Can you imagine Battle.net beating Steam, then the primary online digital distribution platform ending up being owned by Activision?
I get the icks just thinking about it.
The worst part is it’s not that far fetched, we’re actually pretty lucky that valve isn’t massively predatory and we didn’t end up with bobby kotick instead of gaben
The reason Valve is not massively predatory is because they aren’t publicly traded and remain a private company.
We got lucky.
This is true, but it’s not the only factor. Staying private allows a company to not be predatory, but it definitely does not guarantee it - it simply allows the executives to choose. It’s the combination of Valve being private and Gaben always staying true to his values despite his incredible wealth that gave us Steam in its current form.
I’ve known plenty of private companies that were as shitty as a public one, or more. Quality executives are vanishingly rare, particularly at this level of company value.
I’m incredibly wary of what will happen if/when he retires or dies. I hope they have some sort of iron clad succession plan in place.
Staying private allows a company to not be predatory, but it definitely does not guarantee it - it simply allows the executives to choose
Public companies can choose that too, they’re just mostly run by horrible people.
The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.
TF2 is not and has never been pay for anything except cosmetics.
I come from a time where we all lost our shit over horse armor being sold. Your comment just reminds me they have normalized things. They won.
I’ve never understood what’s so bad about letting people pay for virtual cosmetics. You can still play 100% of the game.
Well… No. Those cosmetics are part of the game. You should be able to unlock them through gameplay.
They are part of the game, but they do not change the play of the game.
In a perfect world, things like FOMO and group pressure would not exist. People would understand that skins are just useless pixels. We do not live in that world. Yes there are a handful of people who are not affected by the psychological effects of this and if you are one of them lucky you. The truth is, most people are affected, most people feel bad to be the only one with no knife skin, with default armor ( “Default” being an insult in online games with a very young audience) and most people do love the “look” and feel a real need to buy cosmetics.
There is a reason game developers hire psychologists. That’s why all lootboxes have sparkles and sound effects and even look like slot machines although what is in your box is long decided. It is because it works for most people’s brains as stimulating. That’s why some people make a living out of videos where they open loot boxes because even watching someone else open them makes our brain chemistry go WROOOOOM.
It is way less of a choice for most people than you think it is. I remember one FPS game has a quest where you need to open a loot box ingame and others can watch you do it, to animate them to buy loot boxes. These businesses have no shame to invent constantly new ways of making you enter the shop. Like making food rot ingame so you will have to buy a fridge from the shop (Fallout 76).
MTX and loot boxes are part of the core of many games. When they finally got rid of loot boxes in Mordor: Shadow of War , they had to redo the whole economy of the game, because it was to the core made in a way to encourage you to buy war chests for better Orcs.
You CAN live without ever eating cake, but if everyone eats cake, all other food looks bland and boring and you constatnly are shown ads for cake, shiny cake, tasty cake, colorful cake, cake that you can only buy until and cake that only 100 people can buy and all your friends are having cake right now and telling you how good it is… there is a point where it doesn’t matter that the cake is a
liescam, you will want cake too.Loot box and that gambling business aside, wouldn’t the FOMO argument also apply to the video game itself? If everyone around you is playing this game, you’ll be pressured into purchasing it yourself as well.
I mean you are right to some degree, but considering there’s way worse stuff to get riled up about, I think we mostly have our priorities straight, and I have no issues with that.
… and they could put an end to the black market for skins and the gambling at anytime, but refuse to do so. This would get rid of the account stealing mostly too.
Not to mention that Valve had to be forced to follow consumer laws in some countries by expensive lawsuits.
It was also Valve who started the “you do not own your games” shite, by forcing the connection of licences to an account and a gaming client, which got rid of the ability to resell your games or to have at least the game’s installer offline available.
I’ll never get why Valve always gets a pass. Would it be worse if Steam was owned by Epic / Tencent / Activision …, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it great.
