On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.

Curated Stores

It seems that "curated" is the current buzzword for digital game retailers which aren't Steam.

Source: https://www.gog.com/about_gog

Source: https://www.humblebundle.com/about

Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

This is unsurprising, for two reasons. The first is that, while Valve Corporation's Steam can claim to have the most games, its competitors cannot, so the concept of curation is a wonderful way to present a smaller selection as a good thing for consumers. The second reason is that Steam has been criticized lately for its lack of curation. Valve's hands-off approach has allowed some controversial games onto its storefront, from school shooting simulators to visual novels prominently featuring rape. Of course any games which are controversial enough to attract media attention are promptly removed, but at that point the damage to the store's reputation is already done. Controversial games aside, there's also a general consensus that Steam's catalog includes a huge number of very low-quality games. It's true. It does. There are literally tens of thousands of games on Steam, so of course they're not all very good.

The quality of any given game, of course, is entirely subjective, but few people who have looked past the list of best-sellers would disagree that the Steam store contains a ton of shovelware. And, frankly, how could it not? It's the natural consequence of the store's "anything goes" policy, because Sturgeon's law has no exception for video games.

But does it matter?

Whenever I read complaints about how Steam isn't curated, or has no quality control in terms of the games it sells, I get the distinct impression that the complainers just have a bone to pick with Valve, or with PC as a game platform in general. Subjectively, one might think less of Valve for allowing cheap garbage on its store — and for the sake of argument we will assume that everyone agrees on the definition of "cheap garbage" — but, objectively, I don't think the platform's lack of curation is likely to have any negative effect on the average Steam user's experience. A store which sells only the greatest products, hand-picked just for you, sounds great if you're planning to buy every product in the store's catalog, or choose randomly from it. But nobody does that.

There could be a million cheap garbage games on Steam and you still wouldn't be forced to buy them. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn't even know they exist if you don't go looking for them. If a game is so bad (or, to be generous, so niche) that a manually curated store would be likely to reject it, then that game is too obscure to be found on the front page of the Steam store. Such a game is certainly not popular enough to be found in a list of top sellers or anything else which you'll find on Steam without doing a fairly narrow search. In a way, Steam is curated, in that the games most prominently featured on its main page are there because they're notable. The shovelware simply isn't on the surface. You have to dig for it, at least a bit.

Meanwhile, all the terrible games in the world don't negate the good ones, nor does an abundance of awful games make the good ones any harder to find when you can sort by popularity or review score. Of course, now I'm making an assumption about the popularity of "good" games, but I don't mean to imply that only the most wildly popular games in the top ten best sellers are any good. I'm only assuming that any game with an ounce of quality will have higher review scores, for example, than the shovelware about which Steam's critics so love to complain. Despite the nearly non-existent barrier to entry, not every game is equally visible. Moreover, the Steam store isn't just an unsorted list of games, so the idea that the good games are buried under piles of junk simply isn't true.

Statistically speaking, I'm sure there are a few hidden gems which might be deserving of praise but haven't gotten enough recognition to stand out from the rest of the practically endless catalog. So many games are released on Steam every month that, if nobody has ever heard of you and your game drops tomorrow, it might not get any attention at all. Unfortunately, it happens to be the case that quietly releasing your game on Steam simply cannot be your entire marketing strategy if you want your game to succeed. But if you're that inept at promoting your product, your game probably has no hope of being picked up by a hand-curated store with higher standards, so the fact that Steam is open to every other untalented hack of a developer isn't your problem. Marketing ineptitude aside, what constitutes a "hidden gem" is incredibly subjective, so if Steam were hand-curated, there's no guarantee that any hypothetical hidden gem would make the cut.

On that note, although the concept of curation is nice in general, I don't necessarily want a store doing that curation for me at all. I don't need someone to tell me what's good. I'd rather continue to ignore thousands of horrible games, playing only the ones I want, than even once find myself willing but unable to play a game because some company decided that it wasn't good enough to be featured on their store.

No matter how bad you think a game is, someone out there probably likes it. Maybe no one thinks that obscure, low-budget, independently developed game is the best game, aside from the developer's mother, but it probably kept someone entertained, at least for a short time — proportionally, no doubt, to the low price at which such games are typically sold. Small indie games are okay sometimes, if the price is right. Not every game needs to cost $60 and take 60 hours to finish. Sometimes, honestly, I'd rather spend $60 on 60 games that last one hour each.

I've impulsively purchased my fair share of stupidly cheap bundles of games from sites like Fanatical (formerly Bundle Stars), Humble Bundle, etc., and this results in a lot of really bad games in my Steam library, so I'm acutely aware of how many bad games there are out there. However, through these bundles, I've also found some fun games which I never would have played otherwise. It's important to emphasize that these games were fun enough to justify having spent chump change on the bundles from which they came, and I'm not saying I would ever pay $60 for any of them, but that doesn't matter because that's not the space they occupy in the PC game market.

Would I delete some games from Steam if I had a magical delete button? I admit, it would be hard to resist. But the games I would be most tempted to destroy are, I happen to know, very popular among other types of people. I don't understand why people like anime dating simulators, but they probably don't understand why I liked Neon Chrome and Lovely Planet. So if I woke up one day and found that my Steam account had been blessed with that magic delete button, I'd like to think I would refrain from forcibly "curating" the store to suit my own taste.

After all, those anime dating simulators aren't really hurting anyone.

Alan Wake To Be Pulled From Stores

I don't often have an opportunity to mention on this blog that the music industry is awful. Well, an opportunity has presented itself, so here it goes: The music industry is awful.

Two days from now, Alan Wake will be removed from stores, because the licenses for music used in the game are expiring. People who already bought the game should not panic; it's highly unlikely that already-purchased copies will be taken away from customers in the near future, and I've seen no evidence that software updates will be removing any content from those existing copies. If you bought the game on Steam, for example, it will remain intact in your Steam library, likely for as long as Steam exists. Furthermore, the semi-canon sequel/spinoff Alan Wake's American Nightmare will remain in stores, so there's no rush to buy it. However, if you still haven't played the original Alan Wake, your time to purchase a legal copy of the game is running out.

In the meantime, it's 90% off (from $29.99 to $2.99):

Alan Wake sale on @steam_games 90% discount starting 5/13. Game will be removed from stores after 5/15 due to expiring music licenses. pic.twitter.com/y10DPgY8Q0

— Remedy Entertainment (@remedygames) May 12, 2017

I should clarify that Steam is not the only store with a 90% discount on Alan Wake. The tweet above mentions only the Steam store because, as explained in another tweet, it's the only store on which developer Remedy Entertainment can control the pricing of the game. However, other stores want to compete, and other stores also want to sell as many copies of Alan Wake as possible before they are no longer allowed to sell it.

