Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don’t think I’ve bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don’t play a lot of games nowadays.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen much. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
The thing that pisses me off if that my comp only goes up by 3% but that is failure to a corp.
Thats interesting, I hadn’t connected those before. I think it would be hard to argue in favor of separate expectations for inflation of wages and the companies profits.
Like I understand having a stellar year, but the goal is still set the same, and its fine to return tk that baseline next year. Or maybe even doing well one year means we can lower the goal next year, or bank the difference for bad weather years.
Would be interesting if companies had an interest in the long term like that.
Because they could make it print even more money, and make the line go more up for a very short time!
That looks good on the CV you know.
Because most of these MBA fucks don’t understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Like the 28. Streaming service, so that I can’t find what I want anymore.
Yeah, the thing about Steam is that buying your game at Steam feels better than downloading it for free somehow.
because they don’t understand why it’s printing money
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
it’s a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
You hope. It wouldn’t be the first time.
example? /genq
Oh geez there’s so many people tend to write articles about the general phenomenon rather than specific examples.
One of the biggest recent examples though has got to be Boeing. While they’re a publicly traded company, they resisted the call of greed above all until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and the MD executives won the battle for control of the merged company. Things went on a decades long slide after that which resulted in hundreds of deaths and a chain of high profile mechanical failures we’re still not sure is over.
For privately held corporations it’s all about that new leadership. In fact around 70 percent of family run ones fail in the second generation. But any generation can run the business into the ground or change it up. Bancroft and Barings are great examples of that. Barings was 232 years old when it went bankrupt under mismanagement.
I don’t think he’s really that involved into Steam or Valve proceedings anymore
Whether or not we believe it will be true, Gabe has said that he will release code that will allow you to play every game you’ve bought on steam without steam service if ever things headed in that direction.
Need someone to track videogame piracy rates and if steam gets enshittified make a graph and mark each of their bad decisions against it
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Perhaps one encased in a giant stone bust of himself. With lasers.
Ugh, the thought of some generic investment company swooping in and running Valve hurts my heart.
I’m seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is currently a good company so I am happy to support it. If it enshittifies then I will stop using it and sail the high seas if need be.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there’s no actual law requiring that. It’s just an excuse they use to be greedy.
It’s more complicated than just one law that says “you must be a bastard” I admit, but fiduciary responsibility is a core requirement of any publicly traded company and very much is legally enforceable (this parenthetical aside stands in for about three pages of niche caveats and overly wordy exceptions that I’m just going to shamelessly handwave away). At best a CEO might be found to be civilly liable, but
peasantsnon-C-suite employees are criminally charged for neglecting their fiduciary duty every day in the US.Absolutely, but fiduciary responsibility, has never and was never intended to mean absolutely maximizing profits and especially at the long term expense.
That was a twisted idea that was put forward in the late 70s early 80s as a means to justify destroying companies for short term gain.
Oh, then yes I agree completely!
…
So anyways you coming to Steve’s “eat the rich” party? I hear he’s got a new barbecue.
If you breach fiduciary duty the best thing you can hope for is to be fired. Executives have been criminally charged for it as well though. And while it has to be an intentional act of malfeasance, that gets pretty blurry when the shareholders hire thousand dollar an hour lawyers to come after you.
So while yes, the root cause is greed, the system itself is setup to feed that.
Yeah but they’ll never learn because tons off people keep shoveling money at them.
I think Activision might be on the way out, they’ve had playercounts decline pretty much every quarter and even though their SEC filings show an increase in revenue thats only because Blizzard and other new properties get filed alongside the rest of Activision, now.
It’s a shame, I liked OW1, even with the tired meta and 6v6 more than I liked OW2.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory, allowing unlocking of skins and content without spending anything extra was a nice balance in my opinion that I wish more games did.
They took OW1 and bastardized it, it deserves the rating it has. It used to be that new versions of games were better.
The loot boxes weren’t predatory
Ehhh, they were basically the same thing as a slot machine. The battlepass is certainly worse, as it just encourages rampant (not so) microtransactions, but just because the current battlepass system is really predatory, doesn’t mean the old loot box system wasn’t predatory at all. It was just less predatory.
Well I guess what I mean by that is that loot boxes were free to obtain AND open through leveling and weren’t exclusive to forking over money.
No lootboxes at all is the ultimate goal, but I’d take OW1 lootbox style over nearly any others.
It used to be that new versions of games were better.
I for one am very interested to see the quality differences between worker owned game studios and corporate studios. But last I heard they had only just started unionizing.
