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Digital Game Retailers

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Nov 2014 01:58

Go to the Origin frontpage:

https://www.origin.com/

Titanfall, Battlefield 4, the new Dragon Age, Need for Speed, FIFA, The Sims, and so on, and further down the Crysis games, Mass Effect, Dead Space, and so on.

Go to the Uplay frontpage:

http://uplay.ubi.com/

Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs, Rayman, Child of Light, etc.

Go the Steam frontpage:

http://store.steampowered.com/

THE BINDING OF ISAAC SERIOUSLY? A FLASH GAME FROM 2011 SMACK DAB ON THE FRONTPAGE OF THE BIGGEST ONLINE VIDEOGAME STORE IN THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HOLIDAYS?

It is insane how much shit Steam is pushing on people, and how fervently. For this reason alone I hope one of the other stores, or all of them together, destroy them one day, and the sooner the better. Gabe Newell's dream is to make a store that will exclusively sell Flash garbage that runs on an operating system that doesn't work, preferably running on a dedicated console that has no exclusives and costs more than the sum of its parts cost at retail. The future of PC gaming, according to Valve.
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Unread postby icycalm » 30 Nov 2014 20:14

Basically, if you want to get a game like Far Cry 4 on Steam, you have to know about it from elsewhere, because Valve is doing nothing to promote this sort of game. It's nowhere on the frontpage, and if it does come up, now and again, in some sliding menu, it's always sandwiched between an untold amount of pure garbage. I guess this is Valve's way of retaliating for Ubi and EA opening up their own stores. Or Ubi and EA opened up their own stores because Valve was promoting garbage over their games? Who started this?

Whoever it was, it is pathetic, and the right is of course with the CONTENT CREATORS -- i.e. with Ubi and EA, who are making the huge investements necessary to bring to market their unique arthouse games -- not with SLEAZY MIDDLEMEN like Valve, whose greatest contribution to videogames is a website.
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Unread postby Cassowary » 01 Dec 2014 04:39

The saddest part is that Steam is not the worst offender, although it is high up on the list. GOG to name one example, is equally bad in this regard, if not worse. Bad curation -- seen on Steam -- is still better than no curation. To even begin to use GOG, you need to know exactly what you are looking for, because a decent game will almost never be featured on the frontpage: it's all disgustingly random. The site looks like it was designed by and for people with ADD, despite numerous efforts to clean its design up, and this is reflected in the curation -- there's no better term for it than just random. It doesn't help that the site's selection is also laughably out of date, with almost no noteworthy games from the past few years anywhere in sight.

I absolutely agree with you that the ideal digital game retailer would be run by a developer or publisher -- a real, active one, not a profiteer like Valve. Origin and uPlay are onto the right idea, although they still have annoying clients (still better than Steam, as you can ignore the clients once you have games installed) and useless "social" features. Every developer and/or publisher should ultimately have their own digital retail service for their own games and little more; this would allow the curation to be handled by the people who worked on the games, or at least by people who work closely enough to the games themselves to have some idea how to properly curate them. Even the "indies" should do this, because it would effectively quarantine them and allow them to mess up their own spaces as much as they wanted to (maybe we'd even get "indie websites" where the radiance of the art is so strong that the whole thing is written in Zapf Dingbats and you don't get to choose what you buy!) without really bothering anyone else. I would really love to see more developers follow Ubisoft's and EA's lead and pull (or at least threaten to pull, in Ubisofts's case) games from Steam.
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Unread postby icycalm » 01 Dec 2014 05:07

You are reading a tremendous amount of stuff into my posts which I never wrote down or even dreamed of.

Cassowary wrote:It doesn't help that the site's selection is also laughably out of date, with almost no noteworthy games from the past few years anywhere in sight.


This is understandable. GOG stands for "Good Old Games". I know they sell new games too now, but I think they decided to start doing that fairly recently, so it's no wonder they don't have many semi-old games yet.

Cassowary wrote:I absolutely agree with you that the ideal digital game retailer would be run by a developer or publisher


I neither said nor implied anything of the kind. In fact it is obvious that the ideal digital retailer would have nothing to do with any developers or publishers, just like all the brick-and-mortar retailers ever. It is seriously FUCKED UP that Valve, Ubisoft and EA have their own stores now.

Cassowary wrote:not a profiteer like Valve


Communists are not welcome here. Just sayin'.

Cassowary wrote:and useless "social" features.


Steam's social features are amazing, and that's why I prefer to buy games on there whenever I can. You sound like the majority of players who don't like to play games with other people, and therefore misunderstand some of the best games available today (see all the losers playing PA or PS2 on their own and wondering what icy's going on about).

Cassowary wrote:Every developer and/or publisher should ultimately have their own digital retail service for their own games and little more


Gah I can't stand the retardation any more.

Cassowary wrote:this would allow the curation to be handled by the people who worked on the games


Why was the word "curation" never used to describe what EB Games and GameStop have been doing for decades? Because ten or twenty years ago fagots didn't know how to turn on a console or a computer, so they didn't play videogames.

Cassowary wrote:Even the "indies" should do this, because it would effectively quarantine them and allow them to mess up their own spaces as much as they wanted to


Blah blah blah stupid. The "indies" are making a killing by having their abortions advertised in place of Far Cry 4 on Steam's frontpage, and you think they would GAIN by being relegated to ghettos? What are you, retarded?

Bleh.


(P.S. Don't try to rationalize your bullshit or backpedal because I will tell JC to ban you. If you don't have anything new to say that doesn't seem retarded, don't say anything.)
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