I don't have time to check every online retailer, but I've personally checked two other great stores, GOG.com and The Humble Store, and both of them also have a 90% discount on Alan Wake. Furthermore, both of these stores are arguably better than Steam, because they both offer DRM-free copies. The Steam version (last time I checked) will launch only through the Steam client.

Another difference between the stores is that GOG.com and The Humble Store both have a 90% discount on American Nightmare (from $9.99 to $0.99), while the Steam store still has the game at full price (seemingly by accident) and won't be offering an equivalent 90% discount on American Nightmare until tomorrow. All three stores, however, already have a 90% discount on the series as a whole, so if you buy the Alan Wake Franchise pack on Steam (which is discounted from $39.99 to $3.99), you're effectively getting the 90% discount on American Nightmare as well. I can't strongly recommend American Nightmare, anyway, as my feelings about the game are mixed, but if you're intent on buying it, now is probably a good time.

I can't say this is the best time to buy either of the Alan Wake games, because they were once featured in a name-your-own-price Humble Bundle, which means smart shoppers could have acquired DRM-free copies of both games for only a few cents. But, without a time machine, the current deal is likely the best you'll ever see... unless, of course, you opt for piracy instead and download the game for free, which will be the only option after the game disappears from stores on May 15th.

Regarding piracy, there are times when it is morally (if not legally) justifiable. I went into detail about the pricing, in the paragraphs above, as a public service to those who wish to acquire a legal copy while they can. However, don't think I'm trying to convince you to spend money on the game. Two days from now, it will essentially be abandonware. I'm generally against piracy, but if a game cannot be acquired legally then I think piracy is not only harmless but also necessary for the historical preservation of the game in question. If the publisher doesn't want to sell it, you should not feel obligated to pay for it. The licensed music in the game is certainly not abandonware, but I have no sympathy for the music industry, so I honestly don't care. Nobody who illegally downloads Alan Wake will be doing so just for the music.

In any case, whether you pay for the game or not, I do recommend playing it. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger, though, which is more frustrating now than ever before, because this latest turn of events does not bode well for the anticipated sequel. I'm sure Remedy would like to continue the series someday, but it's probably not happening anytime soon if they can't even afford to keep the first game in digital stores. If I'm wrong and an Alan Wake 2 is in the works, they probably shouldn't release it while legally downloading the original game is impossible, because newcomers to the series might be less likely to buy the sequel if they can't easily play the original game first.

Fortunately, the current state of affairs is not necessarily permanent. If a proper sequel to Alan Wake is ever finished, I suspect they'll renew the music license at that time (or, if we're less lucky, they'll release an edited version with offending music removed). On the other hand, if the franchise has truly been laid to rest and plans for a sequel are permanently shelved, it might be a long time before any more copies of the original are sold. I doubt that Microsoft cares much about the franchise — they never did — so they'll probably be content to sit on the publishing rights while doing nothing with them for years to come.

Humble Bundle and Sunset

A Humble Weekly Bundle called Leading Ladies 2 ended earlier today. Maybe I should have posted about this bundle while it was still available, in the interest of not being a slowpoke. However, in retrospect, I'm glad I'm posting this after the fact. Even though this blog doesn't get many visitors, I wouldn't want to risk giving any free promotion to that particular bundle in any way. Mentioning it before now, even in a critical manner, might have had that undesired effect.

None of this has anything to do with the "leading ladies" theme of the included games, by the way. I have nothing against female characters or female protagonists in video games. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, after all, was a brilliant game; Super Metroid was a brilliant game; Perfect Dark was a brilliant game. Sunset, however, was not a brilliant game. More importantly, the game's development studio (Tale of Tales) deserves no one's money.

The other games in the recently-ended weekly bundle, as far as I know, are wonderful; I know from first-hand experience that Trine 2 is a perfectly fine game. I also know that anyone who buys a pack of games from Humble Bundle can specify where every cent of his or her money goes: to Humble Bundle itself, to a charity (in this case the Girls Make Games scholarship fund via the Tides Foundation), to any of the developers of the games being offered, or to any combination thereof.

Unfortunately, I can only assume that the vast majority of customers do not bother with these options, and just use the default split (65% equally divided amongst developers, 20% to charity, and a 15% "tip" for Humble). Most customers probably just don't care, and what makes this especially bad is that the default settings will send money to the developers of all the games being offered, regardless of what a customer pays.

Typically, in any Humble Bundle, only a few games (in this case Trine 2: Complete Story, Lumino City, and Hack 'n' Slash) are available for any price (or a minimum of $1 for Steam-only games), while some more games (in this case A City Sleeps and The Marvellous Miss Take) are available to customers paying more than the average amount paid so far, and then some more games (in this case Gravity Ghost and Sunset) are available for a typically higher fixed price (in this case $12). As of the end of this weekly sale, the average amount paid was only $4.23; this means that the vast majority of customers didn't pay enough to get Sunset. However, the developers of Sunset still got money from every customer who didn't explicitly choose to put Sunset's share to zero in the options during payment.

More than 52,600 of these bundles were sold this week, the average paid was $4.23, and (as we can see in the image above) each developer gets approximately 9.3% of the revenue by default. If just about everyone used the default settings during payment (and "everyone" is probably a reasonably close estimate), the developers of Sunset raked in more than $20,600.00 during this sale. And this all happened after the previously abysmal sales of Sunset caused them to have a minor meltdown on social media in which they forsook commercial game development, whined about consumers and capitalism, and acted pretty childish in general.

Their oft-cited insults against "gamers" (shown below) are a joke, but still tasteless; moreover, they're the kind of joke that betrays the true feelings of the joker.

@jeroendstout Perfect. Goodbye, gamers! May you die in the same agony that you caused to thousands of defenceless virtual creatures.

— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015

@jeroendstout Hahaha. I'm so free. Look at me. I can say FUCK GAMES! FUCK GAMERS! FUCK THE GAME INDUSTRY! DIE! DIE!DIE! And rot in hell! 😝

— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015

To paraphrase: "Ha ha, look how not mad we are; we're so chill that we're pretending to be mad as a joke! But really, we're incredibly mad."

And then there's this more serious quip:

@vladwes We're not coming back until the game industry gets rid of the vermin that it enables and encourages.

— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015

And here's the best part of all:

We don't need commercial failure to know capitalism is evil, right? Because it is: evil. And if you think that's cool then you are evil too.

— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015

In what universe could good video games (or a career in them) be possible without capitalism? But of course they hate the free market when they're the ones who put out the product which no one wanted.

