tomfreak :
IndignantSkeptic :
I'm glad Valve Software is fighting Microsoft's vendor lock-in by supporting Linux, but Valve Software needs to acknowledge that they themselves are also guilty of vendor lock-in with Steam. Digital distribution needs to be run by a consortium, not one company, and it needs to include everything together such as games, movies, TV series, books, magazines, comics, music etcetera.
blame it on developers. If all the major developer like EA/Ubisoft/2K/taketwo/bethesda put money design 1 single open source client distribution + ditching valve slowly. All of them would not need to pay valve a cut. Games would be much cheaper too.
This is pure hogwash. Games were supposed to get cheaper when they screwed me out of a PAPER manual and a box (which I welcomed, assuming the price would actually drop, I'd rather have PDF's). They went from $30 to $60 and look like they're heading to $65-70 with next gen consoles. On top of that the length dropped from 30-150hrs down to 10-15hrs of game play. All bad things.
What we need is BIG DEVS to DIE and all be replaced by the likes of Almost Human (4 guys for grimrock 1, now 6 guys working on grimrock 2), Runic Games (torchlights), inxile, hairbrained schemes etc where they give us the same great games but for $15-30 again because there is no Bobby Kotick etc to overpay+tons of overhead, no drm etc. Protection schemes were supposed to stop piracy and lower prices too...They only went up and don't stop ANY pirate, but instead just make life miserable for the honest users. Hopefully who then, if smart, head on over to gamecopyworld.com etc to defeat the dumb protections to get a decent playable experience like the REAL pirates get from every game...LOL.
Note the small devs go DRM FREE or at most a serial # or something (which to me is just minimal protections I can deal with, I accept a serial being needed to play on their servers, and it doesn't mangle my PC), which really does seem to cheapen the price. Runic Games says they make as much on a $20 download as they used to on a $60 retail box. Don't tell me torchlight 1 or 2 sucked they were better than Diablo3 IMHO. Certainly better at $20 vs. $60 for Diablo3. The small devs have huge forum participation that dictates the GAME before it's made rather than some honcho in a suit saying umm, no gamers get what we want them to have or whatever we can screw them the worst with (RMAH etc...I'm looking at you Diablo3...LOL). Small devs take user input and develop their game with that input in mind. I love kickstarter for this, which provides funding without the need of some big corp with deadlines pushing games out bugs or not. Sure some projects fail (though money gets returned then), but largely they are asking for feedback on what features you want in the game from day ONE, and it looks like a lot of games will come out exactly as I'd hoped (wasteland 2, shroud of the avatar, star citizen, Torment, Project Eternity! all shaping up to be awesome). Try that with EA...LOL. All they do is cut features to meet some ship schedule that's mandated to them by all their bean counters and shareholders.
Also, regarding a cut to valve: Do you know of any other ways to get cheaper games besides them or gog? Does EA sell cheap games direct? NOPE. Does EA/TakeTwo etc have huge sales weekly? NOPE. I don't like steam, but if I was broke I'd sign up probably. I get enough from GOG to keep busy and until that ends (hopefully never) I'll continue to go to them with no DRM or crap steam app. But I like what Valve does pricing wise and getting games seen by many people where a small dev usually would just go broke. Valve gets them out in front where they couldn't get to before alone or in stores competing with EA etc for shelf space (again, despite me hating their app they do good work for small devs).
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