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I choose to buy my games on Steam. Im done with other sites.

This is respectable. A developer heard the game they sold was being retired, and convinced them to give the game back so he could make it free to download/play. It would be nice if they did this more often, or at least allow those who purchased the game to continue to play it.

I hope steam wins whatever comes their way, if I need to install more apps than games just to be able to shop abd play games

When it comes to online gaming legislation here in Vietnam, the rules are completely hit or miss. For example, PC Games are subjected to all kind of BS restrictions like 5 hours playtime limit (XP rewards gone after the timer's up), violence reduction like "white" blood (Which we call "milk"), restricted Melee weapons (In most FPS games, your default "Knife" is now a Wooden Hammer, for example). Yet, mobile games get all of the passes, so you can have every single violation on Mobile which PC Games'd never get away with. What got most gamers angry is because the "local" publishers spent very little on improving the market, but A LOT on lining their pocket, be it P2W, gacha, FOMO-practice, etc... AND of course, lobbying for eliminating competitors (Like Steam). The ban dropped right after VTC Games (one of the big local publishers here) published their annually hit piece, leading to gamers downvoting their social pages to hell to show their angers.

Only reason i own valhalla is cause i wanted to play the roguelike mode and then the game happened to be 80% off 💀💀💀

Steam accommodated china because the market was big enough. Vietnam off the map is nothing. Hardly a splash in the bucket.

9:21 what that game called guys.

I stopped playing after origins. Odyssey was lame and a copy paste. Not expecting more of Shadows tbh

Why would i pay 100+ buucks for a game that will be 50-70% off in the span of 1 year ? I still have to finish Origins and Odyssey.

Steam is an example where you'll always have trouble dealing with anti-competitive stuff, as there are many people who only want one (and I'm sure preferably none) of the video game distribution/launchers on their system. And despite Steam being a borderline monopoly, even before they had any competition or government regulations about things like refunds, they were still rather awesome by comparison of many other monopolies. Let's be real, Epic Launcher is garbage, and I regret buying even the two games I did on it, and GOG is only good because of the DRM free thing, but is otherwise rather unstable of a platform as well, and who even actually cares of EA or Ubisoft specific ones. Then there's the discovery features, basically modern advertising, that you've mentioned, that creates a delusion that Epic is "better" for the devs despite Steam taking a bigger cut. Steam also seems to be the best and easiest way to play games on Linux that are not native to Linux. Like Sim City 3000, I've seen comments buying the Steam version runs basically fine, but the GOG version requires a third party wrapper download. Steam is hardly a saint, but they're like the most positive demon that seems to actually care about you at all for some reason.

I appreciate how well steam works for consumers. It has its flaws, though, for sure. I never REALLY ran into an issue with the tags as i dont have many blocked. Like 2 maybe, and both are within the adult section anyways, but they still slip through from time to time. Im probably a part of the minority who doesnt block tags i suppose.

That segue 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

VTM: Bloodlines 2 is going to have good company soon. Also, unfair to say that The Last Starship has not sold well. It's in Alpha version 9 at the moment, and it has overly positive reviews. It's understandable that people are not flocking to an early alpha in this day and age.

Its not consumers fault that alternatives like epic dont offer better customer service.. 😅

the only competitor to steam not trying to do stupid shit with their customer is GOG tbh...

i think that more people are aware of this practice and more people realise that it's bad for us gamers.

KSP2 has turned into nothing but a pump and dump scheme. They promised all the features of KSP1 plus multiplayer, colony building, interstellar travel, etc. Early access releases and it isn't even close to being on par with KSP1. No, 15 months after release, it *still* is nowhere near on par with KSP1, let alone with all the additional features they promised. They scammed us, plain and simple

Ubisoft died when they released that vertical slice of the Watch_Dogs trailer, which looked nothing like the game visually unless you mod it in. Since then, I have kept my distance from them. Once in a while, if a game looks good (Far Cry 5), I'll give it a shot when it is on sale. Otherwise, I stick to reputable developers/studios or indie developers/games that more than half of the Ubisoft marketing team knows.

Wouldn't that also mean the epic should be affected by this with making people only sell their games on epic for the first year?

What can you do when your competitors are just dumb asses who keep killing themselves by greed.

If steam doesn't allow the game to be sold elsewhere for less than steam; how come most of my games are bought elsewhere and activated on steam?

Letting the community set the tags for a game was always kinda risky, considering how volatile the consumer-base can be. I hope that they retract user tags, or at least change it so that the owners of the game can approve new tags.

I could be mistaken because I'm not a dev/publishers and therefore don't know the actual details, but I thought Steam's price restrictions was for *steam keys*, essentially saying you can't sell steam keys elsewhere for less than the price the game is charging on Steam itself... Which made perfect sense to me. Again, I could be complete wrong there and it's a different story if it's not only steam keys.

Love watching my PDX stock fall over and over... 😂

Then what about the vietnamese randos that I played with on Dota2?

User-generated tags have always been rather shite. I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 had the "masterpiece" tag before launch... It was neither helpful nor accurate lol. I said that the tags should be generated by the publisher but, and this is the key, *voted on by verified purchases when leaving a review* to ensure accuracy.