I guess the point of this post is to remind people to be aware of where their money goes in the future. If you're paying less than $12 for a pack of games, there's no reason for any of your money to go to the developers of a game which is only unlocked for $12 or more, especially if those developers are talentless hacks known for being crybabies on Twitter.

Steam's New Refund Policy

Originally posted June 3, 2015; updated June 7, 2015 and June 8, 2015.
A shorter version of this article was also published on Gather Your Party on June 3, 2015. Read it here.

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Original Post (June 3, 2015)

Just in time for the impending Steam summer sale — which is said to be starting next week — the Steam store has adopted a new policy regarding refunds and returns. In short, with a few very reasonable restrictions, you can get a refund on any game within two weeks of purchase as long as you've played the game for less than two hours.

Steam has, in the past, taken a lot of heat for its lack of a return policy. While many brick-and-mortar stores (at least in the United States) have incredibly lenient return policies (some not even requiring a receipt and thereby potentially opening the door to abuse), online stores selling digital content generally have a less-than-stellar track record when it comes to consumer rights. Actually, before now, Steam might have been one of the worst. Steam's customer support has a well-known reputation for being awful, and Steam developer Valve Corporation has had, for some time, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau. Pressure to implement a return policy has been especially strong from customers in the European Union (who have claimed, though perhaps erroneously, that they are legally entitled to refunds of Steam games according to EU laws).

The new refund policy is a huge step in the pro-consumer direction, and likely a much needed one after the paid mods debacle (which was so poorly received that the decision was quickly reversed). Personally, I don't think the idea of allowing mod developers to charge money for their work was such a fundamentally awful idea; free mods would surely continue to exist. Even if free mods had vanished completely as a result of Valve's meddling, it would have been more sensible to blame the modding community itself, rather than the company which merely provided what the mod developers were evidently so happy to use. In any case, Steam's reputation was damaged by that embarrassing fiasco. It's probably not wrong to speculate that the new refund policy is, in part, an attempt to repair some of that damage.

You can read the announcement and other details of the new policy on Steam's web site, but the key points (and their implications) are as follows:

• Refunds can be requested "for any reason" (including general dissatisfaction).
• You can get a refund within two weeks of purchase if your total playtime is less than two hours.
• Failing to meet those requirements? Valve says "you can ask for a refund anyway and we'll take a look." So try it, and you might get lucky.
• Pre-purchased products can be returned "any time prior to release" and up to fourteen days after release if your playtime is less than two hours.
• Refunds on in-game purchases are up to the developer.
• Some DLC might be non-refundable for various reasons (e.g., consumable DLC having already been consumed).
• Money is refunded using the original payment method, if possible. Otherwise, the money goes to your Steam Wallet by default.
• This means, in most cases, you can in fact get a "real" refund after paying with "real" money. Fears that customers will always be reimbursed in Steam credit, which must then be spent again on Steam, are largely unfounded and inspired by poor reading skills.
• It also means, if you do make a purchase using your Steam Wallet, you will be reimbursed in Steam credit. The return policy is not a trick to turn Steam Wallet funds back into regular money. If that were allowed, they would simply allow Steam Wallet withdrawals instead. You can, however, request a Steam Wallet refund, and get your money back out of the Steam Wallet if you placed it there yourself in the past fourteen days.
• Refunds are not allowed for anything purchased outside of the Steam store.
• If you're concocting a stupid plan to acquire inexpensive or free Steam keys from third-party sources like Humble Bundle and then return them to the Steam store for a refund of the full retail price in order to get free money, it's not going to work.
• Refund privileges will be revoked from individual users if the system is abused.
• If you're thinking you can get away with buying and returning a game repeatedly in order to play it for free indefinitely, you're wrong. Valve isn't that incredibly stupid, and they will shut you down.
• If you bought a game for full price right before the start of a sale, it's totally okay to return it for a full-price refund and then immediately buy the game at the discounted price.
• Obviously, this means the refunded amount for any purchase is the amount that was originally paid. If you think you can get free money by doing the opposite of the above — that is, buying a game on sale and then requesting a refund when the price goes back up — you're out of your mind. Steam has a record of what you paid.

This looks pretty great, especially in comparison to the old policy of refusing refunds outside of extraordinary circumstances. Some might wish that refunds were not limited to purchases in the past two weeks or games played less than two hours, but at least this is a step in the right direction. There are some additional restrictions, as well, but they're all rather predictable and understandable, so it's hard to imagine this policy causing a lot of grief to consumers as long as Steam upholds its end of the deal.

However, while the response from Steam users has been mostly positive despite the restrictions, some independent developers of very small games (and those sympathetic to their situation) want the policy to be more restrictive. Allowing two whole hours of playtime before a full refund, they claim, is too much. As one indie dev puts it:

you can get a refund for a game if you've got "less than two hours of playtime" on steam. well lol at me trying to sell small vignette games

— nina freeman (@hentaiphd) June 2, 2015

At least one games writer has also voiced her support of this viewpoint by suggesting a petition to change the policy:

i wonder if it's possible for us to organize as a group and make a petition... i wonder how many signatures would convince valve...

— Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander) June 2, 2015

While I can understand the concerns of those who develop very short games which might be completed in less than two hours and then returned, I also want to say "welcome to a real economy for the first time ever" and stress that refunds are a normal part of most business. The video game industry (or, at least, the biggest digital store on the PC end of it) is late to this party. Other industries have to deal with returns, and they do so without complaining. People wear clothes and then return them all the time. Of course, most people do buy clothes to keep them, which brings me to my next point: Not every customer is malicious.

Sure, customers can play through the bulk of an incredibly short indie game within the allowable refund time frame and then get a refund, but they can also engage in straight-up piracy with a negligible chance of getting in any real trouble at all. It doesn't mean they'll actually do either of these things. A satisfied customer probably isn't going to return a game that he or she enjoyed, even if doing so is legal. That's the action of a dissatisfied customer who doesn't want the developer to have any money. If indie developers (who seem to have so much faith in community-driven tools like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight) can't get people to keep their games without asking for a refund, they might have bigger problems than the exact playtime cut-off point in Steam's return policy.

