As you mention Humble Bundle I don't know if you're aware of the latest developments:
Class action lawsuit against Valve/Steam
hbarkas 17d
Kuang Grade Mark Eleven
8Wolfire Games, LLC
(in case you don't know: " The Humble Bundle concept was initially run by Wolfire Games in 2010, but by its second bundle, the Humble Bundle company was spun out to manage the promotion, payments, and distribution of the bundles. In October 2017, the company was acquired by Ziff Davis through its IGN Entertainment subsidiary, though operates as a separate subsidiary. " https://wiki2.org/en/Humble_Bundle)
is filing a class action lawsuit against Valve/Steam complaining about their monopolistic business pratices. If you're interested in any of their games move fast as they might be removed from the Steam store as a retaliation on Valve's side.
" Of those sales, approximately 75% flow through the online storefront of a single company, Valve. Valve’s online game store, the “Steam Store,” dominates the distribution of PC games. And Valve uses that dominance to take an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store—30%. This 30% commission yields Valve over $6billion dollars in annual revenue. For everyone else, it yields higher prices and less innovation. "
and further down
" For example, Valve has set up visibility in its Steam Store to focus on games that are nominally “on sale” to gamers. Knowing that the best way to reach their audience is through discounting, game publishers must artificially inflate their list prices so they have headroom for discounting. But the “sale” price is not consistently available, and therefore some gamers pay an artificially inflated list price for the game. These supracompetitive prices increase Valve’s cut, force gamers to overpay, and prevent publishers from setting the most efficient game prices theycould in the first place. Even worse, these supracompetitive prices are transmitted across the broader market by the contractual restraints discussed above.*
Please discuss
@Cap.Lazorface WF hired Quinn Emanuel so they mean serious business and seem to have the money for a top law firm. They claim Valve dominates the market with a 75% market share.
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Well, Wolfire games is right now not related to Humble, since they sold the company to IGN
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That's exactly what I wrote. Nonetheless Wolfire founded Humble Bundle and many feared in 2017 already the acquisition by Ziff Davis wouldn't improve Humble Bundle. On the other hand Wolfire got a lot of money which will be necessary if they want to stand a chance in the coming lawsuit.
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Was there a sale of one of these major sites or some other major event that made the bundle sites so much less enticing than they used to be?
Hm... not sure what you remember before going to cryosleep but here's some stuff that happened.
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"The one with new game on sale every week and coins and black hole once a year went into some changes and... died? I dunno."
-That was Chrono.gg. I read on their website when they were shutting down and they said something about wanting to focus on the company's next project full time and so they no longer had the time/resources to keep it going. I just can't remember what that next venture was, whether it was a new digital game store or their own game or something... I'm drawing a total blank on that one.
As for Greenlight, I wasn't sad to see it go. I kinda consider that the beginning of the problem. Back in the day, before everything was on Steam, games on the service were quality games, they didn't have garbage games on Steam and most all new releases were at least worth taking a look at. And then Greenlight started and it kind of opened the floodgates and now good games don't always get noticed because they are buried underneath so many other releases of trash.
One question though, has that $100 fee always been the same price? I might be wrong but for some reason I remembered that amount being higher. Was it initially and since been lowered or am I misremembering?
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And yeah I wasn't playing anything or buying anything but the whole Epic Store and how it was stealing away exclusives and trying to set itself up as a major competitor to Steam was a big enough story for me to hear about it in the main stream news.
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"Bundles are dying out because everyone has so many games we're collectors not gamers now" is a great summary of it all. As they say, too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and our poor bundle websites could not keep up with the insatiable demand... like a car, as soon as a game leaves the car lot into the bundle highway it losses most of its value... and since there's only a finite amount of quality titles released each year... the bundles dry up, while our libraries grow exponentially into oblivion. Remember the excitement over the release of competing bundles, with multiple tiers and multiple media? We over-cultivated the bundle fields, and damaged the soils fertility. Soon enough a desert will span over this arid gaming landscape with only our dusting, forgotten libraries to keep us company.
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Punkbuster is still in some games and is still hated and labeled by those who know as being a trojan (It is an anti-cheat program that runs on Windows OS boot, can access every part of your hdd, can screenshots anywhere anytime that can be uploaded to the public net, constantly monitors your HDD, ram, etc whether you are in game or not, and not easily removed or worked around--they removed the uninstall tool from the website.)
