It’s a dumb hypothetical, because of a dumb question.

Depends on who you ask. Square might have projected 15m sales on the first day, in which case it did.

Dead Cells

Never really agreed with the Metroidvania label, same with Skul: The Hero Slayer. You unlock different biomes (and side rooms), but the items to do so are more like keys. Just my thoughts on that.

Hollow Knight
Tunic
Ori
Animal Well
Axiom Verge

Finally beat Windblown on the hardest difficulty (one run). Now I’m back down one step to unlock the new items that were added in the last six months.

BTW, the game can’t be bought in Germany for some reason, but you can activate third-party keys with no problem. No VPN needed.

I bought it on Nuuvem years ago and everything worked. Dunno if region-locked keys are sold, but the store should tell you if it’s only Russian, Japanese or whatever.

BG3 tried it with Bear sex. I guess we aren’t ready for that yet, but our kids are gonna love it.

BG3 and Cyberpunk have boobs and were a success, which would support that statement. But Wukong, Palword, and Monster Hunter Wilds were even more successful (according to concurrent Steam players), which means animals are the true secret to success.

The only thing I know is that access to the specific purchase might get blocked, if there’s a payment issue. Not Steam directly, but a friend of mine once bought Diablo 3 for WoW gold on Battle.net, something happened after a while, and he lost access to the game, dunno if the other side refunded the game or whatever. All the other games still worked, but he’d have to buy D3 again to play it. I would be surprised if Steam blocks the whole account.

If they mean you buy a game, then there’s a problem with payment, but they should still let you download and play, that’s dumb.

The part about Steam Support being extremely slow is also old news. I think that’s been a lot better for years now. I don’t know if it was around the time they were forced to implement refunds, but I think that’s all outsourced now, and you don’t have to hope a Valve dev checks the support mailbox anymore.

You should do what you think is best, since you’re making these threads.

I remember back when OpenCritic launched, the dev made a Reddit post to gauge interest. MetaCritic used some weird formula to weight specific outlets of their choosing higher, and apparently people didn’t like that. OpenCritic was supposed to “fix” that. I never really followed that stuff, so I don’t know if that’s still the case, if MetaCritic changed or whatever.

I don’t care one way or another, and don’t really use these threads or even most of the reviews to decide if I buy a game or not. Looking them over, and maybe see some people freak out because of “too much water” is entertaining though.

The video from LTT made it look like when you launch this game mode or Xbox mode or whatever (like on the Deck, where you can still exit to the desktop), and lots of non-essential processes just get stopped automatically. After you’re done, those processes would start again. So nothing is really removed, just put on hold while you’re gaming, and there’s no separate OS version.

I’m not a Nintendo gamer, but I’ve been watching a streamer play the game, and whenever I see the Knockout Tour it reminds me of the opening set pieces of the Forza Horizon games, where you’re going through all the different biomes, to introduce you to the game. And afterward you’re let loose on the Mario Horizon festival (aka the empty open world).

The game itself doesn’t look fun at all for me, but who cares, if people enjoy it.

I’m interested in the Xbox game mode, or whatever it’ll be called. Freeing up all those resources to improve performance should be good. Also, the unified launcher for all your games could be neat, depending on how it’s going to work out.

Trying to beat the highest difficulty in Windblown. It’s not going well. I’d basically need to be able to beat the game hitless, which I’m not good enough for.

I’m not interested in the Switch 2, but things like that are why I thought about buying one for like a second, just to have a low firmware one.

Finally, some real examples, where EGS is better than Steam, that actually impact people and might make them use EGS. Price is probably the most important one. If someone from Argentina pays like half as much on EGS as they would on Steam (don’t know how much it actually is), because EGS actually accepts their local currency and they don’t have to pay in USD or something, then it makes sense to switch to EGS

Also, EGS is better for devs than Steam, with revenue share, now even more so, as mentioned in the post. I don’t think a lot of people will buy on EGS solely for that reason, but it is something.

The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon

That’s why I mentioned them. You basically said, people (maybe unjustly) talk shit about EGS because of missing features like that, when they also have some advantages over Steam, and then talk about the most mundane stuff. “I might not be able to pre-load this game, but at least I can cap my download at 13468kb/s.” Those two are not the same.

It was very convenient to have everything in one place

As I said, with the button to switch to the Chat inside the Steam app, it’s basically the same. What is the real difference of clicking that button and switching to a different app, compared to clicking that button and switching to a new screen inside the same app? I genuinely can’t think of one. You could argue a separate app is better, because now you can open both apps at the same time in split screen, so you can browse the store or community pages, while chatting (I wouldn’t do that, but it’s possible).

I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now)

Probably not, most of the time, and this post doesn’t detail what bundling for EGS means. Steam has normal game bundles and the Complete-your-Collection bundles, which is dynamic and can give some extra discounts.

However, with Steam keys from legit third-party sites, you might get an even better deal at times, maybe better than on EGS, so I don’t really know where it’s the cheapest.

Wishlisting specific Game Editions would be nice, but how are you comparing nice-to-have features like that or custom download limits to stuff like Pre-Loading, Gifting, Bundles, etc.

For me, a separate Chat app for Steam is also a complete non-issue. I can’t really think of anything, that would improve, if it was integrated in the normal Steam app. Separate download and one initial login less? You can launch the Chat app from the Steam app itself, so you don’t even save that single extra tap to launch it, and for the user it’s basically the same as an integrated chat.