For the good of the games industry, I put my money where my mouth is.

[Arcane Azmadi]

I can see at a glance that I am but the latest of countless gamers to make a thread like this, and it's encouraging to see so many people think the same. But this really is an important issue, and it's far bigger than just Steam vs Epic. This is about the entire video games industry.

In an industry which acts like the ONLY thing that matters is that you make as much money as physically possible, regardless of what you have to do for it, "integrity" has basically become a dirty word. The big "triple-AEYYY" developers and publishers will put more effort into making a game that can exploit the players for as much as they can rip them off for than they will into making it FUN (fun is extra), and will shamelessly lie to our faces about it, and will CONTINUE to do this because gamers continue to give them more money, proving that their garbage works.

So when we find a rare case of a developer who, when offered a potentially future-securing amount of money to betray the faith of the gamers who believed in him and to sell his game out for an instant profit if he'd just damn the consequences, instead put his integrity first and committed to keeping his promises, we simply CANNOT let him suffer for this decision. Wlad counted on his belief that keeping his word and not disappointing the people who were looking forward to buying DARQ on Steam was more important than taking a bribe from Epic to betray them, so we need to repay his faith with, well, our consumer money. We have to show that integrity, honour and decency WILL be rewarded, and that developers and publishers don't HAVE to try and trick, swindle, and strongarm us into giving them money. Otherwise we're just reinforcing the same corrupt beliefs that have ruined this industry and led to farces like Fallout 76 and Anthem and Star Wars Battlefront II 2017.

That said, I made what is for me an almost unprecedented decision: I bought this game, now, for full price. Now, I simply don't buy full price games at all any more, partly because I have very, very limited disposable income, but even more importantly, I just don't need any more games. I have literally HUNDREDS of games in my Steam library already waiting for me to play them, most picked up very cheaply in sales, and I'm fully aware that ANY game I might buy will end up going on a big sale (or in extreme cases even being given away for free) before I get around to playing it, wasting a large amount of my money, so in no way did I actually need to play DARQ (although I did think it looked pretty neat). Yet in this case above all others, I felt I just HAD to buy it to show my support for Wlad's integrity. Because if I didn't, if I just applauded him for his actions then ignored his game, I'd just be a hollow, mealy-mouthed hypocrite, talking a big game about how we need to save the games industry but doing nothing about it. I know my purchase money is only a drop in a bucket, but it's a drop I have to put there if I want to call myself a gamer. And anyway, if you're not going to fill your game with lootboxes and microtransactions to try and extract massive amounts of money from individual "whales", if you're going to just do your best to make a quality game and sell it for a fixed price, then drops are the only way the bucket will fill.

Good luck Unfold Games, and may your bucket fill with well-deserved financial droplets.

[🜃Retro🜁]

Ditto and Here ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Here.

[bgray9054]

+1 here.

[Unfold Games]

Hey, thank you soooo much! This kind of support is mind blowing to me, I really appreciate it! I hope you do check out the game, even though you have a lot of others to play. <3

[Arcane Azmadi]

Originally posted by Unfold Games:

Hey, thank you soooo much! This kind of support is mind blowing to me, I really appreciate it! I hope you do check out the game, even though you have a lot of others to play. <3

Oh don't worry, I already started playing. Not much so far, short on time (and it doesn't help that I consider it wasteful to play it at any time other than the dead of night with the lights off), but definitely going to play it all the way through.

And really, it's your kind of support that's mind-blowing to us. To have a developer just come out and say "I could have screwed you guys for money but I actually care about what people think of me" in today's industry and to MEAN it (unlike a lot of the mealy-mouthed "customers first (up against the wall)" bull we hear from mainstream developers) is just so refreshing.