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Community MetaSteam | August 2022 - Remember Ringo, With Great Power Comes No Regional Pricing
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That's what people said when the price of PC games went up from $50 to $60 a few years ago to match console prices. They were wrong. The $60 price point got normalized pretty effortlessly, even if it did start out with tentpole releases (which I don't remember if it did).
It's one of the top selling Playstation 4 games ever (20 million sold at last count). It absolutely did set the world on fire. Probably the only game that sold better is God of War. And 'only' 87 on Metacritic? You are going in way too hard to try and prove that an extremely well liked, well reviewed and successful game wasn't that. There is not a development studio in the world who wouldn't be thrilled with 'only 87' and 20 million copies sold.
Tbh if your game sells 20 millions copies I don't think the metacritic score matters anymore whether it's 13 or 98.
Those sales already mean the game is well received/well liked without a bunch of reviews "validating" the claim
Also as I said in other posts, we keep stressing over CCUs because they give an initial ballpark estimate for sale numbers, but what matters to companies is revenue/profit the game generates.
If game A has lower CCUs than game B it's not the end of the world, game A can still end up generating more revenue in the end.
edit: also if both games are successful who cares which one "wins" in the end. Both Spiderman and GoW have good numbers.
Those sales already mean the game is well received/well liked without a bunch of reviews "validating" the claim
Also as I said in other posts, we keep stressing over CCUs because they give an initial ballpark estimate for sale numbers, but what matters to companies is revenue/profit the game generates.
If game A has lower CCUs than game B it's not the end of the world, game A can still end up generating more revenue in the end.
edit: also if both games are successful who cares which one "wins" in the end. Both Spiderman and GoW have good numbers.
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Do people forget Spideys regional pricing is fucked and not available in Russia, a giant PC region?
I mentioned this yesterday, but I think Spidey's lower numbers are mostly of Sony's doing. Proper regional pricing and being available in Russia would have easily put it past 100k CCUs. But at the same time, CCUs really aren't that important for a single player only game. It can gauge launch interest, but these games will sell for years and years while only having a few thousand peak CCUs months from now.
Hey all! Just wanted to share my tale of PC technical woe - needed to get this off my chest lol.
So I was playing Warriors Orochi yesterday, when suddenly my PC BSOD'd with all the fans tilting towards maximum. Chalked it up to bad Koei Tecmo programming; launched an undemanding 2D game (Super Crush KO) immediately afterwards, which I played for an hour without incident. Then I switched up to a more demanding game again (Project Diva, running at 4K)...and the stupid thing BSOD's again after a couple of songs.
Needless to say, this freaked me out, and I shut down the PC for the day.
I bring it to the shop the next day for the tech guy to fix, and he goes through the laborious process of testing every component using BurnInTest to figure out what's broken.
CPU intensive test, 17% GPU usage only, thing crashes after 3 minutes.
We see the CPU temp is way above normal, because I'm just using the OEM AMD cooler (I have a 5600x). We switch in a Noctua clone.
Temp drops by 25C, which is fantastic!
...then it crashes on the CPU test again after 3 minutes.
We figure there might be something wrong with the CPU (which would be weird, as its the newest part). Switch in another AMD CPU they have lying around, after some mucking about with the OS drives we run the test again. Still BSODs, so its not the CPU.
It might be the PSU, which is getting on in years and is basically the bare minimum for my rig's power requirement at 750W. I was planning on replacing this anyway, so we chuck in a new Corsair 850W gold. Crashes again.
In desperation, the tech takes out the GPU and replaces it with a test unit they had lying around...
...test completed.
Fuck!!!!
Of course the Zotac 3080 is out of warranty, but since Im friends with the shop guys theyll make an effort to RMA the thing, as I was able to give them the box completely intact.
So basically I spent 200 bucks today, and I have a nice new Corsair PSU, an slimfit Noctua cooler, a non-functional PC with no GPU, and an IOU for a Zotac RTX 3080. Don't buy Zotac, kids.
