As pc gamer (and new Deck owner) i’ve started to check any good game deal, mostly x games on Steam but not only. I’ve soon realize that there are great site like Humble to use to buy keys for cheap, but also “shady” sites with very low price who apparently sell non working keys or try to scam you. Did we have a list of...
You’re conflating grey market key re-sellers (G2A, Kinguin, CDKeys, etc.) with actual legitimate key sellers (GreenManGaming, Fanatical, GamesPlanet, etc.).
Just because the names of what they do sound alike doesn’t mean they are alike. As has been pointed out in other comments, either use isthereanydeal.com or gg.deals with the “Keyshops: Disabled” option, and any shop listed will be fine.
Author can’t seem to understand that Valve’s the only company that can properly do the console-style “subsidize hardware cost based on the cut you’ll get from selling the games” method in the PC space. Asus, Lenovo, Ayaneo - they don’t have the luxury of maybe taking a bit of a haircut on the hardware and then more than making it up on the back end via software sales. They only get paid for the initial sale and then they’re done, so their devices are going to have to be more expensive.
The big question with that plan, though, is what’s in it for Valve/Epic? Valve has no incentive to let anyone else in on their cut, and Epic’s is so low already there wouldn’t be any room to let anyone else in on it with them.
I suppose Epic could try to get a deal in place where EGS is installed as the default store on the Ally or Legion, but it’s not like anyone’s going to just stick with the default - first thing anyone will do is just install Steam, and everyone knows it. I don’t see a way for a deal like that to make sense for Epic to even bother with.
Fair points, yes, but I was speaking within the context of companies that are actually producing handheld PCs. None of the other potentially capable companies you’ve mentioned have shown any indication that they care to enter the space.
That’s disingenuous. The games have controller support, as you’d expect them to. EGS itself doesn’t have an outside-the-games input layer like Steam Input.
But you can always load up an EGS game in Steam as a non-Steam game and have full access to Steam Input on it that way, so why would Epic spend time and effort re-inventing the wheel when they have other priorities?
Not sure about Perfect Dark (never played it), but Goldeneye had the control mode where you hold the left and center grips which was quite similar to dual analog. Of course, that was moving with the d-pad instead of moving with an analog stick, so not quite as smooth on the movement front, but it was definitely a step up from the default control scheme while not being quite as unwieldy as using two separate controllers.
This week, it’s Alan Wake 2, which has released and scored an 89 on Metacritic, a tick below a 90, but a 92 if you’re looking on PC where its visuals can be maxed to their fullest.
BotW was great, but not if you were wanting a traditional Zelda.
TotK is hot garbage. They just took BotW and leaned way too hard into the whole “build silly contraptions!!1” thing that some fans were doing with BotW’s physics interactions.
This went into Forspoken back at the end of September.
I tried it out on a 3080Ti and I can confirm it’s absolute garbage. Totally hitchy stuttery mess, completely unplayable every time I turned it on. Plus, you have to use FSR2 for your image reconstruction to make it work, so you don’t get the image quality benefits of DLSS while you’re staring at the frozen frames during the stutters.
I got Dredge on Xbox for $12, lowest its been on PC is $25.
What are you even talking about? $25 is the base price on PC; are you claiming that it’s literally never been on sale on the platform? Because that’s obviously, hilariously, wrong.
The dude you’re arguing with is an absolute toolbag with his blind PCMR bullshit, but you aren’t helping the case against him by spewing blatant bullshit of your own.
Imagine thinking anyone knows or cares what currency you’re talking about when you don’t bother to specify.
The website you linked doesn’t account for Gamepass discounts.
You’re making your case even worse. I like consoles, but arguing that paying a monthly fee to get a 20% discount is better than the regular deep discounts that PC games get is laughable.
That’s exactly what it is, though. It’s satire, and tells you as much right in the first paragraph of the “About” page:
Hard Drive is a very real video games news site that you should not question. Just absorb the information as truth and move on. JK it’s satire don’t ban us.
if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody’s going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone’s libraries (something they’re obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of “you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.” They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don’t play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on “ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11”. Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn’t up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they’re doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don’t want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I’ve literally seen people say “I want every game on every store and then I’ll buy it from Steam.”
