bogdugg

From what I understand, there's (at least) two kinds of free speech. There's free speech as in the government will not restrict your speech, which is important for criticizing the state without fear of being locked up. Then there's the fanatical idea of maximizing speech: that the marketplace of ideas requires minimal limitations on what can be said anywhere, and the 'best ideas' will naturally rise to the top.

The problem with the latter is that it is incredibly noisy, easy to manipulate, and often an illusion anyway. Proponents of the latter in the US will use the former as cover, but they are different things. The ~~2nd~~ 1st Amendment has nothing to do with your ability to moderate private spaces. Removing trolls, enforcing rules, and focusing discussion are all necessary for engaging in useful dialogue.

The Elon Musks of the world are both wrong and fuckin' nuts, in my opinion. Often, what they really want is for the consensus of a place of discussion to more closely align with their own ideals. They think, "I am right, others disagree, therefore there must be some fundamental flaw in the system." The simpler explanation is that they're a moron.

I have two podcasts in my rotation currently:

• Remap Radio; previously Waypoint Radio, sometimes their politics feel overly dogmatic, perhaps as a reflection of the audience and culture they have cultivated, but the vibes are good and they have insightful things to say. I'd say they are currently in a transition period so they're still finding their rhythm.
• 8-4 Play; Started by a localization company based in Tokyo, you'll get a unique perspective of life in Japan, Japanese games, and industry connections that you can't really get anywhere else, at least not in English.

Used to listen to the Bombcast, but none of the splinters from what it was appeal to me much. New Bombcast, Nextlander, solo Gerstmann, are all flawed in different ways imo.

Why all the hate towards this guy?

As time went on, he developed a reputation for big promises and hype and underdelivering - viewed by some as straight up lying. He arguably killed the Fable brand. He presented a tech demo for the launch of the Kinect that was thought to be a real game, that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Following Fable 3's poor reception, he makes his own company and hypes up "Curiosity", essentially a bad clicker game with a promised prize to the person who gets the final click. The tech was bad, and the "prize" was supposedly a share of the revenue from their following project Godus. That project was not good (which was only expected to be at all due to his penchant for inflating expectations), and the cherry on top was that the person who won the prize for the aforementioned Curiosity game never received a dime.

After that, people stopped caring.

Oh you're definitely correct. But I think many decisions were made in this way, and it compromises the core experience. There's all these friction points between the different systems that make the experience feel disjointed. They are each fine in isolation, but they don't talk to each other very well, in my opinion.

Even Skyrim arguably suffered a little from problem of locations not mattering, but at least you needed to first visit the place to unlock it as a fast travel point, which meant you needed to travel there on foot, which meant exploring the world, which requires other design work that supports that experience. But for Starfield of course, these are planets so you can just fly there. It makes sense for what the game is, but it doesn't make for a compelling experience. See that mountain? You can go to your map and fast travel there.*

*I know it doesn't work that way once you land on a planet, but you know what I mean

I believe it amplifies some of the worst aspects of their games. If I think back to what I liked about Oblivion, it was a world that felt lived in. Objects had purpose, characters had homes, content was discovered. It relied a lot on procedural content, but it felt like there was a strong level of cohesion between the procedural elements and mechanics. The disparate aspects of the game fed into one another. With Starfield, you get this huge increase in scope, but each individual part feels kind of empty and boring and clunky and slow.

Here's a contrasting example:

In Oblivion, imagine if you wanted to steal something from a vendor. You have to wait for night, you have to pick the lock, items have actual value, you have to stealth in case they catch you, you know if they can see you, there are other things to do in the city in the meantime, and during all this you might find something unexpected along the way that completely tangents you off into a different direction. All these elements come together to create interesting player stories, and none if it needs to be tied to any guided narrative.

In Starfield, all of these elements fall apart. The scope of the game means you're constantly fast travelling from location to location. No single location has too much going on, and half the time what is there is sending you back out to space anyway, so you never really feel much connection to any physical place. The relative value of items is totally skewed because of the scale of ship related expenses compared to anything else, so what's the value of stealing a cool rock? It's also very difficult to tell relative weapon/item quality at a glance. I know that a steel sword is better than an iron sword; I have no clue why a Reflective Terrablazer is better than a Targeted Blurgun - and the default weapons usually don't matter anyway because I would much rather have cool modifiers. The stealth and lockpick mechanics are both behind skill tree unlocks, so you're far less likely to engage with those mechanics in the first place. The shops are all open 24/7 (I think? honestly don't even know) so the day/night cycle seems irrelevant, so sneaking in to the shop is a no go, and I feel pretty limited in lockpicks and don't really know where to reliably buy than a few at a time. And you never, ever, find anything surprising or compelling, and if you did it would be reduced to a quest checkbox.

