verysoft

I was wondering what happened to the Discord IPO. Discord already went to shit, I don’t know what else an IPO could do to it? More restrictions?

No… RCS is a protocol (from GSMA) anyone can implement, Google just spearheaded it and developed Jibe to make it easy for operators to implement, but by doing this it means Google gained a lot of control of it and added their own features to such as end-to-end encryption.

The game could also just not have a battle pass. How are people already so indoctrinated into their existence? No paid games should have extra monetisation in.

No, dismissing because of shitty monetisation is great. It could not be implemented in the first place.

Buying a game without reading reviews is like buying a game with these shitty monetisation schemes.

I refuse to buy co-op games that have the online requirement/live service bullshit. It’s only done to sell you battle passes and shit.

There’s no such thing. It’s just milking people who are crazy enough to fall into the trap of buying them.
$30 is not a microtransaction, thats a macrotransaction, thats an entire other video game.

Free to play doesnt give a game a pass on predatory business tactics, they are free to play for one reason only… to sell you worthless pixels for ridiculous prices. F2P games are designed for that purpose and that purpose only.

But I agree that any paid game should have zero MTX cosmetic or not.

Yeah they advertise no ads, but then have referral links to Kayak in their app. Seems like the main devs have gone off their rockers.

To be fair, chromium aside, edge did start as a nice browser, but as with all MS products, they end up getting riddled with more and more bullshit over time.

Just use Firefox.

Delusional.

I’m not defending anyone, I’d rather you pay for your game and that is it, how it used to be before the 2010s rolled around. I despise micro/macrotransactions, battle passes, the cosmetic trend, FOMO content, I could rant about it all day and how fucked it is.

I was just picking my best of the worst. I see you don’t understand how CS skins work, so I’ll try to explain.

• Anyone can design a skin for a weapon and put this on the Steam Workshop.
• People then vote on their favourite skins, eventually Valve make a new case and look through skins to add them to the case,
• Everytime a key for that case is bought the creators get a cut.
• Everytime a creators skin is bought/sold between players, they get a cut.
• I can open the case with a key and hope I get a skin I want. Gambling.
• I can buy the exact skin I want directly off the Steam Market… and be done with it
• I can trade other players for an exact skin I want.
• I can sell that skin again on the Steam Market (Valve gets 15% cut, of which some goes to skin creator as prev. mentioned).
• I can trade that skin to friends/other players, for free or for something they own.

So I get a lot more freedom with my new cosmetic item vs another game:

• Skin made in-house.
• Buy skin from store.
• Maybe I can refund if they have the option, if they do it’s usually limited.
  Or
• Buy loot box
• I now have skin I cannot trade, sell or do anything with but use.

So yeah, I think Valve have the best of the worst predatory cosmetic systems out there. That’s not defending the practice, I’d MUCH rather the whole cosmetic trend fucked off along with the microtransactions and online systems in singleplayer games and the list could go on…

Yeah, the reason why they make so much is because the skins have actual value, they also get 15% on any sale made through their community market. I fucking hate lootboxes, but I also hate skins costing as much as a game. MTX (micro or macro) are always going to be shit, until regulations catch up to all the predatory bullshit we are going to be stuck with one system or another and I’d rather take CS’s.
I mean I made a profit, if I sold up right now.

Don’t bother, this guy is just a troll. Look at all his other responses lmao.

Steam doesn’t pay anyone for exclusives, no game on Steam is an exclusive title, they can be released anywhere else at the discretion of the publishers. Spending millions for free games to bait consumers to the platform is pretty anticonsumer yeah and buying out exclusivity deals is about as anticonsumer as it gets. Why all the delulu?

Nobody is shilling. It’s completely up to the developers/publishers to sell DRM-free or not - CDPR aren’t the holy grail company you think they are.

every game you buy isn’t yours, it’s effectively an unlimited time rental that can be withdrawn for a multitude of reasons. GOG and the like actually sell you the game proper such that it’s yours to keep forever no matter what happens to GOG

This is mis-information - every game you buy on Steam is not DRM and thus is not subject to the ‘digital license’ approach.

Look, I like GOG, I will buy from there if I can’t get a DRM-free version on Steam and the deal is good, I own many GOG titles.
Steam 1000% needs to label what games have DRM or not and embrace that with a category.

True, Epic could have provided good competition, but instead of gaining the trust of potential users and building a feature rich store - they immediately went down the most anti-consumer route they could with exclusive deals and free game bait, all while pretending they are the good buys and Valve are an evil-mega corp. The pot calling the kettle black. So yeah, fuck Epic Games.

I mean it’s not technically a monopoly. Steam’s advantage is that Valve is a private company and can do what they like, it’s not without problems, but it does a great job where it needs to.

Steam also sells DRM-free games, so that’s just mis-information. You can copy the files anywhere and use them without Steam running, it’s entirely on the developers/publishers to make that decision. Cyberpunk 2077 is DRM-free on Steam, just like GOG. Steamworks just has an incredible feature set for developers to use, so for multiplayer games it’s unlikey to see DRM-free anymore as people would rather invite via a friendslist than sharing IPs directly, having to open ports etc.

So, what have we learnt for the next big release?

Yup, technology and especially phones have come a disgustingly long way in such a short amount of time. Running AI efficiently on them is the next step, one that we probably won’t struggle with too much.

They always pick fab artists for their sales honestly!

Insurgency was great, but I never got into Sandstorm and just stopped playing Insurgency at that point. I think they were expecting to go big with the sequel, but it was always going to be a niche game.