If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.
That’s not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam’s in every possible way, you’re still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.
A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits
Nobody is talking about public companies here. Both Valve and Epic are private companies.
If you want to complain about profit motives, that’s a capitalism problem overall, not an issue with public vs. private corporations.
They can’t “push and pull” anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there’s almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it’s not a public company they can’t just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can’t stage a hostile takeover and they can’t dump and run.
There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.
The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.
Sadly, surprisingly often while games release on GOG they then lack features
This is almost always a situation that can be pinned on Steam, actually. The games that end up doing this are usually using Steamworks, which essentially forces them into a sort of soft-exclusivity on Steam since their multiplayer features and such can only exist there.
Although, of course, it’d be cool if Steamworks would work for non-steam games at least for modding/multiplayer.
That’s the point. No, nobody’s forcing them to use Steamworks (especially since Epic has rolled out their cross-platform, store-and-OS-agnostic free competitor to it), but anyone who chooses to do so (which is a lot of devs) ends up locking those features to Steam (barring a ton of extra work for themselves) simply because of Valve’s chosen policy.
Don’t think Valve doesn’t understand this. They found a way to get devs to all but lock their games to Steam and thank Valve for the opportunity to do it.
Not only the same, but better. Epic will automatically just refund you the difference if a game you bought goes on sale within a certain period of time after your purchase (allegedly even beyond the two week refund window, although I haven’t been able to find any definitive statement of how long they watch it for). Just flat out, you get an email one day telling you they’ve credited back X amount of your purchase.
Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.
There are. For more than four years now. The problem is that, just like with Steam, they can only put the option out there - it’s up to devs to actually implement it. And there are a lot of devs who haven’t done so, which lots of people interpret as EGS not having cloud saves at all.
It’s almost as if Epic actually does have developers’ and the industry’s best interests at heart despite the shit takes from the terminally-online Gamer™ crowd…
EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.
GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They’re super cool, but they’re a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.
Origin (or whatever EA’s calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.
The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it’s better than Microsoft’s previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.
Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don’t even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it’s very much an afterthought for them.
And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They’re not in the same market as the others, so don’t really fit into this conversation. If you’re 100% reliant on the store you’re “competing” with, you’re not competing with them.
I tried, I really really tried not to soy face when they revealed Thrawn. But it overpowered me. The sight of a book character being on screen overpowered my will, my mouth fell agape and I full on soy faced. I even kicked my feet a little....
Thrawn, moreso than any Imperial we’ve seen, is a very empathetic character. That line was him speaking from Sabine’s perspective. He’s not saying that he believes she doomed the Galaxy, he’s saying that she believes it.
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
The speculation for a while (and, frankly, the direction I’d love to see them go in) is that the work on the Deck was going to be a stepping stone to a standalone VR headset. Take what they learned in VR with the Index and then what they learned in portable PCs with the Deck and slap the two together to get a real Quest competitor out there.
There’ve even been numerous leaks over the years (even pre-Deck) about a standalone headset internally labeled “Deckard”.
I’m loving it. I’ve played the whole series for years and I think it’s fantastic. Like, I understand that it’s more PC than SR2 and some take issue with that, but I feel like the hatred towards it has become a bandwagon. I personally like that it took a more grounded but still progressive position in its storytelling. I...
DLSS3 and FSR2 do completely different things. DLSS2 is miles ahead of FSR2 in the upscaling space.
AMD currently doesn’t have anything that can even be compared to DLSS3. Not until FSR3 releases (next quarter, apparently?) and we can compare AMD’s framegen solution to Nvidia’s.
Some of the 2023s are moving to 2024, but the bigger issue is that the 2024s - which would still be in production/post-production at this point if there were no strike - will be pushed out indefinitely.
[Question] Were can i find a list of Safe Sites where buy Steam Games/Keys/Bundles??
As pc gamer (and new Deck owner) i’ve started to check any good game deal, mostly x games on Steam but not only. I’ve soon realize that there are great site like Humble to use to buy keys for cheap, but also “shady” sites with very low price who apparently sell non working keys or try to scam you. Did we have a list of...
