Steam Now Offering Free-To-Play Games 152
donniebaseball23 writes "Valve's digital Steam service is going strong with 30 million active accounts, and now the developer has further boosted its offerings by adding free-to-play titles. Steam is kicking off its support of the free-to-play model with five titles (which will include in-game Steam exclusives): Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online: Free for All, Global Agenda: Free Agent, and Alliance of Valliant Arms. Valve's support of free-to-play shows just how widely accepted it's become."
Great catch! (Score:1)
Thanks for the scoop Slashdot.
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in fairness not everyone constantly visits steams website or plays games off of steam every day
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Not everyone plays games off of Steam at all for that matter. Polish it and put lipstick on it all you want, but Steam is invasive DRM that creates an artificial necessity to have a worthless resource using program running in the background and an internet connection even for single player games.
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an artificial necessity to have a worthless resource using program running in the background
Most people use Windows anyway.
and an internet connection even for single player games.
Steam features an offline mode. You only need to have been online once per game to be allowed to play it offline, i believe.
Re:Great catch! (Score:5, Informative)
Steam's offline mode is far from perfect. I've lost count of the number of times I've had games cease working until I went online, even if they showed 'ready to play' in Offline Mode.
Yes, even single-player games with no internet functionality at all.
It's also really annoying that there's no way to throttle Steam's download speed, since it's capable of completely saturating my net connection so no one in the house can even check their email.
And it detects all the software bandwidth throttles I've tried to use and ceases downloading at all until I turn them off and let it have every byte it can slurp.
Then there's also that if Steam knows there's a patch, but it's not downloaded, you can't start the game even in offline mode until you download the patch.
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Conversly, I've never had any such problems, and indeed have played multiplayer while in 'offline' mode. I should also mention I have almost 150 titles on it, having been with steam since it was just a half-baked WON replacement.
I'll agree that throttling needs to be added, but that's hardly an issue unique with Steam. It seems almost every software vendor assumes users have unlimited bandwidth...
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Wow,
Nah, I don't think WoW falls in the free-to-play category.
Steam already had free games... (Score:4, Informative)
It also seems that some of these free to play games aren't available everywhere (a couple of users have written at the thread about it).
Perhaps Valve should just make IvanDoomer's list official or something :)
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Doh! And I had just paid money for some (on sale) version of Trackmania. Thanks for the link! Especially since all these new games sound like boring "fantasy" MMO grindfests.
Had a lot of fun with Alien Swarm back in the day... hoping they start exchanging features with Tremulous!
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Steam's list, though, has some games that limit your maximum level so they are probably n
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Yeah, but what you're missing is that Steam is a commercial product, so to add "free to play" games they likely are taking a cut of micropayments or charging yearly fees in exchange for broader visibility of these games (via Steam). Someone is paying for the bandwidth to download, and I guarantee it isn't Valve.
I see max level limits as OK - it is kind of like shareware - if you like the game after you get to a certain point, buy the rest of it and get more content. It is a good way to avoid games you reall
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Not a fan of the F2P business model (Score:4, Insightful)
Mainly because it's simply not free, yes you can enjoy the games to a certain extent without paying a penny, but they are designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible and in the long term are far more expensive than purchasing a retail product upfront.
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This Penny Arcade strip [penny-arcade.com] pretty much sums it up for me. Mainly because it's simply not free, yes you can enjoy the games to a certain extent without paying a penny, but they are designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible and in the long term are far more expensive than purchasing a retail product upfront.
My strategy to work around this problem is simple and (I think) effective:
Don't buy the extra stuff that costs money.
They're only more expensive than an upfront retail product if you actually spend that much money on them - the choice is yours.
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Don't buy the extra stuff that costs money... [snip] the choice is yours.
True, but a "well" designed free-to-play game will quickly lose its playability if you don't regularly open your wallet - either because you can't progress or because the endless pressure to buy stuff spoils the game.
So, yeah, don't whine if you're stupid enough to pay out a fortune, but also don't confuse "free-to-pay" with properly free or just plain good value.
Plus, just because some people are stupid enough to fall for the sort of pressure these games exert, doesn't necessarily make it a nice thing t
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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/5/11/ [penny-arcade.com]
just read this last night and fished it out of history.