Three things still do concern me about the return policy:

1. Steam only allows the actual players of a game to review it, and this is great because it prevents bogus reviews. However, the new refund policy makes it easier to abuse the review system. Someone who wants to write a bogus review can now do so without losing money. Just buy the game, play for a few minutes, review it and return it. I'm not sure what Steam can do about this, though. I certainly don't think people should be unable to review and return the same game. Whatever prompts a customer to request a refund might be exactly the kind of information which belongs in a review.
2. Some games don't use Steamworks and can be launched from the .exe file without using Steam. In these cases, one could copy the game files elsewhere and keep the game even after uninstalling the Steam copy and requesting a refund. Again, however, I'm not sure what Steam can do about this. It's an inherent risk of selling DRM-free software. Humble Bundle and GOG both sell DRM-free games, and both have return policies which could be abused.
3. Less importantly, as far as I know, there's nothing to keep someone from buying a Steam game, playing for a couple of hours to get its trading cards, selling those cards on the Steam market, and then returning the game for a refund. I'm not sure if Valve would even see this as a problem, considering that they make money from every Steam market transaction, but developers probably wouldn't like it. I'm guessing this is included in the types of abuse for which a person's refund privileges would supposedly be revoked according to the policy. (Update: It seems trading cards no longer drop within the first two hours of gameplay.)

Developers might worry about the first issue, but the potential for this kind of abuse only makes Steam's review system almost as unreliable as one which makes no effort to weed out non-customers, such as the user reviews on Metacritic. I'm not even convinced that Steam reviews were ever taken more seriously than Metacritic user reviews in the first place. Any developer worried about the second issue should already be using Steamworks or some other DRM, and the third issue is probably (update: now definitely) a non-issue. In any case, none of these things create a convincing argument for flushing consumer rights down the toilet.

Update (June 7, 2015):

Want more Twitter drama? Today is your lucky day. Yesterday, independent developer Qwiboo tweeted a graph showing a dramatic drop in sales of the game Beyond Gravity, occurring around the time that Steam introduced its new refund policy.

This looks pretty bad. Perhaps the refund policy is hurting independent developers more than I expected. Then again, this particular graph doesn't prove much. If you look up the game's Steam store price history on the third-party price-tracking site SteamPrices.com, you'll see that a special offer ended at approximately the same time:

The full price of the game is only $1.99, but this 50% discount knocked it down to only $0.99 (which is pretty significant). This information was omitted from Qwiboo's tweet, which also fails to show sales data from before the special offer began. So, wait a second, is this indie dev seriously misrepresenting the sales data to argue more convincingly that Steam's new refund policy is bad for developers? I mean, sure, we would expect sales figures to drop a bit when a refund system is put into place, but the graph originally tweeted by Qwiboo does nothing to prove that the decline in sales is the tragic result of a new return policy rather than the predictable result of a special offer coming to an end.

Bored and unable to sleep in the middle of the night, and not really bothered by the possibility of making enemies, I went and pointed this out on Twitter:

Indie dev @qwiboo blames #SteamRefunds for sharp drop in sales, forgets to mention special offer ending at same time. pic.twitter.com/eOKY7t2DlK

— Out of Lives (@outoflives) June 7, 2015

What I had stupidly failed to realize was that, hours earlier, Qwiboo had actually posted additional data which is much more informative, as it shows the recent sales decline in comparison to other times when a discount went away:

Their sales always rise and fall as discounts come and go, as expected, but this game's sales do seem to go lower than ever at the very end of the graph (which is when the refund policy was introduced). When I saw this newer graph, I posted a correction to my Twitter feed:

Much better data from @qwiboo, which I had initially overlooked, shows the real effect of #SteamRefunds more clearly. pic.twitter.com/0A6jOvLxKV

— Out of Lives (@outoflives) June 7, 2015

Unfortunately, I doubt Qwiboo ever noticed it; almost immediately after my first tweet, this happened:

Oops! Sadly for Qwiboo, the act of blocking my account didn't really do anything except hide my tweets from Qwiboo and prevent me from seeing their page while signed in. It prevented no one else from seeing my criticism, and in fact only made it slightly harder for me to find out about that second graph which led me to post a correction. I'd feel worse about the whole situation if not for Qwiboo's reaction.

Anyway, I guess the takeaway here is that some independent developers might have been right to fear the new refund policy on Steam. At least some of them, Qwiboo included, really are losing sales.

I still do, however, stand by what I wrote before. The new policy is a strongly pro-consumer move. Steam might need to work hard to prevent abuse of the refund system, and they might even need to add more restrictions regarding what can and cannot be returned in order to make this work for everyone, but I won't be convinced that allowing refunds is a fundamentally bad thing just because developers had gotten used to an economically abnormal situation which was truly bad for paying customers.

While it was unfair of me to imply bad things about Qwiboo before doing enough research to see their updated sales graph, I'm still not sure if anyone should feel bad about their current sales predicament. Here's why: I haven't played Beyond Gravity. I don't know what it's like. How long is the game? How fun is the game? Is it well made? Does it suck? Sure, maybe the game is so short that people really are able to abuse the system by playing every bit of the game within the allotted two hours and then requesting a refund. On the other hand, maybe the game is being returned simply because it's bad, and maybe those previously higher sales figures represent a lot of dissatisfied customers who would have returned the game if they could have done so. I can't rule out that possibility. I just don't know.

Furthermore, I'm sure a lot of people are currently using the refund system as a risk-free way of trying a game, but I still don't know that this is a bad thing. There should be a risk-free way of trying a product before putting down the money. More specifically, I believe every game should have a playable demo, and certain people in the industry disagree but their reasons for disagreeing are thoroughly anti-consumer. They are afraid that players will no longer want to buy their games after playing demos; in other words, they want to prevent customers from having the ability to avoid products with which they would ultimately be dissatisfied.

If people are trying and returning full games as a substitute for playable demos which don't exist, the developers or publishers are to blame for not supplying playable demos. If people aren't keeping the games after trying them, it's only because they're able to make more educated decisions about their purchases, and wishing to deny your customers this opportunity is the same as hoping that your customers get tricked into buying things they don't like. That's pretty terrible.

A person who likes a game is still going to keep it. A person who returns a game for a full refund obviously didn't like the game and is dodging a bullet. A developer who complains about refunds, and who has no evidence that the system is truly being abused, perhaps needs to focus on making a better game instead of complaining.

My advice to developers is this: Make good games that won't be leaving customers with a desire to get their money back, and (although I hate to say it) make sure you implement some kind of DRM if you're uncomfortable with the risk of not doing so.

Update (June 8, 2015):

I'm a little disappointed that people keep on retweeting and quoting my first tweet about Qwiboo (in which I hastily made a judgement based on limited information) while my second tweet about Qwiboo (in which I corrected my erroneous implications) is being ignored. But I guess that's just how Twitter works sometimes.

Anyway, I'd like to mention another independent developer now. They've gotten quite a bit of attention after reporting a dramatic loss in sales following the introduction of Steam's new refund policy:

They had more to say as well:

Entertaining conclusions :) But difficult to tease apart from the Steam Summer Sale dates leaking as well.