The Steam Deck's budget price tag is the reason I still rate it nearly two years on (www.pcgamer.com)
Epic Games Admits In Court That Its PC Store Still Isn't Profitable (kotaku.com)
Chicago Doesn’t Own Its Own Streets (www.youtube.com)
Chicago is held hostage by a 75 year lease of its parking meters to Morgan Stanley, impacting public transport and alternate transportation funding.
An unofficial PC port of Nintendo 64's Perfect Dark is available for download, featuring mouselook, widescreen, FOV & 60fps support (www.dsogaming.com)
You need an original ROM file, and this here, according to the article.
‘Alan Wake 2’ Complicates An Already Wild GOTY Competition (www.forbes.com)
This week, it’s Alan Wake 2, which has released and scored an 89 on Metacritic, a tick below a 90, but a 92 if you’re looking on PC where its visuals can be maxed to their fullest.
AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 3 Now Available (www.youtube.com)
It’s only available in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum which is… Unfortunate....
The Good, the Bad and the Incredible – Two Weeks of Witchfire [dev blog] (www.theastronauts.com)
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Sales Breakdown - with PC making up a whopping 68% of units sold (lemmy.prograhamming.com)
Source: twitter.com/…/1709934221840814198
[article] Certificate to own car in Singapore rockets to $106,000 (www.theguardian.com)
Disney+ Announces New Show About Luke's Hand That Got Cut Off (hard-drive.net)
A message to new users
Hello World!...
Unremoval of Piracy Communities
Hello World!...
Epic Games Cutting 870 Jobs, 16 Percent Of Its Workforce, also selling Bandcamp (kotaku.com)
What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved?
I’ve been recently been thinking about Arkane Studio’s Prey which is a immersive sim, with a pretty good rogue like dlc, that probably has one of the strongest hooks of any game I’ve played. If you liked Halflife, System Shock, or Deus Ex it’s definitely worth a play....
Dusk Developer David Szymanski: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)
If I’m honest, I don’t disagree....
Godot is Getting EPIC // 10 Games & Projects Made in Godot (youtu.be)
VFX Series. Shaders: Lesson 1...
Unity apologizes and updates their infamous Runtime Fee (blog.unity.com)
Microsoft - keep your filthy hands off Valve, leak shows MSFT would buy Valve (www.gamingonlinux.com)
The Xbox Series S Is More Popular Than The Xbox Series X (insider-gaming.com)
According to documents from Microsoft's recent case against the FTC, the Xbox Series S is more popular than the Xbox Series X
[Ahsoka Spoilers] I'm so sorry, fellow Star Wars fans
I tried, I really really tried not to soy face when they revealed Thrawn. But it overpowered me. The sight of a book character being on screen overpowered my will, my mouth fell agape and I full on soy faced. I even kicked my feet a little....
This should be illegal (lemmy.world)
This should be illegal, companies should be forced to open-source games (or at least provide the code to people who bought it) if they decide to discontinue it, so people can preserve it on their own....
Starfield, is it getting review bombed? (youtu.be)
Seems kind of like the game is just suffering from reactionaries, but I definitely don’t put that much stock in critic reviews these days either.
Linux updates tease Valve 'Galileo' and 'Sephiroth' - Steam Deck refresh? Or new VR? (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Saints Row Reboot is Awesome (files.catbox.moe)
I’m loving it. I’ve played the whole series for years and I think it’s fantastic. Like, I understand that it’s more PC than SR2 and some take issue with that, but I feel like the hatred towards it has become a bandwagon. I personally like that it took a more grounded but still progressive position in its storytelling. I...
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 - Official 2023 Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com)
This game is apparently NOT dead!
[GOG] Hero of the Kingdom II (www.gog.com)
FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) - AMD Stage Presentation | gamescom 2023 (www.youtube.com)
TL;DW:...
Dune Part Two Release Date Delayed to March 15th, 2024 (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Sea of Stars | Launch Trailer (www.youtube.com)