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And another PA one [penny-arcade.com]
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This Penny Arcade strip [penny-arcade.com] pretty much sums it up for me.
Mainly because it's simply not free, yes you can enjoy the games to a certain extent without paying a penny, but they are designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible and in the long term are far more expensive than purchasing a retail product upfront.
Well, that's why it's called "free to play".
Nobody forces you to pay for it. Unlike WoW or EVE, I can create a LotR:O account for free. And play all I want, day after day after day. Nobody is going to force me to pay for anything.
But there are some nice things you get if you pay money. And, of course, the things are nice enough to make you want to pay for them. That's the whole idea.
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I'm trying out a couple of F2P web games now, Grepolis and Lacuna Expanse. (Out of a dozen and a half games I tried, these were the only ones that felt like they were actually worth playing, or indeed, ready for release.) So far it seems like practically nobody gives either one money, I don't know how they stay afloat. Presumably mostly by having low overhead...
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As an avid player of F2P games, I see a lot of people who seem to be completely in the dark regarding what F2P really does. The majority of F2P games give you no actual competitive advantage for spending money. Those that do USUALLY have a way to attain the same things through trade in-game. Games where a definitive advantage is given to the paying players and are 100% unavailable to free subscribers are remarkably few. Does paying make life easier in many games? Yes. But free players are nearly alway
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Depends on how you play. For instance in Lord of the Rings Online you can get to max level and do end game purely for free, it just needs quite a lot of grinding to earn the points. So it's more of a balance between time spent earning points versus time spent having fun. Some have even calculated that for them and their purposes they can get more bang for the buck by buying all the quest packs and buying off limitations than by subscribing to the game.
Of course, no game is going to be a charity free-to-p
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It's a pretty simple equation: if the cost of the stuff you buy is less than what you'd pay for an average subscription (say, $15/month) then you're probably getting a pretty good deal.
My strategy is to buy very little extra content, but I will once in a while if it's something I really want, like an unlockable class I want to play, an item that makes my life easier, or a new region to play in. I definitely NEVER pay for purely cosmetic shit like fancy clothing, or min/maxing like a weapon that does 1 or 2
Uhm, wrong about LOTRO (Score:2)
In LOTRO you can buy everything -including the expansions and quest packs- using turbine points you can earn in game.
A member of my kinship (guild) in LOTRO has played from 1-65 (the current level cap) without spending a penny of real money. And she has every expansion and quest pack.
Me? I'm much weaker and richer ;)
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In LOTRO you can buy everything -including the expansions and quest packs- using turbine points you can earn in game.
This also applies to DDO, FYI.
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The -only- thing that you can buy with real money in League of Legends that you can't buy with points earned from playing is: new skins. So paying customers and non-paying customers are on the exact same level in terms of what they can accomplish.
League of Legends is a curious example. You do have XP/IP boosts that give you "more bang for your buck" sort of bonuses, and those mean that two players that start at the same time and only play together will see the paying player be a fair bit more powerful than the non-paying player after a while. But then that difference melts away once you reach level 30 (cap) and, once you have the champions and runes you want, you'll find yourself with enough excess IP that you can just collect stuff because you feel
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LoL is a really great F2P model. I don't want to get too bogged down in the mechanics of LoL but it's the only F2P game I've spent actual money on because (as best as I can explain this) I didn't feel I *had* to spend money with it in order to get somewhere with the game.
It's rather obvious that you somehow felt you had to spend money, because you did spend it.
What are these games? (Score:2)
So what kind of games are these? Never heard of any of those titles.
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Lucky for you, they're free to try:
http://store.steampowered.com/ [steampowered.com]
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Spiral Knights is one of the titles. It's been in beta for something like two years now. The art style is somewhere between Crystal Chronicles, FF9 and World of Warcraft, plays sort of like Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past. The first hour or so is quite a bit of fun, but I haven't played past that. It plays sort of like how I would imagine a MMO of Diablo or Torchlight would play out.
Turkish Delight (Remember Narnia!) (Score:4, Insightful)
This offer of Free games sounds just like Turkish Delights in Narnia. Steam does not care about the games, it is all about extending the DRM'd platform. The more people use Steam (and Steam's DRM) the more Steam can tell developers that to reach a sizeable market they have to be part of Steam and use Steam's DRM.
