Helldivers 2

[Gerrard]

I agree with this, however. They did kill off physical media for PC. I truly wish there was a way around Steam keys linked to only one profile since as a collector (of games I really really like) this sucks so much.

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I’m hard pressed to think of anything good Steam did for gaming.

It gives massive marketing to small developers that would otherwise be forgotten in obscurity. Those developers never could have afforded physical media to begin with. It's not like Walmart was ever going to stock a game like Sunless Sea or Knights of the Chalice or Slay the Spire or Terraria or Rimworld or... etc. The indie scene on steam has been killing it for the last decade or so, and it wouldn't have had a chance without it.

Steam has also been an excellent, stable platform for both discussion of games (both reviews and getting help, either gameplay wise or bugfixing/technical stuff) and modding. Yeah, forums existed before steam, but they were very niche and if signing up for steam is annoying, how do you feel about signing up for a different unique forum for every fucking game you want to even ask a question about?

As a platform, it's also attracted quite a few remakes/remasters/ports of old games that would have otherwise been lost to time. I'm not exactly thrilled with a lot of those, but it's better than nothing.

It's also made PC a more attractive platform. If Fromsoft didn't have Steam, there likely wouldn't have been any PC ports for any of their games, they'd all just be Sony exclusives and we'd be sitting around using emulators to play anything other than shitty diablo/doom clone #3314, which was pretty much the state of PC gaming before Steam came along, outside a handful of exceptions.

It's vastly improved multiplayer, making it much easier to organize and play games with friends. Sure, there were means before, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get a tech illiterate moron into a game by sending him a game invite on steam than sending him 3 pages of instructions on how to set up his firewall correctly.

Steam isn’t the reason there’s some indie scene. The indie scene only really starting getting big on Steam in like 2012 around when Hotline Miami came out and Steam Greenlight started. Before that indie titles were Xbox Live’s thing, and they released on PC on their own like Cave Story, the first version of Spelunky, and Minecraft did. I’d guess Minecraft is why Steam even has Early Access. Since Minecraft was doing very well and pulling in lots of money being in early access on its own. And Xbox Live is probably why they had some stuff they don’t have anymore. Terraria is even a result of Microsoft’s indie push, it was built on their XNA engine which was used for the Xbox Live Indie Games service.

Walmart would’ve definitely stocked those kinds of games. They carried smaller PC games for decades. I bought War Wind at Walmart. There’s games I’ve seen in the obscure PC games thread here I saw being sold at Walmart. They’d probably be selling in jewel cases next to Fallout, Stronghold, Gangsters 2, some Anno game, Pharaoh, digital card games (like poker), and random sim games you’ve never heard of like Prison Tycoon. I feel like if Mob Rule and The Nations were games Walmart carried those games you listed could be their too if physical PC games had still been a thing.

I’m pretty sure the problem of needing to sign up to more than one forum to talk about different games was solved long before Steam was around. Steam getting IMDb style message boards like a decade into IMDb message boards wasn’t exactly all that interesting. IMDb would’ve even had more video game boards. Gamefaqs/Gamespot had their own forums for everything too; IGN may have as well, I don’t really remember.

I don’t remember setting up multiplayer matches on PC being a problem by the time GameSpy rolled around.

I’m going to guess that Dark Souls coming to PC, which released with Games for Windows Live, had nothing to do with Steam.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I’m hard pressed to think of anything good Steam did for gaming.

Proton.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

[cries in 7mbit]

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Steam is a walled garden

It isn't entirely though. Plenty of games are sold outside of steam as well as within, and none are restricted from doing so. I've no problem with steam requiring people to have a steam account to buy games through steam, as that's the bare minimum for any sort of control over hackers, bots, scammers and so forth. The thing Sony, Nintendo and Epic do where they enforce contracts that prevent developers from selling on other platforms besides their own is where I draw the line. That's straight up anti-competition shit, and hurts me as a consumer regardless of whether I buy from them or not.

Steam has it's shitty aspects, but it's done more good for gaming than bad by a longshot. We wouldn't have a proper indie scene at all today without it.

