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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  MMOG Discussion  |  Topic: Trion launching its own "Steam", to discover hardcore lesser known games 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Trion launching its own "Steam", to discover hardcore lesser known games  (Read 29581 times)
tazelbain
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tazelbain


Reply #70 on: March 21, 2014, 09:40:33 PM

You are reaching to grind that axe.

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Rendakor
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Reply #71 on: March 21, 2014, 10:00:52 PM

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.

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
Venkman
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Reply #72 on: March 22, 2014, 09:53:16 AM

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.

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.

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.
apocrypha
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Reply #73 on: March 22, 2014, 10:18:54 AM

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.

"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1915.
KallDrexx
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Reply #74 on: March 22, 2014, 11:07:23 AM

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.
Venkman
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Reply #75 on: March 22, 2014, 11:48:06 AM

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.

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).
Stormwaltz
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Reply #76 on: March 22, 2014, 01:13:12 PM

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.

Nothing in this post represents the views of my current or previous employers.

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KallDrexx
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Reply #77 on: March 22, 2014, 04:09:42 PM

Kail
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Reply #78 on: March 22, 2014, 04:55:28 PM


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.
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Reply #79 on: March 23, 2014, 04:02:04 AM

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.

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Merusk
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Reply #80 on: March 23, 2014, 06:26:45 AM

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.

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Hoax
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Reply #81 on: March 23, 2014, 02:54:51 PM

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.


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Chimpy
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Reply #82 on: March 23, 2014, 03:05:32 PM

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.

 

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Venkman
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Reply #83 on: March 23, 2014, 03:17:27 PM

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  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

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.
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Reply #84 on: March 23, 2014, 03:45:25 PM

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.

'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes.
Merusk
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Reply #85 on: March 23, 2014, 03:50:19 PM

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

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Senses
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Reply #86 on: March 23, 2014, 05:14:51 PM

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.
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Reply #87 on: March 24, 2014, 10:32:20 AM

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.

"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist." - George Bernard Shaw
Venkman
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Reply #88 on: March 24, 2014, 04:48:40 PM

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.

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.
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