The most appealing thing about No Mans Sly seems to be the story: of false promises and redemption through hard patch work. But it doesn't seem to materialize nor, I'm guessing, will it ever become a great game. With fading sales, the efforts and investments shall fade, as well.
Same thing thing happened to Starbound. It became a somewhat serviceable clone, constrained by it's initial lack of ideas. Whenever someone promises you the moon and stars... At least it's not a free-to-play MMO, but with the infinite grind it sure appears to unwind like one.
Maybe they could sell the engine to developers, who can create stories or game play in that colorful universe.
Nostalgia is good and all. But who is ready and willing to practice a game for 4 hours a day just to maintain form.
Also Starcraft ultimately failed at 2v2 (always early rushes) and thus failed as a team sport, and became this amazing, grueling 1v1 spectacle. MOBAs surpassed it in popularity not just due to the friendlier learning curve but because they were team games.
The fact that you still have to mod in the co-op campaign is a glaring omission and missed opportunity. Perfect example of modern Blizzard, being lame and dense and catering fan-service to the stupid.
It's good that the concept of "bind box slot-machines" and being psychologically exploited finally trickled down into the conversation.
But Valve-style in-game economies are a straight up fraud. The items are oftentimes treated as an investment. Brad is even talking about how they will go up in price.
However ultimately this stuff will all drop in value sooner or later, or rather it will become completely lost. Because that fool who bought a thousand dollar CS:GO Karambit, will not sell it for one dollar 5 or 15 years later realizing his loss but rather keep it, imagining how it's still worth a lot. The ultimate fate of collectors' items.
The game and the market all wrongly suggest to the player that items have a high and lasting value, the nominal value of keys is even in one way "fixed" at $2.49. But obviously even those keys will lose almost of their value once nobody is playing the game. Creating the perception of an investment purchase while selling worthless stuff, is fraud any way you slice it. With keys nobody can argue that they have sentimental, aesthetic or collector value, other than as a (gambling token) currency. Basically key selling is like selling gift coupons that expire at some point which is and should be illegal in civilized countries.
It's not just the price but also liquidity .What will you do if you have hundreds of items but trading slows down to a crawl, and you'll be selling 2 - 3 items a month at any price. Today there are re-sellers looking to make a buck, who buy-up all undervalued stuff once the price temporarily dips, but that won't be the case couple of years from now, when there isn't enough volume to make money off the fellow naive gamers.
Valve raised restrictions to make profiteering harder, which just moved trade to outside sources, which don't have market fees and are perfectly safe thanks to Valve's openID backend. There is a cottage industry of bots, and exchanges, keys for gems, dollars and bitcoin.
Even penny items like steam trading cards and steam levels themselves are a literal pyramid scheme, it's all sleazy, not-yet-illegal stuff. The perception of value and sometimes the entire demand for virtual goods is held up by a few whales, meaning that it's a bubble, that only works as long as the game is growing. At least trading cards have a use, unlike skins.
We've seen TF2 decline in popularity, but I imagine there was quite a crash (though I haven't followed the economy).
People don't think of gambling as a fraud, it takes mathematics to understand that it is. However at least in a lottery or slots you win real money. Virtual Item gambling is MORE insidious, you don't win real value immediately you have to sell the rare item to actually win!? Most players presumably never realize the market value of their highly valued items, due to inexperience. This only drives up prices even higher, creating a feedback loop of an even higher perception of value, where there is none, mind you. To make matters worse, you can only ever cash out money in wallet funds or with a massive loss going though traders. Steam store credit assumes that you continue to want to spend money on steam, but why would you? It's like you win a million bucks in a lottery, but you only can spend it on lottery tickets.
Some free advice: With all this personality driven streaming, people get the impression that it's about them, about their charisma, uniqueness, shtick or public persona. But at the end of the day people come for video games, even people who barely play anymore but just to want to stay in the loop.
Personalities serve to keep the content grounded, relatable and authentic, their job is to guide the attention from their ultimately boring selves to their current interests/work, preferably related to video games.
A Theory means a body of knowledge, in scientific terms. It's called that because all understanding is theoretical or in other words abstract. As opposed to practical or concrete abilities, like milking a cow.
The scientific opposite of theoretical is empirical, meaning experimental.
Sadly in popular culture, encouraged by anti-science religious propaganda, the term theory took on the meaning of the word hypothesis, meaning possible explanation. But it's hard to tell where this confusion did originate, it was probably made popular by detective stories.
"It's just a theory" became an excuse, for people not to understand but dismiss understanding, as unnecessary and cumbersome, instead admitting that it's difficult yet worthwhile.
Similarly the word experimental, was also perverted by pop-culture, and became synonymous with unproven or torturous. So it's not surprising that very few people "experimenting" with different drugs or sexual partners, actually kept a lab journal.
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