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I'm talking about setting a standard in the game developing world. Respect my standards of quality or else...
We have a lot of rogue game developers who have no respect for the quality of their product. They just make games because they can.
And other game developers aren't skilled in ergonomy. They learned 3D design and coding, but have no skills in other fields, and they need a charter to respect and follow to give superior games.
We can provide punishment for the first group and a road to follow for the next group.
Notice that we are talking about purely technical aspects of the development, we are not touching their creative or artistic fields.
Just remember all the games where you weren't able to respec your keys. Why? Because the game developer doesn't care.
Just remember all the hours it takes you to find your savegames, all the savegames you lost because you had to format your drive after a virus or a hack.
And in some games, you have savegames in both places. In My games and in another location with your settings.
All that lost time remapping keys and settings. Multiplied by thousands and maybe millions of gamers. Just because a game developper didn't take a few minute to set it correctly.
I'm talking about industry standards here. Game developers aren't doing it. Steam isn't doing much. So it's up to us gamers to grab the flag and walk.
It suits Steam's interest and the developer's interest. Not the gamers as there is no filter to protect them.
But what you said isn't entirely true, as we have the Steam curators program. But I see what you mean.
I think that this isn't enough. As gamers we have to group and set the lowest common denominator and then start rising the level at every opportunity.
The result would be "harder job for the game developers" and "easier life for the gamers".
And let's take the scenario where your format your hard drive and notice that you didn't secure your savefiles because they weren't in the standard location. Let's say that you had 50 hours of gameplay saved there.
You lost 50 hours.
Multiply that by every gamer who will have the same issue. Let's say that in the course of the life of a particular game, we have ONLY 1000 players in this situation
So now, we have 50 hours X 1000 players.
Now, I ask you, how much time it takes for a game developer or his team, in man hours, to design their system to use a specific savegame location for each system or to provide a tool for the players to specify their own location.
5 hours? 10? 50?
What I ask the community is to group up to significant numbers of players. Discuss it to make the best propositions. And then we run it by some friendly developers to have their view on the situation. Then we can move up to setting a standard.
By the way, I do that professionaly in different fields. We have similar standard in electronic components, cars, services... Whatever, you name it, we do it.
The problem is the same with the missing "show folder size" for Windows systems since the beginning. Little things can bring a huge enhancement, but for one reason noone cares about and everyone's doing their own thing. Worst are products without no local backup copy and direct cloudsave uploading function....
Only "standards" which are working well and which are constantly being improved, is to patronizing customers, show them advertising, forced online mode, expropriation of property, snooping around in consumers privacy, copyright, patents, rights and some other useless stuff...Here they are always quick to agree on a solution.
Actually, no. You buy a license to play it, not the game itself.
That aside, with cloud based saves it doesn't matter where they're installed. After I had to install Steam and my games on a brand new HDD because the old one died, I was pleasantly surprised that more games actually used the cloud than I thought. For the games that didn't, I could have searched on the old HDD (it's an external now, though with less capacity), but I didn't as I hadn't lost much.
I wouldn't mind having the saves all in the same folder, but I don't see it as a big issue. Never did, btw, and 25 years ago you had to go savehunting much more than nowadays.
The MyGames folder is a remnant of Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative from Vista times.
MyDocuments has many issues, not the least that it gets synchronized as a whole for many people to cloud services or across devices.
Also random applications have no business writing their files into the directory that's dedicated for my personal stuff. It's ridiculous that I have to clean up after them to make this folder even usable by myself. FFS for years now I have an actual 'My Stuff' directory because trying to find your own files among a myriad of games directories is too tedious. Of course that's not recognized by any automation and I have to setup it everytime and some stuff doesn't care and doesn't even asks me where to save files, so I have to chase it down.
Your suggested standard causes nothing but trouble for people who use their PC for anything besides gaming.
But if you want such a standard well, simply don't buy games that don't save games to where you want them to. If there are enough people liuke you who can agree on where a game should save their games...
Jealous?
Game design isn't an exact science, since at its heart its about entertainment and what people find entertaining is rather ethereal. Many game features and conventions we take for granted now basically wwere accidents, or out right glitches . The combo and juggling system, as well as cancelling in fighting games are all examples of the latter. They were initially just programming bugs...that just so happened to make the game more fun.
The thing is OP. you can already achieve this effect. You just have to tell the game where to save the files to. Just about every game has an ini or cfg file that stores that data.
One thing steam could actually implement is a defaulory feature. WHereby the user in the steam client designates a master save folder and if the devs enable the feature, the installer automatically configures the game's ini files to use that Master save folder as it's default fsave folder.
No, it isnt. I literally dont care.
This is the epitome of a first world problem and a cause looking for someone to pimp it for no reason.
The main one being: most saves have cloud saves at this point.
But this is only a step toward a much bigger plan. In this topic, I'm talking about quality standards here. And they have to go UP. NEVER DOWN.
There was a time, when we bought games, not services. And then... Because of some lawyer who doesn't give a damn about players and their interests, we moved from "games we own" to "games as a service we rent for a time".
It's like we had bakeries selling bread that never goes bad. To bakeries that make bread you have to throw out after a day or two... And we allowed that. Why? Because we are suckers.
