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Black Ops 4 (PC) is available exclusively on Battle.net [Port by Beenox]
- Thread starter Lackless
- Start date
Yup. I think that's really cool. Idk why more devs don't list their games on both Steam and on their own websites. Maybe even have the price marked down just a bit from the Steam store price to entice people to buy it straight from the dev.
Yes, if the revenue was the issue none of these storefronts would sell via traditional retailers like Amazon.
Its pretty likely minus retail cut, product manager wages, and distribution costs these titles make less revenue than they would have outsourcing the whole thing to steam.
As I said upthread, although this obviously doesnt apply to the CODs of the world, an indie selling direct via their own website might earn more revenue per copy, but the publicity value of being featured as a steam best seller is worth significantly more overall, to the extent there have been examples of devs asking people to buy from steam instead of directly from them.
I'm really curious for your list of features and services that Battle.net has but Steam doesn't. This should be an easy question for you since Valve is being lazy. :)
Lazy?
- Universal controller support.
- Family sharing.
- Achievements.
- Steam Link.
- Android and iOS streaming app.
- Big Picture mode.
- Refunds, no questions asked.
- Steam sales.
- Most games in one library.
- Screenshots, forums, community, mods.
- Upcoming new client and new Big Picture mode.
- They are working on VR, announced and unannounced games.
What do Battle.net have to offer?
But they would likely sell more copies on Steam, so I'm not sure it really is a win.
No cheating. It's a plague on cod ww2, even though there are like say 5k regular players, people will still poison the game by cheating.
Only Blops 2 i never had any trouble but that was really an exception. After that cheaters galore in ever CoD since on PC..
I mean... there's no cheating because its not out yet.
You should probably hold off and see what anticheat is in place and how effective it is before landing on that one.
Does COD even have an anticheat on Steam? I'm not convinced they do.
Anyway, consider this hearsay, but when I mentioned COD on Battle.net to a Blizzard buddy, his first reaction was "yeah, no more cheaters".
If a publisher doesn't opt-in into Valve AntiCheat (VAC) they must implement their own AC. It is not Valves fault if the publisher skimp on that end.
How is the cheating on Diablo3 and Overwatch? I only hear about so-and-so many thousand accounts were banned, but not how it prevents cheating.
CoD could have had the same with VAC on Steam-
terrible analogy, there's an actual cost to doing all of this with a physical storefront. With digital there are costs but they're mitigated accross their entire library of games. For example, The bnet launcher exists already anyway, it costs them nothing but bandwidth to put a new game on there. That's not remotely the same as opening a retail location specifically to sell a handful of products.
I mean... the thinking that "Hey, I already have a website, I can just sell stuff there, pay for some CDN, cut out the middleman and free money!" is literally the reason why so many of the single publisher storefronts are so far behind Steam in quality of features, service and usability.
Why should Activision be able to implement better anti cheating on Battle.net? Is Steam somehow preventing that?
Considering how awful Steam is at preventing cheating, maybe Battle.net offers better tools?
How rampant is cheating in Blizzard's games, compared to services like Origin and Steam?
VAC is very good at detecting cheating, the problem is the same with all anti-cheat system.
They can't work in 'realtime', because that makes it easier for cheat developers to figure out what exactly was detected and how to make their next cheat version harder to detect, so bans come in 'waves' long after the cheating was actually performed - this is literally the way all anti-cheat systems have to work by necessity
You'll see the same complaints raised about CS:GO as you will about Battlefield as you will about Overwatch, with periodic ban waves 'cleaning the pool' temporarily.
The only 'real time' solution to cheating is human detection, which is why the PC gaming community have consistently pushed for community supported dedicated servers forever, as an admin can observe a suspicious player for telltale signs of aimbotting or wallhacking (the most common types of cheat) and give immediate resolution by kicking that player from a server.
Community run dedicated servers run at odds with many publishers GaaS aspirations however, as a player controlled server can happily give you all cosmetics unlocked for all or whatever
Everytime I see this, I just imagine Major Nelson spawn killing that one other player over and over again.
To illustrate my point: https://www.resetera.com/threads/active-shooter-the-simulation-will-be-on-steam-6-jun-2018.44287/
That would never happen on any of the other platforms.
It certainly wouldn't have happened on the battlenet, a platform that just doesn't sell indiegames in any capacity at all.
Valve should definitely take a note or two of that curation strategy of theirs.
I know you're being deliberately pedantic but I'd rather have a storefront which is carefully curated rather than the cesspool that is Steam at the moment.
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It's your prejorative and all that, but the idea that valve should "step up their game" to compete with a platform that literally only sells a total of 9 videogames is beyond hysterical for me.
Fair enough.
I mean obviously they are two extremes in multiple ways (infrastructure, backend, etc) and also where one company only sells their own products while the other rolls out the carpet for just about anything.
Here's hoping that Valve will take a more active approach when it comes to this stuff in the future.