It brings up the point of this thread: [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/discord-starts-selling-pc-games,37578.html]
How many games services is too much, if at all?
I made the comment of liking all my games in one consistent database, but from a consumer standpoint choice is also good. These companies also usually seem to end up greedy and corrupt if they get too big as well.
The influence of Steam on gaming is a bit of a mixed bag (And not all that positive overall), of course. Which could (and I vaguely recall does) have its own thread to itself.
Its really kind of a wait and see. The big AAA publishers storefronts have always seemed like a bit of a poisoned well, but thats not down to their sheer existence, but combined with various other actions and behaviors. The third-partyish ones are a bit all over the place, ranging from decent legitimate options, to shady key sellers who would be the guy flogging "100 AWESOME GAMES on 1 CARTRIDGE/CD" crap at a stall outside (or well inside, standards werent great) a convention in the 90s.
Steam
GoG
Origin
Blizzard
Twitch
Discord
Does Impulse still exist?
Is HumbleBundle its own library/client too now?
There's some humour to the notion that steam tried to create a hub to minimise on client clutter, and spawned so many more clients looking for a share of that pie.
How about we go back to games being a self-contained unit? (Without DRM)
If that were the case, I'd have no problems with all these market places.
They could compete on equal terms and not hold consumers games hostage.
They would be free to make all the side-dishes they'd like. Voice, Chat, Mods, Walkthroughs, Wiki, etc etc.
As long as it is voluntary extra.
Good ... GoG can't be the only potentially decent one fighting the good fight. Not that I necessarily think Discord will be brilliant, but still. More is more.
How about we go back to games being a self-contained unit? (Without DRM)
If that were the case, I'd have no problems with all these market places.
They could compete on equal terms and not hold consumers games hostage.
They would be free to make all the side-dishes they'd like. Voice, Chat, Mods, Walkthroughs, Wiki, etc etc.
As long as it is voluntary extra.
I'm kinda done with buying games on steam at this point. Their refusal to take any responsibility for curating their store and the side issue of Valve becoming fat and lazy because they're sitting on a neverending pile of cash has made me really avoid buying steam games for the most part. If it's gonna come out on GOG, I'll wait and buy it there. At least it feels like GOG is trying.
And CDPR actually makes good games, so supporting that feels good.
Will Discord's service be worth it? No idea, but I wouldn't mind seeing them try. Just don't make it obnoxious like Ubisoft or Origin and that's a step in the right direction.
How about we go back to games being a self-contained unit? (Without DRM)
If that were the case, I'd have no problems with all these market places.
They could compete on equal terms and not hold consumers games hostage.
They would be free to make all the side-dishes they'd like. Voice, Chat, Mods, Walkthroughs, Wiki, etc etc.
As long as it is voluntary extra.
If GOG-Connect were substantially more broad, I'd probably use GOG more. But I have a massive Steam library. I only have games I got free via Prime on Twitch, and mostly older Sierra games and CDPR stuff on GOG.
If Discord did something GOG-Connect like but did it right, I'd consider using them. I expect that to be highly unlikely.
I do find it amusing that people act like voice chat and specifically group voice chat are new features in Steam though -- they've been around for a long time, just with such a terrible UI I guess you could be forgiven for not knowing it was even an option. Last time I used it I was playing Cards Against Humanity over Tabletop Simulator with the mod of a fan group and two YouTubers (Hannah Wallen and Sour Grape, this was just a week or two after Sour Grape axed her channel). We used it only because two of them were having problems getting Discord to work.
Umless it's a triple A game that has just been released, there is almost chance that the front page has a game I'm interested. I don't go searching for things there. The sales are no longer sales. Prices for old games have gone up. I saw Oblivion being hocked for $10 the other day. And that was on sale. Also, I have yet to buy a triple A game this year. Literally spent nothing on Steam at all.
Ah, I saw this just last night. I wasn't a fan of the robotic voice, but it does sum up my limited experience on the server pretty well.
Somehow, Discord became a favorite place for people on Deviant Art to congregate. It doesn't bother me, but I definitely don't think "Gamer Site" when I think "Discord".
Also I hate how invasive it is in trying to tell which games I played unless I turn certain settings off so I'm sure as hell not going to use it for games when I mostly use it just for chatting
Probably there are two major problems:
1) I'm damned if I want every 2-bit online game provider sinking it's hooks into my system, gouging info from my computer for their own amusement, eating up my disk space and network activity with endless damned updates, and forcing me to remember all their passwords.
2) Too much at the point that a huge glut of game download platforms causes a generalised collapse in the market that not only removes the dead trash, but unfortunately plenty of the useful stuff too, for instance:
I read an economist write about his local suburb; it had no coffee shops once upon a time. Then an indy opened and was hugely successful, good coffee at last, which was great. Then within a year of that there were three. Soon about six or seven, by which time it was obvious they were struggling to get enough custom. Then they all went bust. Every single one had racked up so much debt trying to keep going with too much competition that a downturn killed all of them. Back to zero...
I mostly like Steam. I believe that one of its huge strengths (which as a gamer I don't notice) is that the back end for devs is extremely good and makes it very easy to control patching, mods, updates, etc. For devs, you'd have to imagine that's a major draw. I suspect that will be a lot of what will end up determining the winners.
The downside of Steam is that it's horribly full of crap. Upper, worthless crap churned out en masse from incompetents who've picked up RPG Maker or whatever, utterly derivative and often bugged nonsense, or no-mark far eastern studios ripping off AAA titles as much as they can without being sued with again basic level competence. What new stuff is available on Steam RPG and Strategy this week? Okay, 48 MOBAs (including the MOBA/MMORPG or MOBA/tower defence or MOBA/FPS or MOBA/chess crossovers), 23 pornographic JRPGs, 53 games of no provenance that do not obviously appear to be RPGs or strategy, 8 "choose your own adventure" text games, 12 titles that aren't in English, and 6 sub-PopCap rip-off puzzle games, chances of which 2 have decorative naked anime characters as well. Thanks, Steam. Have you heard of quality control?
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