They never asked us. They never told us or explained it to us or gave us a choice. And then, we ended up with games that stop being playable at some point.
I have games in my libraries that I can't play. Because there is no more servers.
And it doesn't end here. We have more:
I have games like Diablo III that lag when I play solo. I played Diablo 1 & Diablo 2. And I've never had any issues of this kind. They were completely playable solo, no internet needed. But at the third game in the series, they ADDED the need for a direct link with the game server to play. And when the server is down for maintenance... You can't play.
But why are we losing ground in the field we care about? Why are we taking steps BACK? Why are we losing ground to the people selling stuff to us? WE GIVE THE MONEY. THEY PROVIDE THE GAME! ... And? They have the power? NOT US? Are we slaves?
We pay. They gain. We lose and we keep paying for more? How did we come this far? This is madness.
And we have tons of terrible practices that ruin us and ruin game and ruin good game developers to please business men who don't care about games.
So, we have to make a simple choice. The interests of gamers and the interests of good game developers.
Or the interests of the investors who don't play. The interests of the bad developers who don't care about their products.
The choice is obvious to me.
There is no standards to protect the players. Because players aren't organised. So let's organize. Let's work together. Let's make standards for the industry.
And once we are organized, once we are thousands and millions, they will have to listen.
If we don't. The era of overproduction of awful games will continue. And we will be served reheated awful games. Poor ports of console games. Stupid hentai games from Japan for losers etc...
We need to make a move, quickly.
And that's why I said that we have to discuss it.
A possible solution is to have the game ask you where to save your profile.
Right now, in my computer, I have in "My documents" folder a TON of Folders. And I have a "My games" folder with many games saving my profiles there.
And then I have AppData/Roaming.
And then I have cloud saves from many plateforms like Steam.
See the issue? It's total chaos. Everybody is doing what they want. And I even have older games that save their savegames in their own installation directory. (Theme Hospital etc...)
It's total chaos.
This is a technical problem that needs a technical solution.
When I install a game, I'm asked where to install it. Can't they add a prompt where I can show them where to save the files I might need to keep in case I want to format my computer?
And is Cloud saves a real solution? Sometimes I lose internet for days. If tomorrow I have to move out. Do I need to wait for weeks to be able to play solo in single player ONLY game because I have no access to cloud?
You are a customer. Not a partner.
You buy or you don. Its THAT simple.
No. I dont want a group of people like you enforcing anything on game developers; especially through some faux outrage. End of story.
Personally I would prefer all my saved games in one spot and I wish it was in the steam folder Steam > steamapps > Gamesaves > (name of the game). That would be nice.
BUT Valve is never going to do this. Steam is just a store. You would never see walmart telling game makers who have games on their shelves that their save games HAVE to be in a certain location. Its just not going to happen.
Even if Valve said "your game saves have to be in X location" that would only work for all the games that sign new contracts with them. No older game would have be forced to do this because its not in their contract and there is also the fact that many do not have developers working on them anymore which would be required to have their game saves saved to a new location and no Valve would not be able to change that because they don't have the source code for the games and legally they can not change anything about the game.
Valve "might" be able to setup a Gamesave Manager like feature where you press one button and it grabs all the game saves from all the games you have, BUT I doubt thats ever going to happen and to go though all 20,000+ games on steam to find their game save data location for many different OSes and versions of OSes would take a LONG time.
One thing steam could actually implement is a defaulory feature. WHereby the user in the steam client designates a master save folder and if the devs enable the feature, the installer automatically configures the game's ini files to use that Master save folder as it's default fsave folder. [/quote]
I don't know if you noticed it, but you say "yes" and "no" in the same answer.
You start with "not happening" then move to "happened before by mistake" and then you end up by proposing a very plausible future solution.
And no, to answer your question, it is not jealousy.
I just hate it to see people the good people disorganized. And the people doing wrongs get more organized.
A big corporation making awful games can hire lawyers to make up stuff like "games as a service" to sell you perishable goods when it is possible to make you everlasting products.
And then the whole gaming industry follows them in this direction and start doing the same.
The industry can decide to set the price for a game from 30$ to 60$. And they all follow that trend.
And the gamers... Like submissive idiots, they follow up. And they accept anything. They have no organization, no initiative. Nothing.
They keep kick you in the face. DLCs. They don't finish games and release a new version you have to buy.
They even have games like World of Warcraft where you have to pay a rent every month to play.
Here I speak about the savegames problem as small example. They do what they want in your OWN COMPUTER. One saves here, another over there etc...
And the best answer you guys give me is Cloud? And what if the Cloud fails you? What if you don't have internet. What do you do?
No. The solution is to group. To build a dictatorship of gamers. And then we will have the power to tell them what we want.
Because right now, YOU PAY. And they OWN YOUR GAMES. And they do what they want in YOUR Computer.
And of course, if you are not happy... Don't buy the game. other millions of players will submit and buy it. That will fix thing up just fine.
Come on.
My proposition TO YOU is clear. Let's work together. Let's gather some troops. And let's ask them for what we want.
Because right now, they do what they want. If someone have to do what he wants at the expense of the other... Let's make it so that the person at the top be a gamer. And not an investor who never played a game.
We lost Fallout guys... And then we lost Bioware. We are losing the battle.