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Showing posts with label steam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label steam. Show all posts

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Fun and Balance mod for EU4 now on Steam Workshop

Little kitty ♥ =^..^= ♥ by Viola's visions from flickr (CC-NC-SA)

As was requested so many times, it's now available on Steam Workshop:
I also created permanent URL for the mod, instead of just repointing it at latest post about it on this blog every time I wanted to link to it. I still need to setup some pictures.

If you don't want to use Steam Workshop, or you need older version, you can get it directly from my Dropbox share folder.

A bunch of CK2 minimods on Steam Workshop now


People kept asking for Steam Workshop version of Fun and Balance, so I finally made one. (I still need to setup screenshots, links etc., but it's a perfectly usable already)

Anyway, I also put a bunch of CK2 minimods on Steam, none of them affect gameplay in any way:
I absolutely detest dynastic names for countries, and I refuse to play any game without fixing that, even if everything else about the game is pure vanilla. It seems a lot of people share my views, as this mod got fairly popular pretty quickly without any announcements anywhere.

Localized landed titles I can tolerate if they're used sparingly (like West Francia / France, Pannonia / Hungary, Danzig / Gdańsk etc.), and early versions of CK2 did just that. Unfortunately Old Gods onwards it went on Norse renaming binge, and major parts of the map use completely dumb names with dumb non-Latin characters in them. If I wanted to play Swedish version, I'd choose Swedish version. Is it that hard to get?

Localized ranks are not quite as bad, but I made mod to fix them for completeness if you want to play that way. I'm not really decided which way I like more. I don't mind a few Exarchs and Grand Princes, but all they Walis, Beylerbeys, Farins etc. - is this really seriously necessary?

All mods are meant for vanilla, they're compatible with each other, but no idea if they're compatible with anything else.

If you don't want to use Steam Workshop, use Steam Workshop Downloader or get it from my Dropbox shared folder. Code is all on github but you'll need to do some symlinkery to actually build from there.

If you want to see all mods I put on Steam, here's my Steam Workshop page.

These are all cosmetic mods (even if 2/3 change checksum). I usually play with a bunch of balance-affecting minimods too, I'm not sure if that would be easy to extract into something workable.

In any case, enjoy.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Steam is ripping you off

Online distribution of content should be cheap and easy. Compared to the complexities of making and moving around DVDs and such, moving bits is pretty much free. So it's a no-brained that games on Steam should be cheaper than the same games on DVDs, right? Of course that's not how it works.

These are top 10 Steam's best-selling games - this list is rather generous for Steam, as people would prefer to buy games on Steam which were better deal on Steam than on DVD, and would prefer to buy games on DVD which were better deal on DVD - so it's reasonable to expect comparing other games Steam would come out even worse.

As for DVD alternative, I wasn't looking too hard - just Amazon. I'm sure there are ways to get the games even more cheaply, but let's stick with the default online shop. Here are the prices, all Amazon's are with free shipping:

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Amazon £29.65; Steam £39.99 - Steam costs 35% more
  • Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - Amazon £24.99; Steam £29.99 - Steam costs 20% more
  • Left 4 Dead 2 - Amazon £19.98; Steam £19.99 - essentially equal
  • Counter-Strike: Cource - Amazon £14.99; Steam £13.99 - Steam costs 7% less
  • Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City - Amazon £14.99; Steam £19.99 - Steam costs 33% more
  • Civilization V (pre-order) - Amazon £30.99; Steam £29.99 - Steam costs 3% less
  • Mount & Blade: Warband - Amazon £16.97; Steam £24.99 - Steam costs 47% more
  • Borderlands - Amazon £11.78; Steam £19.99 - Steam costs 70% more
  • Just Cause 2 - Amazon £23.92; Steam £29.99 - Steam costs 25% more
In other words - median cost on Steam is about 25% higher than on Amazon. That's even though physical DVD costs quite some money to make, packaging, ship etc., while for Steam it's just pure profit.

And please don't even mention "Recommended Retail Price" - if you fall for this kind of blatant anchoring effect, there's no hope for you.

So to summarize: Steam games cost a lot more, and to make matters worse have no resell value, they're simply ripping you off.

PS. Amazon prices are for NEW games. These are not used titles. Anyone claiming otherwise has no idea what they're talking about.

PS2. Prices I gave are for UK (notice the £s). acct_rdt made a similar list for US prices, which shows exactly the same thing - US Amazon is cheaper than US Steam too, even though the difference is not as drastic (median 7%)
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - $37.80 new on Amazon, $59.99 on Steam
  • Bad Company 2 - $43.83 Amazon, $49.99 Steam
  • Left 4 Dead 2 - $29.99 (both)
  • Counter-Strike: Source - $19.99 (both)
  • Episodes from Liberty City - $27.99 Amazon, $29.99 Steam
  • Civilization V - $49.99 (both)
  • Mount & Blade: Warband - $24.53 Amazon, $29.99 Steam
  • Borderlands - $27.99 Amazon, $29.99 Steam
  • Just Cause 2 - $39.99 Amazon, $49.99 Steam