Could you put a pool?
Do you have links on your readings ?
I won't buy it because I play only solo games, especially those rpg games... π
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Separate clients are acceptable. Steam itself was just a fancy launcher and the world's worst DRM for Valve's games, before it became a large, lumbering game store.
Similarly, technically, GOG is the company platform of CD Projekt Red, which tended to focus on oldies before turning into a DRM-free generic video game storefront.
Origin was EA's online launcher before it started to accept other companies' products.
I see no issues with Activision trying to turn battle.net into a full-fledged client, or Bethesda making something similar (although their Launcher is rather infamously shit), or Epic tying their new releases on PC to the Epic Launcher.
Diversity can be nice. People rarely shop at just one store in their entire life.
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I can understand that but this comes with pros and cons.
And if the cons are more then the pros then the clients are just making more money and nothing more
See your examples all are from publishers, the best publishers in the sense that they care only for the money: Activision and EA killed more developers that one can name, brought us the standard breaking milking of the COD, battlefront, Andromeda and many more.
Zenimax creation club, close so many great mods, now fallout MMO with pre-order only beta, no refunds, then refunds, then no refunds for now.
Take two again another great example.
I am not excluding Steam because they invented this wheel but the + from Steam are more then what the other clients have :D
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I can hardly condemn a company for trying to save money when said money is literally just a tax put on them by another company (this case: Valve), when they can implement the same solution themselves.
There are money saving practices which are bad, like mandatory crunches during development or creating games with people on temporary contracts. Or finding tax havens (even GOG was guilty of that for years), or in the US trying to play around with contract to save on health insurance and benefits.
Making your own client for your own product to not pay 30% of your game income to a random storefront that is not even providing a good service is a rather sane and good decision, even if some really bad companies made it. Even terrible places like Activision, EA, and Zenimax have good moves once in a while that are not just blatant and blind money hoarding for the sake of hoarding money. (For example, as much as I fiercely hate Bethesda, despite the Fallout 76 fiasco, they are still the largest Western supporters of single-player-only AAA games.)
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When they sell thro retail don't they pay a tax cut also?
Don't they use microtransactions to make more money, this is usually why they put their clients in the first place like EA did at frst.
The lack of user feedback, no refunds, great servers like for fallout are great plusses for those clients
You know why they pay 30% for market share revenue, Steam has the largest user base.
From that standpoint, manufacturers shouldn't sell to Amazon also.
You said diversity, diversity has a new meaning now, you make a game and only put it on your client this is diversity now, diversity of mini-monopolies.
By the way, talgaby, warn me if I go overboard, I understand what you want to say but their execution is bad.
GOG is a great addition to the table, origin, uplay, social club are not, they only have their products, nothing great for the customers only for them so no support from me!
""For example, as much as I fiercely hate Bethesda, despite the Fallout 76 fiasco, they are still the largest Western supporters of single-player-only AAA games.) well still are for the moment, F76 is not single-player only AAA game and F4 was not great.
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Origin actually opened itself to others, I am waiting for a sale on FFXV there. They slowly started to take the storefront seriously and try to team up with others to make it more Steam/GOG like.
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I am not excluding Steam because they invented this wheel
Battle.net is 8 years older than Steam.
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Battle.net when it was new was not a storefront though. It was just a way to make finding, creating & joining multiplayer matches easier than what came before it, and even then it was not a unique concept, just a well implemented one.
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Battle.net as an online infrastructure is older, but the Battle.net client is newer. I can't remember the exact date when it launched, but Starcraft II launched on 2010 and Battle.net client didn't exist yet (logging-in and Battle.net account management was done all inside the game itself), it was released a bit later.
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I don't like using separate clients 'cause I'm lazy, but I think it's perfectly reasonable to make them. If you're well-known and don't need that boost of Steam having the largest user base, and have enough games to warrant your own client, then go for it, I reckon. Not much to lose if the demand for your games is high enough and consumers recognise/trust you -- in fact, the cut that Valve takes is just hurting you at that point. 'Course I'm not sure if the demand for F76 or trust in Bethesda was high enough to justify a new client, but still.
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Origin was EA's online launcher before it started to accept other companies' products.
No it's EA attempt on the pie that Valve has, EA stop selling games on steam made their own DRM Origin their own store EA even made deal with ubisoft to have their games on ubisoft's store and ubi games on their. this was 5 years ago way before EA accept other companies products into their store.
