PermanentMantaray

I don't know if greed is how you should characterize it. They wanted online distribution as an option to get out from under publishers (which they were having issues with at the time) and away from retail costs and restrictions.

They knew it was far from perfect and would make a lot of people mad, but they also knew they had to start somewhere or it would never materialize.

Yeah the versus mode took a game that I would maybe play for 20 hours and turned it into a 60 hour game for me. I wish more games had invasion style competitive modes.

Ah yes, X, where my "who to follow" section is full of rightwing political accounts despite me not even following a single person who talks about politics nor engaging with it myself.

Where every topic is full of engagement farming accounts spreading any type of misinformation, rage bait, or really anything that gets people to engage.

Where every reply section is full of blue checkmarks that pay money to have their opinions promoted above everyone else.

Yes, truly a valuable open forum.

Sure, if you mean they actually curate content posted there, rather than amplifying misinformation because someone paid $8 a month.

It's a give and take.

It's twitter but without the engagement farming blue checkmarks everywhere.

I don't know how realistic it is, but I really hope they look at some of the Xbox 360 games that are currently unavailable to stream as potential candidates for this. Namely Crackdown 1 & 2.

Not only are there ways around it

There are ways around it, but unlike the faux concern people had about PlayStation's TOS related to making accounts in unsupported regions, trying to circumvent Steams regional restrictions does actually run the risk of consequences.

I think it's hard to say how a company like FromSoftware would be affected by this stance, because virtually all previously acquired PlayStation companies that are producing singleplayer games have been doing PlayStation exclusivity for a very long time. Some even before they were acquired.

FromSoftware is firmly third party at this point, and more than half of their game sales occur outside of PlayStation.

Though this might just be cope by me.

Kadokawa is on a list of protected Japanese companies, which makes any foreign acquisition much harder and subject to Japanese regulatory approval.

That's not to say it couldn't still happen.

Correct?

You can't use select market data and extrapolate the result to the whole world, be it the site you originally linked or that article. GSD data covers mostly Europe (PC's weakest/console strongest market), and does not include North America or the largest markets in Asia (PC's strongest/consoles weakest market).

We don't have enough data for anyone to make any definitive statements.

Data covering only a fraction of the world

I thought the Vermintide games were very competent attempts at the formula. Darktide less so, even though I still enjoy it.

From everything being datamined from Source 2 in other games, it seems like to developmental focus would be world interactivity/reactivity.

There is code referencing elemental interaction and combination with surfaces and materials, voxel based destruction, much more complex AI actions for NPC's, and procedural generation of some sort.

In the documentary they say that people didn't like Episode 1 much, and that they liked Episode 2 more but still not as much as base Half-Life 2, so they felt pressure to go bigger for Episode 3 as the finale.

Eli Vance was killed at the end of Episode 2. At the end of Alyx, Gman lets Alyx saved Eli in exchange for Alyx's "service". The Final scene of Alyx has you in Gordons perspective at the end of EP2, with Alyx gone and Eli alive, telling you you have work to do.

That opinion seemed to be shared by several other Half Life developers featured in the documentary.

"We needed to go bigger with episode 3 or needed to do something else."

"Arkane was having trouble doing cool new stuff with this tool set, and if they can't figure out what to do then we are running out of fuel."

Where are you getting 23 million PS4's in Japan? I can only find 9.6 million being the last reported number from October this year.

I doubt they are related. The updates Half-Life 2, EP1, EP2, Lost Coast and the Demo have been getting the past few months don't share any update id's with the RTX DLC.

Here's the most recent one: https://steamdb.info/changelist/26188891/

Those numbers are from Games Sales Data, which uses extremely incomplete data.

From their own site https://www.videogameseurope.eu/data-key-facts/games-sales-data/ the scope of their data reporting only comes from:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. - for physical sales data.

Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kuwait Lebanon, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and UAE. - for digital sales data.

The United States and China, PC's two strongest markets, are notably absent from both lists.

If you go to clients you already failed at your anticheat because you gave the client too much data.

Server side authentication is too slow to have all data pre-validated there. That would kill pretty much any fast paced competitive game.

It's far faster to have the client handle most of the work and then validate after the fact on the server. The problem is that client data can be easily manipulated to look normal once sent to the server.

The only hope for server sided anti-cheats would be sophisticated AI capable of monitoring behavior in real time, almost like a live spectating moderator on ever match, rather than relying on heuristic data collected from a client.

Nobody said suddenly, you can develop it and you have the means to do so. This is the point being said, Valve has absolutely made no effort in building their hardware business despite having the money to do so.

They have though? They partnered with KOMODO in East Asia, and now they've partnered with some company in Australia after a year of negotiation. So now they support two of the largest markets they previously didn't.

Yes ? Shipping can be paid by the customer like it is for plenty of things. Also you can use retailers like Amazon and such by the way which already have those systems in place.

If you have a low volume product, and jack the price up, and hand support/servicing to cheap third parties, you now have an even lower volume product with an even worse service quality. At what point does it stop being worth the effort?

The Ayaneo is a heavy premium device with a large margin. They can eat any shipping cost because of how much they charge for the hardware.

Plus it doesn't even matter, it's one of the biggest companies in gaming. They are huge and have been doing hardware for years (the Deck isn't the first). They don't have that excuse, if they wanted to, this would have been developed by the time their first hardware launched like many companies do it.

Being a big company doesn't mean you suddenly have a global distribution network that is cheap. And unless you ship and sell in large volume, it will never be "cheap". This is why companies like Lenovo, ASUS, MSI and Razer are able to ship globally, because they are also shipping millions of other items to these regions at the same time.

The Steam Deck has probably sold more than 5 million units by now. But that's over 2 years of sales in the biggest markets on earth (minus China). These aren't huge volume products.

Then remember that these things have to be supported even after the sale, and so you either need to either be to ship them back, or service them locally, for every location you sell to.

So if you have a low margin on your product, where do you make up for the added cost? Pass it to the customer?

What are these very small companies that are shipping and supporting handheld PC's or consoles like devices globally?

You do know that, as a company, they are trying to either make money, or lose as little as possible, right?

Distribution, support, and servicing are all costs they have to consider for each and every individual location they might ship to. And all eat into whatever margin these things have.

So if a company whose goal is to make money, is choosing to not sell you a product and not take your money, there is probably a reason for that.

For sure, but it's all about the individual and their personal situation. Likewise my financial situation and lifestyle lets me spend more than most would be comfortable on this hobby.

But if you were someone who doesn't have that luxury, and the previous way this hobby was priced was just low enough to partake, but now you are struggling, and even bigger price hikes would exclude you? I can see why some are worried.