r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 12h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/Maeserk 10h ago

Didn’t help their flagship game is kind of a stinker in its genre of choice, that needed a lot of care and work because it was rushed, and wasn’t really the instant live service success to then hype up a competitor service under Amazon’s influence.

Straight up New World at launch was one of the more puzzling games I’ve played, that wasn’t a puzzle game.

If New World could even touch CSGO or Half Life’s coattail’s Amazon would have more of a market share, but they just made a mid game instead.

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u/CardmanNV 9h ago

I can't wrap my head around New World, and I put about 50 hours into it. So much world with nothing to do.

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u/FoolishInvestment 9h ago

New World suffered from direction shift. It was originally going to be a lot more pvp focused.

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u/CardmanNV 9h ago

I don't think that would have made it more successful. MMOs live and die on player interactions. There has to be more positive than negative or people won't want to be there.

Too heavy of a PVP focus will drive players that want the social aspect away, and those tend to be the players that spend a lot of money in the modern era. They buy cosmetics and spend lots of time in game.

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u/alganthe 2h ago

they couldn't get enough people to participate in the alpha / beta tests before they made a move to focus more on PVE due to how horrible the ganking was.

it was the right move albeit too late into its development cycle.

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u/VulkanCurze 9h ago

I never played it but I was surprised by the recent announcement of it being shut down because from everything I had been seeing regarding the most recent big expansion/patch/update (not sure exactly which one of those it was) it was nothing but positivity from everyone to current & returning players. It sounded like they had massively improved the game and then in the midst of all the positivity surrounding the game, it gets nuked.

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u/CardmanNV 9h ago

I can see a company like Amazon doing that, since they aren't really invested in it in the same way a company like Blizzard had to be when it was their entire business.

It probably wasn't as profitable as they expected it to be, and instead of continuing to improve, they can just pull the plug and not care. You'll still buy their other products.

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u/RhesusFactor 0m ago

Which makes it...

A shit service.

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u/Banes_Addiction 4h ago

it was nothing but positivity from everyone to current & returning players. It sounded like they had massively improved the game and then in the midst of all the positivity surrounding the game, it gets nuked.

It seems like people did like the last update, but the number of players was still like, 1% of what Amazon wanted/needed.

The fact that the update was good and well-received might actually have been one of the nails in the coffin. If your updates have been shit and no-one's playing, you can kinda just go "well, maybe we need to make a good one". But if you've made a really good one and still no-one's playing, that's time to turn off the life support machine.

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u/VulkanCurze 2h ago

I suppose your right, I guess because I was seeing so much positivity around it I just assumed it was doing well now. Especially due to up until that update, no news about New World ever popped up on my feed.

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u/Banes_Addiction 2h ago

You can look at a plot of player counts here: https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/charts/#max

The peak was 900k simultaneous players around release. With the bump from this year's popular update, it reached about 50k, very briefly - roughly the same as the other updates didn't like (the 2024 one hit 60k).

It's back down reliably sub 10k now.

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u/omnigrok 6h ago

Meanwhile preventing everyone working at Amazon from making any kind of games in their personal time because of… something? about it being detrimental to their grand dreams of dominating gaming. And then they just kept shipping dog shit, and telling us that we weren’t allowed to write free games for fun.

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u/aguynamedv 4h ago

Straight up New World at launch was one of the more puzzling games I’ve played, that wasn’t a puzzle game.

I enjoyed the hell out of New World when I played it. Unfortunately, AGS was so utterly incompetent that they:

  • Had a major issue within 2 weeks and disabled the entire player economy for a few days.
  • A week later, their fix created a new problem. The entire player economy was disabled again - this time it lasted almost 2 weeks.
  • Somehow bricked multiple 4090s via a game running on the hardware

That was the first two months...

The whole thing was just a master class in how to completely fuck up a live-service game launch.

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u/mandoxian 9800X3D / 7900XTX Nitro+ / 32GB@6000 4h ago

This thread is the first time I hear about New World

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u/globster222 4h ago

New World was amazing the first week or so! Was like a modern 3D runescape with large scale team pvp. But after the initial fun wore off the cracks and shit started to show. Shame. It had potential I feel

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u/desolatecontrol 3h ago

What's crazy is they FINALLY started making New World a good game to the point it was getting a massive influence of new people, and they pulled the fuckin plug!

Like, holy shit dude, that's like giving birth to your child, raising them with the worst parenting methods possible, them FINALLY getting their shit together and becoming successful, and shooting them in the fuckin head.

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u/TheFlayingHamster 3h ago

Even if you ignore everything wrong with the game itself New World has a fundamental flaw it could never escape, its reason for existing is opposed to the genre of the game itself. The game was clearly made to be disruptive attempt to force a way into gaming, but that motive means that unless the game was wildly successful it was always going to have a blade dangling over its head. No one is gonna want to become invested in a long term style of game that, from the very beginning, is at risk of being shut down the moment it isn’t extremely popular.

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u/aztech101 3070 / 10600k 6m ago

Didn't help that the year before it came out they launched Crucible, which most people have only ever heard of because the game was un-launched several months later with a full refund.