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Valve told EA they couldn't sell their DLC for Dragon Age on Steam.
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well it was because they wanted to use a ea only currency
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EA made Origin before they stopped selling on Steam. Best of all, they weren't just bundling their client into your purchases like Ubisoft with UPlay. And buying on Steam unlocked your games on Origin as well, since it would scan your Steam client to find out what you owned. Unfortunately, since DLC in Steam was hidden, EA started using a different system for that so people could buy it for both services without issues.
Unfortunately, Valve got a little bit grumpy, removed some of their games and said they couldn't come back until Valve was getting all of their sweet 30%. You can guess how that ended.
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They did try to enforce Origin for a while. Even games that predated Origin started getting automatic install attempts, and if you wanted a non-origin installer, good luck. I was boycotting it due to their EULA back in its early life, and having things like Spore try to install Origin was annoying. I ended up accidentally agreeing to the Origin EULA when I bought Darkspore, thinking that because it was being launched through Steam it would have been different. Makes sense they would expand their non-specific data collection terms to other stuff, but I was a bit miffed.
Ah well, Darkspore is long dead now anyway \:3/
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Haven't played Spore or Darkspore myself, so can't speak on those, but all the Steam EA games I have at the time have no Origin intergration. At most, they wanted your email for an account system, and that was related to the DLC system I mentioned.
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Well, if Steam took a 10% cut instead of a 30%+ one, that would help the market.
Just cos they are the most succesful doesn't make em right :)
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I'd be all for that as a dev! It's unlikely, though, since even itch.io recommends %10-15 and file hosting is just about the only feature they offer. It'd be nice if it were structured like Lumberyard where the royalty is based on the number of Steam services you integrate, but aside from Cloud Saves and Steam Friend integration the rest of the features are only worthwhile since they're free. In the end you're paying that extra 15-20% for Steam's market share.
Also I hear it's possible to negotiate for Steam to take a smaller cut, but you have to be AAA to even get in the door.
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Ah okay.
So Fallout 76 is so buggy that it is regarded a broken product and Bethesda should be less strict with refunds. They don't allow refunds after downloading it, let alone testing it properly.
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The thing is, they don't have for pc at least physical DVD's only keys :))
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My experience with Bethesda is this :
i'm happy that i buy on STEAM for PC Oblivion Goty,Fallout 3 Goty, Fallout 4 Goty and Wolfenstein 2 and Skyrim Legendary Edition.
i'm happy that i play also Fallout Shelter for Free on Mobile Phone
And i Love and like all theyr games.
Right now i don't Pre-Order Fallout 76 for 2 Reason:
1) Because i don't like the fact that Other Players play in the same Session of my Gameplay and also i don't like that they can trow Nukes for destroy other players town, because i like to be CREATIVE in videogames , i like to create levels or building etc. (if you want see level i create search "claybook" in ita360 dot com i can't post here coz i has problem video faq sg)
So i like to create things and i invest a lot of time on it when i play videogames
And i not do this for my friend see , i do just for myselph i happy to enjoy it
So if i create something in 2-5 months and then other players drop nuke and destroy it in 5 min i really hate this.
Now sincerely i not get more info and not understand so much how the nuke work but i has not a good feel about this and this stop me to buy the game
2) I Don't disagree Bethesda shop BUT i disagree HIGH Prices and Monetizations or High quantity of DLCS , this is why i ask refund for Final Fantasy X and Destiny and with that money i buy insteand Monster Hunter World and GTAV, and i'm scared about Fallout 76 can get the same bad way of destiny monetization etc. so i still WAIT to see,maybe better wait 1-2 years and then buy the goty.
3) I really hate Server-Side games or games that is not playable offline,i want to can play games also when if i can't pay my internet and i'm 100% offline
Now...
if Point 2 is only "Temporal" because right now i'm poor,and so if one day maybe i'm rich i don't fucking care and buy it
Point 1 and 2 is + important because also if one day i have money,but people drop nuke and destroy i build so then i not feel to buy it
I Prefer to play in solo mode,with computer and create things that i enjoy myself,and also i want to can play offline when\if i can't afford to pay internet bill,if a game don't offer offline play is very hard i buy it.
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I assume that the video links were intended as illustrative examples, but they both qualify as "advertising." "Advertising" is not permitted in the SG forum. Please remove those two YouTube links.
