The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon. Bundles are also on the roadmap. At the end of the day though, what’s the main benefit of a bundle? It’s the discount, right? I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now). For some countries, Epic also offers significantly better base prices compared to Steam. It still supports the Turkish and Argentinian currencies and presumably has specific price guidelines for those as well, compared to Steam having removed those options. I also remember Epic talking about supporting more regional currencies compared to Steam. From looking at the documentation now, it’s 37 on Steam and 43 on Epic.

Regarding the app, I disagree. It was very convenient to have everything in one place (which Steam fans should understand, given their reluctance to use a different launcher) and I used the chat feature all the time, but after Valve separated them, I just got tired of switching and ended up not installing the chat app after resetting my phone OS. Sometimes I need to message a friend, but I feel like the effort of installing it and logging in is not worth it for those occasions.

People love to bash Epic and list all the (often redundant) things Steam is ahead in, but nobody mentions the ways in which Epic is ahead. Something as simple as being able to chat with your friends is no longer a feature of the mobile Steam client, but if Epic sticks to the roadmap, their app will allow that. It also makes me think of how despite so many years of existence, Steam still doesn’t allow to add game editions to your wishlist, while Epic has allowed that from the start. It was also the first to introduce a custom value field for downloads throttling, before Steam followed suit.

I’m not even sure if it’s love. When something is all you’ve known, you just view everything else as strange and inferior. When you have so many games and have had so many experiences on Steam, the cognitive dissonance of accepting that Valve is quite problematic could be hard to bear. Knowing that everybody around you praises Steam, with many turning to rage or even harassment when they see competitors like Epic, the fear of being ostracized and ending up in the same position as those competitors is also a strong factor at play.

I even got to downvote that back then!

cultivates chill working culture

Seriously?

“Influencing” is putting it mildly. Funding organizations with political power is a lot more than that.

Let Doechii do it for you 😛

If it does “flop”, they undoubtedly would chalk it up to it being inclusive and diverse though. Otherwise they just quickly move on to the next target.

Very true. I have its history tracking disabled, but it still suggests those videos or creators even when I’m watching something that has no relation to outrage, like a movie trailer or a GDC talk like one on Unreal Engine.

just agitators who don’t even play these games.

Duh, however, they get millions of views across YouTube and X and hundreds of thousands of followers on Steam.

Searching for Dustborn on YouTube is the best way to get introduced to those channels.

They won’t stop supporting 10 unless its use drops significantly. They’d not shoot themselves in the foot.

It was the opposite of a useful or helpful stance. For the countries that got the events, it was performative. For the countries that didn’t get them, it was contributing to the problem by telling people they aren’t welcome. Even doing nothing is better than that, which is why I’d rather play any other game.

You’re basically resorting to the perfect solution fallacy. The reality is that even my Naraka example shows it can be done better, though there are even better examples, like Apex Legends that didn’t mind greeting everyone with the trans flag at one point.

At the end of the day, even if the motives are not genuine, sending a strong and universal message has an impact, as does accurate representation. Many LGBTQ+ people will see it as validating, anybody on the fence will get closer to accepting it as normal, while those who hate will see that their views aren’t embraced. What certainly doesn’t help is showing people that there is a Pride event but not in their country, suggesting their existence is viewed as second-class.

I quit Overwatch after hundreds of hours due to Blizzard’s performative support of the LGBTQ+ community. Limiting the Pride events to countries where it sells while excluding others, some of which are in the EU and don’t even have any laws that would prohibit that, means Blizzard couldn’t care less about the most oppressed.

Funnily, NetEase is better on that front in that its rainbow-colored mountain background in Naraka coinciding with Pride was global. Hopefully Rivals follows suit.

That’s Jason Citron for you.

Yeah, no swastika yet.

Jubilee is a part of the same pipeline. See this for example.

Short of the introductory scenes that teach you to avoid using the special abilities, I can’t think of a case of the protagonist being manipulative in a negative way. It’s worth noting that she can be as bad as the player though, if they decide to interrupt people and use her powers to the same end.

To your second point, there are enough examples of Justice being bad, like their officers talking about arresting people purely out of being annoyed, being kinda racist (e.g. saying that two Black individuals must be siblings, then to themselves wondering if that’s racist), going after a little girl for having special powers, experimenting on people, persecuting all people with special powers and regularly calling them deviants (all while claiming to promote diversity), trying to arrest peaceful protesters, and so on.

I wouldn’t agree with the assessment of the main characters being a-holes. Maybe in the carefully cut clips devoid of the full context.

In the first scenes, the protagonist is indeed somewhat mean to her crew, but the game immediately tells you as much, to show you that abusing the special abilities, Vox, is not a good idea. From there, it’s up to the player whether to listen to every dialogue to the end or to interrupt, whether to avoid using the charged Vocals or to use them frequently. Going by the post-chapter stats at the end of one particular chapter, most players choose to avoid them at least in that instance.