Its not that old (although that does fit the theme) but Hotline Miami 1, and to a lesser extent, 2. Both are limited a lot by the engine, and by the small scale of their development. If they could be re-made in a new engine, with some modern customizability and QoL features, as well as added polish on things like the door physics, I think it could go a long way to ensuring they stand the test of time.

Even with Ana, while it was the peak of Overwatch’s healers, had a lot of the same issues, esspecially when it comes to juice, and feedback for impactful actions. For example, while your primary specialty was healing, the main feedback for that was your teammate’s health bar going down slower, whereas if you decide to play selfish and shoot enemies, you watch their health rapidly tick down, they die, and you get a flashy kill reward and voice line. Even in terms of the OW1 medals, there was only one healing medal and like, 3 or 4 for damage. Despite healing being such a core part of the game, there’s very little moment-to-moment “reward” for it.

Even for a lot of games with strategic views, being able to hover above the battlefield or fly between your battle lines would be so cool - like the most immersive tabletop wargame possible.

Honestly, this just highlights how badly thought out the gameplay is for non-dps classes in a lot of games. So often, both the healer and tank are left as second-class citizens, as all the emphasis is put on killing enemies. For example, in Overwatch, while tanks and healers were effective, there was little depth and little reward in the role compared to DPS characters. Orisa was a dps who couldn’t leave the objective and had to hit ‘e’ on the ground every few seconds. Mercy just followed someone around, with little agency of their own. Compare that with, for example, Junkrat, where you were encouraged to be flying around the map, bouncing grenades off walls to make yourself near impossible to hit while still killing dozens of enemies. Theres both more depth, and more frequent, significant gratification. This is a big part of why I like Dota - supports (tanks aren’t really a thing in the same sense) have a whole separate game they tend to be playing to manipulate the map in their favour, and can still impact fights with a plethora of significant abilities that are flashy and impactful in their own right.

Honestly, Im really suprised official support lasted this long. Microsoft largely gave up on VR years ago.

Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can’t buy the space, Valve doesn’t bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn’t enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I’m interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam’s success that often gets overlooked.

Thr trick will be how long this last before they change it back or break it another way.

Information is limitted as the contracts used for developers aren’t shared, but the general understanding is that this only applies to Steam keys.

The one exception is the wolfire games lawsuit, which includes one alleged instance of Valve asking a developer not to distribute the game for free on their Discord when it is a paid product on Steam. Given the lack of detail, the single anecdote for evidence, the existence of other games where they are priced lower or free off Steam (I.E. Dwarf Fortress), its certainly not a widespread problem, almost certainly not in contract, if it did happen exactly as the anecdote suggests, may have been a misstep on the part of one employee, and may not have happened at all.

Of course, if Valve does do this, nonetheless mandated it, its an issue, but given that no one else has challenged them on what would be such a blatent anti-trust case, esspecially given how everyone else in the industry has been trying to take Valve’s place for years, I think its unlikely.

From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you’re not using Steam’s infrastructure, you’re fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.

From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you’re not using Steam’s infrastructure, you’re fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.

Lower distribution costs (in exchange for less marketing and a worse product) are not lower prices though. If Epic had spent half the time and money they spent negotiating for exclusives on negotiating for lower prices, Im sure they easily could have. For example, Epic advertises a 12% fee on sales, but if they instead took 10% (maybe spent less on exclusives to account for this) and then required prices be 5% lower than MSRP on other stores, then suddenly its a lot more appealing to customers - the ones actually providing the money - while still offering a much better deal than Steam. Similarly, Epic could have just passed on the saving more directly, like I said, with a rewards program or similar. Epic had plenty of ways to actually lower prices for their customer rather than just their buisiness partners. They just chose not to.

Frankly, Epic is pretty irrelevant to this point considering how significantly they chose to burn the bridges with their customers right from the get-go anyway. Unless you’re studying how to lose consumer trust or goodwill, they’re not really a good reference.

Yep, although there are a ton of other ways to do it as well such as a good rewards points system, or a raffle system with bonus games won when purchasing, or similar. As long as you don’t spend years antagonising your customers first, I don’t expect game stores would struggle to compete offering better prices than Steam, even at the cost of features.

I have no idea how any other platform can really achieve competitor status with steam

Aside from all the (other) obvious options replicating Steam, theres always the tried and true option of offering lower prices. To my knowledge, no one has been willing to try that yet.

Tldr:

This update fixed a crash when using the magnifier tool while game recording is active

I’m not sure if we’ll see Deadlock introduce the same features as Dota, but if they do, I’ve found Dota’s casual modes really great for low-stress, fun games. The difference maker in Dota compared to a lot of other games is that SBMM is still used, but less strictly and its all hidden so you (and your friends) can’t fixate on it but also don’t get stomped every game. We’ll have to see how Deadlock’s development pans out, but given that its Icefrog and Valve working on it, and they already seem to be working from lessons learned in Dota, I think theres pretty good odds.

Ahhhhh. 4 dozen.

Of course. Doesn’t mean its not nice to be able to avoid it though. Personally, it will have no real impact on my purchasing decision, but the less DRM, the better.

This seems really promising. Unfortunately, I expect they’ll still use Steam DRM, but everything I’ve heard so far is immensely promising so who know, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll skip even that.

It is worth noting that unlike something like a League or Overwatch skin, and even a lot of early TF2 trading, modern CS and Dota skins have more emphasis put on their marketability and speculative value. For example, I’ve bought a few CS skins that I don’t use, purely because I expect their value to increase over the next couple years. Of course, thats not all of the buyers, but that influences the purchase, and allows for those valuations unlike a Fortnite skin with a fixed price tag set by Epic with zero recoupable value.