this got banned from the Steam Forum "suggestions and ideas"
My suggestion is that Steam put game CONSUMERS first, ahead of game designers/vendors/publishers, ahead of greed.
My suggestion is that Steam comes very close to violation of the letter of the law, and very much does violate the spirit of the law, in regards to federal regulations regarding market monopoly, and readers should let their elected representatives / regulators know how they feel about that situation. More retailers / vendors is always to the advantage of the consumer.
The paying customer puts food on your table, a roof over your head and clothes on your back. A certain amount of humility on your part is called for, Steam/Valve. I'm not seeing it.
There are millions of gamers, and a far larger untapped base of potential gamers who are driven away by a variety of things, such as arrogant vendors/retailers, the extreme toxicity of fourms, toxic online gaming communities, and the fact that so many games are released BROKEN, as voluminously noted for years---- this is becoming standard practice. Why finish the game, when profits on a broken game can be reaped in advance by preying on morons willing to "pre order" and later pay more for the rest of the game as "DLC"?
In addition, Mods on gaming forums are almost never honest, they pander to their clique. The scumminess of that cannot be overstated.
It strikes me as grotesque that the average game consumer appears to accept the idea that they have to get a degree in computer programming in order to simply play a game.
If you purchased a new car, and it broke down, and you took it to the dealer's garage, and the mechanic said to you, "Yeah, there is a big warehouse of parts out back, go look and figure it out for yourself" you'd be pretty enraged, and justifiably so.
I don't believe that things improve by creating a circle jerk of little boys in a treehouse gloating over which one of them can endure having the greatest number of cigarettes put out onto his scrotum by daddy.
Yet what I observe is a culture of masochism and sick arrogance. "I bought it first". "I got an imaginary cartoon trophy on Steam" "i beat it on the hardest setting" "they released it with forty five bugs, and I wrote a patch for one of those bugs three years after the game was released".
Stupid. If the purpose of selling a game is to make money, why NOT design it so that the broadest possible spectrum of persons can play it, without the hassle of patching, mods, DLC and similar crud?
NEWEST has become the synonymous with "BEST". The concept of "quality" has vanished.
I come to a game to get AWAY from the misery of daily life: frustration, cheating, disappointment, ripoffs, injustice. Yet so many games are such an intense fraud, often through incompentence but now more so through deliberate callous neglect and outright greed / fraud. It does not have to be that way.
Yet, when I speak up about any of this, I usually get harassed, insulted, trolled, discriminated against contrary to the very policies of the forums I post in. Honesty is treated as if it were a crime on game forums. Only sychophantic licking is permitted on most online gaming forums.
Of course, there is the fraud of forum rules, as well as the Mod Fraud. If I report the trolls harassing me, nothing is done. If I speak up in self defense, I get threatened/abused by a shill mod. Again, it doesn't have to be that way.
You might be too young to remember paper books, but we used to give them to children full of stories to teach moral lessons.
One of those was the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes:
A couple of con men convinced the Emperor that they could make him a suit of fabric so exclusive and perfect that only the VERY BEST people would be able to see it.
They then pretended to sew a suit, collected their gold, and quickly hightailed it out of town.
All the servants then pretended that the new clothes on the naked man were indeed magnificent, because otherwise, they would not be "in the clique".
The Emperor, utterly deluded by all this false reassurance, went on a parade through the middle of town to display his "new clothes". Everyone lined the streets, and each person lied and pretended to see and loudly admire the magnificent robes, lest they be considered "inferior" and unqualified to percieve the clothes.
At a certain point, the Emperor passed a little peasant boy in the crowd. The boy saw the naked man, wearing only a crown, and laughed out loud, crying out, "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
The entire crowd suddenly woke up from the spell of conformity, and broke out in raucous laughter. The Emperor and his courtiers, with a vested interest in the illusion, were livid.
"Of course he can't see the clothes, is only a common peasant!" Too little, too late. The Emperor was humiliated.
I am that peasant boy, and the entitled / invested predictably hate and attack me. Shills and sychophants.
During the social turmoil of the early 1970s, president Nixon stated that he was confident of re-election, because despite the vocal critics rioting in the street, a "Silent Majority" supported him. He was correct, and was re-elected.
I suspect that many share my views and goals, but just refuse to expose themselves to the vomit that would be spewed on them by the forum shills if they dared to speak up.
Of course, outside of forums, quite a few writers have echoed my points:
A couple examples, you can find many more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEo_NuH1_Mhttps://wordsaboutgames.net/2015/01/20/please-stop-pre-ordering-games-its-ruining-the-games-industry/https://www.cinemablend.com/games/Why-Disc-DLC-Bad-Crime-Gamers-Make-It-Out-48109.htmlhttps://heyyouvideogame.com/toxic-gaming/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js6Lh8P6qJghttps://gamerant.com/aliens-colonial-marines-lawsuit-filed/I've had all sorts of logical fallacies spewed in my direction. A common one is "It's just a game, don't take the flaws so seriously". Well, if it is that trivial, why are you so aggressive and invested in trying to shout me down?
It isn't "just a game". It is time and money. Time is the one thing you never can get more of, and when a game wastes it with frustration, that is a very real loss. Perhaps you will understand better when you grow up.
There are, of course, the weak and the worthless, the coward who will say: "It has always been that way, and it can never change, just give up".....well, quite a few people were saying that when the American revoution was brewing, and Thomas Paine had to set them straight in his pamphlet "Common Sense":
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
The best ideas almost always run contrary to vested interests, to shills and sycophants.
As Edmund Burke said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
The worst people always label something they are incapable of understanding/solving as "impossible". Their lack of imagination, drive and competence is not proof of anything being impossible. Similarly, as noted above, popularity, or lack thereof, is not a measure of the validity or moral strength of a concept.