It's all about the platform and its network effects. The larger the platform, the more relevant it becomes, the worse off we will be (as someone who decided NOT to purchase Civ V just because it uses Steam's DRM.
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And pirates have already made their own DRM removal patch, so even if Valve goes out without that last patch, you won't be totally locked out.
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Plus, they've made a promise to make a DRM removal patch if they ever go out of business. It isn't a legally-binding promise, AFAIK, but it still shows that they mean well.
I find that very hard to believe. Even if they wanted to do that, how can they be sure they will have the opportunity to do that. If they are bought before going out of business, the new management probably won't keep this promise. Unless they have this patch ready right now, it is not certain whether they will be able to develop it when they are going out of business.
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This is infeasible. They can promise this but it won't happen. It's just one of those things that people want to believe in order to justify their love of Steam.
If they truly wanted to do this they'd have the DRM-removal tool already in a third party escrow with a legal contract that allows them to release it even if Valve later changes its mind (ie, under new management, or if they go bankrupt and someone buys them). Which they haven't done. Plus they aren't legally allowed to do this for anything but
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I don't care if it's DRM if it's DRM that makes it easy for me to play my games anywhere.
How about everywhen?
Like letting your son play one game, while you play another?
Or what when a lightning strike has knocked out your internet connection? "Offline play" requires that you go online first to enable offline play.
Or what when you have so many games that they can't fit on a single disk partition?
Or what when you need newer content/patches to play online than what Steam yet offers, and you have to update the game through Steam?
And what about Steam games that add additional DRM, often conflicting
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Like letting your son play one game, while you play another?
im not sure how that is addressed maybe check the steam FAQs
Or what when a lightning strike has knocked out your internet connection? "Offline play" requires that you go online first to enable offline play.
as somebody else has stated a given game needs to be "unlocked" by going online at least once and then will fallback to offline if the network is down
Or what when you have so many games that they can't fit on a single disk partition?
so you can sp
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so you can spend several hundred dollars on games but not US$150 on a 2 TERABYTE hard drive??
2 TB isn't enough to hold all Steam games. You need a GPT partitioned RAID.
And what about notebook users? I have two 150 GB partitions on my notebook. Even if I have 100 GB free on one partition, that doesn't help if the one Steam games on is full.
I'd even be willing to install my games on different USB keys, but Steam requires you to keep all games in a single folder.
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No they do NOT require that, they even tall you how to put games in different places.
Moron.
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No they do NOT require that, they even tall you how to put games in different places.
Reference?
They only tell you hove to move your Steam folder including all games to a different place.
Users (but not "they" as in Steam) has come up with a workaround using junctions for individual games. This, of course, depends on (a) using a file system that supports junctions, and (b) still having enough free space that the game could have been installed there, so the pre-install disk space check won't fail.
Moron.
Well, at least you're polite enough to sign your posts.
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you do know that the drive im talking about is a USB PORTABLE drive so it would be well within the price range of somebody that is willing to spend a few hundred dollars on games.
point is if you are willing to spend X on games you should be willing to spend X/10 on a drive to hold the games.
(and btw if you map the network drive to a letter steam will work from a network drive)
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How about everywhen?
what about it? You can use it everywhen now. It's not like other DRM where you computer upgrade breaks the DRM.
"Like letting your son play one game, while you play another?"
agreed. They really need a home server method
"Or what when a lightning strike has knocked out your internet connection? "Offline play" requires that you go online first to enable offline play."
My test (unplug the net, boot computer play offline) did not need me to go online. I have never actually seen anyone have this
Found the partition answer, and I was right (Score:2)
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=664376 [steampowered.com]
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This is only true if there are no updates for the game. I tried playing The Witcher 2 in offline mode yesterday, but couldn't, because there's a 5 GB(!) update for it. You have to download and install all updates to all games, and then start them at least once in online mode before offline mode works for that game. Until online mode detects another update, that is.
