Charging 70 dollars USD for barely 40 USD of content and everyone knows. The only people I know intent on buying all the latest stuff are people into steamer culture, aka trying to be a streamer or interact with them and follow their trends.

The comment you replying to was trying to not so subtly point out this is a business plot and little else. Nobody is going to pay a subscription fee to have a tree in front of their business, but they might cough up money for a third party to maintain a tank of algae out front if it was sold right

Operating in China and having 10% of your company publicly owned by an entity of the Chinese government are two different things, and EGS has reportedly been all to happy to give over any and all information they have on identified users to the CCP. One article in 2019 suggesting that Hong Kong activists were being targeted by data in part provided through such means.

None of these are why people hate epic games or like gog/steam.

EG is toxicily anticonsumer. Their platform is assbackwards with no good functional community features. They bombard users with ads for games they already own. They spyware they call a store front has repeatedly been caught snooping through user files without consent and sending unknown amounts of data back to their server without permission to gather that data in the first place.

And the cherry on top is their close relationship with tencent, aka one facet of the propaganda arm of the CCP.

The entire point of the community is to discuss games. Not labeling the game in the original post is just inevitably going to result in a quarter to half the comments are people just asking the name of the game.

Thank you. Should be a damn rule you have to link the game in the post

Is this free healthcare you speak of in the room with us right now?

Sex sells, don’t it?

Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.

With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.

Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia

DOG VR would be amazing.

Same studio made a hulk game prior to prototype and a lot of similarities in how the player moves.

Don’t buy any game forced onto epic gamestore.

If you still got your CD Keys you can just use CD Images/ISO files to install the game and play that way. Much like emulators, it’s still legal if you own a legitimate copy.

What I wouldn’t get for another proper entry in this series. Game came out like 20 years too soon. We have proper VR now!

Thats fine, after 6, didn’t have much hype for the series left, guess this makes it easier to not buy.

While I do enjoy rimworld and tynan’s model, I don’t think it would be a good match for Stardew given how the game has a particular branching story it wants to tell and share with the player navigating choices, where rimworld is more heavily into an (almost) entirely randomly generated story where your long lost brother might show up as a pirate or deceased cousin offended some govt official so now they are applying pressure to your settlement as pay back. The cosmetic option would be a much better fit so players could have alternate options on how characters, tools, plants or monsters appear, to say nothing of the home making segment. Yes mods already make this an option, but the entire point of Cosmetic DLCs is a tip jar for the developer you get something back for, and a way to show your support. New content and story pack expansion by contrast can seriously change the flow of the game and many players do not view them as optional in the discussion.

I think ConceredApe could follow the Deep Rock Galactic Model.

All content/story additiona are free updates. But to keep the lights on, every few months a cosmetic DLC drops that had no affect on the game what so ever, just lets player put money in the tip jar and get some cool threads and a hat for their troubles.

The only reason they were making a sequel was because there was going to be a competitor to their 10 year old game that would absolutely take the market share of this niche. Now that the competition died they can put the devs back to making a bunch of overpriced DLC for another 10 years or when ever another viable competitive game shows up on their radar.

EA knows their current Sims game has been a flop they had to make the base game free to play. They wanted a games as service model but 2013 SimCity had such a strong backlash they had to scramble to make it something else and hope no one noticed. So here we are with an underperforming game from a series that pretty much always topped the charts when it released a new game or expansion pack. Thats how bad they screwed up.

Did it have to be Ubisoft? Couldn’t literally any other publisher pick this up?

I think the people who live in the 100+ countries that the game just got delisted, are not supported by PSN, and Sony, the publisher, failed to region lock the game from being sold into, are rightfully pissed a game they bought up to 3 months ago is suddenly bricked because a corporation lied and wants to force a ‘feature’ onto an exsisting game just so they can get better internal metrics on people playing the game to bombard them with more advertising.