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Geck0_k
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I would not be surprised to find some kind of shrine to "The Algorithm" at Valve. Probably hooked up to Vives with fleshlights so they can really show how much they love leaving all their work to "The Algorithm".

Any who you can filter games to 1,179 featuring nudity, but want to find LGBT games? You're presented a much more limited choice.

 

Also the whole "illegal or troll games" is one of those things that you can't just leave as a throwaway line in official policy. That's the kind of thing that needs like a fair few pages of clarification. What is to "troll". For years BBC used "trolling" instead of "bullying", in the past "trolling" was putting up a Rickroll.

And by which countries definition of "illegal" will games be blocked? Will Valve apply US laws globally or make sure that games apply to regional limitations such as the restrictions on Nazi content within Germany? With rules impacting "lootboxes" will those be removed due to gambling laws? As they expand into China will any game referencing Taiwan and Tibet be removed? Will games with LGBT representation be removed for not fitting some countries laws?

 

I've quite a chunk of my gaming collection on Steam so it'd be a bitch to completely pull away from them, but they're certainly no golden angel come to save gaming. Gaming is certainly not as big as presidential elections or EU referendums but maybe in light of all controversy surrounding these if I was Valve I'd be rethinking my over-reliance on algorithms n letting people self-police the store and community.

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Hopefully this will push them to be more consistent with their page info. The developer/publisher info is just a text field, so a lot of them just write it without any consistency. Which makes it kind of annoying when clicking on it to see their entire library. For example, the Neptunia games have wildly different titles so you can't make them all show up with keyword search. But you can't do it through the dev info either because on some pages it's "Idea Factory" and on others it's "Idea Factory Co." or whatever else.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 6 months later...

Why are so many outlets and youtubers shilling for the Epic Store all of a sudden? I don't get it. They hated Uplay and Origin, and rightfully so because those services were trash when they launched. All I hear about with the Epic Store is how they take a smaller percentage from the developers. Well that's great for them but it really means fuck all to me, the consumer. Getting a free game every month is nice, I'll admit, but there's no user reviews, a very spotty refund policy, no forums, bad customer service, very disconcerting privacy concerns, shitty timed exclusives, poor performance, and until recently it didn't even have a search bar. I can certainly see why developers would want to take their business there, but it's because the store seems skewed with a heavy bias in favor of the developers over the consumers. What I don't get is why all these influencers are trying to convince me to jump ship. Steam is a piece of crap in some ways, I won't argue otherwise, but other than the monthly giveaway the Epic Store really doesn't seem to offer anything to me that Steam doesn't already do better. 

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  • 7 months later...

So, people noticed some backend activity on SteamDB for Dragon Age 2 and The Saboteur, the latter not having ever been available for purchase. This led to speculation that EA is planning a return to Steam and, well...

 

 

That cup sure is steaming! Most likely they'll only be releasing older single-player titles such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect and the likes. I wouldn't expect the latest Battlefield or whatever. Then again, a Steam release for Anthem could potentially give it that little boost it so desperately needs...

 

Personally, as long as I can finally play Mirror's Edge Catalyst without having to reinstall Origin, I'll be happy.

 

The timing for this is also pretty interesting considering all the Epic fuckery going on over the past year. EA returning to Steam now of all times would kinda speak volumes. We're also already seeing companies like Devolver trying to backtrack and talking about "resetting the discourse" on the whole "Steam cut too high and bad" thing. Seems like perhaps Epic wasn't quite the saviors they were trying to position themselves as? Steam sure as hell didn't flinch one bit and indies like Devolver are obviously the ones with the most to lose here, so it's not too surprising that they'd be the first ones trying to rebuild that particular bridge lol.

Edited by FLD
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That's the thing I don't get. They've been on their own for a while now and there's no way they're only just now underperforming on Origin. So what changed? It's hard not to look at the timing and wonder if Epic's bullshit played a part in this. Just a year ago, you had all the big publishers looking like they were getting ready to jump ship away from Steam. Then Epic started poaching games left and right and suddenly Microsoft is putting their games on Steam and Bethesda and EA are coming back. Things were starting to look pretty dire just a few months ago, so it's hard to believe the timing is just a coincidence here.

 

It could be that Epic lit a fire under Valve's ass and forced them to reach out to publishers. Or maybe them entering the market so forcefully ended up hurting other publishers' efforts and brought them back to Steam. Another possibility could be that even with exclusives they're still not doing too hot, which could have scared the other publishers and made Steam more appealing. I mean, even when claiming a game did well Epic are still being super cagey about actual sales figures. And since we know their exclusivity deals come in the form of them essentially "pre-purchasing" a certain amount of copies, it's unclear how many of "X copies sold" are actual sales the developers benefit from since X could easily include those copies Epic "pre-purchased".

 

The latter two scenarios would be some delicious, god-tier irony. ?

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  • 1 year later...

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