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Some of us don't permit Steam to run automagically because it is a pig and it spies on your usage patterns. I want to be able to use my limited bandwidth and transfer allotment for other stuff, like Netflix streaming. I bought Half-Life 2 and since I can't sell it I occasionally play it. Bought Garry's Mod too, that has been disappointing because of the awful, awful UI. I don't know if that's Source's fault or what, but it just gives me a headache. Good thing it was cheap.
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The problem is that Steam doesn't care if you are limited in any way. It's abusive. Windows BITS at least tries not to use your whole connection. Okay, so it usually screws that up, but WTF Steam.
Also, Steam insists on showing me ads. That pisses me off. However trivial a waste of my time and bandwidth it is... it is. Further, when you look at an ad, it affects your brain whether you like it or not. I skip previews, I crumple up ad cards and throw them away, and I think Steam is rude for showing me updates
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Steam->Setting->Interface->Uncheck "Notify me about additions or changes to my games, new releases, and upcoming releases." No more Steam message ads!
Until I launch Steam one or two more times, and it re-checks the box "for" me, apparently. I cannot get that box to stay unchecked.
Finally, you can right click games in the library, select properties, go to the updates tab, and disable automatic games updating. That should alleviate some of your concerns.
I'll give that a shot, I haven't tried that yet.
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Perhaps I've altered settings and don't remember, but all of the games in my Steam library auto-update whenever they detect an update. Since it auto-updates, it's always been ready to go for me.
With games like The Witcher 2, where a single update is 5 GB, you have no such reassurance. Once the new update is detected, the game becomes unavailable for offline play (and offline play only) until it has finished downloading and installing.
I.e. with auto-update, if your internet connection goes south before an update has fully downloaded, you can't play that game in offline mode, even if you can play it in online mode.
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How does it know it has updates when it isn't connected to the internet?
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How does it know it has updates when it isn't connected to the internet?
Whenever you are online, and Steam detects that a game you have installed isn't up to date, it gets marked as "not up to date". If you restart in offline mode, the game is still marked as "not up to date".
This prevents offline mode from working for games until they have been fully updated. In the case of 5 GB updates like for TW2, or hundreds of games installed, that can be quite a while. It certainly prevented me from playing The Witcher 2 in offline mode, even though I had it installed.
So, simply put,
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That's the whole point of DRM/the software business model as a whole; you shouldn't be able to use the same copy twice at the same time.
What part of "your son play one game while you play another" was it you didn't understand?
You can only be logged in to a Steam account from a single computer at a time. If junior is playing Smack My Bitch 3 with his girlfriend, you can't log in for a quick game of Puppy Petting IV with yours.
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You should care. That's like saying you don't care about living in a dictatorship as long as it's a benevolent dictatorship.
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My kingdom for some points to mod you up, sir!
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I don't think you understand how (modern) Steam works. I'm guessing you haven't played it since the original Half-Life came out. "DRM"? Maybe, if by DRM you mean "a system that lets me install a game as many times as I want on as many systems as I want, syncs my save data and achievements, and allows me to play offline and forego the authentication process if I'm not connected". Yeah, really terrible DRM there, buddy.
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Having Steam for these games (which are freely available elsewhere) is like putting all your tools in one toolbox.
But what if someone steals your toolbox?!?
Then you kill them and get your toolbox back.
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None of the game clients include Steam's DRM and all of the games can be downloaded and accessed from their respective websites without having Steam installed. Steam is just offering up what's freely available elsewhere in a format that makes it easy for Steam users to find.
But hey, why let little details like that stop you from ranting about Steam's DRM and how it's ruining gaming for you.
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But Steam DRM seems pointless for online games, since online games have the DRM built-in. Ie, you can't play Champions Online without an account, there's no worries about illegally copying to game to other computers, etc. You can also get Champions Online directly from the publisher so there's no need for an extra download mechanism; in fact alternate downloads make no sense since you get all your patches directly from the publisher anyway. So it seems that Steam serves no practical value here. There is
Free to play doesnt mean free. (Score:2)
I really dont care for this business model, i dont like someone having an advantage over me in a game because they spent more money than me. Its one of the things i like about WoW, that everyone on pretty equal footing, they do have some microtransaction items, but theyre strictly vanity items and have no impact on game play. I also really like what valve has done with TF2, i think it strikes a good balance. Every item is balanced, so one is not necessarily advantageous over another in every situation, so i
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Huh? So far the only real "advantage" i have seen in f2p mmo's are that you can pay to have your character get a percentage more xp for a while. Hell, ever so often they give those away for free. Basically you are balancing time vs money. If you have the time to grind your way to the top, you can do that. If not, then you can pull out your credit card and pick up the slack that way. At the end all characters have access to the same powers and items.
