f13.net

Uh... what?

Trion unveils its Glyph digital games platform for discovering hardcore digital PC games (http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/11/trion-unveils-its-glyph-digital-games-platform-for-discovering-hardcore-digital-pc-games-exclusive/)

The games will be DRM-free, and in the words of our beloved Hartsman:


And:


Not sure what games are out there to discover that aren't already getting some spotlight on Steam Greenlight. And if they mean Asian games, boy, they can't even localize Archeage so I hope that's not what they are really going for (although that's actually what I hope they are going for).

They should have announced a strong lineup of (exclusive or atleast having exclusive features when played through the platform) games to go with the platform since as it stands now it's just another shop to compete with a multitude of others with the added (annoyance) feature of trying to sell you virtual currency/goods.  :oh_i_see:

Steam early access level of Indy bullshit is the lowest level of gaming Im willing to go.  I don't even want to think about what sort of games can't even meet the bar to make it onto steam in early access form, and they are offering a whole platform to give me exactly that. Uhhhh....

It sounds like they're aiming for the opposite effect.  As steam becomes less and less regulated, Glyph is (I think?) supposed to provide a curated, high quality library only.  Like what Gog.com is turning in to.

Millions in advertising?

I guess they have the money after all those layoffs last summer (and axing End of Nations)  :why_so_serious:

I'm all for Steam having some competition but I don't see Trion being the ones to do it.  None of their own games on that list do anything for me as is.

It will be interesting to see how loyality model vs discounting model in online marketplace plays out.

But if I can get the same game on Steam, it's a hard sell to get me to go to a more exclusive platform. They're going to need one hell of a loyalty program.

I don't really see the appeal. Rift is the only thing in Trion's catalog I've ever had any interest in, and I don't need another storefront client running whenever I want to play games.

Another terrible idea from Trion. They should use it as a slogan. "The bad idea guys."

They seem to be doing poorly in public opinion as well. I can't say it's undeserved.

It doesn't help that everything since Rift has been shit. I mean Defiance was a fucking total joke. It's hilarious how bad it was. They haven't done anything else other than announce stuff.

Rift is still a good game though.

Yeah, Rift seemed like the herald of a new legit developer/publisher.  But since then it has just been garbage.  Defiance was a joke.  End of Nations never happened.  I guess they are hypothetically suppoesd to be publishing Arche Age in NA, which I think also might never happen.

They also made some really terrible decisions developing Rift and it could've been a MUCH better game. The writing was on the wall.

And I do agree with Draegan, despite all the bad decision making, they started with a good enough core game that it's still one of the better mmos, mechanically speaking.

Shit, their decision making was "let's listen to the 70% of our testing playerbase who are active subscribers to Vanguard, because they KNOW what the MMO market in general needs/wants" Those assholes almost all had never even played an MMO that was not EQ1 or Vanguard. That and their writers were terrible. Like wannabe Metzen terrible. When they added that terrible intro video with the big flying pink text I gave up trying to give them constructive feedback.

There were three points where I got pretty pissed they didn't listen to feedback.

1. PVP control points - they tried a really shitty watered down version. I had proposed a radical control system akin to Planetside where a faction could nab territory in contested zones, which would spawn new quest hubs for them and you could only run those if your faction had control. Deemed not worth it because people wanted their pills when they wanted them, and not a dynamic gaming experience. Also, needed three pvp factions. I was regularly participating in and enjoying the open world combat before the whiners got the alpha server turned into a PVE server. This almost never happens, it's like my enjoyment of grouping in TOR.

2. Steampunk. The Defiant faction could have been really cool and this was when steampunk was ascendant (pun intended). Their factions and lore in general is terribad. The weakest part of the game. Could probably jam level design as 2a, not good.

3. All classes, all roles. I guess this is sort of finally going in now? Retarded to not have four roles (dps/tank/heal/utility) available to all classes, and have four role slots open from the time you hit the first dungeon that requires the trinity. This would allow people to pick class for flavor without being restricted from playing with pretty much anyone else. All you need is 4 warm bodies and you can do a dungeon, just pick the proper role configurations and go.

While 1) could've made this a standout title as a PVP-focused game that was interesting even for non-PVP, I can see why they left that off. But 2) and 3) killed this game's potential before it hit the gate.

The problem with Rift is that it was a really shitty game after 3 years of dev time. Hartsman came in and the game went dark. They had 1 year to make the game it was at release. I know what they had and the amount of work they did to turn it around and produce the product they did was pretty fantastic.

