I'm an old-school gamer. Or, should that read "I'm an old gamer"?
I have a collection of computer games starting from back in the old five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk days.
I'm used to buying a game, installing it and playing it. When it doesn't work like that, I get annoyed.
I used to get cracks for all my games because I thought it was laughable that game publishers thought that their disk was the only one I'd have in my drive.
Swapping disks constantly to play different games was just never realistic.
That's neat. Do you still grow your collection with physical mediums today?
I remember was so happy to get Baldurs Gate on 6 cds. But couldn't run it:/ So, um, borrowed the internet edition. Yeah cracks... those were often needed to be able to run games under wine at all. It's strange. You know, if we would all acted in accordance to licenses they wouldn't have so many customers...
Steam has cheapened the game's market. Just look at the absolute deluge of garbage on Steam. They opened the floodgates for any shitty developer to dump their barely playable garbage.
Not to mention Steam sales.
How does that help developers? "Oooh... that game looks interesting. I'll wait for a Steam sale."
Why pay full price when you KNOW that the game will be discounted sometime soon.
(by the way... if you buy a game on GoG and then it goes on sale shortly after, they give you credit of the difference, as though you bought it at the sale price)
Steam's cheapened the whole thing and the only one that has benefited financially... is Steam. They take a huge cut for just being a "store front".
The word which comes to mind is a monopol. They are
google in this, not much sense in competing unless one comes with something groundbreaking.
They've canceled the greenlight. I dunno if Steam Direct will change anything. But, yeah, the catalogue is already quite huge, isn't it...
Edit: Oh, just look at this:
https://steamdb.info/genres/ 25K products in total!
But fear not, only 2166 of them are EA
Though what's with the sales, wondering, does one have a say in when and how much his game is discounted?
My wife, and one of my best friends, love Steam. Both of them fully understand why I hate it. My friend even jokes that Steam has a flag on my account that tells them to f*@# me over.
Heh. Long time ago, there was this one day during which my head was hit four or five unrelated times (lost the count), not a once it was [completely] my fault. At the end of the day was paranoid even towards own bed! It's like you are asking for it or something