@dabear: SteamDB has listings of estimated ownership based on certain sites' estimates -- they list numbers for PlayTracker, Gamalytic, VG Insights, and SteamSpy, for Starfield -- which run the gambit of my listed range, and thus why I said estimated 1-5 million on steam. And I am not sifting through the 60k negative reviews (or 87k positive) on there to see how much of it is "I played 500 hours and it sucks" or "Bethesda can do no wrong, don't listen to these haters" it contains, merely suggesting if that is a accurate and proportionate reflection of the whole owner count, then there's millions of people with something against it (somewhere around 5.2 million of your 13 million that you keep throwing around)
@dabear: If the steam rating is a collective indication of the estimated 1-5 million people who own it's opinion, that means between 400k and 2 million people think it's garbage. The fact it hasn't broken 20k concurrent players on steam this year so far doesn't suggest it's a very enjoyed game, either.
@thecupidstunts: On the US side, you'll probably see the few thousand of us who aren't goose stepping QAnon loyalists try to find another platform while all those trump followers can further clog the tubes. Dunno about the international users' side once the right-wing can throw more anchors off into their side of the shithole.
@Thanatos2k: Maybe some of the players are spending their remaining sub time killing the NPCs that represent the known problems? Once a certain amount of time passes after they take your sub money, you're SoL for getting it back, so you might as well get some enjoyment out of the (potentially last) money you gave them.
@Thanatos2k: So, those dementor-lookin' ghost things that are the spirits of fate? Yeah, that's the literal personification of FF7 original's canon. Which merged together to try and become larger-than-life boss to stop the party from further running rampant away from the canon events... and got murdered as basically the last boss before "People wanted to fight Sephiroth, so we made sure there was a fight with him" happened.
Oh hey, generic annual sportsball game on a recycled news article claiming to be new (no, seriously -- it says this was a new article released ~11 hours before my comment, and yet the oldest comments come from April, 2020, over a year ago)
I mean, they lay out Steam's rules about using the platform as a distribution point in the article -- basically, "If you sell it anywhere, and also on Steam, you can't undercut the Steam price".
And RE the other two platforms listed -- M$ is dropping their commission from 30% to 12%, sure. I've not seen anyone go "Yes! [Game] is on the Microsoft Store!" other than when PSO2 came out, and there was an equal-or-greater cry of joy when it rolled to Steam because of the mess that the Store version ended up with. (I have seen people cry for joy for games coming out on the XBox Game Pass though, which isn't the store, but still sells a bunch of the M$ library on PC)... and I was expecting Epic's "let's buy exclusives to promote us trying to make Steam drop their 30%" to bite them in the butt as a) people are concerned about the huge chunk of Epic that Tencent owns (40% of the company, as part of them helping out with making Epic go 'Games as a Service'), and b) people like all their games under one roof if they can help it, and Steam's been that roof for over 15 years, which is why the games don't always sell to expectations -- a lot of gamers go "Let me know when it's on Steam", so the games get a second surge of sales after that year exclusivity that Epic forces, when they hit Steam.
I do wish the article was a little more blatant in the semantics on the time frame. The wording implies it's the best selling console ever, and it only took 5 months, instead of implying that, in the first five months of a console's life, it has shipped more units compared to its peers in their own first five months.
The semantics are important because, sure, it's a fast growing system... but it still hasn't even outsold the Vita yet, and that's the lowest selling no-longer-in-production Sony console.
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