September 2025 PCG Article Discussion


These people need to go away. Trying to ruin perfectly normal, capable adults trying to make games. This is def. over-reach and the fact steam caved to the payment processors is showing a dark future ahead to me on this subject.

Look, i dont think ANY gamer wants violence against women but what this group is doing and having the mentality that "well too bad, its not our fault" is not it.
 

I absolutely love Deus Ex Mankind Divided. It’s heavily flawed, the ending was completely rushed, but it’s still a great game to play for the moments where it excels. The music is a huge part of my love for the game as well. I’m definitely going to listen to this while staring out the window with a glass of whiskey on a dreary rainy day.
 
These people need to go away. Trying to ruin perfectly normal, capable adults trying to make games. This is def. over-reach and the fact steam caved to the payment processors is showing a dark future ahead to me on this subject.
I am sad to say I am from the same country as they are. Thinking like this seems to boomerang every few years.

People who just dislike the existence of something but don't consume it themselves are a problem gaming seems to suffer from. It used to be music.
 

Zed Clampet

Community Contributor

These people need to go away. Trying to ruin perfectly normal, capable adults trying to make games. This is def. over-reach and the fact steam caved to the payment processors is showing a dark future ahead to me on this subject.

Look, i dont think ANY gamer wants violence against women but what this group is doing and having the mentality that "well too bad, its not our fault" is not it.
Fortunately, this group has a long track record of being unsuccessful. They go after many things, and people just ignore them. They've tried repeatedly to get GTA games delisted, for instance. But some media are sensationalizing this thing and making it sound like any game this group doesn't like is going to be removed from Steam, and that's not even remotely the case.

Do I think credit card companies should have the right to refuse service for legal sales? No, absolutely not. If they weren't a monopoly via collusion, maybe, but as it stands now, no, they shouldn't be allowed to refuse service so long as the product is legal.
 

Zed Clampet

Community Contributor

This is the kind of stuff you just don't get in AAA games.

My anal retentive wife actually laughed at this, and she never laughs. That's why I like posting here. All you have to do is attempt to be funny, and people will give you the laugh emoji for the effort. My wife just says, "That's funny" and goes back to work.

I don't laugh very often either. My wife often shows me (short) videos and most of the time I can't do any better than "that's funny" either.
 

if this works, i think it just proves that its entirely possible for what SKG is after. just think how quickly we could have set this up if there was an acutal sunsetting plan in place. Or hell, the code was there for someone more willing then ubisoft to set it up. More prime example of just publishers and devs being lazy rather then the process being impossible.
 

Frindis

Dominar of The Hynerian Empire
Moderator
Releases in under 1 hour! It's the type of game that I suck at, but that I would not mind supporting. I liked the art of the first one; this one looks even better.

 
Releases in under 1 hour! It's the type of game that I suck at, but that I would not mind supporting. I liked the art of the first one; this one looks even better.


It seems Steam is still struggling a bit under the amount of people trying to buy and play the game now. I just got an error when trying to open the store (though a reload fixed it).
 

Zed Clampet

Community Contributor
@Frindis @Pifanjr

over 350,000 concurrents right now. That's not bad for a platformer.

I have a question for the board geniuses (they are kind of like Big Foot) and the rest of you, I played Hollow Knight the other day, and the OG game it reminded me of was actually Super Mario Bros, which came out before Metroid and Castlevania. So why is this genre labeled as Metroidvania instead of something Mario-y?
 
@Frindis @Pifanjr

over 350,000 concurrents right now. That's not bad for a platformer.

I have a question for the board geniuses (they are kind of like Big Foot) and the rest of you, I played Hollow Knight the other day, and the OG game it reminded me of was actually Super Mario Bros, which came out before Metroid and Castlevania. So why is this genre labeled as Metroidvania instead of something Mario-y?

I believe a Metroidvania is a platformer that includes backtracking to earlier parts so you can use a new ability to progress, instead of just having discrete levels you progress through one after the other like in Mario.
 

Here it comes, a Steam console designed to run PC games on your television.