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Bethesda knew that their game's a buggy mess at launch, which would turn away the most average gamers. All they care about is separating people from their money; that's why they're not allowing for refunds. Chances are, this will happen with every game they release from now on as long as they continue to use their dated Creation engine, which makes their game client simply another cash grab.
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I think it's great to have multiple store fronts to choose from, but I hate needing multiple clients to launch games.
Telltale is a great example - they had their own storefront, did not have their own client, and were available on other clients.
On the other hand, I made my choice (steam) and I'm sticking with it. If a game needs a separate launcher, I won't buy it.
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They're pulling a Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 to avoid bad reviews. I figured more would do it. You'll see more of this trend.
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While I am not a fan of multiple game clients its really not that big of a deal. Prior to game clients you had your OS to aggregate your games and your CD wallet to manage your "downloads". If this saves them 20-30 percent of their gross income that allows them to either spend more money on perfecting the game or at least keeping the cost down for consumers. Even if they keep it as pure profit it will allow them to invest that money into future products, more choice is hardly a bad thing. Its ok if you don't care for this particular title, perhaps the next will interest you. Unless things change I know I won't be buying Fallout 76, but who knows what the future will bring and what other releases await.
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We are talking about BugTesda here.
And I have all TES that are on Steam + from I to III on GOG, all of them had and still have bugs!
http://prntscr.com/lnse4z
http://prntscr.com/lnsfn7
http://prntscr.com/lnsgaq
So yes, principles don't preorder, don't buy F4 at a high price :)) and don't buy F67 :D
Perfecting a TES games means mods :D
Also, OS is necessary, another client is not!
I like what you said, but F4 was 110$ for base + expansion pack, F67 had a 130$ version with no CD :)).
Also, you know that so little goes to the devs the majority goes to the stack holders from Zenimax so ...
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If you had the choice of
- Paying out $300,000 for every million made to another company
- Spend a fraction of that to build a client yourself
What would you pick? You don't like needing another client, but be honest, would you throw away millions if you had the option of keeping them?
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The smartest move would be, make your client, make a good game and sell it on all platforms for max client base!
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Except they will only lose money with that. Their online only game would still be through their service since they would need them all to work together, but they would have lost 30% of the profit selling it to those people.
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I understand what are you saying but we both know why they didn't release their game on Steam, the 30% was not it.
Also, they don't lose only that 30% but also the other 70% for each product, you can't think that all the games that they didn't sell would be sold on their platform, too small and new!
Steam is like Amazon, you can't ignore it, if you have a good game sell it everywhere is a more solid approach!
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The thing is, many people DO buy on other clients if they want the game. You believe that because you have no interest, no one else is interested either, and so they should have given you what you want. It was third on the UK Sales charts for example, ahead of either Pokemon Let's Go game even, though losing to Spyro and Red Dead Redemption 2. Sounds like a far cry from losing money from lack of sales.
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Again, not a fair argument but:
Did F4 sell on Steam and other platforms, yes
Did F76 sell only on one client ... yes.
Did the first week for F76 sold 80%+ worse, yes
Did the game sell so few copies that it dropped to 35$ ...yes
This is not a fair argument as I said, I am not interested in the game, even if it was on Steam so I never was a customer so my interest as a customer for this use case is nill but in general this use case is the worst case scenario and it could get similar to Arkham Knight, Andromeda, Battlefront II, No man Sky, Sea of Thieves etc
Why are you comparing it with Spyro and RDR2, compare it will the F4 that was on steam and is a Fallout game!
And last, of course, many people buy on other clients but it seems many MORE people buy Fallout if they have on more than one client.
That was the entire point to make, do your client and spread the game to other clients also.
If you sell way less on your client that on Steam and you pay a lot of money then maybe Steam has a better wager for you, restricting customer to only your client is anticonsumer similar how EA did and you are maybe right that maybe they make more money this way but I am the consumer here not the stockholder and at the end they make money because people buy it, put enough restrictions and bad decision and you will get yourself another Battlefield V :D
Btw I love the talk, you have a valid point but I disagree and share another view!
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Was the beta a horribly broken mess and the final reviews terrible? Yes. I'm sure the drop in sales has nothing to do with that though, and it is all because the PC client, even the reduced sales on other systems. -_-
I'm comparing it to the top 10 sales for the week in the UK, which is something that can be found since few companies tend to publish actual sales numbers for everyone to see. Despite crap sales compared to Fallout 4, it was beating Pokemon. It still sold damn well to do that, it just didn't sell insane numbers.
