Bottom line: Konami is a weird company making odd calls and has been for a long time. Someone in charge likely decided 11 years ago that MGRR should not be released on PC in Japan and that's all there is to it.
Like every PvE game which does not have hundreds of people working to churn out content, its playerbase will dwindle until only those who do not get bored by its gameplay stick around. Whether it's Left 4 Dead, Payday, Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide, those types of games follow this pattern...
And I for one, see no fucking issue with that. It's a great game, people play it until they have had their fill and then move on. Helldivers 2 is only an outlier because of how hard it hit at launch. It absolutely does not have the content pipeline to keep a large playerbase engaged, so yeah it will not keep printing a lot of money, just a little bit every now and then.
Now excuse me as I go and spread some managed democracy.
tl;dr: Watch what you put online and who you friend, especially on Steam. Once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever.
That right here is very much what it boils down to. Whether it's SteamHistory or The Internet Archive or whatever public or private data store... Any information you publish is out of your control as soon as you do.
Vocal minority is the assumption when this sort of collective outrage manifests. This time though, thanks to Steam player count we will actually get some hard numbers and see if that has an effect or not.
Fuck me, that is some quadruple-A-level bullshit from our man Yves. I played the closed beta and I am sorry to say that this game is going to tank, hard. Its gameplay loop is waaaay too simplistic to be making those grandiose claims.
It's kind of amazing they chose to go with that design, when they hadthe benefit of hindsight with recent superhero-backed games:
- the live service Avengers game flopped pretty hard
- the singleplayer Spider-man games did gangbusters
"Well duh, let's try and make one of these live service games".
Ordered-ish by recommendation:
- SUPERHOT (it's the most innovative shooter I've played in years)
- Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
- Sayonara Wild Hearts
- Carrion
- Planet of Lana
- Jusant
- The Artful Escape
- The Gunk
You can hear a more detailed explanation on VLC's stance from the man himself (JB Kempf) in the FOSS pod S1E11 episode around 22:10.
Basically:
- Not that many threats become lawsuits
- Patent trolling is countered with publicly accessible prior art
- Having no money is also a good deterrent
I would say it is more of a practical consideration. Private trackers generally enforce upload/download ratios. This ensures the health of the sharing pool stays good.
The new MW3 steam reviews are locked until its official release, as is always the case. People are venting where it is both possible and making some sense.
The author likely is aware of this and just likes to poke fun at angry CoD fans.
The Epic Games Launcher is so far behind on features compared to Steam it's not even funny. Epic chose not to try and compete with Steam on that front and to try and force users onto the platform with exclusivity deals and sweeten the deal with free games.
The one user-centric killer feature Epic has in their stack IMHO is the built-in multiplayer crossplay. Except it's not even exclusive to their store ironically (you do need an Epic account for it though).