Steam Region Locked Gifts?!!

So once again Steam manages to piss me off.  Now I know that this thing I'm about to get mad about probably has some kind of economic/business reason that I'm just too stupid to understand but that doesn't stop it from pissing me off any less!

So a few days ago I was streaming Silent Hill and one of my Stream regulars said that they wanted to donate to the charity.  However, he couldn't donate because BTMyDonate wouldn't take his card and he lives in Russia so getting money into the charity was proving to be quite a task for him.  So then he comes up with a great idea of gifting me a game from Steam and I put the money into the charity from my account equal to the value of the game.

So he gifts me the game on Steam and there's this big stupid fucking message on it says "This game can only be played in <bunch of countries in and around Russia>"  It then goes on to say that even if I accept the gift, I won't be able to play it unless I'm in one of the listed countries and if I try to get around this block with a VPN or some such crap then getting a ban from Steam would be quite possible.

FUCKING. BULLSHIT.

What the fuck is the goddamn problem?  All I'm downloading is the data for the game, why does Steam have to limit access to a title based on your fucking country?!  This is the beauty of the internet, that it doesn't matter where I am in the world, I can download a file or share a file with someone else.  If I have photos on Facebook I want to show my friends, then they can see them, you don't see social media platforms going "NOPE! YOUR FRIEND LIVES IN JAPAN SO YOU CAN'T SEE THAT SHIT!"

Why is there any region locking on PC games AT ALL?!  Or any games at all in this day and age for that matter....

So the next day he comes in the stream and he's like "Yo! Why does my donation say £19?!" at which point I start to fucking panic because I thought I undercut the guy.  But no, turns out I went WAYYYY over what he paid.  So for me the game costs £19 but for him it's 450 rubles which is equal to £4.50.

OH, SO THERE IT FUCKING IS!  I guess the reason they region lock the gifts is so that people with Russian buddies like me can't just get round all the jacked up prices and get easy cheap shit, right?  Well that's still bullshit because why does it cost so much for me and so little for him?!  Why not bring the price down for us, or up for him?  Like is 450 rubles a ton of money or something?  I mean the way he was talking about it it's not that much so what the fuck?!

But whatever, let's just say I don't understand, but the way he got the game to me in the end was through Good Old Games

Now the game is a bit less there, it's more like £16 but for him it's STILL £4 fucking 50p.  But you know what? I can't even be mad at this change in price because GoG doesn't fucking region lock their gifts.  He gifted me the game and it went into my account just fine with no problems and then I used the Steam price listing for his donation.

All in all I'm not really that angry because I got a game, he payed next to nothing for it and £19 went to the Alzheimer's Society but I'm hoping that someone out there can explain this shit to me because right now it seems like top grade, pure gold bullshit.

Shouldn't Digital Cost Less?

Before I make this post I'd just like to clarify that I am not a businessman and I know very little about business.  However this is something that has been bothering me for a long long while and I can't help but feel that there's a little bit of bullshit involved.

So, when I used to only buy hard copies of games a brand new game would set me back about £40.  For this £40 I would get the game, a box to keep it in and an instruction manual to tell me how to play.  Now, a brand new big title game on Steam will STILL cost £40 but all I get is a digital version of the game and nothing else.  Now I'm sorry but since I'm getting less stuff for my money shouldn't digital distribution cost less?!

When you're making a hard copy of a game you have to make the disc, make the box, print a manual, ship it to a retailer and a bunch of other shit that would be a cost to the people publishing game.  But with digital you aren't doing any of that so shouldn't the costs to the producer be less?  If that is the case shouldn't the cost of the game be less?  Why am I still being charged £40 just for the games data, it seems like a bit of a con.

I've even come across examples where the digital version of a game was MORE EXPENSIVE than the fucking hard copy.  Xenoblade X came out recently in Japan and if I go down to my local game store to pick up a copy it would set me back around 6000 yen.  However if I go on the Nintendo E-Shop it costs fucking 8000 yen!  What the fuck is that?!  where is that extra 2000 yen coming from?  I'm getting significantly less for significantly more money

Maybe there's something I'm missing and digital copies of games are actually more of a cost to a company than producing a hard copy.  I'm hoping that if this is the case then someone can explain it to me because right now I feel like I'm being fucking ripped off!

Won't stop me from buying digital though, it's just so damn convenient.....

It's Not Nostalgia Goggles

Sometimes I get into discussions with my friends or on forums and things like that about how older games are better than modern ones.  I'm one of those people who is inclined to agree with that idea because personally I find a lot of modern games to be a bit of a joke.  That doesn't mean I think modern gaming is bad but I just find the older experiences a lot more enjoyable.

At first I thought it was just a case of personal taste or hell, maybe it was really nostalgia goggles but on my long boring train rides I decided to think about it a bit more critically and old games are really just better.

So here's what I'm going to do to illustrate my point.  I'm going to take the first 3 genres that pop into my head and explain why old games in the genre are better than the newer ones.

First Person Shooters

This is a no brainer since if there's any genre that is guilty of being dumbed down for mass consumption its this one.  Take old games like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, Hexen and many many others.  These games were popular not only because of their ultra violence, but because of their big sprawly labyrinthine levels full of secrets and generally speaking you needed some degree of brain power and strategy to win at these games on higher difficulty levels.

Contrast that with now, where all the exploration and skill that this genre was famous for has been completely stripped out for an experience that people who don't want to spend time learning a title (read: idiots) can handle.  Regenerating health was the first big culprit, then came limited weapon inventories ruining strategy and limiting your play style.  Also every level in a modern shooter is basically a corridor and all you do is hide behind cover and pop heads.

