Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Yeah, you've made clear you don't care if people besides you get tricked into throwing away money. What does a systemic problem matter, so long as you, the protagonist of reality, are safe?

Your choice doesn't change this system. The people who fall for this shit matter more than your nonparticipation, by an order of magnitude. Only a slim fraction of them need to pony up five actual dollars per imaginary hat, to make this widespread abuse worth spreading wider. Which is why it's fucking everywhere - and not going away - despite people like you, chiding others 'just don't buy it!' I'm already not doing it. It's still a problem, and it demands fixing, and me not doing it plainly will not suffice.

Systemic problems aren't about you.

We were never gonna shop our way out of this abuse.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Only legislation will fix this.

Hard to argue with this. I'm going to, anyway, and give a doubly contrarian answer - the most influential video game of all time is Dungeons & Dragons. There is not a single element of CRPGs that wasn't nailed down by 1976, on various mainframes. All those teenage dorks were ripping off the freshly-released tabletop RPG and adding first-person dungeon crawling, random map generation, and everything else that Akalabeth popularized but did not invent. Some of them had real-time multiplayer. Because mainframes. Rogue was only the best of an entire *spate* of games just like it - a popular and well-built point of reference more than a surprising innovator. The continuing explosion of CRPGs was surely less about deliberately saying "let's make a game like Rogue" and more about other people seeing your broader-zeitgeist dungeon-crawler and saying "oh, it's like Rogue." By contrast, Doom is a clear inflection point. "Doom clones" were absolutely trying to clone Doom. id themselves wound up cloning Doom. But I'm not sure Rogue, arriving in 1980, was anything more than an excellent example of the wider genre it came from. In fact, for direct contrast, damn near every JRPG traces back to Wizardry. That game's creators explicitly namedrop earlier mainframe titles. The Japanese did not have the same tabletop game trend. The PC-8801 port of Wizardry came out of fucking nowhere, for them, and apparently blew their dicks off.

Then why Ultima and not Akalabeth?

> they make more money than every other platform combined An abuse which demands correction.

Fuck software patents. Zero advantages to anyone except greedy bastards who fear competition. They're not "playing it safe," they're just killing art.

Not an answer. Not a defense of Valve's 30% cut. You're not being serious.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Only legislation will fix this.

Dark patterns work.

Until the game does a secret dice-roll and decides a big enemy has already beheaded you, making you stand there doing nothing while the animation plays. Even if they're almost dead and you're at half health.

Two comments ago: >> Their cut is so huge that they can afford to let devs sell keys elsewhere, knowing it makes no difference to their immense profit margin. >> >> Largely because their monopoly is self-reinforcing, and the number of off-site sales is a rounding error. Let's try this again. How is a 30% gross cut worse for consumers than 15%? Because *that* policy, *that specific policy,* is shared by Nintendo, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft... and Valve.

>> Why should we do a thing that's completely unrelated to the question being asked? Incorrect. What Epic means by "for developers," is... developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how *that, specifically,* is bad for you. I am not interested in general attacks against Epic. I make no general defense of Epic. Fortnite's business model should be illegal. But what you're doing is bad argumentation. You're reaching for ways to say 'Epic bad' as if that's gotta be relevant. As if attacking Epic in general constitutes a defense of one specific thing Valve does. As if promoting Valve in general means this one specific thing can't be wrong. As for indie support - Valve doesn't need to push big games on their store, because *they have a monopoly.* There is no sense telling people 'if you're gonna buy it on PC, buy it on Steam!,' because of course you will. Indie games 'don't make Epic money' because Alan fucking Wake barely makes them money. Their market share is garbage. Steam has the freedom and the incentive to push more game sales, of any kind, and there's a lot more little games than big ones. None of what Valve is doing would suddenly disappear if they took *only* one-quarter of gross revenue. Or a fifth. Or less. They're shaving straight off the top for nearly the entire PC gaming market. Their war-chest is ridiculous. They have such a "petro curse" that they briefly forgot to make games. Yet they treat the studios that make them *all of their money* the same way Nintendo and Sony squeeze console developers. Would criticizing *this specific cut* be easier, if we talked about Apple's iron grip on the App Store? Because it's the same damn policy. Feel free to talk shit about when Apple does it, if you insist on judging whole entities instead of what they do.

That shift was a quarter-century ago. 'It used to suck worse' is a bad excuse even when it's fresh. I don't care what Steam would cost if they were a brick-and-mortar store; they have only ever done digital distribution, and they have done it for a *while.* Their cut is so huge that they can afford to let devs sell keys elsewhere, knowing it makes no difference to their immense profit margin. Largely because their monopoly is self-reinforcing, and the number of off-site sales is a rounding error. Meanwhile: What Epic means by "for developers" is, developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how that's bad for you.

Neat. Explaining how they got the monopoly doesn't change that they have a monopoly. Amazon or Epic could do all that - and they genuinely could, god knows they have the money - but the result would not be the same. They exist in the context of Steam already running shit. Adoption is a feature you cannot design. That's why Valve had to force it on people via Half-Life 2. > Tim Sweeny even said EGS is made for developers, with the implication it is not for consumers. What an absurd read. As if middlemen taking a third of revenue is pro-consumer.

'Why didn't they just try harder?' is an increasingly worrying take. A company could copy Steam's storefront and backend, verbatim, and it wouldn't impact Steam's monopoly on PC game sales. They're entrenched *and* they're well-liked. You can't buy a reputation overnight. Blaming the action without considering the environment is still a mistake. Epic tried everything, and people still scoff about UI, like *that's* the billion-dollar difference. Nah: it's attributing the difference in outcome to surface-level distinctions. And if Epic unfucked their apparently ugly storefront, these people would pick another excuse, because I guarantee you it wouldn't change EGS's irrelevance.

... and then they'll recoil in horror when you mention that's what a monopoly is. Monopolies can be positive and functional. They're still monopolies. Streaming was better was Netflix was the only choice, and had everything, for a reasonable price. Competition's supposed to be what drives those qualities. Exclusivity breaks that. Exclusivity splinters the market into desperate fiefdoms. But there's still a word for when only one store matters.

Seriously though, some maniac's bound to coerce this onto PS Vita. And Android.