I’m hard pressed to think of anything good Steam did for gaming. It’s just so ubiquitous to PC gamers now that they overlook everything horrible about it. That and when it started Valve was in that kind of Blizzard place Blizzard once enjoyed where tons of PC gamers would suck them off without thinking about it. Shit, Steam is essentially the reason physical media is dead for PC gaming now. Steam started becoming a third party key code in the late 2000s, the first non Valve game I remember needing an online digital handshake to even start was Spore Creature Creator, and that’s the way PC gaming went to the benefit of Steam. I mean why even have physical releases after that point when you’re going to require an online check-in. Physical releases where basically just a formality after that point for a bit longer because downloading a whole game could still be a bitch.

Like everything good for the consumer I can think of that someone may say Steam did was shit that was going on before Steam got in on it.

Steam is exactly the same thing those other companies do.

It’s not like Nintendo, Sony, and EPIC force studios to make exclusive deals with them. And without those deals, some of those games may not even get made. I can see not liking exclusives when it comes to consoles, because that means you’ve got to buy hardware. But this thing about being pissy about EPIC exclusives when you’ve got a PC that can play the game I do not really get. Like I could get it if you also hate Steam and are only getting shit off GOG, but otherwise it’s just kind of like: Shut the fuck up.

Steam had very little to do with the death of physical release of games. Because physical game releases existed for a long time after Steam was invented and they were complimentary.

The main contributing factor to the death of physical game releases was the war between game publishers and retails stores that rented or re-sold used games. Basically selling or renting used games provided revenue for retail stores like Gamestop, but provided nothing for the publishers. That compelled them to double down on activation codes or live-service games or games that need constant updates, therefore ushering the new era of gaming, in which everything is very reliant on the internet, making physical releases irrelevent.

With Steam or without Steam, this would have happened.

PC games never had a renting problem. Not in America anyways. And I’m not even sure GameStop sold used PC games. I think there was only a fairly small window when they sold new PC games.

Console games had what could be called a renting and resell problem. Although the renting side of things likely ended with the 2010/2011 death of Blockbuster. Despite these “problems,” physical console games are still currently a thing.

 

[Reinhardt]

The issue is not the PSN account itself, not even the data breaches. That's just surface level thinking.

The issue is that Sony wants to control the community and ban you for wrongthink directly.

if you are in uk and say "nigger" ban in the game would be least of your problems.

 

[JarlFrank]

 

[Damned Registrations]

Steam isn’t the reason there’s some indie scene. The indie scene only really starting getting big on Steam in like 2012 around when Hotline Miami came out and Steam Greenlight started. Before that indie titles were Xbox Live’s thing, and they released on PC on their own like Cave Story, the first version of Spelunky, and Minecraft did. I’d guess Minecraft is why Steam even has Early Access. Since Minecraft was doing very well and pulling in lots of money being in early access on its own. And Xbox Live is probably why they had some stuff they don’t have anymore. Terraria is even a result of Microsoft’s indie push, it was built on their XNA engine which was used for the Xbox Live Indie Games service.

XBL's indie scene was a shitshow though, akin to the mobile game environment today. You could spend a whole afternoon (and a good chunk of money) buying and playing random shit without finding anything worth playing a second time. I can start browsing steam right now and look for something as specific as card based roguelike games with a sci-fi theme and find what I'm looking for in seconds, along with a decent idea of which ones are utter shit and why.

Cave Story and Spelunky initially were freeware games; and having to make such a highly polished freeware title to even have a chance at later making sales is one hell of a hill to climb for an aspiring developer. No, what kicked off the indie scene is absolutely the combination of youtube/twitch providing free marketing and steam providing an accessible platform to sell from as well as further advertising, searchability and security for consumers. To this day there are plenty of people that won't touch Starsector because it's not sold on steam or another large storefront and therefore is surely some sort of scheme to steal your credit card info.

Walmart would’ve definitely stocked those kinds of games. They carried smaller PC games for decades. I bought War Wind at Walmart. There’s games I’ve seen in the obscure PC games thread here I saw being sold at Walmart. They’d probably be selling in jewel cases next to Fallout, Stronghold, Gangsters 2, some Anno game, Pharaoh, digital card games (like poker), and random sim games you’ve never heard of like Prison Tycoon. I feel like if Mob Rule and The Nations were games Walmart carried those games you listed could be their too if physical PC games had still been a thing.