End rant. Sorry guys, I just had to vent lol.
So I was playing Warriors Orochi yesterday, when suddenly my PC BSOD'd with all the fans tilting towards maximum. Chalked it up to bad Koei Tecmo programming; launched an undemanding 2D game (Super Crush KO) immediately afterwards, which I played for an hour without incident. Then I switched up to a more demanding game again (Project Diva, running at 4K)...and the stupid thing BSOD's again after a couple of songs.
Needless to say, this freaked me out, and I shut down the PC for the day.
I bring it to the shop the next day for the tech guy to fix, and he goes through the laborious process of testing every component using BurnInTest to figure out what's broken.
CPU intensive test, 17% GPU usage only, thing crashes after 3 minutes.
We see the CPU temp is way above normal, because I'm just using the OEM AMD cooler (I have a 5600x). We switch in a Noctua clone.
Temp drops by 25C, which is fantastic!
...then it crashes on the CPU test again after 3 minutes.
We figure there might be something wrong with the CPU (which would be weird, as its the newest part). Switch in another AMD CPU they have lying around, after some mucking about with the OS drives we run the test again. Still BSODs, so its not the CPU.
It might be the PSU, which is getting on in years and is basically the bare minimum for my rig's power requirement at 750W. I was planning on replacing this anyway, so we chuck in a new Corsair 850W gold. Crashes again.
In desperation, the tech takes out the GPU and replaces it with a test unit they had lying around...
...test completed.
Fuck!!!!
Of course the Zotac 3080 is out of warranty, but since Im friends with the shop guys theyll make an effort to RMA the thing, as I was able to give them the box completely intact.
So basically I spent 200 bucks today, and I have a nice new Corsair PSU, an slimfit Noctua cooler, a non-functional PC with no GPU, and an IOU for a Zotac RTX 3080. Don't buy Zotac, kids.
End rant. Sorry guys, I just had to vent lol.
The first reveal trailer for that game had like 30 million views. The brand and marketing sold those 20 million copies long before its release. Its one of the biggest brands in the world and it is Sony's strength to do what they do for their games b4 they release. Especially back then when they took E3 more seriously.
And yea 87 isn't bad but you can't deny its mid. The game got shredded by both RDR2 and God of War in the goty voting that year. Those games were in the mid to high 90s on meta. It stood no chance so you can't say reviews don't matter. They do matter for both legacy and impact on the industry.
And I'm not saying its a bad game or anything. Its very good and probably the best they could have done with a first entry. I haven't played MM but the sequel can be even better. At the same time it doesn't reach the same highs as those older Arkham games imo. and it reaches lower lows as well despite being heavily inspired by those titles. It kind of just came and went but didn't really leave some massive impact on the industry.
Back then it didn't matter because hype took over everything but 4 years later selling an 87 meta game full price on PC will definitely have some effect on sales.
XIII - XIII Remake – A major update coming September 13 - Steam News
To achieve the quality standards and offer an optimal gaming experience, Microids decided to entrust the development of XIII Remake to the French studio Tower Five (Lornsword: Winter Chronicle). Hard at work for more than a year on a major update. This update will be released on September 13th...
XIII - XIII Remake – A major update coming September 13 - Steam News
To achieve the quality standards and offer an optimal gaming experience, Microids decided to entrust the development of XIII Remake to the French studio Tower Five (Lornsword: Winter Chronicle). Hard at work for more than a year on a major update. This update will be released on September 13th...store.steampowered.com
yup, that's from the update
$50 to $60 wasn't as close to $100 as $60 to $70 is and in this day and age when recession is a thing, Globally the economical situation is pretty worse than ever and PC gamers now a days are a lot used to discounts even at launch than like 10 years ago or so.
The price of a game as long as it keeps getting close to $100 will become more and more of a mental barrier for PC gamers more than others because PC is a price sensitive market vs console.