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

For what it's worth the previous 3 months data has been pretty constant, right up until 2 days ago.

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

I wish we were provided with more insights as to what causes our sales (and seemingly, our sales alone) to flatline overnight

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

Worse is that every single one of Steam's competitors (including direc sales) have been so comprehensively crushed there's not much fallback

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 4, 2015

Puppy Games is the developer of stylish faux-retro/arcade-style games Revenge of the Titans, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks!, Ultratron, and the upcoming Basingstoke. I've played the first four of these games, which I bought back when Puppy Games was featured on Humble Bundle, and I actually like this developer's work. I really enjoyed Titan Attacks! and Ultratron, the latter of which I've played for a few dozen hours in total. Because of this, I'd be a little surprised if Puppy Games' recent drop in sales were truly the result of returns by legitimately unhappy customers. Then again, I realize that this developer's games are not everyone's cup of tea.

In any case, despite how I feel about their products, I'm finding it really hard to feel bad for Puppy Games no matter how low their sales go. Long before the new Steam refund policy was announced — in August of last year, to be exact — Puppy Games posted a truly idiotic and somewhat self-contradictory anti-consumer rant on their blog, followed by an only slightly believable and still obnoxious "just kidding, it was all just a ruse for attention" post two weeks later. Regardless of how serious they were when they called their customers worthless, and regardless of what hidden intentions prompted them to write such intentionally inflammatory garbage, the whole ordeal pretty much cancels out any sympathy I might feel for them now.

To make matters worse, in regards to refunds, they tweeted this yesterday:

Again just for the record: the next idiot to say "why don't you make games people don't want to refund then" can shove their opinion up thei

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 7, 2015

what a shame, ran out of characters

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 7, 2015

Personally, I like their games, as I mentioned already. However, this doesn't mean I agree with the way they've rudely dismissed the very sensible notion that perhaps developers who don't want to see their games returned should try harder to make games which people want to keep. At least they were being more sensible earlier today:

Further clarification: we absolutely agree with having a refund policy. We had one all along until Valve came along

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 8, 2015

What we have a problem with is its implementation

— Puppygames (@puppygames) June 8, 2015

So, regarding implementation: Even if the refund policy recently introduced on Steam could use some fine-tuning, any revenue lost due to legitimate refunds is not something for which anyone should apologize. Happy customers typically don't request refunds at all, and unhappy customers deserve to get their money back, so refunds are justified almost always. The system can be abused, but I doubt this is the case for Puppy Games. It almost certainly isn't a case of players returning the games after finishing them, because (with the possible exception of Titan Attacks!) the games have more content than one is likely to see in only two hours. Maybe people are buying games to try them, and maybe Steam will eventually come out and say that this counts as abuse of the refund policy, but I still think it's fair when no playable demo of a game is made available.

I doubt I'll be updating this post again unless Steam's policy changes, so to close it out, I'll post some more tweets. First, here's some evidence that the refund policy isn't so bad for every independent developer:

@puppygames @Steam_Spy That. pic.twitter.com/MOYsTZlF8g

— Garry Newman (@garrynewman) June 7, 2015

our sales are going up since the steam refund system. It might be a really good thing after all! #gamedev #indiegamedev

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 7, 2015

Not sure if this is the final graph or if refunds are taken out of this but thats what we got #steamrefunds pic.twitter.com/x0Qlktl8z5

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 8, 2015

I dont see #steamrefunds really making any difference in our sales atleast. Guess #HeroSiege is a good game after all.

— Elias Viglione (@eliaspixel) June 8, 2015

Finally, some wise words from the HuniePop Twitter account:

How any indie dev is under the illusion that being anti-gamer is going to work out for them I'll never understand.

— HuniePop (@HuniePop) June 8, 2015

Funny how you have yet to see any pro-gamer dev that has been negatively impacted by the refund policy. HMMMMM.

— HuniePop (@HuniePop) June 8, 2015

The Benefits of Cowardice

Recently, I've been playing a lot of the Gauntlet-style PC game Hammerwatch. Like The Binding of Isaac, my other recent indie game obsession, Hammerwatch came into my game collection by way of a dirt-cheap bundle whose other games I haven't touched. My digital game collection is filled with perhaps too many of those bundle B-sides — games which I only own because buying an entire set of games happened to be the cheapest way to get a single game which I actually wanted (most often thanks to Humble Bundle, Bundle Stars, and similar sites). I tell myself I'll get around to enjoying these incidental purchases eventually, but life and video games don't often leave time for each other, so it rarely happens. Sometimes takes me quite a while even to try the games I bought on purpose. For instance, I didn't actually get around to playing Hammerwatch for several weeks after the bundle went on sale.

And now, according to Steam, I've spent over 50 hours playing it. There's the first problem with Steam: It permanently records my playtime, without any option to reset the count, and displays the information publicly unless my entire profile is made private. The only way to avoid the shame of my friends knowing exactly how much of my life has been wasted is to play a game in offline mode (or run the game outside of Steam entirely if possible). The other problem with Steam is that it taunts me with achievements. Oh, sure, I can ignore achievements in a bad game. I won't play garbage just to increase the number of unlocked achievements shown on my profile. But any good game with achievements is just begging for 100% completion, and as an occasionally obsessive completionist, I often can't resist. Any set of challenges or unlockables will do the trick, in fact, but achievements — being (like the playtime counter) public and permanent — are particularly good at keeping me playing a difficult game past the point where I might otherwise have given up.

It was exactly for this reason that I found myself playing Hammerwatch's unreasonably punishing survival level, completion of which is related to two achievements (one for medium difficulty and one for hard). After the first few attempts, I began to suspect it was virtually impossible to beat, at least on my own. Hammerwatch is a multiplayer game but, having no friends currently playing the game and having no desire to play with strangers, I had been flying solo up to this point. My brother owns Hammerwatch, so I could have enlisted his help, but he hadn't played in a while and had never accumulated as much playtime as I had. He would have been rusty, at best, and might have been little more than dead weight in a game of survival with shared lives. So I continued playing survival mode on my own, determined not to let two little achievements stand in the way of total victory.

The survival level in Hammerwatch works like this: Only one extra life is given to start. Waves of increasingly numerous and increasingly powerful enemies spawn to attack the player, while the eventual boss (the Crystal Lich) sits in the center of the map, invincible but able to shoot any player who comes too close. Vendors, reached by way of a portal in a hidden room, sell upgrades and extra lives, which can only be purchased with currency obtained by inflicting damage on a few large crystals placed around the map. Meanwhile, stalactites periodically fall to the floor in random places, doing serious damage to everything in a huge area; these can kill a player instantaneously. After about 45 minutes, the regular bad guys stop spawning and the Crystal Lich comes out to fight.

