Oh yeah, I’m definitely only speaking to what they are now. I avoided Steam for a long time because of DRM + not really having a computer that could run anything they offered anyway. I don’t have much of an idea of their original context.
Like everyone I find it very useful having a main place to go to to buy games, and a main program to launch that collects all my game-stuff together.
and this is just one portion of the valve nausia train. they introduced game-as-excuse-for-a-market design with the TF2 reconfigure, which they then perfected in dota and particularly counterstrike, where loot crate gambling is a destructive activity involving thousands of dollars at any given time that have nothing at all to do with playing a video game about shooting people with a gun. dota came up with the wonderful innovation of making fans pay for the pro scene in place of valve, who then take a (large) cut for doing nothing. the article in question already tells you about their “hey wait a minute, can’t we just pay people nothing to make our shit for us?” eureka moment. they turned sales into games so you can give them money for nothing, then sell the nothing you get so they can take another cut. they collect data and feed it back to you to tell you what to buy. whether you do or not, I’m sure that information is itself sold. they encourage the worst of the metacritic mentality in their recommendations and in greenlight before that. their entire business is taking the focus off of games and putting it on how to turn everything around games into worthless shit they can charge for as a way to engender brand loyalty. steam itself is simple volume, it exists to overtake the market it serves with itself. steam is the game, the shit you buy just keeps the wheels spinning. valve have used it to gorge themselves on every festering part of the modern internet business and branding lifestyle. the story of how valve mutated from a quake mod studio into the buzzword frankenstein they are today is the story of the entire sickness of the internet age
Steam is good in the same way Google is good. It’s convenient for us as consumers but also it’s a massive hateful techno-blob that will one day devour us all, Akira-style
This is a nice clean analogy; the product is still mostly good and their existence created many new good things but it’s impossible for a monopoly to not introduce deleterious frictions over time.
and they’re both terrible at ux
They were as far behind facebook and mobile games on this as the Ottomans were in WW1 military technology. They didn’t pursue it with more vigor than EA, Microsoft, Ubisoft; they just were more successful. And the F2P model they created is less hostile and draining than the alternatives.
Which, again, is not to say that it’s good! but all their real evils can be seen in context of the industry, and their scale & power within it. Valve creating a small evil can matter more than Microsoft fumbling a big evil.
god that’s such a direct consequence of their weird hiring policies; it’s impossibly over-determined
RE: Valve stuff, here’s a thread
I’m thinking of the benefits that have come from improving their unified platform: the managed installers/updates, the unified storefront, the Steamworks package, really, that both cements their monopoly and has made PC gaming much better, with unified chat, matchmaking, cloud saves.
It’s a modern tech company in all senses in that these services are useful and beneficial and have created an ecosystem for previously shut-out creators but is definitely a monopoly.
Funnily enough, it was just announced that Destiny 2 for PC is going to be distributed exclusively via Battle.net (Destiny is published by Activision/Blizzard) and all the PC gamers are absolutely fuming that it’s not on Steam for some reason
i don’t even know if this is a good game. yasuhisa watanabe wasn’t enough to save the first game for me, but he might be this time.
If you didn’t like the first game I’m not sure if you’d like the second game either. It’s a bit faster and nuttier so it probably feels better to casually pick up and play but it’s perhaps less precise and methodical than the first game. Not that I have a particularly great understanding of the games myself (I don’t exactly have a lot of people to play it with me) but somehow that’s the impression I feel like I’ve gathered from the internet and from my time with them. I don’t know if it counts for anything but the several YouTube channels I followed for SnR Duo matches have gone back to playing SnR1 again for quite a while now.
One thing I’ve always thought about is that the way your life starts draining to zero in the last 10-15 seconds of the match felt like a concession to the fact that they couldn’t resolve the same trend of timeouts that pervade high level Virtual-On play and still pervade in SnR (and would undoubtedly be the status quo method of victory in SnR if the life-draining mechanic wasn’t implemented).
If you like anime SnR Duo did have a text heavy, visual novel style story mode but who knows if it’ll be kept for this this new version. There could even be balance changes.
as a linux user and on the dev side of things these days, my opinion on steam is really just “yeah, they do a lot of distasteful bullshit, how about you give us practical alternatives”
and no matter how much you might hate what they do, they’re still a better option than the basically worthless marketplaces provided by google and apple
maybe if y’all supported the great things the itch.io guys were doing we wouldn’t be in this kind of mess, but we are, because that’s how the world works
oh man it just hit me that i’m getting into my itch collection as a direct result of reading this lol
the itch app is ok y’all!
They’ve come right out in interviews as saying that the MK8 team is behind ARMS (at the very least, they share a producer, so there’s most likely a lot of the same kind of same design goals in mind) and I think it shows quite a bit both in aesthetic and game flow (though I will say it was kind of a dick move to have a Splatoon 2 trailer right after the ARMS direct because somehow they’ve managed to up their style game in that).
also did you see Twintelle’s ass, my lord
itch is probably my ideal storefront in how much it just leaves you alone. Developers seem to have a lot of leeway in how they format their pages, customers can use the website or the app, there doesn’t appear to be any native DRM.
Yeah itch+discord is pretty much why people don’t see me hanging out or buying games on Steam these days.
What’s the best Metroidy/Hyperlight game on itchio?