If someone want to give praise I would point to GOG. Not perfect but at least I own my licence to the point that I can install my games from an installer I have archived on my HDD (no deleting the game, no forced updates, no adding MTX at a later time, no taking away licenced music), I can go to earlier versions of Early Access games if they change it for the worse and more.
And valve tried to push the paid mods shit, too bad people forget too quickly. Not saying valve is straight up bad, but they aren’t your friends either
Why are you against mod creators getting paid for their work? Some mods are amazing and definitely deserve some money.
The store shouldn’t get a cut though. But if that’s what you mean, let’s call that out specifically.
Modding has always been motivated by passion, not everything needs to be connected to money in this world, the capitalistic idea that only money can motivate people to do things sucks.
You don’t pay people because it’s the only motivator. You pay people because you need money to survive in this world. If we don’t, then the only people who can afford to spend time making mods are those who are already have their basic needs taken care of through other means.
I would like to see a world where anyone with the passion for modding can make mods.
Go see what paid mods does to the modding scene in FF14 and think again. (spoiler: Its drama, people stealing assets and trying to monetize it, piracy, people paying for mods that stop working when the game updates and getting no refunds, etc)
So is all art, should artists all work for free? Why do I have to pay for books and movies? Aren’t the authors motivated by passion? Isn’t your argument the same one used by corporations underpaying game devs all the time, “since they should be happy fulfilling their passion”?
the capitalistic idea that only money can motivate people to do things sucks.
Agree, and I wish we lived in an utopia where nobody needs money and everyone can share their work freely. Sadly, this is not the world we live in, and so we need to reward passionate people to let them dedicate time to their passion rather than having to only focus on work for survival. That way not only rich people can afford to make mods.
You mention the world is not an utopia and on the same breath explains how we should make it even worse. I come from a third world country and as a kid most people could only afford one maybe two games, all my friends bought half-life and warcraft 3, can you guess why?
By your logic we should also make libraries paid and charge for all FOSS too, yes, lets put a price on everything! What an utopia this will lead to!
Plenty of large mods have crowd funding to support them.
I guess because I never played TF2 back then my experience of games having predatory gambling mechanics was mobile games with the f2p and low costs pushing towards different ways to monetize. Seemed inevitable once mobile gaming exploded and makes up a larger portion of revenue than PC and console gaming making other companies want to copy it.
Battlenet brought some really clever innovations back in the day!
If it was 2010 and you had both running, battlenet was clearly superior.
Battlenet’s UI and presentation looked great. Automatic patches, lots of settings to where files should go, info about the game. They also had this sweet feature where you can play when it has the core files, and it continues to download in the background, which still doesn’t exist in non-battlenet games.
Really though, 2010 was also when Blizzard started to fall apart too. Constant churning of WoW expansions, deciding to split StarCraft 2 into three games, and making Diablo 3 look “prettier” was all bad signs.
If Blizzard owned something comparable to Steam they could have become too big to be bought by Activision.
Its possible that being the platform meant they wouldn’t have been bought up.
You have to realize that if they had become Steam, they would have had so much money they probably wouldn’t have sold to Activision. Hell, they probably would have been the ones buying Activision.
Wow, we dodged a bullet there I guess
Blizzard was well liked before they joined Activision
And people would fanboy it just the same as Steam
Yup, it’s a good reminder that Steam can change direction at any point as well.
That can always happen, therefore I hate all locked in services, even if they are good at this moment. But so far it looks like steam is still interested in long-term goal, they didn’t go public yet after all.
Until Gaben steps down or pass away. It will be a butt clenching moment.
Especially if they get bought out by Activision.
I was there… 2000 years ago
Wow gamers were zealots
Valve asked several companies to build something like Steam, was turned down every time and decided to do it themselves.
Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren’t on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.
I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
oof. years before heavier-than-air flight, an engineer in Florence wanted to utilise novel aerodynamic techniques to create a “flying helix”, but was reportedly ignored.
Yes, right this way to the Florentine Helicopter Mr. Bryant
We dodged a bullet, I’d say