Launch title is Half-Life X

maybe
Really wondering what this is going to be. Being named the Frame makes me think of Framework with their modular computers. Maybe a Steam Deck with the ability to swap out some internals? The Steam Deck already has a dock that can connect to your TV and allows you to use a controller just like playing a console so I wonder what this could be. Maybe the Steam Deck 2 but it comes with the dock bundled by default.
 

"This is about you having more flexibility to dictate what Google shows you, rather than leave it entirely up to an algorithm to decide."

And thats exactly how you have people believing in things that arent true. Having this ability is a conundrum because if you can manipulate your feed into showing ONLY articles in favor of, lets say, flat-earth theory, then thats all youre going to get? Just seems that this way of thinking is only going to make people more ignorant of a situation rather than understanding it.

But i dont like an auto-generated feed full of ads, ai slop, more ads and people and subjects i never agreed to follow or have no interest in.
 

"This is about you having more flexibility to dictate what Google shows you, rather than leave it entirely up to an algorithm to decide."

And thats exactly how you have people believing in things that arent true. Having this ability is a conundrum because if you can manipulate your feed into showing ONLY articles in favor of, lets say, flat-earth theory, then thats all youre going to get? Just seems that this way of thinking is only going to make people more ignorant of a situation rather than understanding it.

But i dont like an auto-generated feed full of ads, ai slop, more ads and people and subjects i never agreed to follow or have no interest in.
I mean, you kind of already had this option by adding "site:<site name>" to only search content on a specific site.

I don't see myself using this. If I prefer a particular site, I'll just go to that site directly instead of using a search engine.
 

"This is about you having more flexibility to dictate what Google shows you, rather than leave it entirely up to an algorithm to decide."

And thats exactly how you have people believing in things that arent true. Having this ability is a conundrum because if you can manipulate your feed into showing ONLY articles in favor of, lets say, flat-earth theory, then thats all youre going to get? Just seems that this way of thinking is only going to make people more ignorant of a situation rather than understanding it.

But i dont like an auto-generated feed full of ads, ai slop, more ads and people and subjects i never agreed to follow or have no interest in.
It's such a hard thing to perfect for these companies I suppose. Their algorithms are constantly feeding off your information, likes and interests, and tried to show you stuff they believe you will like. This often results in showing you stuff you never want to see, things you really aren't interested in, harmful stuff, etc. This is nice to have a bit more control, but like you put it, you can enter in your own biases and be shown only that. I could put InfoWars into that and only ever hear that hothead yelling through my screen. I think there needs to be a good balance of different outlets where people get their news from, and this feature could be gating you into a bubble instead.

I don't see myself using this. If I prefer a particular site, I'll just go to that site directly instead of using a search engine.
This is another thing I don't understand. If you have news outlets you like reading, you will always go straight to their site rather than using a search engine to find their articles unless its something specific, but even then most sites have their own search boxes.

I can also see an issue of a user selecting their trusted sites, but when using Google to search a problem, not getting the most relevant results for it. Not sure if that is how the feature actually works, but I'd rather see a search with various results rather than only results from one website.

This feature seems to be more problematic than helpful.
 
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Boomer shooter fans rejoice! Loved Cultic. Been waiting for its new chapter to come (theres actually more than 1 coming). I highly recommend this game for fans of this genre.

Yup, stoked.

Was pretty rabid for the first episode and have been eagerly awaiting more, so I'm hyped for this. Easily my favorite of the boom shoots.

One of the few games I will absolutely not touch with my Deck because it completely deserves being played on a full PC setup.
 

This makes me want to replay Dishonored. I never got that far into it and kind of beat myself up over the fact. Besides the stealth, this game seems to be exactly up my alley, so I'm unsure why I never gave it a proper shot. Maybe because I despise stealth but I'm sure I can go around it in this game, just be as chaotic as possible.
 

Zed Clampet

Community Contributor

Here is also a tangentially related older article about the Pope and his Pokeman card moment:


PCG has the comments turned off on the saint article, as expected, but I've noticed at other places (like reddit) that sentiment about the Catholic Church seems to have improved pretty dramatically with the new pope. For many years, you couldn't find any news about the church without the comments filling up with pedophile comments.