That being said, the development direction of the game was a mix of good and shit. I loved what they did with world design, even design and quest design. This fucking instant adventures are awesome for leveling. Fuck questing.

The shit was class development. They just made it more and more vertical rather than horizontal. They kept adding tiers onto their talent trees. They should of embraced the whole idea of souls and added more columns and then connected those columns with other souls so you can branch into other souls without starting from the bottom of the tree.

They also couldn't balance or fix classes for shit either.

I agree with the lack of horizontal class design for sure. And the way they seemed hell bent on removing the really fun synergies that we found between souls.

And if any game could've ditched mainstream questing for dynamic content...

Ah, well. It still doesn't explain Glyph.

Aion had the pvp objectives spawning faction in charge only dungeons with a third faction being a enemy of both sides AI race. It worked fine as long as you had population parity.

But as it was obvious from my suggestions about UI/QoL interface stuff that they had no one who had ever played Aion nor were they interested in stealing good features from there.

To survive as a video games studio these days means either having a super blockbuster hit that fills up bank accounts with infinite++ money or generating other revenue streams that let you subsidise your games development time. Trion's gone for the Steam-like approach rather than the Unreal-tech product licencing approach.

And no, it isn't going to work for Trion because those indie developers want their game on Steam.

They've done a terrible job in terms of community relations with ArcheAge fans. They announced in January 2013 that they were publishing the game in the West, which was when it was actually released in Korea (after six years of development and testing). So you had your early-adopters getting excited, evangelizing for the game, planning guilds etc as you'd expect.

Since then it's been almost silence from Trion - there's talk of an announcement this week but as I write this there's still no hint of a launch date or beta date, and almost no news about progress at all. ArcheAge fans have tried to raise the game in Trion's dev chats for other games but obviously they don't get a response there. The result is that the ArcheAge "community" such as it is has got the impression that Trion treats them with contempt and basically hates Trion.

You could make an argument that the fans are being unreasonable, Trion doesn't owe them anything etc. But whether the fans are right or wrong, it's ridiculous that Trion hasn't even attempted to build good relations with them. Community relations doesn't have to mean giving people everything they want - managing expectations can also be part of it (and people actually respond fairly well to being told bad news if they think you're being straight with them).

By contrast, look at the work SOE are doing to build good relations with EQ Next fans - not just talking about Landmark but also talking about EQ Next itself, even though it won't actually be playable for God knows how long.

Your early adopters might be a small part of the eventual player-base but they're still important because they'll do a lot of marketing for you and not only do it for free but if you help them out a bit they'll actually feel like you're doing them a favour!

SOE has done such a good job building early adopter relationships that those people will cut you if you bad mouth Landmark.

The fact that the Russian version of AA is out and Trion still hasn't announced a release date does raise some concern (atleast for me) on how well they can manage it nevermind create something original after Defiance's less-than-stellar success.
It's also hard to see why someone would choose Trion's platform over Steam unless they charge (the customer and the game developer) significantly less for their service (and for drm-free stuff GOG.com or Humble Bundle store seem like better choices if you feel strongly about things like that).

I heard something about the AA team in Korea only working with one localization team at a time and that was causing the delay.  I know nothing about how this sort of thing works in game development, so maybe someone else can say whether or not that is plausible. 

Either way, Trion just seems to be another developer pumping out mediocrity these days, and a new platform for selling games certainly doesn't strike me as the thing that is going to turn them around.

I think it's somewhat funny that after the relative disaster that was Champions Online (a game that I personally actually had a lot of fun with against all odds), Cryptic seems to be one of the few devs that has made stuff people around here care about.  Neverwinter got some decent buzz, even if it wasn't a long term hit.  Star Trek Online still has a thread at the top of these forums.

Meanwhile Rift has floated into obscurity.

I hear the same thing but you'd think they'd be announcing a timetable now that the Russian version is out (and they have a rough estimate on how long it's going to take based on how many resources they are willing to dedicate to it and on how long the Russian version took to launch). If it takes too long all the people really interested in AA will play the Russian version to boredom since there are some English translations for it.

I have heard that a lot of their employees are members of FoH. That's probably the last place I would look for talent to build any mmo.

A lot of their devs were former Sigil employees too. My old guild leader from WoW was one of those.

