Steam's New Indie Festival Lets You Try 40 Upcoming Games For Free (theverge.com) 43
The Steam Game Festival is returning for a spring edition starting today, featuring more than 40 indie games you can preview with free-to-play demos. The Verge reports: Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards executive producer and host, first announced the event yesterday on Twitter, saying it was put together to help feature games from indie developers who lost the opportunity to demo their titles at the now-canceled GDC, which was to take place this week in San Francisco. The Steam Game Festival will run from March 18th to March 23rd. The collection features games from a number of the more well-known indie demo day events, many of which participate every year at GDC. That includes Indie MegaBooth and The Mix, as well as smaller events like Day of the Devs and Wings Fund.
Oh great (Score:1)
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I didn't know they stacked shit that high.
You have obviously never been to San Francisco :)
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Nice display of ignorance there. There are many indie games on the market far more fun and better made than a lot of AAA garbage.
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Demos? (Score:1)
So, a game having demos is news now? Back in the day it was EXPECTED they'd give you something to try before buying!
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It was expected, but that trend slowly died. There are still games with demo (even on steam) but it's far from the norm now.
Which is sad, because with today's way to access digital content, going from "demo" to "buying the full thing" can happen with a few clicks; making a demo version is almost free advertising.
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Demos are bad for sales. Here's why [youtube.com].
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These are pre-release versions designed to showcase aspects of the game and generate a level of publicity so that when the game releases, the developers can get some sales.
The newsworthiness comes in part because it's a dedicated event designed to promote a range of independent developers. The demos offer a reason for the public to engage with the event as a whole.
Steam Bad (Score:3, Informative)
Steam sucks, they force bad game upgrades and prevent you from choosing which version to run. You know the one right before the game is crippled to sell DLC, or made more grindy to sell pay to win items or alter privacy conditions to make them worse, agree or they block you from playing the game, long after you bought it. Steam is shite forcing bad patches on their customers.
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They allow me to try games before I buy, and often have sales where games are heavily discounted, enabling me to play many games I might not have been able to afford otherwise.
If my drive dies, I will be able to reinstall the games I have purchased, without having to pay again.
Steam is great.
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You know you get those things in every digital store right? Even console digital stores offer you that nowadays.
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Yeah the GP's expectations are low. How many other "stores" provide remote streaming, cross play between two PCs on the same game, forums per game, a place to create and publish user generated guides, a workshop system for complete mod management both for modders and for players, and an entire VR platform that is API compatible with other platforms (if you're into that like I am)?
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Not sure about PC, but to be fair, the Xbox at least isn't bad in that area (in some ways ahead), though the Switch and PS4 aren't quite there. For example, you can play digitally bought Xbox games on more than one console. I don't play Xbox anymore really and pretty much purely play PC now, but games bought digitally like Diablo 3 always worked just as well on mine and my wife's console together.
Similarly Xbox has the concept of clubs that can be linked to games with calendars and such for club gaming sess
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It is the game Publishers that force this sort of bullshit on gamers. Again, it is the Publishers that would have a hissy fit if Steam allowed earlier versions to co-exist with later 'undesirable' versions. That would lead to all sorts of incompatibilities for co-op / multi-player games.
The gamers get the short straw on this. Publishers have a lot of clout. Single gamers or even vociferous groups of gamers have very little influence.
Steam isn't the one responsible when a Publisher decides to change the EULA
Re: Steam Bad (Score:1)
HumbleBundle and GOG don't force you to update games. And you can backup and hang onto old versions as long as you'd like. They don't have all the games that Steam has, but there is a significant overlap in their catalogs.
Re: Steam Bad (Score:2)
Aren't most humblebundle games sold as steam keys?
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That appears to no longer be possible.
You can turn off automatic updates only until you launch the game, so not terribly helpful.
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Steam sucks, they force bad game upgrades and prevent you from choosing which version to run.
Welcome to 2020 where games are required to be at the latest version because everything is online, and Steam users are too clueless to figure out how to use the console to download any version of the game they choose.
I play a lot of Beat Saber. Updates break mods. Therefore I run an old outdated version 1.6. You can do that with any game on Steam, downloading any version ever released directly from Steam. All you have to do is Google how. Steamdb.info is a site which can give you the download IDs.
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Steam sucks, they force bad game upgrades and prevent you from choosing which version to run.
Welcome to 2020 where games are required to be at the latest version because everything is online, and Steam users are too clueless to figure out how to use the console to download any version of the game they choose.
I play a lot of Beat Saber. Updates break mods. Therefore I run an old outdated version 1.6. You can do that with any game on Steam, downloading any version ever released directly from Steam. All you have to do is Google how. Steamdb.info is a site which can give you the download IDs.
Unfortunately many older steam verisons of games breaks and care no longer supported by the devs, deep rock galactic had a major update and luckily enough I had made a copy of the original game files in a directory in case the developers cocked up. And low and behold they programmed the game in such a way that they have steam to check to see if you're running an old version and it errors out. AKA you can't revert back to an old version.
This is what was better about the 90's and mid 2000's when you got hon
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Steam lets you install old versions of games as long as the developers themselves have whitelisted the old version. For example, with Civ4, they did an update that removed the GameSpy integration when that crashed and migrated over to Steamworks so you can play online using Steam's backend instead. That's useful if you, you know, want to keep playing online multiplayer without having to fuck with IP addresses. However
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Sorry, rather, "when that went under."
Couldn't I just watch the youtube video (Score:2)
it would probably be as useful as a crippled demo that made me install Steam.
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that made me install Steam
If you don't already have Steam then why not see if your other store of choice is offering something similar? GoG is. Do you have Gog?
Forget Steam (Score:3, Interesting)
I have mostly avoided using them.
Steam is everything wrong with the market. DRM on multiple levels. You do not own the game by any conceivable measure at all.
For example... I bought Final Fantay 7 a long time ago. Had no trouble playing it... then one day recently I went to play it... wham... I had to register with Square Enix to play the fucking thing. This should be illegal. I only paid $2.49 for it so I guess I didn't lose out much but they can kiss my arse, just like Stardock.
Buy on GOG. It's the only way to send the proper message. There you can still manage your version to some degree. Though GOG Galaxy itself is a form of DRM too.
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Yes, buy on GOG/alternative DRM-free if possible. Note the emphasis.
Publishers and developers decide where the game go. They also decide what happens with their content. It seems you're blaming steam from "locking you out" of a game when the change clearly came from the publisher/devs of the game. They're the one who decide what goes in which upgrade.
Steam does two things: provide some level of DRM (even if it is one of the least intrusive I know, it's still DRM), and ensure that you always have the la
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"It seems you're blaming steam from "locking you out" of a game when the change clearly came from the publisher/devs of the game."
You have some fair points but this is the "following orders" defense and is not valid. You cannot participate in doing wrong because that was the only choice you felt you have. It is wrong of developers to change certain things like the Sony Other OS and is likely illegal if people and prosecutors cared enough to really look into it. There should be a law that if a developer c
I treat Steam like a rental service (Score:2)
Re:Forget Steam (Score:4)
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Also, I don't really think it's the end of the world to register a free account to launch a game. I registered an account with them a long time ago and I've never gotten any emails from Square that I didn't solicit. If you're really paranoid,
In other news (Score:4, Interesting)
Good Old Games has 27 games for free right now.
https://www.gog.com/partner/st... [gog.com]
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And the Epic games store has 3. You know, because Steam is a monopoly that's killing the industry, no other companies exist, and Epic is going to save PC gaming! /sarcasm.
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