Master Chief Collection came out in late 2014.

Now throw in average incomes on the low, medium, and high ends and see if that makes any difference in your criticism of people not wanting to spend so much on a game they might get a hundred or so hours out of.

Hell, throw in the average housing costs and costs of consumables while we’re at it.

Your track record of not hating people for their opinions is muddy at best.

Being bought, or being sold? There’s a difference. If they’re not being bought at those numbers, they’ll still show up the most.

They also said “starting”, which implies that’s what it’s being sold at, not what you see the most listings for.

I didn’t like it because it seemed pointless if you don’t really care about getting vengeance on specific thing. So the name of a mob that kills you fills in an empty space? Which is the same thing that happens any time you hit a story beat anyways? What’s the point? It’s all just randomly generated grunts that try and kill you.

It brought very little in the way of innovative gameplay and roleplaying, yet people seem to treat it as the greatest revolution of game design in the last several decades.

I’ll take that as a no, then.

Does the dadaist approach to arguments usually work for you?

Because they’re trying to compete on a product level, not a service level. They want your money, but don’t want to have to put forth the effort Valve has to get it.

Because it’s not just about you. Even if just 1% of people decide “Huh, I wonder what else is on there”, hell even .01%, it’s a win for them.

It’s not about big gains, it’s about attrition.

Yes, but how does that make rich people more money?

At least two major MMOs have the player being the “main” character, FF14 and WoW both treat the player character (and their friends) as the “hero” (and their party). I’m sure others do the same, but honestly I never get far enough into them to find out.

You’d almost certainly not be Aloy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the main protagonist of the story in the game.

Quality isn’t necessarily measured by desire. One can enjoy something they never desired before it existed. And one can loathe something they always desired before it was made, see the Warcraft movie (for me, at least).

Well… not at first.

You mean like how Steam does with the Steam Deck?

Consoles these days are basically just PCs with limited development criteria. But a much much narrower library.

Being able to bring your console to someone else to play couch co-op with them makes developing that style much more appealing.

What are the pros and cons you’re considering, and how do they compare to the pros and cons of a Nintendo console?

Partial backwards compatibility, based on their asterisk, at least.

To be fair, it wasn’t especially popular with anyone.

Industry standard fees, actually.

Epic is the outlier, and only because they want to seem like the good guy. If they had market dominance, they’d charge just as much, if not more.

You spoke of their track record, which is something specifically referring to past activities. Sure, their recent track record is good, but going back far enough it was terrible.

But they did improve. Which is why they have a good recent track record. They listened to criticism (and as others have stated) followed regulation to best suit the needs of their customer base.

And instead of pushing back and doing their best to go around it… they made accommodations to follow those directives.

They’re not perfect angels, but they’re also not malevolent demons either. They tend more towards consumer friendly practices, even if they need a push sometimes, than most others in the field.

I guess I don’t really get where you’re coming from. Are you saying that, because you don’t feel that PC gaming was important in your lifetime that decisions Valve has made don’t really make any difference? That even if they had made anti-customer decisions, that it wouldn’t really matter because “PC gaming is dying”?

Hell, a major reason some companies claim that is because of valves dominance on PC. They don’t want to admit that they don’t have as much control, so they do their best to dismiss it as a non-issue…

Which is really neither here nor there about the entire point I was making in the first place. At no point did I say that they were the spearhead or major push… just that they helped. Just because something doesn’t do 90% of the work doesn’t mean they made no impact at all, and that decisions they made have no moral or ethical emphasis. The point was that Valve is not some pristine god from the heavens sent down to cleanse our filthy gamer bodies. They’re a company like any other, who occasionally make missteps. Valve just tends to make more consumer friendly choices than most.

They also have an excellent track record for customer support.

Their customer support actually used to really suck. They made a concerted effort to improve it.

You give too little credit to horse armor.

Mobile gaming was the major factor, definitely, but it was far from 100%.

Yes, it was more mobile gaming, but that doesn’t mean Valve had no hand in it at all. It certainly had a huge impact on desktop variations of it.

That doesn’t mean they’re wholly evil or some other bullshit like that, because of it, but their hands are definitely not clean of it.

They did help usher in the age of microtransactions and lootboxes with their CS and TF2 stuff. That’s about the only major bad thing I can think of that they haven’t been particularly apologetic about.

Yeah they charge like 10% of profit for the games on there, and more if you make it big.

Which is the same as the vast majority of every other store (video game or otherwise). It’s really only a factor because Epic keeps bringing it up as a reason they’re better than Steam, and should be allowed to be the monopoly instead (though they don’t explicitly state that part).

There’s an app, i think it only works for android TV, or Google TV, or whatever they call it. Same basic functionality, just dependent on your tv (or whatever thing you use for watching shit on your tv) hardware.

Not a single mention of the Deponia series… sad

Arin, is that you?

Yes, and if the kebab store pitched a fit every time someone provided a better product than them, calling that competition a monopolist, I’d have the same criticism of that kebab shop.

If they’re just doing their best to provide a quality product… I wouldn’t like that they have a monopoly, but if they’re not in any way abusing it… that sounds like they’ve earned their place. The problem lies in the people not putting forth enough effort (despite have the resources to do so) to match.

… because now your weird obsession with blaming Steam for all things going wrong with gaming has less ground to stand on?

So the systemic reason of… providing a quality storefront? Are you demanding that they just make things shittier so that other people have a chance?

This has got to be the most twisted criticism of Steam I’ve ever heard…

… right, which is why I said they want a monopoly, not that they have a monopoly.

Are they providing an actual alternative, or just creating a pseudo alternative then bitching about how someone else gets more attention?

Sounds like that was Sega.

That was on the developers, not the storefront, though. Epic has specifically decided they don’t give a flying fuck about Linux.

Steam is their scapegoat, they want a Monopoly without having to say they have a Monopoly.

Something that came out last week can be considered ancient in tech terms.

Insofar as Blizz-Activision does, yeah.

They got Bethesda now, too.