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No point of arguing with someone who has all the marketing and development data of Bethesda along with the long-term financial plan of the product (as usual with every game he talks about) /s
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Adam with respect, who was arguing here?
I was shearing my point of view!
I am not arguing only debating, I already he is correct in what he says :D!
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If FO76 was on Steam, it wouldn't have sold much more.
I get what you try to accomplish here, but your reasoning is that Blizzard made a big mistake by not putting Overwatch on Steam and forced people to install Battle.net for it. Heck, I heard a ton of this reasoning around its launch. Yet Overwatch is essentially a money press for Blizzard, without touching Valve.
If FO76 wouldn't be a festering pile of buggy shit with zero content beyond a bunch of audio logs and repeated quests, it would sell well, simple as that.
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Why are you comparing it with Spyro and RDR2, compare it will the F4 that was on steam and is a Fallout game!
Why are you comparing it to F4? You really can't, since F4 got decent reviews (metascore 84) while F76 got crushed (metascore 50). If you really want to argue that F76 has low sales because it was not on Steam - well, the way more logical reason is that it got horrible scores and people know it's a shitty game. I see no evidence that the bad sales are related to Steam in any way.
I know what you mean, and there are people who will only buy on Steam (especially here on SG). But I assume the majority of gamers don't really care and just buy the game they want, no matter the platform. Most people wouldn't miss out just because a game is not on Steam. The fact that basically every big new game client was a success so far should probably be considered proof of that. Origin, UPlay, Battle.net, GOG Galaxy - they all work just fine and sell well.
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Sadly any large game comes with bugs these days, hopefully none game breaking. Also, not all of them get fixed either because they are too small, too infrequent or too costly to fix.
No game will ever be perfect. Closest you can achieve is modding and still would required tailored mods to the individual. When you bring that into multiplayer it becomes quite difficult to balance without having private servers and hoping others enjoy your mods. I am on a private Ark server that is hardly perfect with its mod selection, some I like, others I do not and others are missing. If we brought those mods I want in and toss the others out the server may get closer to perfection for me but further for others.
OS may be necessary but I am pointing out if you have 100 games you had to manage 100 games individually instead of say half a dozen clients. One client to rule them all may sound nice and all but there are costs associated with that. Besides, the Steam client has its own issues. Large game launches or sales can easily bring down their site, let alone the client. I've had numerous issues with their downloads and I am hardly alone with that and that is one of its main functions! Games are useless if they can't be downloaded and updated properly.
F67 may have had 130$ version but Civ V costs more than that with their DLCs and it didn't stop you from buying the game nor Mortal Kombat X which is similar ;)
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All great points, I really love the discussion in here.
Yes but CIV costed my a small part of 12$ Mortal Kombat XL 9$ :D
Heck, F4 Goty cost me like 15EUR.
The prices I kind of blame them also on consumer :D
Management wise a singular lightweight controller like Steam would be idle or maybe even lighter like Galaxy and I wouldn't mind them having their own client, they can do that but they did it EA style!
Release the game on all clients and no one would mind, well except the stockholders would want all money.
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All of the publishing companies deciding to make a client to MAXIMIZE profits an only for that
Daily reminder that people/companies make games to earn money. It's not charity.
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Well yes, but they should make money not all the money!
Because when you try to make that you get 86% fewer sales than from F4 in UK in W1 for example!
You sell your product at 34$ after 10days!
Have 5.. /10 on meta ~3 on user scores.
That is not the way to sell a new game.
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You see.. Bethesda went full retard corporation xD If that makes sense. They only count numbers and study graphs. Without contact with realty or their customers. Numbers told them - milk that franchise as much as you can! Paid mods! Don't pay developers after releasing game - so there will be no bugfixes (because why waste money on something that community will do for free). Quick - sell another, even unfinished game as fast as possible before die-hard fans realise that we killed that franchise.
F4 was last Bethesdas fallout that I have bought. And I thought (silly me) that it was last nail to the coffin of fallout. In that case 76 is like corpse profanation xD
And now I play Quake Champions and I see how they are killing another franchise - with each patch game becomes worse and worse.
Bethesda prefers business model of scorched earth.
So far so good - but I really hope that one day they will catch fire.
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They already caught fire from my pov.
They were almost, it just works :)), now almost 50% in 10 days and 20% of F4 sales, that stinks!