Maybe this is a matter of me living in a smaller city, but there isn't a chance in hell of seeing games like that at my local Walmart. Walmart also has restrictions about requiring games to be rated before they're willing to sell them (leading to a lot of lame censorship and extra costs), is going to take a much larger chunk of profits on a cheap game than steam would, and physical production is a massive extra cost that has no guarantee of getting paid back, making even the attempt quite risky and requiring startup capital even for a hobby project. There's a reason it took years before Spelunky and Cave Story ended up going on sale, despite being overwhelmingly popular already.

Gamefaqs/Gamespot had their own forums for everything too; IGN may have as well, I don’t really remember.

They did, but good fucking luck getting help on a Gamefaqs messageboard for some obscure game. It was fine for games with a lot of sales or cult followings, but something really small would probably be completely abandoned, or see maybe 5 posts in a month. Gamefaqs also kind of went to shit at some point after being sold to CNET, I can't recall when that was exactly. At any rate, going to more official message boards was definitely the way to go for a lot of games back then, and it was a pain in the ass.

I’m going to guess that Dark Souls coming to PC, which released with Games for Windows Live, had nothing to do with Steam.

I'll take your word for that, I don't have a good timeline in my head of Fromsoft vs Steam or knowledge of where the bulk of their sales came from. Though I don't think Windows Live was actually exclusively a PC thing; I seem to recall Xbox games that need a Live account to do multiplayer shit. We can substitute Monster Hunter instead I suppose, that's much more recent.

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

Yeah I don't exactly miss the days of (Load disc 4) popping up while playing games. Hell, just installing that shit was a pain in the ass even back when it was floppies. And these days you can download and install a game faster than you could even get a disk from it's package into your computer depending on the size. Nevermind trying to go out and find a physical copy of something obscure 3 years after it's release.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

Walmart would’ve definitely stocked those kinds of games. They carried smaller PC games for decades. I bought War Wind at Walmart. There’s games I’ve seen in the obscure PC games thread here I saw being sold at Walmart. They’d probably be selling in jewel cases next to Fallout, Stronghold, Gangsters 2, some Anno game, Pharaoh, digital card games (like poker), and random sim games you’ve never heard of like Prison Tycoon. I feel like if Mob Rule and The Nations were games Walmart carried those games you listed could be their too if physical PC games had still been a thing.

Yeah, can confirm. I bought Stronghold in a jewel case at Walmart. Also Tropico, Zeus: Master of Olympus, 1602 A.D., Lords of Magic, Tzar: Burden of the Crown, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II etc.
These were all on their $10 software racks around 2003/2004 and I'd regularly blow my allowance on whatever random game caught my eye.

 

[Bulo]

WE DID IT, REDDIT!

 

[Jrpgfan]

So, I was about to purchase the game and only now got aware of this whole crap with mandatory PSN login imposed by Sony and steam players review bombing it and asking for refund.

After all, what the fuck is really going on? Am I gonna be able to actually play the fucking thing? Are there people still playing it?

 

[Gerrard]

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

[cries in 7mbit]

Location: Italy


You can still leave a game downloading overnight though, no swapping multiple DVDs.

 

[ferratilis]

Steam forums for this game are something to behold. NSFW, because of all the corporate dick sucking.

 

[Alienman]

Disgusting, but probably Steam point farmers.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

What toxicity? Most games I join no one says a word.

Anyway, DM me if you want to team up, I'm usually on around 9pm CST

 

[Gerrard]

Watching the PS fanboys lose their shit is the best side effect.

 

[Melcar]

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

[cries in 7mbit]

What killed physical media were stores. Shelve space was expensive and at the time PC games were in a slump in sales and demand. Store also were very anal about ratings. Digital distribution was a Godsend for game developers and publishers, as they no longer had to deal with big stores anymore.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

My quick thoughts on this:

1. Sony hasn't changed. They still have the same goals and incentives that led them to try to force account linking. They were blocked this time but they will try something similar in the future, on this or other games.
2. Sony didn't back down due to outrage. They backed down because it was no longer possible for them to get what they wanted at a price they were willing to pay. My guess is that Valve offering refunds, plus the risk of class action and regulatory lawsuits, shifted the economic calculus enough to force a climb down.
3. It is important to know why the players won this time, so the victory can be repeated in the future.
4. This is a win. Sony wanted a lever for player community control. They tried to get one, and failed. I'm sure there are dangerhairs gnashing their teeth in the bowels of Sony at this very moment.