That doesn't mean a lot cause the way Spiderman as a brand is treated.. Horizon isn't even close to it popularity wise and GoW while finally got its prestige via TGAs in 2018 but still not close to Spiderman in terms of popularity is above it. Spiderman has sold 33m copies while GoW nearly 20m as per the last update in late 2021. There's definitely something wrong with the concurrent numbers going by this and its not as impressive as you might think for Sony's spiderman on PC infact Sony's other past releases like Days Gone and HZD don't have 'impressive' CCU numbers either so the bar isn't quite high however GoW for me was the first title that reached at least 70K+ which seemed like 'ok this one at least is getting close to the CCU peaks that big games usually reach now a days.. 66K is still quite a bit lower than quite a lot of AAA games releasing now a days.
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Fashion Police looks really good
This is a several years old single player game, of course it's not gonna have the same CCU as day one live service or multiplayer games or games with high replay value.
You're right and i agree but others who speak too highly of the brand and how 'good the game is' might not be convinced solely due to this explaination and when they see its numbers vs the other games and that its not going above and beyond them, then they'll see it as a negative.
It depends which perspective you see it from.
Already out of warranty? I thought even Zotac would have at least a 2 year warranty, if not 3 years for most regions.
The Spider-Man brand is big on Playstation consoles, but it didn't have much of a presence on PC in the past, I think?
Also looking at the peak CCUs list on Steam, the Spider-Man numbers look just about right for what it is (a late release of a big single player game).
Higher numbers are mostly either multiplayer/live service games, or single player games with high replay value, or big single player releases that were released on PC on day 1 (RE Village, for example).
The thing to consider though, is that getting a peak CCU of 65k (and whatever that implies for total sales) with this kind of lousy regional pricing is probably earning them more money than if they had gotten 100k with proper regional pricing. It's definitely possible that's the case. Losing Russia is undeniably hurting their sales but again, if they had priced it at 4000 rubles or something silly like that then those sales would have been depressed as well. I really did think it would go to 100k. Definitely launched lower than expectations as far as I'm concerned.
My understanding of mathematics absolutely lets me deny that an 87/100 average can be called 'mid'. Even when you consider only the 60-100 game reviewer scale. And especially when you recognize just how much it takes (mathematically) to increase a metascore by even one point when you're already that high up.
I don't know, you seem to have this weird issue or grudge against the game where you're trying to downplay how popular and well liked it was. Ascribing 20 million sales to hype and not the fact that people enjoyed the game is just so strange. Games don't sell 20 million because people don't like them. And because other games won GOTY awards that makes the critical reception of this game... mid? Is that the scale now? If you're not GOTY you're mid? That's so bizarre. 87/100 is objectively a very high score. 20 million sold is objectively an insanely high number. This only happens when people really like a game.
I suspect none of this will matter and $70 games will get normalized on PC at the same time they do on consoles. Which also hasn't happened yet by the way. It's just Sony first party stuff and a couple of other publishers poking at that $70 price point for now, but we'll get there eventually. Probably around the time they stop making PS4/Xbox One versions of games.
Also worth noting that whenever a game releases these days with a standard/deluxe/ultimate edition, the highest tier version is usually sitting at the top or above the other versions on the sales charts. People are already used to paying more than $60. I also expect people will take those pre-order discounts which bring the price of a game from $70 back to $60ish and consider it a win.
I'm convinced that this complete abandonment of regional pricing by many publishers will cause more of a downswing in sales in the affected regions than the $60-$70 price hike. For us, the pricing has already gone from $60 to $300 (or whatever absurd equivalent you want to denote it as). It doesn't really matter if it becomes $350 because both of those price points are beyond our reach. The rich regions, however, will probably tolerate/accept it.
That is good news to me at least, as it gives me hope that they'll actually give me back a working card (instead of having to face the terrifying prospect of repasting a 3080). Over here when you buy PC parts the retailers give you one year as standard, and its really hard to get replacements directly from the manufacturers without the retailers' help.
