Digital Game Store Competition - Epic vs. Steam

Jim Sterling has a pretty good piece on the Epic Store and why it seems to be generating so much ire:



One item that isn't pointed out enough about the Epic Store is it's profit split with publishers.....according to reports, Epic is doing a 12% take with publishers, in contrast with Steam which is a 30/70 split. Gamers may be pissed off....but that's significant, and business owners (the publishers and devs of games) would be engaging in poor business practice not to take advantage of this. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole point of going exclusive with Steam for some of these larger publishers like Ubisoft wasn't to put a dent in Steam's stranglehold on the online market for this exact reason.

Gamers who recall 2003-2004 well as I do may also recall that all this row with Epic sounds an awful lot like the exact same fit people had when it was revealed that Half Life 2 would require the Steam store link to download. And while, as Jim Sterling points out, the Epic Store does not have even a fraction the features that Steam offers users....it was also true back in 2003 when Steam was revealed that Steam itself had no special features (outside of getting Half Life 2 to us on slow speed internet connections) and lots of disadvantages against a physical purchase in the store.

One thing Valve did offer through Steam back then was a clean storefront with a selection of games people wanted. It wasn't huge at first....but it was possible to actually find the game you wanted on Steam, and you didn't have to drive around looking through dusty bargain bins to located it. Cut to 2019, and suddenly Epic offers up a clean, simple (too simple) site with a limited selection of "curated" titles (special backdoor exclusive deals aside), and Steam is the digital version of the dusty bargain bin filled with trash that you wouldn't pay 50 cents for....and somehow, miraculously, Steam has managed to bury its own quality under mountains of digital detritus.

Steam could take this back from Epic. To do so, it needs to recognize that it's unmoderated wasteland of content is just not going to work anymore, but continuing to develop a reliable, feature-laden, community driven service that it has morphed in to over the years should be priority. Also, maybe find a way to compete on the price split, too....in the end, it doesn't matter what you have on offer if the publishers can get an extra 18% on their game's price by going with the competition.

Steam Summer Sale in Full Swing

It started a few days ago but the Steam Summer Sale is once again upon us. It's not as exciting as it used to be....they sort of got all my money (and I got all the games) a long time ago. Now, games worth getting are still too pricey to be "deals" and Steam's array of new content seems to waver between trash that even Gamersgate is apologetic for and an endless array of risky-business "Early Access" games that seem to be stuck in development hell --but which I feel is a variant of the Kickstarter program, which boils down to this: once you have suckered someone into buying your unfinished product, what's your incentive to complete said game? That aside, there do seem to be a fair number of early access games that look like they are making progress....tempered by those that don't.

As a rule I've been careful to avoid early access games, as I'm not a beta tester and I don't like messing with unfinished product unless I'm being paid for it (I actually did get paid for it once, when I worked for two excruciating weeks at Nintendo in Bellevue, Washington as a QA tester).

But.....I'm breaking my rule on a few hard to pass up Steam sales this time. I grabbed Nether (despite some suggestions in the forums that the game is vile, it sounds more like its a PvP game with some disgruntled buyers who didn't realize that), as well as StarForged (loading, will let you know what I think). There may be a couple more. Project Zomboid came and went on its sale, but I'm sure it will be back and I may take the plunge. If the price is right, I'll risk "early access" territory for a chance to try out these sandbox survival games.

I also picked up Betrayed, which is a fascinating game and also an example of a successful escapee from the early access pit. The game is a cool, polished experience and worth the price of admission if you snag it on sale. Betrayed places you on an island, sometime in the seventeen hundreds by my guesstimation, surviving on an island of ghosts, mysteries and mad zombie spaniards. It's a very atmospheric game that utilizes black and white visuals with occasional colors (reds mostly) to create a unique experience (though a color slider lets you add color to the game if you really must). Worth checking out.

Aside from that, I picked up Insurgency and the remaining Saint's Row IV DLC content I didn't already own. My wife and I actually played some SR IV co-op last night.....it wasn't as exciting as we'd hoped, if only because the missions for co-op only were basically cat-and-mouse or pvp games, and she's been playing a lot longer than me so her character just kept mopping the floor with mine.

Not sure what else I'm going to grab this time around.....the pool is ankle deep for me now; I own too  many games on Steam already and lack the time to play any of them. The few AAA titles coming out this year are all optimized for machines greater than mine so it's easier for now to pick them up for the PS4, which will give them a fairer shake than my PC can. I may need to consider upgrading sometime soon....!

Steam Box? Also: The fine art of focused storytelling vs. the problem with sandboxes; or, Metro 2033 vs. Dead Island

 First off, this story has me interested: apparently there's more than a little reason to believe that Valve is looking at a dedicated PC design with console features. At first I was thinking, "whatever, I've got my PC at home already," but I concede a few ideas sprung up which make the concept more tantalizing. Notably:

More games that normally only see life on consoles could come to a dedicated "Steam Box," as the design intent behind a console (dedicated architecture) would hopefully lure some of these console-only designers over to offering up ports on a Steam Box. And no I am not a PC elitist who likes to bitch about "console babies." There are plenty of console-only games out there I'd love to be able to play without buying a Wii or PS3. Unfortunately it probably won't help with the 1st party releases designed to sell systems (Gears of War, Halo...the two I care about in this case) but maybe games that normally never see life on the PC would get a chance this way. Maybe. (And also probably a flood of console shovelware too, I am sure...)

