Seeing as I work in a municipal building, it's a bit unnerving to see this.

I lost my hype when they fucked off to Epic. While I enjoyed the first couple games, I have no desire to play Exodus, or anything published by Deep Silver, after that anti-consumer bullshit. Even when it comes back to Steam or others next year, I really don't care about it anymore. Same goes for any game that starts off being available on multiple open storefronts that gets bought out exclusively by Epic. I absolutely refuse to support the behavior.

Until then, I was pretty excited for it. 4A are outstanding devs, and their publisher turned me away forever. If they get a new publisher that doesn't shit on customers like that, I may get excited about their games again.

Can't say much without being labelled as a fanboy or shill on this topic, but it's disappointing that poor business behavior and anti-consumer practices are being rewarded by the largest chunk of the consumer base -- the ones that don't give a shit about their rights and just go wherever the games go. Can't fault them for just wanting to play the games they want to play I guess, but the precedent is being set for the future to look more like a shitshow on PC like it has been on consoles where you have no choice but to use the only service available without choice, whether it does anything to safeguard your information or provide meaningful features, or just says "**** it, we got your money anyway, who cares."

The amount of times I see Steam = monopoly and monopoly = bad getting thrown around in this debate since it started continues to show that people arguing don't understand what's going on and why so many are against it. Literally from the FTC's site:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined

"Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns."

Valve does not make exclusive deals with third-party developers or publishers to keep products exclusive to their platform, whereas Epic is paying publishers and developers (often at the last second to release) to only publish to their platform, the literal definition of exclusive. Should they become the market dominator (like Steam is now) through what they're doing, it's legally an anti-trust monopoly violation. Doing business with Epic means only doing business with Epic, whereas doing business with Valve, or CDProjekt, or any other distribution platform, is one of many options available to them. If a publisher only publishes the distribution of their product to Steam, that does not prevent them from also generating keys and selling them elsewhere (cutting out Valve's 25-30% through the sale entirely), nor does it disallow them the ability to publish on any other platform at any time.

Whatever though, "cry more PC gamers" is all proponents for Epic ever do when people raise concern over Epic's exclusionary behavior in the market, so that's all I expect as a response. All I can do as a consumer is not support Epic, the publishers, or the developers that do this, because I don't agree with it. I will miss out on games I was originally excited to play (Exodus, Maneater), and it's highly unlikely that losing my support will even remotely dent these entities. Didn't stop EA from going Origin only, or Ubisoft from going...still uPlay, but now you can only get them on Epic + uPlay instead of uPlay + everywhere in order to entice people to go exclusively uPlay, which is almost brilliant I guess? But that's my choice as a consumer to do. Oh well for me, I'm the loser in the situation, and Epic will likely win, because the majority will support them because they don't care about the things I do.

When EA started taking their stuff off and went to Origin only, I stopped getting EA games (not like there was much of a reason to anyway though).

When Ubisoft started making all their games launch UPlay, I pretty much stopped buying them. I'll make rare exceptions though, since they're still available on Steam itself.

Ever since I quit WoW a decade ago, I never felt the need to play anything on Blizznet.

So in conclusion, anyone that bails on Steam is unlikely to get much business from me in the future. Same way companies bailing on Netflix to make their own streaming service are now on my don't-give-a-shit list. Fragmentation of content across multiple services only serves to annoy customers and cause an uptick in piracy or alternative sources. To be fair, I was ticked off about Half-Life 2 needing Steam way back in the day too. Having a whole platform for one fucking game? But once they took off and got everything under the sun in one place, and my library grew and grew, the advantages became obvious. Splitting everything up again after so long is not advantageous to anyone, customer or publisher. Who would want to download a Bethesda.net app on their PS4 or XBox, then download games and start it through that instead of it just being on PSN or XBL? Steam won PC distribution long ago, and unless someone else reaches that level of offerings, then exclusivity will only hurt individual companies. GOG seems to be about the only decent (and somewhat superior) competitor to Steam.

Tully's Hawaiian Blend + hazelnut creamer.

Xenogears and Silent Hill 2.

Storytelling is one thing, story itself is another. They may not have had the best storytelling, but they had a unique story that really wasn't done before or since. So many games these days rely on extremely high production values to amazingly tell a dull, boring story. I can appreciate them for different reasons, but I wouldn't consider most modern games to have an amazing storyline.

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth.

I have six figures to brag about financially.

But I'm not very attractive, and though I'm not inexperienced sexually, there's not much to brag about there as far as I know.

So, money. Too bad neither aspect is contributing to my happiness at this point in life.

Annihilation.

I've seen some complaints about it, but overall I enjoyed the wonderful imagery and the tension when it delved into the horror spectrum. That bear, man.

The article is accurate -- I don't remember anything about the storyline at all. I do remember it being quite unique and overall pretty cool. If I recall, blue weapons like SMGs and automatic weapons accumulated "temporary" damage rapidly which was only committed as true damage by red weapons like pistols and heavy arms? The gun mods got overly insane as well. Also something about trapping enemies in a triangle between your units.

Dunno, but Tri-Ace tends to have some of the more unique/complicated JRPG battle systems.