Praising it but leaving room for the rest as well. Otherwise what's good about watching the ceremony? There's no excitement when everything feels predetermined.
The main problem with the Steam awards is that they don't respect the actual release dates. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2, a 2018 game (or a 2019 game if you go by PC only) was named the Steam GOTY in 2020.
Steam also had little to offer in the years that were heavy on Epic exclusives and great games like Kena or Control, resulting in it being hard to think up a nominee.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, they also bar prior winners from their "most supported game" type category, which makes no sense because some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, get regular content and technical updates to this day. On the other hand, The Witcher 3 recently won in a category despite having been untouched for years.
I get that Baldur's Gate 3 is a great game and I have no reason to dispute that, but its presence in any category this year leaves no chance for the rest, making the nominations pointless.
Same. I used to play competitive pvp games, but after thousands of hours, the toxicity and overall stress from having to always be beyond your absolute best just felt like too much. That said, there definitely are multiplayer games, like Fall Guys, that don't stress out at all. I think having no chat feature and the game not taking itself seriously are crucial for minimizing toxicity.
That's a valuable metric even used by SteamDB. The best part is that it's not limited to Steam or PC. Fortnite was recently recorded having three times more active players than the most played Steam game, CS2.
You can't deny that Epic taking 12% revolutionized the industry, with Microsoft following suit and even Valve making some small changes. As Gabe himself said on the competition, "it keeps [them] honest". That's a win for game creators.
For the gamers, we got many free games and I think the Epic freebies inspired Microsoft to offer similar deals with Game Pass, Amazon with Prime, and even GOG recently gave away a pretty notable game, Blacksad, which was uncharacteristic in relation to their past giveaways.
The claim specifically mentions Epic and quotes a Valve employee who made statements to the effect of it being prohibited, irrespective of whether a Steam key is involved. Read from page 47 and pay attention to the last paragraphs of page 55.
I have no idea why this is newsworthy. Epic's own 2019 documents and testimony in the Apple trial showed that the company did not expect the store to be profitable until 2024 or even 2027. The strategy of heavy investment and operating at a loss to turn a profit later worked for Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, and many others. Even this week, there are headlines like "Elon Musk Says SpaceX's Starlink Achieves Breakeven Cash Flow".
I'm pretty sure the prices are based on the projected sales using industry knowledge and tools like SteamSpy, created by Epic's head of the publishing strategy at the time. It's not common that a publisher participating in a giveaway would get to use their own figures from a prior giveaway to change the price offered by Epic, while the others' figures are available only for the games in those leaks. In other words, claiming many copies in the present is extremely unlikely to have any effect on the future buyout prices.
You're lying to yourself. They pay a fixed amount for the giveaway and it doesn't matter if the games are claimed. If anything, you owning a game on Epic means you're more likely to mention it to your friends and possibly get them to use the platform and spend on it.
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You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.