A lot of your posts make so much more sense now…
That’s a personal thing, but for me between Humble Bundle, Twitch Prime, Epic, and Origin Access Basic now I have very very little reason to outright pay for games. The games are quality enough and my free time sparse enough that I’m getting good mileage around them. That is averaging $14.50 I’m spending on games a month (not counting Amazon prime because I pay for it not because of Twitch).
The last times I bought PC games were:
- Monster Hunter World release because I was hyped for it
- $40 of games 2-3 steam sales ago which I still regret because I haven’t gotten to them yet.
So the glut of PC games (and lack of free time) means I’m only going to buy games if I have significant hype for a game (which for me is rare). Otherwise it’s mostly not worth me paying. The only reason I picked up PS4 games recently is because I had gamestop credit and a buy 2 get 1 preowned deal (and even then each game was no more than $13 each).
That being said, it has gotten me to try games I would have never tried otherwise. I just beat Death Squared which I got from Twitch and it was Fantastic, but if I hadn’t played it I would have probably never payed it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing for the developer or not though.
Whoa…
But if you already own it on Steam, you will get the final 2 episodes there.
Oh wow, just fuck off already
Makes sense to me - want to maximize their profit margins on a risky investment.
Pretty epic thread, huh?
As far as I understand it, Epic gave them (some of) the money to finish development. But I have lot of doubts about whether anyone is going to maximize their profit margins here. But of course it is unlikely that we will ever get any sales numbers. Which is itself funny, considering steamspy’s existence.
From Reddit: Epic store Subnautica users turn to Steam forums for help.
Also, it appears that Subnautica now has DRM to make sure it’s always run from the Epic launcher, so… so much for the DRM-free thing.
Sir. We have it from good authority that the only thing forums offer is a means for gamers to abuse developers, it couldn’t possibly be a place where playrs go to get their games fixed and hopefully running today and not 4 to 8 weeks from now when or even if the developer gets around to answering e-mail.
This is similar to my complaint earlier about the Epic store. I actually have to pull up the Steam page to find any useful information about a game.
Making me open up your competitor’s game store to get information about the game I want to buy. Great design, that.
Storm in a teacup.
There are a myriad of ways to get information on a game. Reddit, PC Gaming Wiki, self-hosted forums. We’re on the Internet and it’s ya’know, searchable…
And yet, they’re on the Steam forum.
When I search the internet for gaming issues and answers the top hits include Steam threads.
Yeah, like I barely use the steam forums, but when I do, it is because I am having an issue with the game, and usually there is an easy to find post that is helpful.
Forums fixes are a symptom of the problem, not the end all, be all solution. There’s no reason there can’t be a better way to direct players to technical help.
I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that the creators are not going to take their extra cut and use it to hire more staff to actually respond to player requests for helps, and that on release days, weeks, the best option anyone really has is to go to some forum and see if anyone else is having the same issue and, better yet, found a way to resolve it.
Even if they hire 2-3 people to handle something, the general public has 100s sometimes 1,000s doing it just because. If I ran into a bug and I know a work around for it that no one else knows, post it on the forum and keep playing. At least others can enjoy it in the meantime. And that’s the entire point, they want help now, not to be qued at the bottom of the list of someone else’s work list.
Hosting your own forums really is not that catatstrophically expensive. I do it at my site, I even use the same software QT3 uses (which is a bit pricey). The same people you would pay to check steam forums (me) are the same people who would check your own forums (me). In other words, swapping from having to moderate forums you don’t really control (steam) to those on your own site where you are admin, involves virtually no effort.
Quite a few devs who are new to the industry have just got used to the idea that the conversation about their games happens on steam, but this never used to be the case. Indie devs used to have websites, and the serious ones still do anyway.
If epic allow devs to link directly to their own forums, even better. That would be ideal.
That’s not ideal at all. Now there’s dozens of additional forum logins for people to manage (for the devs who bother to create and maintain forums). And of course, dozens of additional opportunities to get the inevitable “Gosh, we’re so sorry, but we sort of got hacked could you please change your password?” within 6-18 months.
Loads of forums (mine included) allow google, facebook or twitter logins.