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I think reason Valve die hards don’t care about the loot box portion is because they are the type more likely to be using Valve to buy games so spend more of their time buying and playing individual games.
The ones most exposed to loot boxes seem to be the ones who are the type to only play 1 or 2 games, and are fully invested in live service titles and is a majority of their gaming time.
So likely very different demographics when it comes to type of games they play and what they spend. One leaning more towards in game virtual goods than outright buying games. So it’s a group that can be completely unknown to game collectors.
It’s more people like Valve as a service than liking Gabe. Helps that it is a private company so not beholden to stockholders and has a reasonable amount of employees for a more sustainable business. Not that it can’t all go to shit, but I trust publicly traded companies even less when it comes to having to rake over consumers to keep increasing stock prices.
It’s a launcher successful on the most popular OS in the world that they don’t even own that anyone can come in to compete at. And had decades to do so when “PC gaming was dead” so was wide open for anyone that wanted to try to reach potential customers over fixating on the console demographic. What more do want.
It doesn’t even come pre-installed with Windows.
Yeah even apple is talking about potentially introducing ads into maps when their whole positioning of premium price has meant premium product and experience.
But the pressure of continual stock increases means company has to keep chasing exponential growth as opposed to being content with sustainable growth.
From what’s been seen checks and balances no longer exists in the US and is moving towards authoritarianism, and threatening allies is not normal. And enemy in the west is more of a concern for a lot of people due to proximity.
Any country undergoing a huge purge and closures would be raising alarms, and it is more worrying because of the huge military and economic influence and power of the US.
PS4 was when I switched to PC for a majority of my games except exclusives. I refused to pay for PS+ to play online, since I enjoyed my free online on the PS3 the past Gen.
Picked up a long hdmi cable back then so I could enjoy the couch gaming experience when I felt like it. So that stopped being a selling point for consoles for my use case.
Thing is even if people are in queue with the intention of scalping with multiple IDs or whatever the nice part of a queue system is that all you have to do is wait for your queue to come up.
When I put in my queue for evga and steam deck I just forgot about it until my time came up months later. Didn’t have to keep refreshing or wait in line or care about stock.
That’s the beauty of queue for people who care less about getting it immediately but that they can guarantee themselves one without having to actively search the product out.
Why don’t more companies do what Steam did with Steam Deck or Evga used to do of putting people in a queue so they can buy without having to fight scalpers at brick and motor stores or bots online?
It has been the best system I’ve experienced, since whether it takes days, weeks, or months I know that when my time comes I can buy my product without having to beat out other people.
What hurts GOG is its stance on DRM, since companies don’t want games to be DRM free. It leads to late releases if it does come out leading to missing out on a lot of the purchases associated with hype. Leads to less games being sold at full price which happens most at launch with games having to rely on discounts older they get.
I’m saying I believe mobile gaming has played a stronger role in pushing the industry towards the freemium model.
With mobile gaming becoming bigger than consoles and PC combined years ago and it wasn’t through selling titles.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/27/mobile-games-spending/
Point is traditional gamers overlook the juggernaut that is mobile gaming, since they are only fixated on consoles and PC not realizing how absolutely financially huge mobile gaming is on its own, and showed that the model is extremely effective by overtaking consoles and PC.
Consoles were and still are more mainstream than PC with some companies claiming PC gaming is dying for so long that is took a long time for other companies to start giving a go at a storefront on PC.
I just don’t really buy the Steam factor, since most people’s exposure to mtx, iap, and in game ads has been through mobile gaming. Like if they don’t even play CS or TF2 they don’t even know about it at all which would be someone like me, but mobile gaming has been so easily accessible that even “non gamers” like old people were sucked into stuff like bejeweled.
Most games have also been console ports to PC than the other way around too. Steam and PC emergence has felt like more a recent thing that started taking hold last gen with companies finally coming around to porting stuff to PC.
That’s not to say they haven’t had a hand in it, but it seems overstated with rise in the freemium model across platforms being the main driver. Even the concept of gacha existed before video games.
Yeah, I don’t think lot of gamers realize just how huge the mobile gaming market is and how influential it is with other companies following trends of proven money makers.
Like Apple ranked third in gaming revenue with 15.3 billion in 2021, and traditional gamers wouldn’t think of Apple when it comes to gaming.
Wasn’t it more mobile gaming that had a bigger impact on mtx and loot boxes with games there having consumers less willing to pay more than 99 cents at the time and having to rely on the freemium model as well as having an enormous user base with the accessibility of smartphones?
I keep hearing tf2 and cs go but maybe it’s because I got into PC games late, but had no clue about loot boxes. And average gamer or last least the younger ones grew up playing consoles and then mobiles games more than PCs at the time aside from PC only games like league of legends, cs, and so on.
Seems to be other games too
https://www.techspot.com/news/105709-windows-11-24h2-update-breaks-ubisoft-games-fix.html
On another note being subbed to similar communities across fediverse kind of makes articles that popped up a day ago and sometimes longer show up again give me feelings of deja vu.
Reviews are more relevant to customers who are buying the game than people who own the game.
It’s no different than people putting in a bad review because a product they got broke on them.
When it comes to digital PC games on changing hardware and OS what the game was at launch is not the same years later. Who’s ever fault it is for the game being in a broken state doesn’t change it is broken, so reviews being updated to reflect the change is helpful for people actually buying games.
There’s been issues raised for a while. Fixes don’t always happen that quickly if ever.
https://www.techspot.com/news/105709-windows-11-24h2-update-breaks-ubisoft-games-fix.html
24 hour fix was mentioned by you, but review bombs happening after issues having popped up all the way back in October in the article is indicative of current owners being fed up and now resorting to public pressure for fixes while also serving as a disclaimer to potential buyers who don’t keep up with gaming news.
Cloud saves, achievements, and tracking hours is something I do like. I have over a 100 GOG games, so individually managing exe files isn’t something I really want to do.