I'm neither Catholic nor religious, but I'm a big believer in not mocking other people's faith. Well, unless they are something clearly ridiculous and dangerous like breatharians.
 
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Zed Clampet

Community Contributor

I said from day 1 that this was a terrible idea for the industry, even though when Microsoft was paying a fortune to bring games to the service it was a benefit to indies.

Adoption is far away from what Microsoft was hoping, and that's a great thing. Microsoft needs to close it down and just do what Sega did and become a publisher for console and PC games. They've completely destroyed their own console.

Please note that I love Game Pass and will be sad when it goes away. I was merely talking about what needs to happen for the game industry to get healthy again.
 
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I said from day 1 that this was a terrible idea for the industry, even though when Microsoft was paying a fortune to bring games to the service it was a benefit to indies.

Adoption is far away from what Microsoft was hoping, and that's a great thing. Microsoft needs to close it down and just do what Sega did and become a publisher for console and PC games. They've completely destroyed their own console.

Please note that I love Game Pass and will be sad when it goes away. I was merely talking about what needs to happen for the game industry to get healthy again.

To me this seems to mostly be a problem of developers making bad deals with Microsoft. According to Phil Spencer himself, Microsoft doesn't have one standard way of paying developers for adding their game to Game Pass, or at least didn't in 2020:


If you can get your entire production funded by Microsoft in return for putting your game on Game Pass, you obviously risk losing out on sales if your game becomes immensely popular, but you're also not risking losing a whole bunch of money if no one decides to buy your game.

And the comment about turning developers into "wage slaves": there's a reason most people are working for a boss instead of starting their own company or working as a freelancer or contractor. Having a guaranteed income vastly reduces the risk of going completely broke because no one is buying your product you put a ton of money and effort into.
 

Zed Clampet

Community Contributor
To me this seems to mostly be a problem of developers making bad deals with Microsoft. According to Phil Spencer himself, Microsoft doesn't have one standard way of paying developers for adding their game to Game Pass, or at least didn't in 2020:
I could have misinterpreted it, but I think they were mostly talking about AAA games made by developers owned by Microsoft. There is zero chance that a AAA game can make more than just a tiny fraction from Game Pass that it could have made just selling the game, which is why you hardly ever see new AAA games on Game Pass not made by a Microsoft studio. Microsoft paid billions for these studios and is killing them off because they aren't making any money because they are, for all intents and purposes, offering their games for free.

There is a bit of dishonesty coming from Microsoft. They are thumping their chests about Game Pass making a few billion dollars in profit when Call of Duty use to, by itself, make that much money every year. How successful is your program when you now have 40 studios and your profits are what a single game used to earn? And Microsoft isn't paying big money to other publishers for games anymore...



It is an absolute fu****g curse the way that Internet searches prioritize current news over finding archived stories, but there was a series of stories in the last 12 months or so that I can't find now due to the recent stories on the problems with subscription services. Basically they said that Game Pass money has largely dried up and that Microsoft is not paying nearly what it paid a few years ago to get games into Game Pass.

* 3 years later *

AHA, here you go:

And the talk lately has been that Microsoft developers need to retool to make more smaller/cheaper games. If you do the math, it becomes clear.

Microsoft purchased juggernauts. Activision was making twice in revenue each year what Game Pass is making now. Yet they are trying to roll everything into this low profit model. By any definition of financial success I can think of, Game Pass doesn't work. Sure, it's making money, but Microsoft would be making vastly more money if they didn't put everything on Game Pass.

Please note, I'm over-simplifying this out of necessity (because Microsoft doesn't release the numbers). The truth is that Microsoft games are still selling on Steam, so they are obviously not making only the Game Pass money, but they are literally trying NOT TO SELL games anymore and get everyone into their subscription service, and that's just not going to work for big AAA games. For small indie games? Maybe.

(I'm having brain problems right now due to lack of sleep--apologies for confusing and potentially misleading arguments and possibly unintended hostile tones)​

 
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