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LotRO is also a hybrid. It's not pure free-to-play, it's a mixture of free-to-play and micro-transaction and subscription. The same with Dungeon and Dragons Online.
Of course paying gives you some advantage. What's amusing is when people who subscribe for $10/month complain about this because their subscription already gives them a massive advantage. "Pay to win" is irrelevant in a game that doesn't have winners and losers and where PvP is a tiny side game. But even in a cooperative game quite a lot of
No they do not (Score:2)
" Its one of the things i like about WoW, that everyone on pretty equal footing, "
False.
In some FTP games it's money v money
In other FTP games there is very little advantage. In DDO, you can buy some thing, but the power advantage is minimal. It's real power is in selling some special and interesting dungeons.
In WOW it's time v time. If you don't have the inclining to spend 4-12 hours a day playing, you will never be able to compete. By the time you just about get to the power level, there is an update and
F2P MMO's (Score:2)
Please note, these are not what GamersGate is doing which is an F2P for single player games that are ad supported:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/14/gamesgate-explain-freegames/ [rockpapershotgun.com]
This is regular F2P mmo's where the payoff for having people play for free is the community is bigger (small community and empty worlds can kill an mmo in a heartbeat). The games just seem to be promoted on steam now, not that much of a story to be honest.
do not see the point... (Score:2)
all of the mentioned games can be installed and played without touching steam. And being mmo's they are updated as needed anyways. What do Steam bring to this?
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Would you prefer they try to market their game with in-game purchases to grandmothers who are struggling to learn how to use email, and always pay in cash or check at Walmart?
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Steam brings the ability that, on the off chance you do decide to buy something in the game, you pay someone you (theoretically) already trust rather than a whole bunch of other entities.
The fact that you no longer have separate logins for these games is a plus, too... or at least you don't for Spiral Knights, the only one I've tried.
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This allows for you to have microtransactions handled by a single, relatively well trusted company, rather than having to trust your credit card info to multiple smaller ones.
This x 1000. While there are risks in having your transactions handled by a central company (hello Sony!), they are mitigated by a few factors:
If you only have CC Info with 1 company instead of 10, you only have to worry about 1 company being hacked.
On average, 1 larger company will generally have better security auditing than 10 smaller ones...especially a company like Valve.
Steam allows you to purchase, but not save CC info to the account (providing a similar level of security as prepaid points cards on
For what its worth... (Score:3, Informative)
Here's a quick overview of the Steam announced titles.
Global Agenda: Free Agent - I've been playing this for quite some time, back since it was "boxed product" that was going to be a MMO. The devs then actually had the integrity to say "You know what, monthly subscriptions aren't right for this...so we're just not going to do them." That evolved into its current state where it is actually completely free, and you can pay a $20 ONE TIME fee to be upgraded to Elite Agent status on your account (anyone with a boxed copy of the game on their account is automatically Elite) which unlocks a number of things, including speedier XP and more loot. You can also pay for name changes or buy a "booster" which further gives you 2x XP and Loot, plus so many "free" tokens every day. Amazingly for a free game, to get the best in game gear you don't have to buy or pay for anything if you don't want to. Global Agenda plays well on Linux through the use of WINE, at least in my experience. Onto the gameplay itself, mix "Planetside" with "Guild Wars" and you get a MMOTPS/FPS that is actually really, really fun. There's a lot of content available, open world "questing" areas like any other MMO...but you have to use your FPS/TPS skills to take down that enemy you need for the quest. PvE content, PVP content, and Agency vs Agency combat in a meta-game for map control of various "Hexes" on a grid. If your agency (guild) say, owns a hex and have built a special building on it that provides resources, it can be attacked by another enemy agency - 15+ members of your team teleport to an in-game instance of that hex (with special building) and you fight against 15 of the attacking enemy etc... Crafting is more accessible than ever and there's a nice amount of customization. Out of all the "shooter MMOs", I think Global Agenda is one of the best. It may not have the scale of Planetside, but it has a nice "Guild Wars + Tribes" mix that's really unlike most of what's out there, polished to a nice shine. I buy boosters just to keep this business plan viable.
