You might be able to attract new players that don’t have any baggage, but older ones with games on Steam, you’ll need to climb the Everest to convince them.
That’s why they do the giveaways. Because kids playing Fortnite have Epic libraries now, and will be invested in Epic more than Steam later, when they start spending their disposable income buying games.
Metaprogression was always pretty unrewarding, dripping in upgrades and unlocks so you buy a game, but you don’t get the game you bought until 10-100 hours of time invested playing a worse and/or more limited game. It’s always been weird how so many people say they need progression to enjoy a game. Fun was always a better reason to play a game than progression. Fun is why better games have ways to rebalance to match the things progression adds along the way. It’s just a shame people will basically scorn most games that don’t offer some kind of cross-run progression nowadays, so devs are stuck doing something. Not just roguelites, either. Look at what’s happened to Diablo-style ARPGs, where the addiction mechanics have pushed things to where people want seasonal resets so they can meaninglessly re-grind, because the fun has shifted to grinding loot (and trading), and the game doesn’t matter once you have enough that loot isn’t changing things for you. People don’t even want significant gameplay, as it just slows the grind. Then the inevitable endpoint of unlock/progression based play is horde survivors, where the games have openly admitted the actual play isn’t even the point anymore. It’s just builds, unlocks, and grinds, watch it go.
But I never really got people acting like you can’t tell how you’re doing in a game as things shift, or they can’t engage with systems because things get added, or a win doesn’t feel like a win. It’s not usually that hard to tell how you’re playing or how stuff works. These things are rarely that unusual, and if winning on easy isn’t good enough for you, look for the higher difficulty. If there’s no option to adjust difficulty and give a good play experience, that’s the problem, not the progression. Difficulty always needs options, and people should play at the level where the game feels good to them, not get stuck trying to prove something by defeating the game. Just like devs should not take a lazy, one-size-fits-all path, especially if that path means more experienced players only get a less interesting game.
Finally, contrasting “sideways” unlocks to power progression is often a deception. Many games with sideways unlocks gain a great deal of power/easing from adding options, synergies, and opportunities. Then people try to act like the experience is more pure than some other game where things get easier just from stats. Yeah, stat upgrades are obvious, but you didn’t start in the same place as before when you’ve altered the game and drop pool to your advantage.
Yeah, Steam Input could have been huge for the entire gaming industry, but instead it’s only for Steam and so only can get fixed by Valve, who just doesn’t really care about coming back to things and keeping them working after initially building something. Frustrating to see something almost so good just kinda limp along, accumulating bugs no one will fix because Valve doesn’t really care beyond the simple button mapping use.
Just like how dynamic collections could have been pretty great, but Valve got a rudimentary version working, patted themselves on the back, and left forever without even implementing the most basic tools anyone would need to actually use them (boolean combinations, actually using the tags you set on games, etc). It could even have been a slick new interface to Steam’s tagging (imagine if you set a collection specifically as a tag, and Steam took your manually adding and removing games there as tag votes) that might’ve helped ease some of the dumb problems tags have (there’d be a lot more info for Steam to draw on than just the people actually updating tags on the store page).
I’m kind of impressed no one makes a better gaming social-launch client than Steam, but then Steam’s own client has a massive lock in advantage so you basically can’t make something that wholly replaces it, and Valve doesn’t care to play nice when they want that obvious Steam-game vs non-Steam-game divide.
I also saw a solution for normalizing the scores of every person to battle this bias. This is used in Criticker system (recommendation for movies
Sounds good. Doesn’t actually work :/ Sure, if everyone gave a statistically valid data spread covering every rating point, then you could probably normalize them so it doesn’t matter what numbers an individual used. But people don’t do that. Maybe someone only rates 8-10, but is that because they like everything, because they don’t rate anything they didn’t like, because they think an 8 is bad, because they just lump everything they don’t like in the “8 or below” group, or some other random thing? They don’t know, and what about the obvious fact that most everyone watches more movies they rate good than bad, so ratings have a huge implicit skew to the distribution? They don’t know that either, but they scale the ratings anyway, and that’s some of why they don’t really work if you get down to it. The rest is just that their analysis concept is broken.
I actually use criticker for my movie rating, and it doesn’t really do me any good (but it’d be a pain to move everything, so I haven’t :). Their system still falls prey to the usual issues, just not as obviously as say Steam which basically just always throws the most popular candidate it can shoehorn into a rec. If you have weird taste, you get grouped with rating profiles that happen to agree enough on something, but that don’t actually have real connection to your taste. Eg, if I like some movies everyone likes (and let’s face it, we pretty much all have some close-enough-to-universally appreciated likes), my “close rating” users will be focused on people who also liked those movies, and a lot of meaningful stuff becomes noise, but one’s taste is much more in the noise data than in the big obvious strokes. Alternatively, if I watch and like some fringe thing no one sees, suddenly anyone else who did is closer to me, mainly because there’s so little data in common between us to go on.