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I've been trying to remember the name of a program I used to use for uninstalling and then removing all remnants of programs I wanted to get rid of, and it even included a little tool where your cursor would turn into a set of crosshairs and help to remove malware that tried hard to disguise its name and location. This uninstaller would find it, run the standard uninstall if it was working, remove all traces of it on the HDD if it wasn't working, and then go to town on the registry and ,,,,,
REVO! That's what it was called. Anytime you find yourself with another malicious program that just doesn't want to leave and you can't find an uninstall tool specific to that app, try REVO, if you haven't heard of it and tried it already.
I never had problems with Bundlestarts but then I don't remember what my past encounters with Punkbuster involved if I had any. I never had any issues with Stardock's Impulse, but then it was sold off and now redownloading the games I paid them for is not worth the trouble. The same goes for Direct2Drive which ironically used the slogan that said something along the lines of "buy now, own forever."
Epic Games might be snatching up some big name exclusives, but if you're like me, you wait long enough for a decent sale for 99.999% of all titles, and for the big AAA games, that's about the same time that the exclusivity lasts.
My problem isnt so much with the other services leaving, it's with how shabby HB, IG, Fanatical, and all the rest (what rest?) have become.
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Thank you for reminding me of revo! The problem is that steam reinstalls PB for steam games that have it if you verify files.
Now, most everything doesn't use PB anymore, and my commenting re PB wasn't a dig on Bundlestars at all.
Yes, i wait until things are on ~70+% off before i consider it.
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I don't think only the bundle sites are to blame. The concept had its long-term flaws right from the beginning, just noone cared, because it was new and shiny. Niche and indie developers/publishers reached way more players than before, some became even hits after bundle buyers did buzz marketing. Players got their wanted and additional games pretty cheap. The bundle sites grew and a few actually stayed profitable.
Maybe some people foresaw that there would be a little gifting/trading, but not the grey market. Back in the good ol' bundle days there were like more than 10 bundle sites, while only G2A and Kinguin as grey market. Now there are like 5 (malfunctioning) bundle sites, but more than a dozen keysellers. Now devs don't want to get their games bundled anymore, because they fear that the grey market devalues them for good instead of bundle duration. Bundle sites can't convince as many devs as often to offer good quality bundles regularly (if they ever cared about it) and even non-collectors have 1-5k games in their library and cry "Repeats" on each bundle release.
Tl;dr: the bundle bubble popped a while ago.
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Ever hear the song "My City Was Gone"? The lyric goes, "I went Back to Ohio, but my city was gone." It kinda got ruined for people when a very polarizing radio host began using it as their show's theme song, but regardless, the message of the song is an important one and relatable for anyone, more or less about the old saying that you can't go home again and how sometimes when you live somewhere and love it, it becomes a memorable setting for one of the chapters in your life and sometimes when you try to revisit places like that they are unrecognizable and have changed more for the worse than the better.
Sorry to open with an analogy (or digression or whatever the best word to use here would be) but that's kind of how I feel about how drastically things have changed over the last few years, especially for someone like me for whom the changes weren't subtle and over time but were more instant because of my absence.
The bundle sites have gone way down hill. Humble Bundle had to run out of new games to bundle eventually but the quality of games bundled, the value of each bundle based on price, and the frequency that new bundles start have all gone down drastically. Indie Gala was my own personal favorite and although it might not have had the same level of games that HB had in terms of notoriety, I found myself buy from them more often because of how many new bundles they were always launching and how often many of them would contain mid-tier games that I was interested in. Now they only seem to feature shovel ware and the only redeeming feature of their site is their store which offers decent sales but which I don't really see myself using all that often. Bundle Stars changed to Fanatical and seems to have slightly improved but still has bundles that no one is in a rush to buy and that have no apparent deadline in sight. Chrono.gg is gone, Groupees is gone for all intents and purposes, and DIG still limps on selling the same kind of games they've always sold.
Lots of things hit the trading and giveaway communities pretty hard before I left for awhile, the end of Steam Gift copies of games, the crash of the TF2 trading market, region locking of games and the crackdown on 3rd party sellers, but what else happened that I may have missed? I think I read that IGN bought HB? I know Gamestop bought one of the now defunct digital games sights and killed it. IGN bought gamerankings.com and then shut it down and may have sold it to metacritic which is where you get redirected to if you still try to go there.
Was there a sale of one of these major sites or some other major event that made the bundle sites so much less enticing than they used to be? Or was it just a matter of time before a finite amount of games resulted in an end to new bundles? Or a combination of what I talked about above all adding up and having an impact over time.
EDIT:
Here's a couple of GA's that no longer have any contributor value so I'm only making them so long. If no one enters or only a few people oh well.
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/usZic/psychonauts
https://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/mi6Cw/brutal-legend
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