• 5 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • crossmr@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Steam is a ticking time bomb
    3·
    7 months ago

    Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn’t your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.

    Approaching this from a developer point of view, let’s talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.

    Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don’t know that one of Valve’s requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can’t count the number of store pages I’ve seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren’t gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn’t allow any gameplay at all, etc.

    Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because ‘the UI can be seen’. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal’s Hires screenshot tool. It’s incapable of capturing the UI. That’s kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying ‘You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad’. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: “First player uses keyboard and mouse”, because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.

    Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told ‘oh we can’t actually update your account fully to the new country, you’ll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information’. So I did that, but oh… the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I’d already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they’d let me transfer that to the other account.

    Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they’ve already bought.

    From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don’t particularly like. The trashy meme ‘curators’ they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a ‘review bomb’ regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.

    But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.

    There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven’t gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can’t have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You’re entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying ‘If you refund a game during this sale, you can’t buy it again until the sale is over’.

    People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just ‘meh’. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what’s on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the ‘event’ of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.

  • crossmr@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Two indie Steam games were disguised as Helldivers 2 to scam players
    21·
    8 months ago

    This is what Steam takes 30% for. Legitimate indie companies submit games and some jobsworth continually rejects it because of incredibly asinine trivial stuff like a word being out of place or literally made up stuff that isn’t even real meanwhile companies like this just carry on.

    Steam literally has a policy in place that once you pass approval, you can do whatever you want. Why even make them pass approval if they can immediately change it to something that violates their ‘standards’?

  • crossmr@kbin.socialtoNews@lemmy.world•Revealed: at least 22 Californians have died while being held face down by police since 2016
    25·
    8 months ago

    and yet we do. This is like yelling at a kid for throwing a candy bar wrapper out the window while ignoring the factory around the bend spewing sewage into the river. Fact of the matter is health care workers have been killing people far in excess of any unjustified killings by police for years/decades and there has never been a peep out of people about it. The fact that you take the time to say ‘fuck the police’ over the healthcare workers who are killing them in an order of magnitude higher speaks volumes about you.

    Do keep in mind at no point have I said that what the police have done is acceptable or okay. That’s your own narrative.

  • crossmr@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•South Korea’s fertility rate sinks to record low despite $270bn in incentives
    65·
    8 months ago

    15 years in Korea, I saw before, and I see it now.

    When I first got there, Korea was still a bit like the past in North America. It was still completely viable to have a 1 income household, and in fact most working women would say, at the time, they couldn’t wait to get married and have a kid so that they could retire and take care of their kid full time. The husband made more than enough money to support them, and how many people actually really want to work right?

    Now, it’s a requirement that both work full time at very good paying jobs or you’re going to struggle significantly. The government thinks this is solely a money issue but it isn’t. It’s an everything issue.

    1. Housing - Housing prices shot up 3-4x in a span of 10 years. Wages did not. It’s still a money issue, but it’s a pretty extreme one. Korea has a house ‘ladder’ type system with their jeonse deposit. It’s not as common now that interest rates are gone, but in the past, if you put down a big enough deposit you lived without any month to month rent. The landlord would invest the money you paid as deposit for 2 years and give you back the whole thing, you could turn around and save your money over those 2 years to then have an even bigger deposit and either keep moving to bigger and better houses or eventually saving up enough to buy your own house. This is now broken, but they didn’t exactly switch to a more worldly system. Many houses still require a massive deposit (maybe not quite as high) but also a high monthly rent. Be prepared to put down $100-$200k and still spend $1,500-3,000 a month for a good place. This is very bad in a place where wages have stagnated. The government has done nothing to really alleviate this situation.

    2. Working hours - Working hours are still very long there, despite some shifts. Your standard work day is typically 9-6 or 7. And then you need to get home. Most people wouldn’t get home until close to 8 pm depending on what they do and how far away they live. The government has done nothing to address this. The most they’ve done is actually make a couple statutory holidays in lieu. In the past most holidays that fell on a weekend you just lost. Now about half of them you will actually get the Monday or Friday off.

    3. Vacation time - most companies do not give extensive vacation time as you see in western countries. You might get a couple of days here and there, but for the most part a lot of companies all take some set time off during the summer and good luck booking any kind of reasonably priced recreation with you and 20 million of your closest friends all within the same few week period. The government has done nothing of note to address this.

    4. Recreation and leisure - Spend a little time on google checking out things like water parks, beaches, fireworks, parks, science museums for kids, the cherry blossoms in the spring. What’s the first thing you’ll notice? The fact that you’d have to put western fire marshals on suicide watch over the amount of people at each of these events. The itaewon crush disaster could probably happen at several different activities each year in many different places. I went to Ikea once and it was a mess. Shoulder to shoulder through the entire store. An hour long lineup to get into the restaurant. It is very difficult to enjoy your life outside of the house there because everyone else in the country is trying to do that at the same time in the same limited venues. The government has done nothing to address this.

    5. day to day cost of living - in the mid 2000s this was dirt cheap compared to western countries. This was the trade off. You went there, made less money, but the cost of living was so cheap you could still save quite a bit. Now it’s on par with western countries but wages haven’t kept up. Quality of life has taken a nosedive. Fewer leisure activities, fewer enjoyable things like ordering out, less money to spend on what little hobby and free time you have. The government has done nothing of note that has alleviated any of this.

    The government simply refuses to address the core issues that make people unhappy in their day to day life. Even if you immediately tripled everyone’s salary, it wouldn’t change the fact that they spend too long at work and in what free time they have it’s impossible to go out and enjoy themselves.

    Meanwhile soju is $1-2/bottle and you can still get $20-30 day rates in motels so getting day hammered and having an affair is still the most affordable fun you can have.