 

[toro]

My quick thoughts on this:

1. Sony hasn't changed. They still have the same goals and incentives that led them to try to force account linking. They were blocked this time but they will try something similar in the future, on this or other games.
2. Sony didn't back down due to outrage. They backed down because it was no longer possible for them to get what they wanted at a price they were willing to pay. My guess is that Valve offering refunds, plus the risk of class action and regulatory lawsuits, shifted the economic calculus enough to force a climb down.
3. It is important to know why the players won this time, so the victory can be repeated in the future.
4. This is a win. Sony wanted a lever for player community control. They tried to get one, and failed. I'm sure there are dangerhairs gnashing their teeth in the bowels of Sony at this very moment.

 

[Baron Dupek]

 

[Azalin]

What killed physical media on PC was the fact that you can download a game faster than a DVD drive can read it off a disc. Also games that are 50+GB

[cries in 7mbit]

 

[Pika-Cthulhu]

Democracy Manifest

 

[Hell Swarm]

The issue is not the PSN account itself, not even the data breaches. That's just surface level thinking.

The issue is that Sony wants to control the community and ban you for wrongthink directly.

if you are in uk and say "nigger" ban in the game would be least of your problems.

You've never gamed with us bongs. We say nigger all the time. Usually "Oh Fuck there's a nigger outside! BRB HIDING UNDER THE DESK!"

XBL's indie scene was a shitshow though, akin to the mobile game environment today. You could spend a whole afternoon (and a good chunk of money) buying and playing random shit without finding anything worth playing a second time. I can start browsing steam right now and look for something as specific as card based roguelike games with a sci-fi theme and find what I'm looking for in seconds, along with a decent idea of which ones are utter shit and why.

I would love to know what the fuck you're searching so I can do the same. I search anything on steam and I get nothing but utter garbage I have no interest in. I have to use 3rd party sites to properly see tags and filter stuff. Steam is worse than xbox live was because it's so much bigger the garbage pile is even harder to find something good within it.

Cave Story and Spelunky initially were freeware games; and having to make such a highly polished freeware title to even have a chance at later making sales is one hell of a hill to climb for an aspiring developer. No, what kicked off the indie scene is absolutely the combination of youtube/twitch providing free marketing and steam providing an accessible platform to sell from as well as further advertising, searchability and security for consumers.

You're completely wrong. The PC was in a slump during the Xbox 360 days when Halo, Gears and CoDs were making PC sales outside of WOW look like chump change. Microsoft picked up the indie scene with Xbox live and then filled it with garbage with Xbox live arcade. Spelunky wasn't paid attention to at release and Cave story was popular for a short while. But the Indie push we see now started with Microsoft, Sony desperate for games for the PS4 jumped on board and Steam naturally followed as the PC store front you could dump anything on. Youtube was a thing but it was more 360 no scope montages than a promotional platform. And Twitch didn't even exist, it was Justin TV and it was mostly movie streams, people pretending to be DJs and then gaming off in the corner. 4chan was the marketing platform of choice and streaming slowly creeped in from there. Notch would use /v/ as his home base until he ran off to Reddit when he made enough money. The early streamers of Minecraft were mostly anons who followed Notch's work on /v/. It was peak 4chan's impact on culture and internet culture and Notch rode the wave.

They did, but good fucking luck getting help on a Gamefaqs messageboard for some obscure game. It was fine for games with a lot of sales or cult followings, but something really small would probably be completely abandoned, or see maybe 5 posts in a month. Gamefaqs also kind of went to shit at some point after being sold to CNET, I can't recall when that was exactly. At any rate, going to more official message boards was definitely the way to go for a lot of games back then, and it was a pain in the ass.

Official forums were full of cock suckers. Gamefaqs were better for basically anything niche. I spent way too much time discussing Japanese exclusive mecha games on Gamefaqs.

It is important to know why the players won this time, so the victory can be repeated in the future.

They didn't win. Sony now know they have to force a PSN account at launch and can't add it later. Every PS game going forward will have this as a requirement. Probably even if it's single player. It's not even a bloody nose for Sony. They learned a way to turn the dildo sideways as they fuck you and you think it's a win they didn't do it this time.

 

[blessed king of longing]

by the way, i'm not changing my negative review and neither should you. they knew this was going to happen and didn't give a shit. devs need to lie in the bed theyve made

 

[Space Satan]