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
unions are a harder sell in an industry like tech where it’s common to have a diverse skill set spanning work that could arguable each be it’s own union. does a full stack dev have to join the database admin union before they can write sql queries?
those diverse skill sets also make the individual value of workers fluctuate a lot more as well.
I still like the idea of unions but I just don’t know how you can make them work for tech;if anyone has any good resources on the subject I’d love to read more about it
And a programmer friend I talked to couldn’t comprehend why he would want to be in a union.
I also had a programmer friend that was anti-union. He was like “If the place I’m working at sucks, I’ll just find another place.” Very short sighted and optimistic.
It really is a shame. I played so much OW1, and then suddenly it changed to be like all the other modern games with sleazy monetization that I avoid.
CDPR? admittedly they’re really good at gaining it back again, kinda homer simpsons vibes where they repeatedly fuck up but then make an honest attempt to make things right only to repeat the cycle all over again.
CDPR is still on my “probably pass” list after cyber punk. I read the launch news, stayed faraway. I picked it up this year, after all the patches and work and… yeah it’s still fundamentally broken.
Not in terms of balance or bugs, but it didn’t have the magic. To start, I really don’t like fantasy games. They’re just not my thing. Witcher 3 had bad combat mechanics, could be terribly grindy and YET is one of my top five games. The story telling, from the plot itself the tiny immersive details in the world, hooked you. They nailed the big things, but it was the little things like sometimes you’d free someone, and realize they murdered a bunch of dudes who were minding their own business, and none of this was mentioned in or affected any other plot line, it was just a random detail in the universe.
Cyberpunk has a semblance of the big stuff, but exactly none of the soul. I cared about some of the main characters (emphasis on “some”) but exactly none about the world. It never felt like more than a backdrop.
A loss and misstep is ok, particularly given a growing studio, the problem with CDPR is they think they fixed cyberpunk. With that mentality I’m giving their next game a huge berth.
And if you liked cyberpunk, enjoy. There are parts to be enjoyed. There are some neat plot threads, some nifty side quests, if you enjoy it don’t let people ruin it for you.
They lied about Cyberpunk. They knew it was bad on release and maliciously made decisions so that people would still buy it. That’s not some minor thing, that’s a crime. “We leave greed to others”, yeah, right. And this problem was never addressed by CDPR, like it’s a normal thing to do, they think it’s okay.
Man, Cyberpunk was not a Homer-like fuckup. They were promising features which were nowhere near ready, while their whole game hardly ran at all. That’s a crime, at least in my country. Homer doesn’t do crimes…
CDPR mistakes can be corrected, but blizzard games are designed from the ground up, with purpose, to be fuckup games in order to milk as much money as possible from it players. There is no correcting the boat for blizzard because for the managers of blizzard the boat IS correct
Hopefully their transition to unreal engine 5 gets away with a lot of their launch issues I genuinely love all of their games but their release dates being “game launch +1-2 years” hurts me.
Death to ActivisionBlizzard. Company of shitty games and sexual harassment.
Hey now, what did Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard King ever do to you?
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
Even if Blizzard games haven’t had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.
Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.
Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan “free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times”, which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.
It wouldn’t be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard’s actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren’t just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government’s oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard’s morals and principles, or lack thereof.
That’s exactly where they lost me forever. Truly a despicable bunch of assholes.
Reminder that that event happened IN TAIWAN.
That makes it even more hilarious.
I’d forgotten all about that.
All the sex pests felt like a “good” reason to quit WoW but I’d say my real reason was it had become a piece of shit that didn’t value my time, and I’d honestly been looking for a reason to quit for a long time.
The removed a bunch of portals from WoW in order to “make the world feel big” (make you waste more time traveling instead of doing fun things).
I might just be too casual, but I remember that half the fun of WoW was traveling. Of course, I never got into raids or pvp anyway, I leveled up and did dungeons lol
Travel (especially in older zones where you would be using portals) consists of:
Mount flying mount, point in the right direction, hit auto-run, wait.Not really the most exciting game play experience when you’ve already flown over the area a dozen times before. Taxis are also just as bad. Other MMOs (Guldwars 2, FF14) have no problem with players teleporting directly to somewhere close to their destination. They already traveled their once, no need to force them to do it again.
Oh much of my playtime was in Azeroth during TBC, I didn’t really have flying mounts lol
That’s the event that gave me the push I needed to request deletion of my account with them. I won’t give them another dollar for as long as I live.
Same, was just starting wow classic with my partner as she’d never played wow before, that made us both cancel immediately and never give them another cent.
