I recently purchased a Radeon card that had this and Crysis 3 included - the e-mail said they'd send the Steam code for Bioshock as soon as it was available. Did anyone else get the game via this offer, and if so, have you received your code yet?
I have too much time at work today, but ever since Amazon stopped selling the download version of the game, I've been watching the reviews. It's getting 10 to 15 new 1 star reviews every 10 minutes or so. It's actually pretty remarkable.
I really, really, really don't understand why they make these sorts of decisions. They're already not well-regarded, and then they go and do something like this - if Blizzard can't successfully do an always-online launch, what in the hell hope does EA/Maxis have? I predict another year of EA at the top of the "most-hated company in America" list.
@drdarkstryfe: That's a very valid point, but I suspect that developers wouldn't do it (and keep doing it) if it wasn't viable for them. We obviously don't know how many units they're moving, but I suspect, as long as the port is easy enough, that doing the Steam version must always make sense. If you put your game in a box on the 360, both Microsoft and the retailer take a cut of that. If you put it on Steam, it's just Valve - I have to assume the margins are better there, right? It probably doesn't move as many units as the 360 version, but the game presumably stays on Steam forever, so you can keep making some money during Steam sales, whereas, unless you're Call of Duty, your game will probably be pulled from store shelves eventually.
The lack of transparency in this industry has finally started to catch up. It is hard to want to invest, and take seriously, an entertainment industry that hides its development costs so much.
The biggest disconnect between the average game consumer, and those that make and publish the titles, is the knowledge of how much contracted labor, how much outsourcing, and how much in licensing fees go into the development of a game. People see a name like Infinity Ward attached to Call of Duty and think that every bit of the game is done by them.
This makes me really interested in the documentary that is being done alongside the development of Double Fine's Kickstarted adventure title. When it is all said and done, will we get a really nice look at everything that entails in game development?
The video game industry has a seriously lack of transparency with its financials. We all champion the cheap sales available on Steam, but does Steam make people money? Probably, but since Valve is a private company, they don't have to disclose any numbers whatsoever, and that data essentially becomes proprietary. Good for Valve, but not good for consumers necessarily. The publishers have bullied organizations like The NPD Group into showing less and less retail sales data to the public, not to mention NPD Group wanting to make money for that data, and we're left with little to analyze on a month-to-month basis. Compare that to the movie industry, which discloses its box office returns every damn week. We'd have a much better idea of what the industry was really like if the numbers were on the table, rather than waiting for people to spin it for us.
I like that Valve is a private company (I know you aren't advocating them going public, but hear me out), and while I am curious about their financials, it's purely curiosity - I don't need to know, and I'd prefer they're private than public. I think companies often lose something when they go public and start answering to investors rather than consumers - Valve has made Steam work, and work well, which is sort of crazy when you consider that it's DRM, and people mostly hate DRM because when they think of DRM, they think of DRM done poorly.
That being said, I like seeing numbers as much as anyone else, and I'd like to know how Far Cry 3, for example, did on PC vs. the 360. But if the alternative to the current status quo is Valve releasing numbers, but answering to investors and only concerning themselves with increasing revenue, then no thank you.
@crunchman: I agree, other than their lack of an announcement of price. To be fair, I didn't expect them to announce the price this early, but I think price was the biggest problem with the PS3 (initially, at least), and they aren't addressing it yet. And judging by the specs of this thing, it won't be cheap.
I went into this pretty skeptical, but I must admit, they almost have me sold on one, pending a little more information*. If they stick to what they showed here and don't throw any sliders, and Microsoft comes out swinging with Kinect, then I would almost definitely choose PS4 over the next Xbox.
*Pending information being whether everything is available digitally, whether they understand the concept of sales and how goods lose their value over time, and whether it's possible to swap in an SSD for the HDD. Those are concerns that I suspect neither of the two will get entirely right, though.
On a related note, am I crazy for thinking that this makes the WiiU look almost silly? I don't know what the price on this will be, but the WiiU definitely won't be running the same games as this thing (not that there was any question of that prior to the unveiling). Nintendo needs to get their first party games going soon (preferably yesterday) in order for anyone to give a shit that it exists.
Something I still struggle with is thinking of this as an "us" and "them" situation. People play games. People watch movies. People read books. I don't know why people who play games are their own group of people, whereas people that watch shitty reality TV every night are just people. I know people play games to varying degrees, but almost everyone - and especially people who have smartphones - plays games to some extent. Hell, I don't know that my wife has ever touched a 360 controller, but even she plays Temple Run and Angry Birds on her iPhone. Does that make her a gamer?
Also, I would like to voice my concern about shooting being a core mechanic of so many games. I'm not talking about it from a violence perspective, but I'm starting to think of it as sort of lazy and uninspired design. My annoyance at games like Uncharted 3 (timely reference here) is really starting to skyrocket. I liked the game, but I felt like it didn't need to be a shooter. Games don't always need to involve shooting other people.
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