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Steam might be a popular digital distribution platform for video games, but it is far from perfect. Valve has been working long and hard to improve Steam and is finally making headway with its much-touted Steam Direct system.

Steam Direct was announced back in February, but Valve has taken its time to implement the system because of one crucial element: developers need to pay a fee to submit games through Steam Direct, and Valve needed to iron out the size of this fee. If the fee is too low, developers could be tempted to spam-submit bad games and hope one makes it through the cracks, but if the fee is too high, small yet talented indie developers won’t be able to afford to submit their games. Today, Valve finally reached a decision and announced via blog post that the submission fee will be $100, which is high enough to discourage spam-submissions but is low enough to be easily recoupable. According to the blog post, the amount was decided after numerous conversations with the Steam community. Initially, Valve wanted to set the publishing fee at $500, but these conversations convinced the company to “aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible.”

For those of you who don’t know, Steam Direct is supposed to replace Steam Greenlight, an ambitious system that let users freely submit games and have gamers vote on whether or not these games would be put up for sale. However, many users quickly started abusing the system. These abuses ranged from selling games made of unaltered Unity Store assets (referred to as asset flips) to downright plagiarism. To make matters worse, many games, even those that didn’t abuse Greenlight, were just plain bad (and in at least one case, openly offensive and homophobic). Granted, Steam Greenlight had its fair share of amazing hits, such as SUPERHOT, Rivals of Aether, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and UNDERTALE, but for every Papers, Please there were at least twenty Day One: Gary’s Incidents. To fix this rampant abuse, Valve decided to implement a new system that weeds out bad games by forcing all game submissions to go through rigorous playtesting by Valve employees, i.e., Steam Direct.

While Valve has not provided a timeline regarding the implementation of Steam Direct, the company has promised to keep gamers apprised of future developments. We here at Geek Reply look forward to the system’s release.

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Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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Gaming

You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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Gaming

This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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