There are a couple of VERY GOOD classic pservers out there which are not only better maintained than the Blizz servers, these have also much less bots and way healthier populations and economies.
Do you have any resources to share so that I could join one?
I can absolutely recommend Turtle WoW. It is such a good classic+ experience: imagine if there never were any of the wow addons but instead the base game got expanded in a meaningful and in terms of Warcraft 3 lore-friendly way. There are new and very well-done zones which were empty before. There are new items and professions without nullifying the existing ones, there are two new races and new race/class combos (to keep close to WC3 lore), there are new dungeons and raids, tons of new quests and a lot of quality of life improvements. You have many options to play how you want: restrict yourself on how much exp you get and play slow & steady, opt in for a built-in hardcore mode, activate warmode to be flagged for pvp or a combination of those. Also, pretty much all classes got rebalanced (some more than others, though) to make more builds viable without altering the game to much (more balance updates are in the roadmap). The dev team is very active and dedicated.
Crossing fingers that we get the answer. I would love a well-recommended classic server.
Look one comment above.
Same! Still kinda miss hearthstone but in the end it was just a game.
It was easy to predict a downward slide as soon as they merged with Activision.
Rather than merged I think they were simply bought by Activision. An Acquisition is when one business entity becomes a child to another, a merger is when the two become one different entity.
“Mergers” end up being acquisitions in the majority of cases. One company culture will prevail, one companies middle management will take over the administrative sides and depending on the structure also the technical side.
Okay but the merger was Vivendi Games who merged with Activision. Blizzard Studios was never at any point Activision’s equal, they’re a bought and paid for property of Activision.
I didn’t even know they merged with Activision. And I didn’t even know that the latter has also gone worse than I expected. Which is a shame because I have fond memories of pre-2010s Call of Duty games.
Ever since they banned that StarCraft II pro for protesting china in Hong Kong, I’ve uninstalled battle.net and didn’t look back.
I rather buy a game from EA.
Same, down with the CCP
Same dude. They had been on the downhill for a bit but I sold my stock and was done
Sometimes Blizzard says things but it just sounds like Winnie the Pooh’s jizz gurgling out their mouth.
what
They lost me before this line, but I will never forgive and never forget:
“What you guys don’t own phones?”
They made me sad with Diablo 3. But they lost me at StarCraft 2.
D3 got better after years of updates. StarCraft 2’s story was hot garbage and they turned a single full game into three smaller games.
Seeing Blizzard fuck over Overwatch fans was not a surprise to me.
The story was absolute crap, but the campaign levels were still really fun.
Also, each campaign did feel like a full fledged game from a content perspective. I can give blizzard shit for a lot, but how they handled sc2 (beyond dropping it completely) is low on the list.
SC2’s esport and competitive scene was incredibly successful. We got 14 years of incredible tournaments, content, personalities, streamers, etc… Seems like you are just a casual player that just missed the boat.
Blizz was salty about not being able to sue their way into a cut of all of the professional Brood War revenue in Korea, which is why SC2 didn’t launch with LAN support (except when played at an Official Blizzard Event).
It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.
It’s a shame 'cause SC2 had some genuinely awesome ideas, like the Allied Commander mode. Probably the best casual online gameplay of any RTS, which frankly every other RTS ever made should copy.
Unfortunately every other RTS only tries to copy the sweaty multiplayer 1v1 experience. Like playing guitar hero on expert mode on your mouse and keyboard while also doing strategy at the same time.
Even more unfortunately no one seems to be able to execute even that part half as well as Blizzard did.
Since we’re talking RTS, do you have time to talk about my shameless plug for http://beyondallreason.info?
This style of RTS appeals much more to me in recent years. Feels less like you need to perform like a speedrunner.
So much QOL compared to the APM spamfests other RTS can become.
“You think you do, but you don’t!”
unpopular opinion: this phrase is right, sometimes. In that context, at that conference, bad call. But sometimes… people think they want something until they get it, and then they realize they don’t want it.
Makes me think of that Reddit post where the guy thought he was into shitting and ordered an escort to shit on him, only to realise he was in fact not into shitting
How you phrase things is also important. Never having played WoW, they came across as arrogant and out of touch. Something that’s only been reinforced by their further actions. The “Do you guys not have phones?” comment is just the sequel. The issues only be more and more serious since then.
It was evident that they had completely lost touch with their player base at that point
deleted by creator
Hulu was really good a decade ago. Then they put ads in and created a higher tier. Nobody was surprised when it happened again some years later.