My first character of choice in the game's main campaign had been the paladin (equipped with a sword which deals damage in a wide arc, a shield which blocks most projectiles coming from ahead, and some other incredibly useful abilities). However, I had heard the ranger (equipped with a long-range bow and not much else of import) was the most viable choice for beating the Crystal Lich (whose homing projectiles travel almost as far as the ranger's arrows). Unfortunately, the ranger isn't as well suited to the pre-boss fight against huge waves of enemies. The paladin would have been better for that. I could only pick one, though, and I didn't want to play 45 minutes to get to the boss only then to find myself in a virtually unwinnable fight, so I was committed to using the boss-killing ranger throughout my solo attempt.

I died. A lot. I died dozens of times without ever getting a chance to fight the Crystal Lich. After all, the ranger (who deals damage at long range but in a narrow line as opposed to the paladin's wide arc) doesn't do well when surrounded, and getting surrounded in the survival level is all but inevitable. The one obvious benefit was the ability to farm crystals somewhat effectively without stopping. The ranger can shoot a crystal while approaching and then shoot some more while departing. Even so, I could never afford enough upgrades to stay on the winning side of the arms race for very long. Eventually, I'd always start dying faster than I could farm enough crystals to replace the lives I was losing.

Then I noticed that the hidden room with the portal to the vendors, although it's a cramped dead end, is actually very safe: Few enemies spawn in range to see the player, and stalactites don't fall there (except in the case of one scripted stalactite drop which destroys the portal at the start of the boss fight). Perhaps best of all, the nova-firing trap in an adjacent room is close enough that it will fire when the player stands in the hidden room, and this periodically damages a nearby crystal for free money (as does the occasional lucky stalactite drop). This free money isn't as much as what a player can get by actively mining the other crystals, so I had no intention of hiding in the hidden room throughout the entire pre-boss battle. Still, it was the best solution for the second half of the fight, during which any attempt at mining was likely to cost me more lives than I could buy with the money I had gained.

And by retreating to the hidden room when things got too hard, taking my free money like a welfare check while waiting for the boss to appear, I finally loved long enough to fight him. At that point, it was just a matter of fighting him from a distance while finishing off any nearby enemies left over from the pre-boss phase. I won.

Thus I was left with a somewhat viable solo strategy for the survival level in Hammerwatch, using the ranger:

1. Don't destroy the nova-firing trap in the east room.
2. Farm the crystals in the north (behind the green spike trap), west (behind the red spike trap), and center (near the Crystal Lich). Each should have enough time to recharge while you're farming the other two.
• Don't bother with the crystal in the east (behind the blue spike trap); the active nova-firing trap makes it difficult to escape the room safely.
• Eventually a crystal in the south will be made available, but that little room with two small openings is a death trap. Don't go there.
3. Buy upgrades for speed, bow damage, and bow penetration. Buy an extra life when needed, but keep in mind Step 4 below.
4. When things get too difficult (and you're dying more often than you can mine enough cash for the next extra life), go to the hidden room and stand just south of the portal, ready to shoot anything that comes after you. You are not totally safe here, so don't fall asleep.
5. As you get free money from the crystal in the east (which should be taking damage from the nova-firing trap), keep on buying upgrades and/or stock up on extra lives, at your own discretion.
6. When a stalactite starts to fall above the portal, get out of the hidden room. Avoid the boss until you've cleared the nearby remaining enemies.
7. Fight the boss from a distance, coming a bit closer to shoot him and backing up to a very safe distance when he fires back. It will take a while, but if you can avoid the stalactites and any leftover enemies on the map, you'll win.

This cheesy strategy allowed me to beat the survival level on medium difficulty. Unfortunately, it wasn't so reliable for hard difficulty. After fighting and farming as much as possible without repeatedly dying, I was able to hide in the hidden room until the boss emerged, but the necessary task of clearing out remaining enemies during the boss fight became much more difficult. My damage output just wasn't sufficient to avoid being overrun once a group of enemies caught my scent, especially since the area of effect of the ranger's attack is constrained to a thin line.

Ultimately, I ended up playing with strangers to beat survival on hard mode, but even finding a suitable game wasn't easy. At any given time, I only saw one hard survival game (or none at all), and the first few games I joined were full of novices who didn't really know what they were doing. Even when I managed to join a game with more experienced players, lack of easy communication made things very difficult. By some miracle, however, I was eventually able to join a game with a couple of players (a warlock and a ranger) who were unbelievably good. Even when we were joined by a fourth player (a paladin) with no survival level experience, we weren't dragged down. I ended up getting killed before the boss was dead, but the other ranger lured the boss into a narrow hallway in which his attacks were blocked and finished him off.

So I got lucky. My advice for Hammerwatch's survival mode without friends? Try my solo strategy. If that doesn't work, I'm all out of suggestions, because you can't really count on finding a game full of expert players who are able to coordinate a victory with complete strangers. In other words: Good luck!

But, whatever. I got mine.

Midlife Crisis, Part 1

I've been wanting a new PC for a while. In fact, I've wanted one ever since I first played F.E.A.R. back in 2005. The game was fantastic, but the computer I was using at the time was only decent, perhaps good, but not great. Those maximum graphics settings were pretty far out of reach; I think I had to settle for medium. (The horror!) Still, I was an optimist. I simply told myself that, someday, I'd have a computer that could easily run the game on the highest settings.

Of course, that wasn't exactly a promise to spend lots of money. I figured correctly that I wouldn't be getting a new computer for several years, and I knew that even a relatively inexpensive PC in the ambiguously distant future would be far more powerful than what I presently had. Then again, when investing in a new PC, one might as well invest enough to play contemporary games on the highest settings as well. So, whether I knew it or not, I was telling myself that someday I'd blow a bunch of money on an expensive toy.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I started to think more seriously about it. By this time, the personal computer had truly become my video game platform of choice, and the machine I had been using for years was starting to show its age, particularly with some of the more recent games. (I suppose I should be surprised that any of these modern games worked at all on such an old system, which had only been given a few small upgrades over the years). Although I'd only encountered a couple of games that simply refused to work at all, it was clear that it was time to move forward.

After some quick research, I decided that $800 would be a sufficient budget for a replacement. I just didn't know what to buy. My old PC had originally been a family computer not purchased by me, so I didn't know much about how to shop for a computer, let alone parts for a custom build. Of course, figuring this out doesn't really take a whole year. If I'd gotten my act together, I might have been done with the whole process by last Christmas, but I procrastinated. The holidays (and then spring and then summer) came and went before I got around to doing the research, setting aside the money, and making the purchase.