I *love* Hartsman, but I feel like he should be smarter than "YEA, LET'S COMPETE WITH STEAM."

I suppose the question is if it was something he initiated.  And if so, even a guy as smart as Hartsman can make a call we disagree with.

I feel like trying to compete with Steam isnt' a terrible idea.  I do think that a heavily curated store that isn't moving towards a focus of Indie spam (that isn't EA) would be a good thing.

What is a terrible idea is Trion unveiling a store with no third party games, meaning not one person is going to give a shit about this unless they already are playing one of their games, in which case they already know about the game and don't give a shit about a storefront showing them games they already play....

I have to imagine this is more a "target of opportunity" thing than them thinking they can legitimately take down Steam or Origin.  They've already (I assume) got a billing system in place for people to play their MMOs, they've got a few thousand eyeballs they can throw ads at for free every time they load up the launcher, so why not try to sell them copies of The Stanley Parable or whatever.  They're not footing the bill for developing the games, and much of the work in setting up the store is likely already done.  If they can keep their costs low, they don't need to sell millions of copies of any of these games to make a bit of a profit.

Gog, Humble Store, Green Man, and even GamersGate are all competing with Steam in their own ways and seem to be doing okay. Which still doesn't mean "Us too!" is a good idea. It's a better idea than Defiance though.

Primarily because each one of those serve a niche market.  Trion's program doesn't really do that, unless they plan on doing something silly such as preventing their games from being distributed on Steam.

Gog does the old games thing.
Humble does the charity thing.
GMG does the super cheap warehouse deals thing. 
Gamersgate does the, well, I don't know what they do.  Overseas?

Trion's program will be viewed by the masses in the same light as Origin and Uplay. 

I think Defiance was a great idea...it's the execution of that idea where Trion dropped the ball. Hopefully it doesn't kill off any interest in a mmo-tvseries tie-in (where both are launched and done at the same time and not just one being based on the other) since I think it has the potential to make both media better (ie. better stories and characters for mmo, more and better background stuff for tvseries)

GMG, at least in my experiences with them, sells me shit cheaply and more often than not the deliverable is a steam cd key.

I think whatever they come up with will be comparable to the Stardock steam-competitor. I can't even remember its name, but I used it for space pirates and zombies in alpha/beta and it was fucking terrible.

That's probably as good as anything Trion makes is going to get. Stardock.

I feel they specialize in hardcore Euro strategy and sims, as one might expect from a company that spun out of Paradox.

Luckily for me, the Internet provides a metric fuckton of "curated, high quality" lists of games that I can buy on Steam. Hell, Steam even offers Metacritic ratings right there on the frickin' page! There is absolutely nothing saying "I will only buy curated, high-quality games on Steam" other than my own inability to control myself during Steam seasonal sales.

DRM-free just means I have some shit to keep track of on a hard drive if the service doesn't exist in five years. Since I have zero faith that Trion as a company will even exist in 5 years... no thanks? Meanwhile, I'll bet anyone here a hundred dollars, inflation-adjusted, that I'll still be able to download all my games in my Steam library a decade from now.

Steam early access level of Indy bullshit is the lowest level of gaming Im willing to go.  I don't even want to think about what sort of games can't even meet the bar to make it onto steam in early access form, and they are offering a whole platform to give me exactly that. Uhhhh....

There are a lot of good games that don't make it to Steam because of Greenlight bullshit.

Steam is the single worst platform in terms of getting a game on it as a developer. The single worst. Once you do get a game on it that's usually great for business, get getting on it is a complete clusterfuck. As a developer it's really frustrating because there's basically no process at all and the timetable is anywhere from a day to infinity.

It's also in a weird place where it's essentially curated but in an awful way.

Edit: I think there's room for a digital distribution platform on PC that is developer-centric in terms of the submission process. Just have a simple process and give devs a timely yes or no answer on whether you'll carry their games and developers will use it.


I can believe this. As a developer there is currently no good way to distribute games on PC. That sounds like an insane statement but it's the truth.

Yeah, considering the previous distribution method was "imminent death of PC Gaming" Steam has a lot of karma built up. Developers will alternate between crying for more curation, less delays and less costs and valve are slow.

Alternatively.... Trion who?

:awesome_for_real:

Bot I'm assuming?

But yeah, I don't believe in the 'highly currated store' model having any chance.  All of the successful competators to steam specialize in some niche over steam.  The niche they are advertising for this is hard to find/unknown indy games.  Which had better mean 'indy games I can't just go buy on steam' if they want to have any chance.  Though again, I don't have a lot of faith in that specific category of games.