Criticker is convinced I love esoteric foreign drama (I really don’t), because I scour deep into horror during part of the year and occasionally find a gem that gets a good rating, often from some dark corner of Asia. They also think my 50 is 77th percentile, probably for the same reason (ie I do have a lot of low ratings, because I’m watching things just because they are horror). A 50 is where I put “pretty decent/not really that good” stuff, which seems a lot lower than 77 to me, but I can’t tell Criticker that because of their “helpful” scaling. After my partner (who watches basically everything I do and has very similar taste), the next closest TCI (their code for how close your normalized ratings are to someone else’s, and the basis for their rating prediction) comes at thirty. That basically says they’re useless, which is more accurate than any given rating prediction they generate for me, with my mere 1,845 ratings to go by ;)
I really think one needs to find and minimize the “common” elements to focus on the uncommon in rating analysis, and in prediction. Eg if people tend to like X but I don’t, that actually means a lot more than if I also like X. And recommending I rush out to watch The Godfather (thanks again, Criticker, never heard that one…), doesn’t do me any good, because everyone already knows it. It’s an “easy” rec, but it’s not a good rec.
If Criticker used the 3-4-3 system for their ratings instead of telling us it will just work out, that would lead me to apply my numbers differently, which on its own is kinda telling for improving their data. I didn’t make up the 3-4-3 thing, BTW. I was working on a related web/database project, and that was passed on to me as studied and statistically well-proven for producing better survey results (and that was someone from an industry that definitely cares about that). Does make a lot of sense, though. It’s nice when something has a clear right answer like that… except you get a little frustrated seeing nothing actually use it ;)
I have one more question, if you don’t mind - what is your feeling about game recommendations after you rated 3-4 games? Were recommendations lean towards predicable “correct” way, or were they completely random and off?
I didn’t rate any games, just looked at what it would take and had some quick feedback to offer. Part of the issue with Itch is that to rate games, you have to first find things on itch, as well as find things that’d be representative so you might see how recs do. For testing something that isn’t going to do much right now, that’s a fair bit of trouble, especially since my key interest would be whether recommendations really take taste into account or use one of the usual shortcuts that either lump you into categories or fall prey to the “well everyone likes X so X” syndrome. Either of those would take a fair bit of data for me to put in, and a rather surprising amount of data for you to already have at such an early stage.
I notice you are using a nineteen point rating scale, going from 1 to 10 with halves in between and a slider. You will get better ratings if you use a more standard scale that’s compatible with other sites and a better method for inputting ratings.
You’ll want to link your rating data to other sites (eg, backloggd.com, igdb.com) if you have any hope of this being used, so that’s why compatibility is valuable. Mapping a 10 point scale to a 19 point scale is a silly wrench to throw in, and how will you translate your users’ 19 point scale to push to sites with 10? You need to be able to keep users from entering scores over again to survive at all.
As to entry, something almost everything gets wrong is you actually get better data if you present ratings with the right number of points to the scale and use a tiered grouping (visually, not as in requiring a series of questions for a single rating). There’s basically a right answer here, and its 10 points grouped 3-4-3. The grouping helps cognitively because you’re basically picking high-mid-low twice instead of analyzing a 10 point spread. People are significantly statistically worse at using a wide, flat rating scale, and the two-tier version corrects that and gives you richer and more accurate data, especially if you label the tiers, to help reduce individual bias about how they apply their feelings to numbers (eg the modern 6/10=bad syndrome).
We need better rating analyzers than we have, but it will never work without connecting to other rating systems and processing games outside itch.io. And if you keep your recommendation mechanism under wraps with only manual rating entries, especially limited to itch.io games, you’re asking far too much from someone to see if it’s potentially relevant to them, both in the sense of effort and the sense of trust (“non-biased, community driven”).
Not only that, but true to Ubisoft form, many Uplay DRM games still require Steam if you buy them through Steam, so you actually must have both launchers running to play, not just Ubisoft’s. If you start it from Uplay (yeah, I know, it’s “Ubisoft Connect” now), it will start Steam up. Steam doesn’t require this–lots of Steam games don’t require Steam’s DRM. It’s completely Ubisoft’s choice to force Steam DRM on top of their own DRM.
No it isn’t. They explicitly renamed themselves to “GOG” and removed the “Good”.
It’s just displaying review summaries from VaporLens next to the reviews on the store page. There’s no AI boogeymen in the plugin itself, and you can easily disable the feature.