At this point, I could just buy one of the new consoles that are coming out later this year, but I've fallen out of love with consoles in general ever since I started playing shooters with a mouse, namely F.E.A.R. and its expansions. (I don't think I can ever go back to thumb sticks for anything requiring precision. Sure, consoles are still great for any genre that really does play better with a gamepad, but you can play those on a PC with a USB gamepad anyway.) Besides, very few of the games I've wanted to play over the past eight years have actually been console exclusives. Enough of them have been released for Windows that, throughout the lifetime of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I've been content to keep playing on the computer I already owned instead of buying new hardware. Now that I have another opportunity to get on the console bandwagon, I don't think that's going to change.

I can certainly see the appeal in the idea of standardized hardware, though. I've been agonizing for weeks over how best to balance the money I'm spending with the performance I'll get, but console owners don't need to make these tough decisions. I can also see the appeal in the exclusive games if there are enough of them to make a difference. However, I don't want to be stuck on the same hardware for the next eight years with no possibility of upgrading, and I don't really want enough of those upcoming console-exclusive games to justify the purchase of any particular console.

So, a number of weeks ago, I started actively researching PC parts, reading reviews of mid-to-high-end graphics cards and asking for advice in various places. One of those places, for better or for worse, was 4chan. It's worth noting that, on the site's /v/ and /g/ boards, the standard response to any question about PC building is a link to a guide called Logical Increments. I was wary about taking too much advice from a single popular source without going any further down the rabbit hole, but it seems to be a competently written guide, and a good starting place for anyone in my position. As of now, I highly recommend it, but the nature of the site means it changes constantly. I don't know how good it will be any number of months or years from now, if it still exists.

After some further research (which mostly involved lots of careful comparison of benchmarks, reviews, and prices), I did ultimately take quite a bit of advice from Logical Increments, getting a processor and a motherboard presently listed on the site's "Superb" tier and a graphics card which was until recently listed on the "Excellent" tier. Then I added some memory, some storage, a power supply, and a case, as well as an inexpensive optical drive (because I still have plenty of old games on discs), and I was done. Here's the breakdown:

CPU — $194.99
MOBO — $129.99
RAM — $68.46
HDD — $59.99
GPU — $209.99 (before $20.00 rebate)
PSU — $74.99
CD/DVD — $14.99
Case — $59.99

Disregarding sales tax and applying the rebate, this puts my subtotal at $793.39. Most of the components were cheaper than they'd been in previous months, according to their respective price histories, so it looks like I got a decent price overall. Unfortunately, the effect of sales tax (usually a negligible annoyance) was a real bummer.

I made my purchases from three stores — Amazon, Newegg, and NCIX — and while NCIX didn't seem to add any tax to my subtotal, Amazon and Newegg both did. (I think the current rule for New Jersey, though I believe it's going to change soon, is that an online store must charge sales tax if it has a physical presence within the state, so I can only assume that NCIX does not.) After applying the 7% tax to everything but the CPU, RAM, and HDD, my $800 build was suddenly much closer to $850, which I can only bring down to around $830 if I do the mail-in rebate. I'm not sure if I will, though, because I've heard these rebates tend to require that you send in the proof of purchase that is also required to get a replacement under warranty, and I don't want to jump through too many hoops if I need a replacement part. So $850 it is, until further notice. If sales tax had been applied to everything, I'd be looking at $870 (or $850 after the potential rebate), so I guess I should be glad for that.

Did I really get a good deal? I'm sure someone will tell me I didn't. After deciding on my parts, I could have waited months to get the best possible deal on each individual component, but I felt it would be best to buy them all at once. (Keep in mind that I do want to test them all before any of them are too old to return.) I had already considered prices when choosing my components in the first place, and I'd have to do that work again if I waited long enough for prices to start fluctuating away from the low price/performance ratios I'd deliberately sought out, so I just bought the whole list as soon as I was ready. Sometimes prices go down if you wait, but sometimes they go up, and I can't see the future.

Yet, even if I did get a good deal on these parts, I can't help but wonder if it was simply a bad time to buy a PC, given next month's launch of Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The next-generation (and soon-to-be current-generation) consoles are as close as they'll ever be to state-of-the-art. Although this PC will easily crush the outgoing generation in terms of performance, it won't have such a strong lead for very long. It's also worth noting that many games released for Windows are actually ports that were optimized for consoles, so the performance on a PC might be worse even if the console has weaker hardware. Now that consoles are suddenly getting more powerful, I can only hope my PC will be ready for whatever I throw at it.

We also might see further price drops in the AMD graphics card I bought, since a new round of AMD cards have just been released. Everything I bought might be cheaper when Black Friday comes around, as well. Waiting for the holidays might be the best time-for-money trade-off I could have made. However, my experience with Black Friday sales is that the deals aren't as good as people think and everything sells out fast, so I can't even be sure that waiting for late November would have helped.

In any case, there's no sense in worrying about it now. I don't spend money on myself very often, so if the computer works and I enjoy using it, I'll call it a win. I'll admit that $800 plus tax is a pretty hefty price tag, though, especially when I haven't included the peripherals. (For the immediate future, I'll be using the monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse from the old PC.) I haven't even included a copy of Windows (since I'm still trying to decide between 7 and 8).

To put things in perspective: My brother just got a new laptop for around $1000 (and my computer will play Crysis a lot better than his), but the cost of that laptop probably includes an extended warranty. The cost of mine doesn't. I'm putting my faith — perhaps too much faith — in manufacturer's warranties, which might screw me over if one of my parts dies two years down the line. Buying additional protection plans separately for each important component likely would have pushed my budget over the edge. But at least I'll be able to replace a single part without replacing the whole rig. I'm not sure if my brother, or any console owner, can say the same.

All that really concerns me right now is the Sapphire GPU, since I've heard that Sapphire's customer service is somewhat lackluster. On the other hand, I've heard some good things about the quality of their cards. I guess I'll just have to hope mine isn't defective; if it is, I'll just have to hope I can arrange for a new one without too much trouble. If worst comes to worst, and my new PC explodes after a month, I'll just hope I'm selected for beta testing one of the prototype Steam Machines, preferably the one with a GTX Titan. (Please?)

In times like these, the most comforting thought is that what's done is done; my PC is ordered and will be arriving in many parts shortly. At least, that's what I hope. Thanks to the free shipping from Amazon, I might not get to put this beast together until the weekend before Halloween. In the meantime, I'll keep on playing old games and some indie stuff from Humble Bundle. The Binding of Isaac, by the way, is a fantastic game. I regret that I didn't get around to it sooner.