That's right, modern FPS is nothing but the fair ground duck shooting attraction but with a military theme and attached to a roller coaster track.  Finally, don't give me none of that shit about Multiplayer either.  If you think Call of Duty or Halo stack up to something like Unreal Tournament or Quake then you need a slap.

RPGs 

RPGs barely fucking exist nowadays and that's a damn shame.  Just to qualify, when I say RPGs I mean both the J and W type, so don't worry I'm not discriminating between countries.  Western made RPGs used to be such deep and rich experiences.  Things such as Ultima, Baldurs Gate and old school Fallout were such joys to play with so much goddamn content in them that it would probably take a few playthroughs just to notice all the little details about the world you were in.  Japanese RPGs were a little more simplistic but the variety of what was on offer in that genre back in the day was absolutely staggering.  Most western games tended to focus on Tolkien-esque swords and sorcery settings while JRPGs tended to have more outlandish settings and characters.

Contrast that with now, where every Western made RPG just feels like a cheap knockoff of something that came WAY before it.  Most RPGs today have these terrible fucking "morality systems" and stupid branching dialogue trees with only 2 or 3 options on them and the extra tidbits about a worlds lore aren't even half as developed as they are in older games.  Just look at how Elder Scrolls started and look at it now and you'll see exactly what I mean.

Japan on the other hand seems to have forgotten how to produce anything that isn't shallow, moe, otaku pandering bullshit with every game box on a store shelf having some wide eyed anime girl on it doing something cute and the game play is much shallower.

The Point and Click Adventure

 Do I even need to explain this one to you?  Just look at stuff like Monkey Island, Sanitarium, Myst, Grim Fandango and god knows what else.  Then look at what passes off for an "adventure" game nowadays.  Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Serina just to name 3.  A genre once known for it's insane mind bending puzzles and great stories now reduced to walking simulators with barely any game play produced by people who can't make a game worth a shit and can't write for shit either.

Let's just be happy that GoG exists to preserve all the great point and clickers so that people can still experience them and all this modern badly written bullshit can hopefully be forgotten about

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Now I know I've been ranting and it sounds like I hate modern gaming with a passion but that couldn't be further from the truth.  Modern gaming is still great and there are still new titles that come out and I have plenty of fun with.  It's just that gaming has gotten noticeably stupider and I think it's a damn shame.

Also I know I've been talking about "modern gaming" in general terms but there are exceptions to all the above and in all other genres.  Some developers are still trying to capture the magic of the old school shooter with things like Painkiller and The Rise of the Triads remake to varying levels of success.  I've been hearing great things about Divinity: Original Sin and Japan is still producing RPGs of the old quality such as "俺の屍を越えてゆけ２" which looks fucking radical

The point and clicker is still being moderately screwed but an HD remake of Grim Fandango is coming out so I guess it's not all bad, just a shame that the newest thing I can think of in the genre worth a damn is Anna on PC

So to all you devs trying to make intelligent games for the modern age, keep on going.  Finally to all you devs making safe, mass appeal bullshit, try pushing out the boat a little more will ya?   You can still make buckets of money with a smart game, I'm sure it'll be OK.

Steam Sale! DRM discussion inbound!

Well shit, I'm surprised it's not started already, I was really hoping it would have happened by now.

Anyway, if you are not a user of Steam, at certain times during the year Steam do this massive sale thing where they will slash the prices of pretty much all their games by huge amounts.  I'm talking about being able to get games for insane things like 75% off the original price, it's a great time to get some cheap games if you're on a bit of a budget.

So I want to take this moment to talk about Steam itself, since there are a number of communities that like to yell "fuck Steam! fuck DRM!" and this tends to people on the other side of the camp getting all overly defensive and everything turns into a massive rage war between the two sides.

Well lets face some facts, Steam is essentially a form of DRM.  You buy a game and you can only use it on your Steam account, you can't lend the games to anyone or even sell them back (although I've heard about people in the EU getting refunds).  If something happened to Steam, you are more than likely going to lose your entire library and all the raging in the world wont return your collection or your money.

So from that brief paragraph describing Steam as a form of DRM you might think that anyone who uses Steam a lot must be fucking stupid right?  Well no, not really.  You see, while there is all these drawbacks with Steam, the software does offer you quite a lot.  It gives you everything in one place and provides a shit ton of feature for connecting with people and playing with friends.  But none of that really matters when you look at the prices of shit on Steam.

If you're willing to have some patience with it, Steam will give you a massive amount of games for basically no money.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single game in my entire library that I have paid over £20 for and with the introduction of the Steam Marketplace, I've been able to sell my virtual items and use that money to get free games.

So Steam is essentially DRM done right in a way.  It's annoying that I'm limited with what I can do when it comes to my collection but I paid so little for the 200 games I've bought over 7 years that I really don't care.  As long as you follow their rules then Steam is a great, cheap gaming platform that you can have a lot of fun with for very little money.

Ideally, no DRM would be best but in this day and age we know that's never going to fucking happen, so long live steam and their insane sales!

Unless you're GoG, those guys are great

Free Game Friay x9

You may remember that a while ago I told everyone about a game called Beneath a Steel Sky for a Free Game Friday a long time ago.  Well this week, I thought instead of telling you about those games one by one, I'd just let you know that there are 9 classic games available for free on the website Good Old Games.

I won't go into detail about any of them since if I was to do that for every game, it would take far too long, but they are all worth playing.  I mean Ultima 4 is included in this deal, so you're getting an absolutely brilliant RPG right there for nothing.

So head over to Good Old Games, grab yourself an account and some free games.  Hell, the selection of games is so good on that website that you might even end up buying something after you've played the free stuff too!

www.gog.com/