It happens all the time. Sometimes it’s a disclaimer on the store page, or sometimes they just list “multiplayer”, and I have to find out via forums if the game is actually DRM-free or if they’re using the equivalent GOG multiplayer service. And the reason it’s there is to entice those developers who rely on the equivalent Steam services, but I wish those API calls could somehow be co-opted into actual DRM-free multiplayer.

It’s strange, because if I buy an expansion for a board game, I don’t have to shop at the same store that I bought the base game from.

An extremely similar API exists in GOG, for better and for worse, because it functionally is the only DRM in GOG. And of course Epic offers the same thing, too.

If that happened, that would mean you’d be able to buy DLC for all of your free EGS games on Steam as well. Selling DLC for those games is probably just about the only money that store brings in outside of Fortnite.

I’m going to nitpick the controller stuff too, because they could have done it in a way that was store agnostic, but of course, they benefit if they don’t do it that way.

You can start shopping on another store, like GOG. But also, the add-ons thing feels like these folks have never shopped for video games anywhere else, because everyone does that.

1. Games get updates far more often than they did back in the 90s and 00s. If your game is installed, it’s pushed to you automatically. If it’s not installed, the next time you install it, you’ll be on the latest version.
2. Installing a game is passive compared to inserting the next disc, fishing out the serial key, etc. You just click download and walk away for 5 minutes. Likewise, as games are very large these days, you can easily uninstall and reinstall games on limited drive space very easily from the same UI.
3. Cloud saves. They’re always nice to have. You can rig up something like it if you’ve got the networking and scripting know-how, but once again, it’s just passive through a launcher like Steam.
4. There’s a lot to be said about the longevity of network multiplayer games that allow you to self host and port forward, but Steam and its ilk mean that the average person never has to learn how to do that ever, and it’s more secure for the end users for Steam to take on the burden of facilitating the connection.
5. With things like Steam’s Big Picture Mode, you can navigate an entire library and jump from game to game with nothing but a controller.
6. Launching a game via Proton, whether in Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, or Steam, is just easier and more automatic than not using a launcher.

All that said, there’s a lot of value to GOG for never requiring the launcher (but they make an annoying exception for network multiplayer games).

You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.

But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.

Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.

I just watched 3 friends play it, and they were miserable.

Their concern isn’t that people are getting laid off but that they’ll be laid off here and replaced with people abroad; and the executives benefiting from the cost-cutting are no longer Americans in this case.

Nothing will come of this unless it also concerns Republicans, but it doesn’t, because the President’s son-in-law helped make this deal happen and personally benefited from it.

You can do all sorts of things with video games, even when sticking to realism, if it helps you achieve your goals.

If only more people had heeded her message, we wouldn’t have ended up with the “morality” system of Infamous, where it was such a hard choice to either save these people or harvest their energy for your own gain. Decisions, decisions.

One might argue that KOTOR semi-ruined a generation of video games with morality systems. I’m one. I would argue that.

I guess I don’t see either of those games as being massive open worlds but just a modern implementation of old-school RPGs like the original Fallouts.

It’s far better than the game dragging on longer than it has any business to, IMO.

I think this thing with Tencent is the only buyout they’re going to get.

To be fair, that story involves time travel.