I ... err.... there are people that think metacritic scores are relevant O.o

Even if you don't the user reviews and tagging system along with being able to see how much any friend you have has played the game or if even any own it means that you have more than enough information to make informed purchase choices on steam.

It was a coherent on topic statement, I don't see how it's anything but a normal first post.

It was a coherent on topic statement.

I love steam.  It is probably the only thing in the last 10 years that has come along that changed the way I play games.  A new service might indeed be great but I really don't see Trion doing it.  They have a host of half-ass endeavors in their wake and I don't know why they can't just spend their time finishing a good game instead.

Am I being subtly trolled by you guys?  If so it’s flying way over my head.   :awesome_for_real:

You're reading too fast. Goreschachs joke it that it's not a normal first post (as Ingmar stated) because it was a coherent on-topic statement instead of some rambling rant or weird self-intro.

Tangent aside:  Why do I care about this or other devs' inability to get on to Steam, as a consumer?  There's lots of products that don't make it in to other storefronts I might be interested in.  If only there was a way to market yourself these days instead of being beholden to central resellers.

Ah, ok.  Then I guess my original point was missed.  Which was:  Go look at the third post of this thread.

Oh, lawl.

The metacritic score itself? Not so much. Being able to read a bunch of different reviews from both amateurs and pros in a single click from the Steam page? Yes, pretty fucking relevant.

This. I don't take Metacritic as a be-all end-all... but if I see a bunch of 70's or less from the "journos" and lots of 0-6's from people, I can be well-assured the game is probably goat balls. I'm looking for the general tone of the writeups and the scores which I grade on the curve.

I generally agree with Haemish but I have enjoyed some games with sub-70 metacritic scores like the recent reboot of Jagged Alliance.

70s don't bother me as I can put up with more jank than a 'reviewer'.

Now if it has 50s and low user scores...

And as I learned recently, metascores can move into lulz territory after a few years (splinter cell is not a 90+ game today).

Well, generally, I only look at those Metacritic scores if it's something I'm on the fence about. "Is this really worth $5 when I already have so much else to play?"  :awesome_for_real:

Curation isn't a feature I value in an online store front unless its a tangible benefits like Humble Bundle.  This is "I am going build Amazon but with only the best stuff"  Inevitably the best isn't really the best stuff and I'd rather decide for myself.

Amazon's claim to fame wasn't built on having the best stuff, but having ALL THE STUFFZ for cheaper than everywhere else. Steam has partly built its success on also having all the stuff (or most of it) and having sales that make it cheaper than everywhere else. It's periodic sales have forced other online vendors to have regular sales as well just to compete.

Eactly what I was saying( or failing to say). "We are Steam but with 'big selection' replaced with 'our good taste'." is repelling.

I would think a curated games store wouldn't stock Trion's games. Maybe Rift. So there's that.

Except those reviews aren't on the steam store page (only the overall metacritic score) so I'm not completely sure what the advantage having the score on the store page is (from your original post).

When I am thinking of buying a game on Steam I generally click on the "Read critic reviews" link beneath the Metacritic score. Then you go to a nice page with the reviews you want, without making the effort of typing "Bioshock Infinite reviews" in a searchbar.

Apple and the iStore seem to do okay.

Not that they've got the clout of Apple or I think it's a good idea, but sometimes the market does reward things we don't think it should.

Apple's a closed shop though. Apple users buy Apple devices and get software from Apple stores.

^ That ^. Which is also one of the reasons the Kindle has become the eBook standard - closed system and a huge library in conjunction with discounted pricing.

Because in theory you're missing out on good games that don't happen to be on Steam.

Steam is not like Amazon, it does not have "all the stuff." It's semi-curated in a way that is really haphazard.

That's a list of games I can count on one hand.

My thing is, as a consumer, I don't care. Really, I don't. Not one bit. Sorry.

Here's what you're arguing to me;  It's ridiculous that Wal*Mart sells plastic adirondack chairs when people could be buying designer Torsa chairs there.  WalMart should carry those chairs, not the crap from China. People don't know what they're missing.

I care less about what I'm missing that isn't on steam and care more about what I'm missing because steam is overloaded with crap I don't care about and browsing the categories seems like a waste of effort more and more these days.