Tooling around and checking some Guild Wars 2 boxes as usual, but the new arcade twin-stick Sektori has been eating dedicated playtime all through holidays. A couple of my Steam friends went for some scoring in the side modes, but I got some solid runs in they will have to work pretty hard to pass again. I’m still trash against the games heinous bosses, though. Those things were designed to grind mistakes out of you, and I only occasionally get by even the first tier boss versions without some mistake. I definitely get tired of playing boss rush, but until I’m more consistently passing those without eating hits, campaign mode just isn’t going anywhere, and I’d really like to be over that hump. Good thing the other side modes are all pretty great and focus on the core play rather than the fancy but tiresome bosses. Too bad side modes got short-changed on achievements, because the dev annoyingly limited the Steam achievements based on consoles, so there are a bunch of pseudo-achievements that are only displayed in-game.
Sure, I knew which game you meant. It was just an oddly dismissive and mildly inaccurate way to refer to a legit top-tier game.
I play a lot of twin-sticks, so Robotron was a real curve to throw in. From my perspective, those are pretty different ;P
Shooting shapes in Sektori, a stunningly good arcade twin-stick, bashing dragon toes and playing bells in Guild Wars 2, a fun ARPG-MMO where we recently added a few more dress-up dolls to our roster just because we play a lot and like a few more ways to play, and third, mowing down hallways full of bugs in Combat Complex, a top-down shooter ARPG that’s weak on the ARPG aspects but the shooter side manages to feel like a great arcade twin-stick, plus some neat enemy-enemy friendly-fire mechanics.
Much more the first two than the third, as CC is good but it’s in early access and they recently changed and botched the progression, so playing right now at my level/floor is basically worthless, and I just have to hope they eventually do something to fix it.
Sektori, though, is seriously good.
geometry wars meets robotron type deal.
That makes no sense. Both of those are just arcade twin-stick shooters, and Sektori is no more Robotron than Geometry Wars was. Also, while Sektori very obviously draws a lot on Geometry Wars, it’s an amazingly good arcade twin-stick that improves so much on what GW did, and really deserves recognition. It’s niche, but it’s genuinely a top game in that niche, and I mean best in ten years top game.
It’s weird just how long input device bigotry persists in the PC space, despite being basically ridiculous.
Mouse is great for positional input, and keyboard has a lot of keys, but let’s be honest, the keyboard isn’t even great for typing, let alone gaming. That ‘m’ has been hard-carrying kbm for a very long time, whereas controllers are very much purpose-designed, and have finally been getting some nice advances with gyros (pretty fun to use with flick-stick) and extra buttons, plus one of mine has a cool automatic trigger resistance option that really adds to driving games even without the game knowing about it at all.
And that’s not even getting into that some players just find controller a more fun way to game than kbm. Sure, I’m never playing an action game on keyboard because it would murder my already pained hands, but honestly, that’s not why I play on controller. I like (preferably unassisted) controller gaming. Yeah, it’s not optimal in some games, but “optimal” does not equate to fun, especially if you’re not deep in competitive shooter territory, which includes a lot of players PC or otherwise.
If you like arcade twin-stick shoot-em-ups, Sektori is one of the best the genre has seen. Hard though: if one doesn’t know the genre, play Waves and Assault Android Cactus first.
Game pass is in essence a subscription model to demo games.
I’m not pro Game Pass either, but this is misrepresentative. Game Pass isn’t for demoing, it’s for the large number of people who just don’t return to games after playing them. They don’t care about owning their games, and they may not even care that much about choosing their games, so Game Pass gives them things to do and plenty of hot new things to jump into while everyone is talking about them, all without ever having to pony up for anything specific unless it’s the rare case of something they want to play more/again after it leaves Game Pass.
It’s like the old console market where one would buy a game, then trade it in for credit on the next game. You feed money in to have things to play, and then some more if you actually want to keep something and have to make up for its trade in on the next game. Especially since things are probably getting discounted by the time they leave Game Pass, so the sub+price-to-keep may still end up being comparable/better than the original buy price.
It’s just a different way of experiencing gaming, and Microsoft is obviously still trying to figure out exactly how much they can milk that market for that convenience. Quite a few smaller games can probably make more from Game Pass than they would from sales alone, because fewer people would buy the game than consider it added value on their Game Pass sub, and multiplayer games can jump-start their communities without going free.
They don’t want to hurt some dev’s numbers, but they don’t like the game either.
Or they just can’t handle giving the thumbs down. A lot of people like that nowadays. Only likes are allowed.
You see the frustration of rational voters. We can’t just vote harder when a candidate is telling existential threats to hold my beer, but have to watch the distant #1 choice be “couch” while the only option we’re offered for “maybe don’t destroy everything” comes in at #3.