid a decent amount of screen time and some money to spent, like normal parents do. That their kid got pulled into an addiction by an industry that does everything possible to make that happen did happen over time, hard to notice until it is already a problem.
Most people blaming only the parents do not have children and have watched their child cry for days because it can’t have the skin “all the other kids have” and therefore gets bullied in school. All these games on purpose work with group pressure on top of addictive game and loot mechanics. They prey especially on neurodiverse children and adults, FOMO and more.
They’ve ruined the games market to such an extent that it doesn’t even have to be the game’s fault if it’s a flop.
First: A decent, average game is now a flop. In a highly saturated market, this means that 98% of all games will be flops, because people can only buy and play a certain number of games, and the highly acclaimed games were never more than big outliers. Each small problem a game has turns its chances on the market drastically down.
Secondly, I saw The Lamplighters League and I said: “This is a shoo-in for Humble Bundle, I will wait.”
Games are worse than lettuce these days. They sell today or become pig feed tomorrow. I got about 60+ games for free this year, not counting F2P games, just normal games, good games, for free, including triple-A games. I got about 100+ games on Humble Bundle for a tiny fraction of their release price, and most of them were not older than a year or two and when the year ends my subscription there will end, because I definitely do not need more games. I get games every few months with my free Amazon Prime subscription because they keep offering me and everyone in my family 30-day paid trials and we keep them on one Amazon games client so we have them all in one place. Then there are Fanatical bundles, and Steam has a big sale so often that it’s hard to find a day when there isn’t some sort of sale going on.
On top of that, on PC most games stay playable forever. I played more old games (2004 - 2010) this year than new ones, because I have access to so many of them and I lost interest in the “latest thing” because I am flooded with so many new game releases that I just can’t keep my interest for them up anymore.
Where is this industry heading? More ingame shop games on mobile and more gambling sports games, but live service hasn’t worked out for a lot of games the last two years. Some didn’t make it into a second year or just barely when they were thought to live for 10 years or more. At least in Europe video game gambling with loot boxes and alike is under attack.
I look at this and I am happy for my backlog. If this industry collapses, I have games to play untill I am 100 years old and most of them did cost me close to nothing. On top my hardware works forever it seems, no need to upgrade that either. So weird. I am 57 years old and playing games since 2000 and when I started there were less than 70 games coming out per year on Steam, in 2022 the number was 10644 add to that console and Nintendo and others and it’s crazy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/
This opens up future plans for some Rocket League vehicles to come to other Epic games over time, supporting cross-game ownership.
The Meataverse. The shitshow which lead to 900 people being laid off. “Everything EPIC” needs to get under one huge umbrella for this.
Next step will be that you can buy a skin in one game shop and getting it in multiple games, so a pumpkin skin in Fortnite turns automatically into a car skin for Rocket League but costs three times what it costs now, because “You will get sooo much more!!!” All to make you stay inside the EPIC game world, because the next new game that comes out you can use all these crazy skins in from the start and why would you want the game on Game Pass or Steam where your skins won’t work? FOMO meats sunken cost fallacy.
Everything and I mean EVERYTHING Epic does from now on is done for the Epic Metaverse, nothing else will count, not the people working for Epic, not the gaming communities.
The good thing is: It has already started to ruin them and it will continue to ruin them and it will ruin Epic until the CEO has to go and he owns half of the company, so I doubt it is going to happen soon. Look at what this same idea does to “X” or Facebook and in the end there can only be one Metaverse if that idea would work, but it won’t.
Tim Sweeney’s “apology” for laying off 900 people: “I was spending to much on the Metaverse” - first sentences. “I am going to spent more on the Metaverse anyway!” - last sentences.
Source: https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/layoffs-at-epic
This article speaks right out of my soul, when comparing Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 2.0.
The quest qualtiy itself is comparable, but the delivery of Starfield makes it solely my job to create immersion (which I can and will do), while Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 grabs me by my balls and drags me into the world.
Spoiler for a small quest in Cyberpunk
When the barkeeper leans slightly forward, looks carefully right and left to make sure no one is listening and then tells me he suspects his wife sees someone else, I smell his parfume and I notice he relaxes his hurting back by stemming his arms onto the desk, because he is doing a double shift. Having Silverhand commenting on every step of the quest and turning it into a noir detctive story, making fun of me, added more immersion to a “follow person, report back”-mission. That I then can just call the quest giver on the phone, as a normal being would feels life like.
A similar quest in Starfield:
I talked to the barkeeper in Starfield from the wrong angle and he only turned his head and it was very uncanny valley, because over the whole conversation I was questioning how he can still talk with a broken neck.
EPIC is laying off 900 people so Tim Sweeney can follow his stupid dream of a Meataverse. He even said this in his “apology letter” where he writes, that he spends too much on metaverse, so he has to lay off people, but then he ends with the promise to continue to overspend on the same thing going forward.
He lays off 900 people, 1/3 of them even core people making his game(s).
It is stupid decisions like this that make the layoffs “necessary”, not anything actually related to the development of games, when it comes to these big developers/publishers.
Don’t let them fool you that this could not have been prevented.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/layoffs-at-epic
For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic and growing Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators. I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.
and
About two-thirds of the layoffs were in teams outside of core development. Some of our products and initiatives will land on schedule, and some may not ship when planned because they are under-resourced for the time being. We’re ok with the schedule tradeoff if it means holding on to our ability to achieve our goals, get to the other side of profitability and become a leading metaverse company.
He is totally fine with crunch because he on purpose understaffed his core development teams, he is happy for an upcoming community event while having laid off all the staff for that and will continue to make the same mistake again, while laying off 900 people at a time where getting a new job is hard and where many of them rely on finding a new job or losing their working visas.
Fuck him! Do not defend him!
Yes. We should embrace it. /notsorry
More seriously, we don’t know. Only time will tell. Take-Two will definitely be looking at redundancies, so it might not be good for all employees. For the IPs, hopefully it can’t get much worse than sitting at Embracer while the company sinks like the Titanic. But Take Two has also had layoffs and shelved projects. One can only hope for the best.