That makes sense to me. Better to concentrate all of your sales on the most popular platform to boost your visibility on that platform. Though, I believe it also released on Epic on day 1, so idk what’s up with that. Maybe the 50% lower revenue share Epic takes was worth the minor impact on Steam metrics?

I don’t think most publishers (Remedy in this case) care. The ones that do are ones like Epic and Microsoft who were trying to promote their own stores.

Like, yes they want to diversify their platforms. But if you want to bring in revenue quickly and start paying off thr debt accumulated from 3-5 years of developing a AAA game. You have to choose whether to delay your game’s PC release entirely for a couple of months, or whether to release on Steam ASAP and collect the vast majority of revenue from that and just delay the other platforms that are an insignificant fraction.

Remember that marketing budgets are a huge factor too. I suspect Lemmy users are probably more ad-averse than average, but your average gaming consumer probably saw a lot of ads for this game leading up to launch and was riding that hype train. Delaying the PC release means that you either need to pay for those marketing costs for longer, or release without that benefit (a death sentence). Or you delay the console launch too, which means even more time spent with financing tied up in debt and accumulating interest, waiting for the revenue to come in.

And even if you DO decide to go ahead and delay… The vast majority of PC gamers are going to buy it on Steam anyways. Only a tiny fraction of people care about DRM. Personally, I avoid anything with Denuvo and a lot of the publisher-specific stuff like EA Play.

You are paying a premium to buy a launch day game anyways. The reason people want to buy games on launch… Some people do just really want their gratification and don’t want to wait to enjoy the game, but a LOT of it is about social status. These are people who want to read articles, watch videos, engage in discussions both online and offline. They want to ride the hype train. And for people who want to maximize that experience, Steam is the platform of choice. They blow Epic and GOG put of the water in terms of social features. They are way better than any of the consoles too.

As someone not socially motivated myself… Well, I absolutely loved Control and I have been gushing to people about it for a couple of years. I’m in absolutely no hurry to buy the sequel. I’ll wait until it goes on sale for some reasonable price, probably $25-$30. Then it will sit in my library with my ~700 other games until the time is right. My mood, my schedule, the weather, etc. And I will almost certainly buy it on Steam for the convenience of having it on the same platforms as my other games, including cloud features that let me switch between my Deck and PC seamlessly, and stream to basically every screen I own.

Pretty sure Remedy games have always hit piracy sites on day 1 of release though. I’m sure their management is aware of that. They even built in a little Easter egg in the pirated version of Alan Wake where Alan would walk around with a pirate eyepatch throughout the game lol

Sony’s games were on GOG when they started, but they stopped once they started integrating PSN. I can’t say EA, Activision-Blizzard, or Ubisoft games have even been a going concern for me for over a decade. I played Hazelight’s last two games and that new Prince of Persia metroidvania, and that was it; even PoP made me regret it because the DRM was such a pain in the ass.

I’m playing through it now, on and off, for the first time. I love the lore, the plot, and the environments. I also like the slow but continuous progression and variation of enemies and powers. But the combat feels like a bag full of chocolate: it looks wonderful at first, but after a while I’ve started to get sick of it. I could use fewer (or even no) random encounters, if only they weren’t necessary to allow for grinding.

One thing that takes some of the shine off the whole thing for me is the way that lore pickups are handled. When other “timely” things occur, one of your menu buttons is temporarily repurposed as a “do exactly that right now” button, so why not lore pickups? Especially because the lore is often best consumed in the time and place where you find it. But because actually reviewing it requires me to go through mutiple levels of menus every time, I usually put it off until I have several waiting for me.

Almost as annoying is the fact that for things you can experience within the game world (movies, videos, and tapes), the item will still be marked as “unread” in the lore menu system until you review it there, even if you stood still in the game and waited for the whole thing to finish. Since they’re already in a separate lore category, I think it’s safe to risk using a simple algorithm (for example, the player stayed within X distance for 95% of the total runtime, without an enemy encounter) to mark an item as “read” in the lore list.

Adhd?

For me, that something was identifiably a frustrating telekinesis power that seemed to always get my projectile stuck on a wall or some other object in front of me when I most needed it to dispatch an enemy. If I wasn’t so close to the end of the game by the time I decided I disliked it, I wouldn’t have finished it. At least Poets of the Fall doing their fake metal band is always a good time.

I was really enjoying Control, but stopped during one of the boss battles. It was so obviously a “game-y” boss battle (do this, dodge now, wait for the vulnerable part to be exposed, repeat this pattern ad nauseam). When I’m playing a story-driven immersive game, these videogamey elements shatter the immersion for me.