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Not really. They planned to get the last drop from that franchise and then abandon it. At least it looks like that. Now they can move on to destroy another game series xD
Only hope is for skyrim 6 to be a huge disappointment :)
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You might be right on the money there.
F3 was great because of first 3D fallout, NW was the best because of Obisidan F4 mediocre and F76 .... what is that?
I like Oblivion because it was my first BG game and wanted some Gothic similar RPG, not the same, for me Gothic 1-2 are better then all TES only TES III can hold a candle to those 2.
Then played F3 and was like ok some more TES but in the future, then tried Skyrim and said again the same mechanics and the same feeling :)) NO, with mods yes but only that!
Now F4, wasn't this done again?
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NV is decent game but shows how terrible is bethesda as publisher.
They gave them only 18 months to make game of that size. That's why it was full of bugs and a lot of places and stories cut out from final version- there was no time to finish it properly.
Also support and bugfixing ended really fast - and If you want to have proper game experience - don't touch it (like any other bughesda game) without community patch.
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Even before the Fallout 76, everyone should have known that buying a Bethesda product at launch is a dubious proposition.
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This.
They aren't called Bugthesda for no reason. If people buy a game at launch and are disappointed with the bugs, gameplay etc they only have themselves to blame. As if waiting a week or two for reviews to come in is such a grievance.
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I really hope this is their defense in court, actually. "The customers had reason to believe the game would be broken at launch, our company is so famous for our bugs that we've even used them to win court cases."
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Well this is why I spent 40EUR for TW3 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35jbGqO5Q8A
This is how you can make me spend money :D
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AAA gaming surely served its quality shitshow this year. If I'll have time in december, likely january maybe I'll try to check how many AAA (or close to that) quality game were released that actually fared good, without controversies.
( While no such fancy quote, Gearbox's We Happy Few was also a quality fail this year :D )
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This game is so bad that even hardcore fans like Joe give it 3/10 "_"!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjrDbSgB9IU
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Bethesda Support Leaks Fallout 76 Customer Names, Addresses & Phone Numbers
It just keeps getting better and better.
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The only client that i kind of accept its battle.net, but since i stopped playing starcraft and all the apparent bad decisions of blizzard, probably i will just not install it next time, cant say ill get another blizzard game.I have 3 bethesda games, and i have played none on steam either, so. Meh.
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You have 900 games on steam.
I have all the big ones but that is enough!
The only one that I use is steam and gog from time to time, I played shadow warrior 2 from GOG throw steam
I have 1300 games on steam, many of this are games that I played from when I was young to now, It took me 2 years to have them again in a singular place with Steam and GOG :D
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I have 903. And i dont think i will ever finish half of them. Not even a quarter.
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I have 1348 on steam alone, 173 on GOG 20 on Uplay and Origin and 100+ key on HB, fanatic etc.
I really don't care anymore off I finish all of them as I did in the past, I love that I can play them whenever I want, I have games installed on my primary external HDD from 3 years ago and I can play them now if I want :)).
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I'm starting to finish my games one by one. I estimate I can complete 30 games in one year, not enough to finish all my library in my lifetime but it's a good start :)
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The problem is that I like more the games that I already finished before several times then what I didn't so I don't want to finish all my game.
Many are from the first year of steam when I put in my account all the keys that I saw, some of those games I don't even want to play :))
I rather play for the 7th time gothic 2 then play some asset flip free game that I put in my account :D
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Some updated that I had access today :))!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3y6xXIqnYI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iZPeNIJzAo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss2xyfb2anI
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Starbreeze Under Investigation https://www.gamespot.com/articles/major-game-devs-office-raided-computers-documents-/1100-6463688/
and One Person Arrested
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This is interesting for me!
From my reading on game related sites including the forums on SG I saw a lot of support for Bethesda decided to make yet another great move: to release games on yet another game management client(their own).
So I want to know what do you believe about that?
My own 2 cents about that as a consumer, if you don't bring additions to the market as GOG did, don't bother.
All of the publishing companies deciding to make a client to MAXIMIZE profits an only for that if crap from me.
This was never done to help the market, to compete with Steam or GOG, no the clients are based on the publishers need to make all the money.
Some info related to the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHG7VkzJ9Sc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAHX_foGYHA
More info thanks to PoulpeP
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/a0loue/bethesda_game_studios_deceptive_trade_practices/
New link : https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-11-27-bethesdas-fallout-76-refund-policy-causes-confusion-prompts-investigation-by-lawyers
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