Thank GOD that Steam is a private company

Didn't know Steam could do that, like hinder sales elsewhere, kind of a blackmail situation.

countries do be jealous of the power of steam

For all those hating on the game keep in mind the team that worked on it, the people you should be angry at is not Ubisoft in general as the marketing employees, coders, writers, landscape designers, characters designers and directors worked there ass off to release this possibly Amazing possibly shit game, if you want to be angry be angry at Ubisoft’s corporate office, you know the Vice president, ceo, managers, and chairmen, long story short don’t judge the game till you have it and play it and if you don’t want to play it that’s fine to that’s all you need to say not “oh there’s a black guy im never playing another Ubisoft game again wah” instead say the truth “I’m not playing the game because Ubisoft has dragged out the franchise far too long because corporate wants to milk the money till the end of time” short story shorter, wait till the game releases then judge it if you don’t wanna play it watch the play through to get your info

It's not Valve's fault that its competitors don't bring anything better to the table. If anything, they're often worse.

The base game is 130 bucks in NZ

the whole "you cant make it cheaper else where" would make me want to file a lawsuit on companies for selling it cheaper else where for trying to trick me the consumer.

Thank you for the video.

What I want, is them to catch up to the digital age, and make it so we can sell our games lol

well, the thing that makes PA2 interesting for me is the addition of verticality in your building options.... thats it. But that they have booted the main developers.... thats kinda sus, also Paradox just pumping out DLC after DLC without addressing core game issues is hard to get past when it comes to buying one of their products...

Bulwark is slightly more than a landscaping 'game'.

Another Public Pressure win was Helldivers 2 no longer requiring a playstation account. Aaaaaaaand i just noticed you have a video about it 😄 The shots of your game are soo beautiful, who did the art!? woah!

Another tag that gets used very weirdly is RPG, that seems to mean very different things to different people these days.

That bulwark problem, while greatly sheds a light on the, deeper, more problematic issues related to user generated steam tags (weaponization in certain cases) and how trusted they are, is similar to the Slipgates steam game. Specifically where Slipgates had this hub-hub of being a 4X-lite game, where the Developer even started buying that to the point of quasi advertizing the game as such in official interviews, when the reality is that product's gameplay philosophy is that of a Puzzle game.

If Steam is anti competetive...what's google?

Reading the part about UOKiK sounds like they went after Sony and Steam is just collateral damage. Restricting the sale on rival platforms? Like when EpicStore has contractual exclusives? Limiting market access to rival platforms? Like when literally everyone else (Ubisoft, EA, Epic, Rockstar) has their own launcher and it interferes with Steam? Get them outta here.

I think steam is not only taking a tax for dev tools, but also for their consumer tools... other stores just can't compare at all. Not sure with gog, though

$team being invested for anti-competitive practices by merely a single country is the biggest issue. That should be done by many, MANY more countries.

5:38 Honestly Steam removing Turkish regional pricing was huge betrayal to us and i'm hope publisher are happy with the rise of piracy in Turkiye.

What are they gonna investigate steam about?? The fact it doesn't shoot itself in the foot every other week?

I've played Rogue and most games tagged "roguelike" are nothing like Rogue. Tagging/genres etc - It's flaky, man.

I keep hearing this argument that Steam doesn't allow the games to be sold cheaper on other platforms, but I still cannot find any evidence for it. It's either people misunderstanding the rules present on Steam page, which speak only about free keys generated by Steam (where Steam doesn't get any cut from selling those) or some insinuations of some developers that Steam *might* be doing that. There was this one court case where it was mentioned but so far noone has shown any evidence. Was there some that I missed?

This is why I never preorder games. That's insane for something nobody's really even seen yet.

I have a lot of beef with Steam's recommendation system lately. First, the user tags are generally a good thing, but some of it really annoys me both in that Steam themselves will remove "negative" tags that would be very useful, like they removed "asset flip" and "mobile port" in the first few weeks of the tag system. Plus the with the Bulwark story, when people add tags for something that isn't in the game. I've seen so many "roguelike/roguelite" tags for games that have a little bit of procedural generation or randomization, but aren't roguelikes/lites. Just because a game has randomized levels after death doesn't mean they are roguelikes. Second is with the recommendations themselves. I remember years ago the "more games like this" section being very accurate. Now when I go to it, it seems to only recommend newer games or ones that are in a vaguely similar category. There are so many games that are a "clone" of something and basically the same game with slight changes in mechanics and graphics, and instead it recommends something insanely left field, and no matter how many times I refresh the page it will not recommend the game that inspired the game I'm looking at, but will recommend something almost completely unrelated. I get it when the game is very unique and way out of left field, but when I'm looking at a metroidvania I expect ti to recommend Metroidvanias like it used to, now I'm getting top down roguelikes and puzzle platformers. In a genre thats super oversaturated on Steam it should be recommending everything from that genre/subgenre. Same goes for the "because you played" section, it has the same issue. Overall its better than any other storefront, I just have some criticism for something I love.