Yes, there was a malware incident in 2017 (which was fixed quickly), and there was bundled software installed alongside it (Avira, so not the worst you could install, but still)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCleaner should have all the info
'Pirate' Spider-Man Remastered Steam Keys Sell Out in Sanctioned Russia * TorrentFreak
High-priced Spider-Man Remastered activation keys sold out in Russia despite the game being cracked and pirated immediately after launch.
torrentfreak.com
No More Robots 5th Anniversary Sale
Can you believe it's been FIVE YEARS since No More Robots was born? To celebrate our birthday, we've got a whole bunch of exciting events going on: We've launched Fashion Police Squad today, a brand new shooter about finding fashion criminals and dressing them properly! There's a brand new...
No More Robots 5th Anniversary Sale
Can you believe it's been FIVE YEARS since No More Robots was born? To celebrate our birthday, we've got a whole bunch of exciting events going on: We've launched Fashion Police Squad today, a brand new shooter about finding fashion criminals and dressing them properly! There's a brand new...
Looks like it might be time to nab that Hypnospace soundtrack.
Granny Cream's Hot Butter Ice Cream!
I wonder if Humankind is good. I vaguely recall some reviews saying the victory conditions were a little too luck based / uncontrollable ?
Might be remembering it wrong.
Still thirsty for pc as fuck games right now. Still haven’t played anything because old your horse, cowboy.
And also still trying to understand if I should shell out an unreasonable amount on a gpu now or wait, and if I would really appreciate RT anyways.
Might be remembering it wrong.
Still thirsty for pc as fuck games right now. Still haven’t played anything because old your horse, cowboy.
And also still trying to understand if I should shell out an unreasonable amount on a gpu now or wait, and if I would really appreciate RT anyways.
Gonna give The Surge 2 another shot. Got it from a giveaway a long time ago but it ran like ass on my old hardware.
'Pirate' Spider-Man Remastered Steam Keys Sell Out in Sanctioned Russia * TorrentFreak
High-priced Spider-Man Remastered activation keys sold out in Russia despite the game being cracked and pirated immediately after launch.
Well, it is a availability problem, as Gabe once said. If Russians can't legally buy the game, they will pirate it.
Apparently they're doing a Gobliiins 5
Launched a kickstarter for it today, I also learned that the iii's in the goblins name represented how many goblins you actually controlled in a game
Don't know if it's coming to steam (People keep asking, and most of the comments are in french? so dunno!)
I do know that's being made by the same person and most of the budget is going for music
But currently the only place to get some of the other games is GOG:
Gobliiins pack
Would you like to play something with tough puzzles and laughing-out-loud humour? What ab
Good, at least the people can somehow manage to get the legal game.'Pirate' Spider-Man Remastered Steam Keys Sell Out in Sanctioned Russia * TorrentFreak
High-priced Spider-Man Remastered activation keys sold out in Russia despite the game being cracked and pirated immediately after launch.
'Pirate' Spider-Man Remastered Steam Keys Sell Out in Sanctioned Russia * TorrentFreak
High-priced Spider-Man Remastered activation keys sold out in Russia despite the game being cracked and pirated immediately after launch.
All Spiderman keys are region free with the one caveat that they cannot be activated in Russia or Belarus. The vendor in this article says (in the screenshot) that a customer will have to change their region to activate the game, which is correct. But in that case, those folks can buy keys from any grey market site (like cdkeys, G2A or Kinguin) and will get a better deal than the price this vendor was charging ($64). So basically these people are ripping off their customers by taking advantage of the fact that people might not know the keys are region free or perhaps they support some convenient local payment method.