So to summarize: I don't know who I'm stealing from, I don't know why I would care to steal anything, it's not obvious how stealthy anyway I am unless I skill into it, it's not worth using my lockpicks, I'll never be caught, and their door is always open. There's zero motivation to actually engage with the world in a way that makes it feel alive. But it's critical to note: all those systems are still there! You can do all this stuff in the game! But because of how things are structured, even though the game on a fundamental level is extremely similar, the way you interact with it is totally removed from the kind of emergent fun that makes exploring those worlds so fun. It's just a smooth path of monotony to the next thing. The systems often amount to less than the sum of their parts.

Now I'll admit, some of this could be on me. Maybe I've changed. It's possible. But man, I tried. Hey, what's that cool cave on this planet? I'll go check it out! Oh uhh, it's nothing? There's... a dead crab and a box with some old glue? Okay I guess?

This is an interesting perspective, and gave me something to think about!

I don't think the Steam Deck is quite there in terms of adoption to justify an across the board tax. The order of operations is kind of reversed, where Steam is reinvesting money made from previous sales towards R&D and Hardware ambitions, rather than using the Steam Deck to bring in users. But if you're developer that benefits from the Steam Deck's existence, or saw a sales bump from Steam Deck sales, or some other benefit like that, I agree it's a pretty good trade-off in that case.

Nintendo is a bit different because they sort of focus on their own thing and everyone else is secondary. Something like 80% of software sales for Nintendo platforms are first party, so it's mostly a Nintendo machine. Frankly, I think they should take less of a cut. Indies do really well on Nintendo though. They have a kind of pseudo-monopoly of a younger casual gamer demographic, and they maintain that user base by putting out great software. It is an interesting counterpoint though.

Is there a source for the $10 fee for digital releases? I'd love to read more about it, had trouble finding it.

I'm guessing they don't want non-qualified individuals benefiting monetarily from mental health services. I can only assume it's a legal can of worms.

The consoles justify the amount they take more because they are selling hardware at a loss to bring in users, so as a developer, you are seeing direct, tangible, and ongoing benefits to giving the manufacturers a cut. Every console cycle, there is renewed investment in the ecosystem to keep users interested.

For digital platforms, the continued investment in the platform itself is both less tangible, and I would wager less overall (though we can't know this for Steam because we don't have access to numbers like that). The longer Steam continues as a platform, the more true this is, unless you believe that Steam will continue to improve at the same rate. I don't see my interaction with Steam being much different 5 years from now as it is today, so it is less obvious to me that such at steep rate is justified.

Like, imagine they "perfected" Steam. They made all the features users could ever want, and there becomes no reason to make any more changes. Should they keep charging the same rate? Or, maybe a better way to frame it, would be that rather than investing some of that 30% rate into improving the platform, they invest in developers themselves to make better products, because it's the only place left to make the platform better than it was before. This would be equivalent to just lowering the rate across the board, in my opinion.

“are the devs happy with it? Is that the standard for digital stores as well?”. And the answer to both is Yes

I fully disagree. On the first point, do developers accept it? Sure. That does not at all mean they are happy about it. Money is tight for games, and I guarantee you every developer would much prefer to take a bigger piece of the pie.

To your second point, it is the standard but it is not universal. Epic Games Store takes 12%. Itch.io defaults to 10%. Google Play Store takes 15% on the first $1 million in revenue.

But that alone doesn’t impact me, the consumer.

I don't believe this is entirely true. The more cash flow developers have, the more stable they are as companies, and the more able they are to put out good games. You are indirectly impacted because a larger tax on developers means fewer, or lower quality, games that get released.

Steams share has zero impact on my wallet.

~~Disagree, unless you exclusively play AAA.~~

Edit: Actually I've changed my mind on this. I mostly agree the percentage cut doesn't affect the optimal price point.