It would open up my Steam account to a console that is optimized for sitting on my comfy sofa couch in front of my 55 inch screen TV. Admittedly, I can hook my PC up to my big screen TV right now and play games, but I've found that this experience is not at satisfying as simply playing with the Xbox on the big screen (and don't even try to get any real work done this way!) So for the sake of design and convenience, why not.

It might have a chance of dethroning Microsoft and Sony from their console pillars. I'd like to see that just for the hell of it.

In Mother Russia, Pip Boy Wear You!

Okay! So anyway, as of today I am at last 92% finished (according the the little meter) in Dead Island. By the time this sees print I should be done with it and probably experiencing the agony of poor design that is allegedly found in the Ryder White DLC. We'll see. I also finished Metro 2033 this weekend, even with a baby sitting on my knee staring intensely at the screen while I blew up dark one amoebas (and crying ceaselessly if I tried to put him down; I have no idea why this kid was so fascinated at watching Metro 2033, a game I felt rather nervous about playing with him even being in the same room. Hmmmm definitely my child, though)

Dead Island and Metro 2033 are both amazing games. Both have some weaknesses, but their strengths overcome those, for the most part. Moreover, I look forward to the sequels, because unless suits and marketing start meddling in these games the sequels should only get better. But it was interesting to realize that Metro 2033 was ultimately a more satisfying experience, albeit frustrating at times, if only because it was semi-linear (providing linear levels, but with a modest range of options in how to complete each level) and as a result Metro 2033 was able to focus heavily on mood, atmosphere and integrated story telling. When I got to the end of Metro 2033 I felt like I had experienced a meaningful and coherent story arc.

Although I won't be done with Dead Island until tonight, I have to say that the game's efforts at atmosphere and immersion, while excellent, nonetheless began to wear on me toward the end. The game did mix it up....just when I was starting to think that the second act in the city would never, ever end, suddenly I'm in the Jungle, and then I'm in a research facility, and next thing I know I'm exploring ancient Maori cults on the island. Despite this, and perhaps because of the finsl prison level, I still felt like the game's sole purpose was to exhaust the hell out of me while keeping me in a perpetual state of mild confusion. I think it's because while the game's efforts at creating a sort of sandbox zombie apocalypse environment for me to explore are impressive to experience, I absorbed almost all of that ambience and got my fill of it in the first 12-15 hours of the game, before I'd even penetrated the second act. So by the time I reached the fourth act, I had lost any connection to the "setting immersion" element it had early on, and was no firmly wrapped up in the "gameplay element" which honestly gets a bit redundant. See zombies. Kick them down, hack them up, move to next group, click on quest goal, repeat.

Also, Dead Island could have benefited from not having constant, unending respawns MMO-style...

It doesn't help that Dead Island's ability to tell a story is a shoddy mess. The vast plethora of side quests are, while appropriately narrated, almost entirely disconnected from the player character and consist almost exclusively of fetch quests, occasional escort quests, and periodic "clean up" quests, all thematically at odds with the ragtag gang of four that the story is supposedly about. Of the four possible player characters, only the asian gal really strikes me as a "do-gooder," the other three are hard-as-nails amoral survivors with personal agendas that never really get directly addressed throughout the storyline. Worse yet, whenever the game does have a major cutscene or story event, apparently Dead Island was designed under the expectation that at all times you would have all four characters represented, so these storylines are jarring when you see all four protagonists engaging in discourse about a situation or taking action, then the cutscene ends and its back to just you in a solo run or maybe one or two other co-opers.

Despite the lack of coherence in the storyline, and despite the fact that every damned side quest in the game is an annoying and irrelevant sidetrek that only the most lawful good of paladins would bother with ordinarily, Dead Island does have a story, and its a rather interesting one when taken as a whole; the problem is that the developers of this game clearly are not used to the optimal way to stitch together a coherent plotline in a sandbox environment. I'm no authority on the GTA series of games, but it does seem to me that Rockstar has this sort of approach down to a science. Just play Red Dead Redemption for an example of how to do this very well. In fact, for a full-on zombie experience with coherent storytelling get the Undead Nightmare DLC for some wild west zombie action, too...

So in the end, Metro 2033 was much shorter than Dead Island, but was rewarded with a more focused and coherent storyline and an experience that never got old because it used its set pieces and interesting bits to great effect. Dead Island in turns has felt like someone did not edit a film, and instead released several dozens' of hours of raw footage through which I have been methodically watching, at once fascinated, bored, energized and irritated with occasional brilliant moments shining through.

Carmen Sandiego, Where Are You?!?!?!?