In Ukraine starlink was being hailed as a hero before Elon decided to turn off Internet access in areas he deemed Ukraine to be “too aggressive”.
Goodwill doesn’t deserve it’s reputation. It uses minimum wage exemptions for disabled people to pay it’s staff below minimum wage.
Edit to add - Destiny 2 was the other one I was thinking of and couldn’t quite place. Great PvE shooter with great story, and they killed it to force people to buy DLC.
D2’s problem is different. To succeed critically they needed to produce The Taken King or The Witch Queen every content cycle, but there’s no way to do that except release only once a year — but they wanted to release every 3 months, so they made shitty DLCs that everyone mildly disliked and hyped them up so people actively disliked them on release.
Then the shitty mini DLCs began cannibalizing the dev, time and monetary budget from the main DLCs and it fell into a downward spiral.
Yeah that wasn’t great but I think it was the part where they literally deleted a bunch of the story so you either bought the DLC or wandered the maps aimlessly killing stuff that really broke any good will left.
Or worse… you bought the DLC and had no idea what was going on because you’re a newer player and they deleted the story that this DLC is a follow up.too…
It’s amazing how people still get things wrong ages after it’s been corrected by the author and spread misinformation and the hate involved with it.
Elon didn’t turn starlink off. It was always off. It was never ON to be turned OFF.
Further, allowing ukraine to use starlink as a weapon in an offensive attack was against the terms of service and would put spacex in a very difficult position with regulations. That’s why the DoD took it over, and it’s okay now.
If it was always off then why did they lose Internet? And why was Ukraine’s counter offensive bad but Russia’s offensive okay?
They lost internet because they went out of range of where it was on. They assumed it was on everywhere.
They strapped them onto boats where the internet was on, and drove them to where the internet was off. Then they begged SpaceX to turn them on, and they refused.
Not turning it on to allow the attack was in line with the terms of service and weapons export rules. SpaceX doesn’t want their consuner service to be considered a weapon.
Russia was getting satellites from 3rd parties and using them in ukraine because they work in ukraine.
Edit: and just to clarify, now that the DoD is managing this for ukraine through a contract with SpaceX, the DoD is allowing its use as a weapon AFAIK.
A. That’s not how satellites work
B. The US considers Crimea to be Ukrainian territory.
C. These uplinks were already purchased by the DoD, who was very vocal about Elon fucking with the signal.
I know it sucks that your idol turned out to be the vain villain instead of Tony Stark but we were all here. We all remember.
Lol, service absolutely can be turned on and off based on regions. SpaceX doesn’t turn it on in a region until the local government had an agreement with them. Just because the US gov sees Crimea as Ukraine does not mean SpaceX is obliged to turn it on there.
And no, there was no DoD contract in place at the time. SpaceX was providing services for free out of their own goodwill.
The DoD had a formal contact in place in June 2023, the incident falsely commented on by OP was in 2022.
Edit below
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
You can go read it all in the wiki yourself but the relevant part
In June 2023, the Department of Defense officialized a contract with Shotwell’s SpaceX to buy Starlink satellite services for Ukraine.[10] The deal includes the Pentagon buying 400-500 Starlink terminals for Ukraine, giving the Pentagon control of where Starlink works inside the country without fear of interruption.[79] The terms of services of the final contract were undisclosed for security issues.[10] Following the contract, The Pentagon stated Starlink was a “vital layer in Ukraine’s overall communications network” amidst “a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities they need.”[10]
Edit: oh, you’re OP. LOL
I’m not going to read the wiki on an active war with a cult of personality involved. It’s not going to be unbiased.
News reports from the period make the situation very clear. As well as whistle blowers straight up telling us Elon personally shut down their Internet.
Get fucked.
Okay dude, continue to have your raging hard on for hating Elon
I’ll wait for a verified source that shows spacex had a formal contract to supply starlink services to Ukraine with the DoD prior to this. I imagine I’ll die before you can do that since you can’t.
Edit: specifically before the event in question.
I’m pretty sure is right there with them
Blizzard died quite a while ago. Even if the same dudes are still making decisions at the head of the studio after the Activision buyout, clearly they have dementia or some other cognitive defects.
Firing Nethaera was a bullet in their brain.
I think the execs were always somewhat shit, even when they were making good games. It’s just their creative team miraculously managed to make good games despite the shitty execs.
Yeah, they used to have a Caste System in Blizzard HQ where badge color decided your importance. And get this, their tech guys, security guys, and hardware guys (not firmware) were all the lower caste lmao.