It's not a view I agree with, but it's definitely an opinion I hear a lot lately.  There's a lot of whining about how Steam has "gone to shit" because they carry more games, a lot of people who feel that Valve guarantees the quality of games on Steam or that when a company sells a shit game it somehow reflects on Steam overall.  I've come across more than a few comments about how many "crap games are getting through greenlight" or how Steam is "infested with early access shit".  It's not a sentiment I agree with personally, but it is out there, and apparently Trion is going to try to sell things to it.

The question is, can Trion win that market, though, and I'm not sure they can.  They'd essentially be trading on their reputation as game connoisseurs, and I don't know that they've earned that reputation.  If I didn't read these boards, I don't think I'd even have heard about or remember the Defiance MMO, and their only other title is generic MMO also-ran #507.

I tend to agree, which is why I said "in theory" above.

Steam is curated but it's curated very poorly. So it's kind of a worst-of-both-worlds thing. Something being on Steam doesn't mean that it's good, and something not being on Steam doesn't mean that it's bad. It has all the problems of both curated and non-curated storefronts.

The tag system is also hilarious useless. It's the same fucking games for all tags. Like, you click on 8 different tags and they all point to GTA and Skyrim.

You are reaching to grind that axe.

I buy my PC games 99% exclusively on Steam, and I don't ever browse any categories/tags/whatever. I either buy games I've heard about in other ways, or browse what's on sale during the big sales. Unless Trion starts offering lower/comparable prices to Steam sale prices or publishing JRPGs/eroge/otherweeabooshit I probably won't bother even installing their store app thing.

All of this is true. But I also think maybe people are putting more responsibility on Steam as a digital store than they would on, say, GameSpot or Walmart.

I look at Steam as a place to buy games that has a nice foundation of integrated tools I only occasionally use. The most useful thing to me is cloud storage for archiving games I'll probably never play again anyway but it's nice they're there, and cloud saves for those games that I play which support them. There's a whole bunch of other stuff it does which is nice and all, but they're free to me and I wouldn't pay for them anyway. They make up for a lot of gaps Microsoft could have filled years ago yet which come at a cost which compels some publishers to go it alone on digital distribution.

But I'm not some Steam loyalist who'll slavishly stick with it any more than I care about any one retailer over another on some emotional or political principal. So I launch Origin if I need to play a game in it, launch Steam if I need to play a game in it, let UPlay launch the once a year I play the next Assassin's Creed and Battle.net launch the once every few years I launch a Blizzard thing. Basically I'm fine with whatever environment needs to launch so I can play the game I want to play. It's not because I'm worried about the analytics they're generating. They're all doing it right alongside everyone else doing it. I just got used to optimizing RAM usage and background processes years ago.

However, I also don't play a lot of the kinds of games as you all. Trion's promise is an environment filled with things I can either get on Steam or things I probably wouldn't have been interested in anyway. So good luck to them.

There's a huge difference between Steam and GameStop/WalMart/etc and that's the outspoken, PC-gaming evangelist Gabe Newell.

The other retailers are just that - retailers, but Valve as a company make no bones about trying to influence the direction of PC gaming as a whole. The success of Steam gives them real clout to make that more than just lip-service too.

It's not a question of being a Steam loyalist, it's recognising that they are a qualitatively different entity in relation to PC gaming than other retailers are.

Just so we are all clear, I have zero hate towards steam and its poorly curated store.  I just think they do a piss poor job of making quality games stand out without the use of sales and I think this is where an opportunity comes in for someone to actually compete against steam.  I used to browse steam (especially the $10 section) but now i'ts overloaded with crap that I don't have any bother to do so.  The only time I look at steam's store is when a holiday sale is going on, and even then it's rare.  It's become much more efficient to browse reddit /r/gamedeals or the multitude of sale sites to see if anything I recognize pops up.

Steam recognizes this is their weakness too.  That's why they keep harping on community curated sections in the future.  If they will be able to pull that off than more power to them, but it's going to be extremely tricky to execute properly.

I get all that. As I gamer, I get to draft off all of that. In part they are keeping PC gaming alive. They pretty much created the whole mid-core business segment that large publishers would never have done. Heck, those large publishers woulda long since left PCs in their race to fewer platforms with higher volume forecasts to support. I credit Steam with giving them a measurable reason to keep doing PC games.