Champions Online: Free For All - Cryptic, the developers from the City of Heroes team, made this "sequel" if you will, to practice for their better known MMO, Star Trek Online. One thing Cryptic does better than most other MMO developers is to make you "feel" powerful. Blasting someone with a ice beam has a real "weight to it" and you feel "super" when you deploy your batman-style grappler to swing around the map. In Champions, Free "Silver" players have a wide variety of prefab archetypes that basically include a balanced set of powers along a fixed progression. If you want to mix and match core skills, you'll need the "Gold" subscription, which is like LOTRO/DDO in that it costs the standard MMO fee monthly. Gold also allows you free access to many of the "travel powers", which silver players can purchase individually if they wish. After selecting your character's powers, you can design a costume from what is likely THE most comprehensive costuming system in a MMO to date. If you want to be a hero with a tiny green head with pointy ears, a barrel chest, red hulk hands attached to robot arms, you can do that. Silver players have a lot of the content unlocked, but there will be some that need to be unlocked with a Cryptic Points (a RMT token). Those that don't want to spend anything can have a great experience and not "fall behind", provided they don't mind losing some access to certain costumes, travel powers and a couple of the Adventure Pack zones of the game. Unlike many, you can level to the cap easily in the zones available and without buying any XP-boosters. Its a good value for Silver players and has what you'd expect from a Super Hero MMO and many of the things you may not. Works in WINE on Linux, in my experience.
Spiral Knights - Anyone play "The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventure"? Spiral Knights, made by the Puzzle Pirates developer three rings (Amazingly, one of the only devs with the balls to create guild owned pirate ships that p
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I give you all of my imaginary mod points.
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Thank you, that list of quick reviews is *very* useful.
I tried Champions last night. I've been wary of the title because of the bad blood between it and my beloved City of Heroes, but I thought that if I didn't need to give Cryptic any money it couldn't hurt to get a taste of the game. My first impression is that it's not bad but it breaks immersion in all the wrong ways. There's too much complication in game mechanics that should be simple (the dizzying variety of equipment that doesn't seem to have any
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You can also directly enter the ASCII code on most keyboards (in Windows at least) by holding alt while punching in the base 10 number. For example [alt]156[/alt] yields: "£."
I don't do a lot of currencies much, so I'm not using £, ¥, etc... often, but I do use some of the Greek letters on a daily basis - particularly mu (who wants to use the letter "u" when you can use "" (230))*. "" and "ß" (224, and 225 respectively) are of occasional use. The fractions for "½", and "¼"
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not sure what'll get through, but we'll try -
alt-0230: æ æ (that 'ae' character)
alt-0181: µ (mu)
alt-0176: ° (degrees)
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On a Mac (US Keyboard) you can just press option-3 :P You can do a lot of other things using option- or shift-option- including some cool stuff like umlauts (option-u) where when you do an umlaut, it highlights a freefloating umlaut yellow indicating you can type the following character you expect to display under it so typing option-u and then a gives ä which I don't even think appears in a language (if slashdot chokes, the character it gives is literraly a lowercase a with an umlaut).
Also I'm not sur
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It does exist im dumb Wikipedia has an article on it but Slashdot can't handle "Ä" in a url so yeah.
Re:I dont think free means free here (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the subscription model is going to decline severely the more games that exist which are FTP. I would not be surprised if even Blizzard is starting to see their subscriber numbers dip and are beginning to wonder what to do about it. Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
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Maybe it means WOW will eventually go FTP, or a successor title will.
Not while they're under Activision. Even if they weren't tied to Activision, I doubt Blizzard would make such a move. They've got plenty of users and the number of attrition doesn't quite alarm them, yet I'm sure. (There are still millions of players worldwide.) I imagine if they had to start reducing the number of servers down to about the 10+/- range, then they'd start to worry.