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On another note, does anyone still play Lost Ark? I assume at this point all the 'casual' players will have left the game and those still playing are the truly dedicated folks. If you are one of those people, what are your thoughts about the game now? I played the game a lot (700+ hours) and loved it to bits but so many things went wrong with how Amazon/Smilegate managed it that I just sort of gave up on it. I mentally checked out about 6-8 weeks ago but still kept playing out of habit and FOMO to some extent. I've been drifting away from it more recently. It kinda feels like detoxing from a bad habit honestly. I also feel kinda dumb because I spent a ton of money buying skins for all my characters right before I started losing interest.
I was very excited for lost ark when it first came out and put in a decent chunk of time but a lot of that was because I wanted to play the game for so long. I heard about Lost Ark in like 2014? or whenever it first got announced in Korea and they did their first trailer and it looked amazing.
Pretty sure their was ways to play it in english through the time period inbetween but I always just sort of held out hope for an official way to play it and just forgot about it until I saw a new trailer or someone else would go "Omg look what i just found out about"
Pretty much just played it until I got to raiding then did like the ranking up or whatever? Then the people I played with stopped playing as we/they came to the realization that it would be such a massive time sink that it just wasn't going to be worth it.
If it had come out in english a few years earlier it would of been an entirely different story but oh well. It was still really fun to finally get to play it after all this time.
I found the dungeons fun enough and the story was kind of stupid but just enough there to sort f string you along
Tried out Elder Scrolls Online for the xbox challenge and got reminded just how much I like the looting in Bethesda games, I genuinely miss playing a main Elder Scrolls or Fallout.
I would say wait if you can unless you "need" a new GPU right now. By need I mean your old GPU died or anything similar that restricts you from playing games.
There's a RU + CIS sub displayed on Steamdb. Bukka might have sold RoW keys when the game released which is kind of weird but that would explain the need of changing region which is obviously not a good idea in general.
Nevertheless that might have been maybe just release day until they got RU + CIS keys. This is just a theory, but reveals many publishers are eager to sell their games again in Russia and old soviet territories, afterall Russia is a major region for PC gaming as people have said before this post.
Yeah i agree. Fallout 3 was amazing fun to play when it came out, same with Oblivion. They felt like 'next gen' games to me. Fallout 4 was still fun as was Skyrim. When Fallout 76 got announced I was pretty disappointed. No interest multiplayer versions of these games. Im a grumpy old gamer.
I played around 150 hrs of lost Ark from launch. Enjoyed my time with the game a lot. Until I didn’t. There where 2 factors that made me drop it.
First up was the grind. Learning that the most optimal way to level weapons was to have 6 characters maxed out and do the dailies on all of them so I could fail miserably at upgrading my gear.
Second was the glamours. I did not like the fact that all the best looking glamours where pretty much cash only. Having come from FFXIV where there are so many decent glams without needing to go near the real cash store.
i keep thinking I may go back to it. But haven’t so far
The reviews for this game is sus af
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I've played a 100 hours around launch and enjoyed my time with it a lot, but I quit shortly after the time I hit the point where the gear enhancement and all the daily stuff kicked in. For the same reason I quit almost every other live-service game: too much work. And additionally I don't like when games want to dictate my gaming schedule too much (I understand a certain degree). There's so much stuff in Lost Ark you can only do during specific hour windows in the day and honestly, miss me with that shit.
Man past 12 or so hours was really not good for me (I think that I had food poisoning) but I think that things are getting better and tnx to Steam Deck i am entertained 
And I must say that I really like Tales of Arise, way more than I thought I will.
And I must say that I really like Tales of Arise, way more than I thought I will.
ToA is a solid game, definitely a looker, but I hope they improve the story and script in the next game. I beat it almost exclusively on Deck too.Man past 12 or so hours was really not good for me (I think that I had food poisoning) but I think that things are getting better and tnx to Steam Deck i am entertained
So far I like the story. I am more annoyed by some small things mostly related to lower budget. Like lack of choices, lack of fully voiced scenes regarding side quests, map based world, lackluster exploration...
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