Family Sharing on Steam

Recently, Valve announced yet another new addition to Steam, called Family Sharing, which is to be launched in limited beta next week.

The new feature will allow you to authorize a "shared computer" on which others can download and play the games on your account. The official announcement doesn't specify whether these other players will need to be on your Steam friends list, but it's safe to assume they'll need to make their own separate Steam accounts if they haven't done so already. In return, they'll get separately logged achievements and saved progress for the games they "borrow" from your library. According to the FAQ shown here, up to ten devices can be authorized for sharing at once, but only one person is allowed to play the games from a single library at any given time.

The idea of sharing games on Steam sounds like a pretty big deal — a game changer, if you'll allow the terrible pun — but is it all it's cracked up to be? While you and some of your friends could, in theory, share the same pool of Steam games, time management would be an issue. Since a friend can only borrow your library when you're not playing, the Family Sharing feature amounts to little more than a safer alternative to the unofficial method of sharing Steam games — that is, letting your friend have your password.

Tighter restrictions might also be implemented later on — it's easy to imagine some kind of time limit on "borrowed" games, for example, or a drastic decrease in the number of shared computers allowed, or a drastic decrease in the number of games available for sharing — so we can only wait and see if the finer details of Family Sharing prove too good to be true after the beta is over. In the meantime, it might help to read those details carefully. There already are some games which can't be shared, according to the Family Sharing FAQ, namely those requiring "an additional third-party key, account, or subscription." While this limitation is technical, it makes me wonder if some developers will make sure their games are exempt from sharing by implementing any of these already-quite-irritating requirements.

So let's say Family Sharing doesn't live up to our expectations. Does this mean Steam's version of sharing is a bad thing? Not really. Any amount of sharing is extremely valuable for those who like to try before they buy (especially when playable demos are such a rarity these days). A lot of players supposedly engage in piracy for this purpose alone, and Family Sharing might present an alternative to some. It all depends on whether getting a friend to share on your computer (and then finding time to play when he or she is offline) is more of a hassle than finding a good torrent. As always, Steam has to treat piracy as a competitor. The problem will never go away, so the only real solution for digital distributors is to make their services so convenient that we don't mind giving them our money.

For many, however, no combination of convenience and competitive pricing can change their view that digital goods mean a loss of consumer rights. Being allowed to resell a thing that you've purchased is often considered a right, but it can't be done with Steam games. There's no thriving second-hand market for downloaded content because customers are rarely allowed to transfer "ownership" of what they've purchased. Even sharing without breaking the law can be difficult. While Steam can certainly try to remedy this situation, it might not be feasible for a digital distributor to emulate the way in which physical media can be shared legitimately among friends and family. Digital rights management always gets in the way somehow, often ruining the experience, while the total absence of digital rights management leads people to stop sharing and start giving away free copies. Neither scenario is ideal. (There are some DRM-free digital distributors, like Humble Bundle and GOG.com, but they're basically operating on the honor system, and they can only pull it off because their customers like them enough to support them voluntarily.)

Although any publisher of any intellectual property, retail or digital, might prefer that your friends buy their own copies of whatever you have, borrowing physical media is so commonplace that nobody really complains. But is it only allowed because it can't be avoided? Nintendo didn't try to stop me from lending my copy of Metroid Prime to a friend back in 7th grade because lending GameCube discs is legally and socially acceptable, but what's more important is that, unlike a digital distributor, they had no way of stopping me. The same can be said of music CDs, paperback books, and anything else you can physically hand off to your good pal. It always felt a little unfair that digitally distributed games like those on Steam — or, in fact, any game protected by any form of DRM, even if it comes on a disc — cannot be shared in the same way as your favorite book... but hey, maybe we're just spoiled by centuries of unauthorized sharing gone unpunished.

In any case, Steam's new Family Sharing feature will not erase all the perceived injustices of DRM, and Valve had its own arguably evil part to play in the rise of online DRM with the introduction of Steam back in 2003, but it seems to be a step back in the right direction. (At the very least, it certainly isn't a step in the wrong direction, since they're giving us some new options and taking none away.) The new feature on Steam certainly isn't a perfect imitation of "real" sharing, but it's a decent compromise.

The known limitations, while forgivable, are numerous. For example, your Steam library is shared not with a person but with a single computer, which means the so-called borrower cannot simply play your shared library anywhere he or she wants. Furthermore, you cannot lend a dozen of your games to a dozen different friends, since your library can only be shared on ten computers. Finally, since only one account can access a lender's library at a time, a single borrower essentially reserves the entire library instead of grabbing a single game. You can't let your friend play one game while you play another, so it's kind of like lending your copy of The Kite Runner to a friend when all the books on your shelf are glued together.

This kind of sharing does have some perks, though. After I lent that copy of Metroid Prime to that friend, I never got it back. If you're sharing your Steam games, you don't have to worry about this, and you can even boot your friend out of your library while he or she is playing if you've decided it's your turn to play. (According to the FAQ linked above, the other person will be given a few minutes to finish up or to buy their own copy of the game. How kind.) Better yet, since it's all digital, there's no "sorry, I scratched the disc" or "oh man, my mom sold it at the yard sale." The fact that your entire library is shared at once can also be a good thing, unless your friend is a young kid who needs to stay away from your bloody murder simulators.

It's entirely possible that Family Sharing will make Steam more attractive to those who usually avoid buying digital copies. Many of them, however, will probably continue to avoid Steam on principle, regardless of how Steam's features and restrictions might affect them personally. Even those of us who are always online, and always signed in, can be annoyed when going online and signing in is a requirement for installing a game. Even those of us who don't think Valve is likely to go suddenly bankrupt can be angry about what would happen if our accounts were to vanish into thin air. Even those of us who only care to share our Steam libraries with a single friend might be critical of the fact that we can't allow more than some arbitrary number of shared computers. Unfortunately for consumers of PC games, however, DRM is a fact of life. It has been for years. At least Steam makes it relatively painless most of the time.

I won't say they're adding this Family Sharing feature out of the goodness of their hearts — that's not how businesses operate. The most altruistic motivation they can have is the hope of bringing in new customers by improving their image. In this case, they might also be responding to the problem of accounts being shared off the record. You can share your Steam account without the help of Family Sharing simply by giving your password to a trusted friend, and Valve obviously knows some people are doing this. Instead of alienating customers by enforcing tighter restrictions, they're embracing the idea of sharing, but with sane limits. They can't stop us from sharing our accounts, but they can try to keep sharing under control if they can convince us to do it their way.