I just don't use most of the stuff they provide personally. For me it's a store with some platform stuff. But I also don't go to any store to browse and be convinced of what I want at point of sale. That's what TV commercials and friend referrals are for  :awesome_for_real:

So let's call it the difference between what Steam is and those parts that affect me indirectly versus what few parts of it affect me directly and why I'm not biased against other services giving it a shot (because they'll offer things I either already know I want on Steam or won't really care about).

My take is that I don't care that a digital seller has "poor" games in its inventory. It's an irrelevant issue.

I look for what I want, which is not what the rest of you want. I will cheerfully plunk down cash for titles ranging from AAA games-of-the-year, to buggy East European space sims, to hex grid wargames with a UI stuck in 1992, to anime-style visual novels written by a couple of American twentysomethings in a basement somewhere.

I do not give a flying shit what someone else thinks is "worthy" of being on their platform. I move towards titles that appeal to my taste. Better curation only means less titles for me to browse through, and ultimately the vendor getting less of my money.

Shit, Gamersgate was getting quite a bit more of my money than Steam was until Steam starting letting more indie and Euro "crap" in. I can prove this through the last three years of receipts.

At least we know quality games are being curated through the Greenlight process (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=122551274)  :why_so_serious:

If only there was a store that wouldn't even give me the choice to not buy it.

Seriously, though, I think this is one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenarios.  Steam's getting simultaneously slammed for letting too many titles through and not letting enough through.

And honestly, when it comes to Greenlight, that IS one of the good ones.  You don't want to see the bad ones. (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=238671401)

For me, the more games available the better.  I'll curate my own damn collection, I don't want a store to do it for me.  Anything Steam does to increase its catalog of games, shit and all, is fine by me.

More or less my take on it, too.

And the Steam greenlight process is Newell trying to protect his Brand so they're not "home to shitty games" rather than just being a storefront and promoting the good ones with better sales if that's his goal.  Yes, it's stupid in the entirety. Be one thing or another, don't try to split the difference.

Having a problem getting on Steam, hire a firm to market yourself to abuse the process like the other guys. Marketing exists because people are dumb and will buy into it.  Got a team and still no sales? Fire them and get a new one. Stop trying to be so high-minded about it and just bite the bullet. You're not unique special snowflakes and neither is your game.

Bose, Monster Cables, Beats audio.  All great examples of mediocre products that sell because of better marketing.

I cannot believe how much Beats Audio I see on people. Truly a triumph of marketing and making the product so recognizable and obvious that the popularity seems greater than it really is.

I did read somewhere that the Beats version of Pandora has a cool feature where you tell them where you are, what mood you are in and what music genre you feel like and they curate a "station" for you. I wanted to play with that but the sign up process was more than I could be bothered with.

The worst thing about Beats headphones is that they are selling you headphones at a price higher than good studio monitor quality phones cost that people buy to plug into a portable device with their low powered, mediocre quality output amplifiers.

They are a fashion accessory, not about listening to music with good quality reproduction.

 

That's kind of a sliding scale though. I can understand why some people say such things are successful because of their marketing. However, it's generally marketing plus a product engineered and priced right at the "good enough" point. Beats plugged into an iPhone is good enough for the vast majority of people. That's not the horn speaker/vacuum tube/turntable crowd  :grin:

tl;dr: the more popular a thing, the more middle of the road it probably is.

Bringing it back to Steam, I could make this argument about PCs vs consoles for gaming.

A pair of much higher quality headphones from Sennheiser/Grado/Sony (some may scoff at the Sony part, but the MDR-7506 has been the most commonly used studio headphone for decades for a reason) cost the same or less as the cheaper model Beats headphones. Sounding "good enough" coming from an iPhone shouldn't cost you more than $50-75. Beats are $200-300 a pair.

But if i only spend $50 nobody will know I'm fashionable and chique!

They struck lightning with right song, right football player, right time in their commercial too.  I don't own beats but I do hum that stupid commercial frequently.

The one good thing about Beats is that Dr. Dre and I can't remember who got the brand afterwards completely fucked over Monster Cable and took the brand with them at their first opportunity. Which is great because Monster Cable is an awful company.

I'm not trying to argue the logic. If you really want to get right down to it, skip the after market altogether and just use the Apple earbuds. For modern over produce shit, NPR and podcasts, they're fine. Heck, go further and ditch the Apple products altogether and get some free no-brand smartphone for emails and Spotify.

"Best", "awesome" and "good enough" are so strongly influenced by effective marketing that quality itself is a sliding scale.