The only game devs i know who hate steam are shovelware or low effort devs. Or i guess contrarians that just want attention.
I get it, steam takes a big cut. But you make more releasing on steam alone than every other site combined, by a lot. You get more audience, word of mouth, advertising, you get more api features, etc.
And i say this as a fan of GMG and GOG. I want them to be the top dogs, and i like posts that give them more attention.
The consoles are typically FSR2 upscaling from 1440p or lower. Plenty of games are down around 720p. Lets not pretend theyre doing 4k native on AAA titles. The pro isnt going to be native either, we need to see games and PSSR in action to see where it falls vs FSR, XESS, DLSS, and see what gpu is closest in performance. You can get a used RTX 3080 for 350-400 and i’ll be pleasantly surprised if PS5 Pro beats that level of performance.
Ray tracing is not a fad though, and reducing it to just reflections is ignorant. Reflections, shadows, bounce lighting/global illumination, etc. all get noticeable bumps in quality. They are definitely more subtle than previous bumps from new techniques because those old techniques have gotten so damn good. But at the same time, those previous techniques have reached their limits and have unfixable problems. Whether that is occlusion artifacts in reflections, light leaking from global illumination, non-interactive baked lighting, shadows with uncanny resolution and no penumbra, hacky ambient occlusion, etc. etc… the problems are all minor, sure, but they are there, noticable, and devs want to keep pushing.
And this is ignoring the benefits on the dev side as well. No more annoying rasterized light placement. And pulling your hair out trying to hack the engine to get the look youre after. “It just works” is an unfortunate comment but holds a lot of truth. Even non realistic looking games will use more and more ray tracing as time goes on because of that. And eventually every device and card will have performance for a full suite of effects. Its an inevitability, not a fad.
Only in single player though.
Multiplayer reload speed is a knob for balance.
Depth to movement mechanics is one of the differences between mediocre and great first person games. Look at counter strike movement over the years. Players have extracted everything from the quirks of that engine, the game is better for it, and the skill ceiling for movement alone is enormous. That skill ceiling is important. Crouch jumps in particular have been in pretty much every game i can think of since i learned halo on the og xbox. even if they aren’t explicitly used by the game designers, there is often tricks you can do to exploit campaigns in fun ways, or maneuver the multiplayer with a higher level of expertise than others. Thats fun. Competitive but fun.
Compared to games where every mechanic is dead simple and everyone can do it, its more just rock paper scissors at that point. The designer gave a specific movement ability, you counter it with some other ability they designed. Its boring to me.
It shouldn’t be ignored full stop. It depends entirely on the game. A purely arcade shooter should probably ignore it and most do (halo, overwatch), but a sim certainly shouldn’t (tarkov, arma). And a mixed game can decide for themselves (battlefield, cod).
Some do this, tarkov is a popular example.
Theres plenty of high quality content on youtube though. You gotta wade through wall to wall youtube cringe to find it, but once you got a list of good subs, that problem disappears. The idea that youtube is solely garbage low effort content is so outdated
Chess has been played for ages with no dlc. Competition against another person is engaging on its own. And chess is a good deep game on its own.
Combine competition with a good game and you get a successful infinite live service game in theory.
Only one or the other and you get a flash in the pan.
Bro, you’re the one shitting on everything here by being misinformed. But you take any critique of your opinion as hate and then get defensive af. Lol…
35% of players don’t pirate every game… Thats absurd. If you’re referring to the pc gamer survey from like 10 years ago, there was way more nuance to it than that. Go read more than the headline please.
But even so, its not up to the consumers to bend over and be “pleasable”. Devs should treat the platform well, instead they shit out bad ports, they dont bother with basic options, they require more layers of launchers and stores, drm, kernal anti cheat, etc etc etc.
The pc market is huge, even excluding people who haven’t upgraded in 10 years. Its plenty attractive
What you describe as the word’s flaws make it perfect though. The word itself is an icon for the actions it describes
Frame generation isnt going to help 30 fps console games though. AMD recommends a base of 60 fps, nvidia recommends 45 iirc. Those numbers will improve over time, but likely not fast enough for the ps5/pro gen to use it at 30.
You dont need a 3k gaming pc to get started. PC has lots of options, thats part of the appeal.
Steam alone has as many monthly active users as the switch has lifetime sales. Its not a tiny niche market.
Its also not unpleasable. There are certain technical standards, sure. But that is true for all consoles as well.
Its not juat about looking nice. Sub-30 fps is genuinely uncomfortable to many people. You aren’t sensitive to it, good for you.
2x on a 970? I struggled with my 970 at 1440p low-medium settings until i got the 3080. Often had to put scaling to 1080p. And that was on “last gen” titles, cant imagine still trying to limp that thing along nowadays, despite as much as i loved it.
You must not notice aliasing and shimmering then? Most find it very distracting to see everything flickering and shimmering and stair step with the slightest motion.
And ray tracing really depends on the game, implementation, and hardware. Ray traced global illumination alone fixes the classic video game look that stems from rasterized lighting errors (light leaking, default ambient light, etc). It is the future for high quality games even not photo-realistic ones. Its expense is offset by both reconstruction and improved hardware. You wont be able to avoid it forever even if you want to.
Pubg standalone may not have been first, but in its mod form for arma i think it was the first. Someone less lazy can probably look up the specific dates
Are you actually crying about someone having a cool image on their debit card for something they are a fan of?
But where are the actual good reasons for the hate?
“Ugh i have to use this genuinely good storefront if i want to be successful” is not a logical reason. Its not a monopoly. Consoles and mobile are still a thing afterall, even if we ignore all the pc stores and the fact that plenty of games do fine without steam, including indie.