Having said that, I've let my subscription to WoW lapse recently and indefinitely. It was a fun game, but if I'm paying a
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Their hand is going to be forced on the matter whether they like it or not. WOW apparently lost 600,000 subscribers since last year which is a drop of 5.5% or ~ $108 million in revenue. I don't think they can sustain their current model if subscribers continue to drop like that.
Well, 5 percent in six months is certainly something to be concerned about, but the overhead drops almost as quickly as the income, so in eight or nine years, their $2,000,000,000/year cash cow will be breaking even. I don't think they need to worry quite yet.
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The problem with these one off purchase games with online play, is that most of them don't release the server code and force you to play on their servers... And if they are not making any ongoing revenue, they have very little incentive to keep the servers running - and the online play mode of the game becomes useless once the servers are shut down.
Warcraft is a bit better since your paying for a service so they have an incentive to keep it running, but i do resent being expected to purchase the game *and*
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But concerning physical, the very fact that you can purchase a physical title for 30% less than it is on steam including middleman's cut and P&P more or less highlights the point what a scam the store is
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"But concerning physical, the very fact that you can purchase a physical title for 30% less than it is on steam including middleman's cut and P&P more or less highlights the point what a scam the store is. Even Portal 2 was cheaper by 30% than it was online."
what the hell are you smoking?
I paid 10 bucks for the Orange box on steam.
Postal 2 was 5 bucks cheaper then nay B&M
I have about 100 games, and 3 of them did I pay more then 10 bucks for. I regularly get gamers cheaper. Steam is always having a s
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For example Duke Nukem Forever is €49.99 on Steam and €33.99 on Play.com, 32% cheaper. Dungeon Siege is €49.99
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The hate for steam most likely comes from the fact that Steam the service is tied to Steam the store. It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles.
Right. Why let knowledge and research ruin a good argument.
You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
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You do know that prices on Steam are set by the publisher not Valve, right? At best, Valve picks times for sales. They don't set prices. Want to complain about high prices? Throw those complaints at the publishers.
Oh stop with this bullshit please. Valve's own games sell for 30% less in retail even when they must manufacture a box & DVD, ship it to a retailer, the retailer takes their cut, and things like returns / unsold stock must be taken into account. 30% cheaper and the bloody games ending up using Steam anyway.
The price of games on Steam is pure greed and Valve is as guilty as every other publisher. Why aren't they setting an example? Valve is in strong a position to change the landscape but they choose
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"Furthermore, why should publishers be in such a strong position to dictate prices anyway? In physical retail they can recommend an RRP / MSRP but they cannot enforce it and merchants will sell somewhere between the MSRP and their wholesale prices"
true,. They also have the right to not let someone sell the game. SO if you don't play ball, you loose out next time.
And in most cases, it's fixed for a period of time.
That said, competition still occurs, it's just on the value add side. i.e. free crap.
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It's rapidly becoming a monopoly on the PC
I can think of about half a dozen other digital download services for PCs and I spend more money on one of those than I do with Steam. So I can't see where there 'monopoly' comes from.
and that reflects in the stupid prices it commands for titles.
That's true. Thanks to Steam sales I rarely pay more than $5 for a game these days; and because Steam is so popular, other sites have to compete with similar sales.
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I'd prefer a disk check (Score:2)
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Microsoft, for all its faults, recognized this eons ago with directx.
There's a certain irony here, as from what I remember, DirectX was introduced to make it so you could run the same programs on Windows 95 and Windows NT4 without running into compatibility issues.
Then apparently Microsoft realized they weren't limited to just application stuff, and thus Direct3D was added in DirectX 2.0. Unfortunately, it was inferior to OpenGL until at least DirectX 6, which is likely why most games you run into don't support DirectX less than 7.
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It was more about driver abstraction than cross-platform, although DirectX on NT was a necessary step to abandoning Win9x. It wasn't really reliable until Windows 2000, which also became the basis of the Xbox OS (pretty much just the kernel and some key libraries.) The few graphics programmers I know personally said Direct3D was fairly offensive to use until 9; in my personal experience it became tolerable from the user's POV about 7 as you say. Most games you run into don't support DirectX less than 7 beca