• Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I really hope that Gabe has future-proofed valve. It really is a remarkable treasure and one of the most user-friendly platforms of all time. Especially in these days when we are seeing a corporate takeover of the internet, or realizing that we lost a long time ago when we put all of our eggs in the Google basket.

    I could see so much potential for fuckery happening, can you imagine if steam was as fond of kicking people off the platform as Reddit is? Or if games were constantly being curated to make sure they check all the boxes like the YouTube algorithm does? Five Nights at Freddy’s would have never existed if steam played by those rules, same for every other surprise Indie hit

      • twelve20two @slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Aren’t Google/YouTube, Amazon, Facebook/Meta also all private?

        Edit: just realized you probably meant privately owned and also not publicly traded on a stock exchange

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        A successful gaming company going public ultimately leads to their IPs dying off thanks to executive meddling and the developers being sent to the mines to work on whatever is popular.

        Thank God that the Sims appeals to such a wide casual audience and is one of the rare franchises in gaming with a higher female fanbase than a male one.

        So much so that when the Sims 2 didn’t have a breast size slider for fear that perverts would take advantage of it, the decision proved to be unpopular because too many of the fan base was unable to make Sims that accurately looked like themselves.

        Because if that wasn’t the case the life simulator genre would be pretty much dead, outside of promising looking indie games that try to replicate the experience, remain with a Steam page that says “Early Access” and a kickstarter that is ignoring all emails.

        Even if every game after the Sims 2 was turned into a nickel and dime machine, and I say this as someone who not only has all of the DLC for The Sims 4, but also, remember the old days when people joked about The Sims 1 having an expansion pack for everything.

        Incidentally I don’t think downloadable content and micro transactions are necessarily a bad thing, it’s certainly beats the alternative of going to the store and buying a new edition of the game that has like a couple of bug fixes and maybe one bonus dungeon at the end…

        I just wish they were reigned in.

        I’m all for private Enterprise being able to call its own shots as long as it isn’t price gouging and hoarding Necessities like medicine, food, or housing.

        That said if legislation came out and penalized companies for openly basing their business model on FOMO it would be one of the first times I actually wanted the video game industry to come under Fire by the government.

    • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s impossible to future-proof. You can’t for the rest of time have good leaders, inevitably someone will come and ruin it.

        • DingoBilly@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Even if you carefully get a successor, they can still fuck up and ruin it. Or they just die/decide to move on 2 years in and you’re in similar shit Creek. Or hell, Gaben himself gets dementia and starts making shit decisions.

          It’s impossible to control.

      • Rose@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Agreed.

        First, as the creator behind the new Metro skin, I can say that their CSS is flawed to say the least, while the UX sense is extremely off. Not only do they almost copy Windows 8 in that they have two instances of settings that do the same thing, but the interface is also full of remnants of the past, with some pages and windows prioritizing blue and others gray, and so forth - most likely caused by the components released at different times, with years in between. Their understanding of alignment is also absent, as the web pages and the client (which too is essentially a web page now) are full of elements that aren’t centered in their boxes, or boxes that aren’t aligned on their axes.

        Secondly, the talk at the OP link is just fluff because Steam is as bad as it can be at helping you discover good games. The ‘curated’ front page promotions will typically feature a game that is already well-known, but when browsing through the categories, most of the games are asset flips and porn games (usually both at once). The “for you” recommendations are pretty useless for someone like me, as Steam incentivizes farming trading cards to then sell them on the market and get funds to buy more games, which means that many of the games Steam treats as played have never been actually played by me, as I idle them for the cards.