GamezRanker: I keep seeing people saying similar, and I ask: what's the problem with (some) more games? It's not like everyone has to buy them.
Sarafan: It's probably because people see what's going on on Steam. Try to find a really valuable indie game in the masses of games that are released there every day. It's easy if a game gains popularity for some reasons, but before that, it's just impossible. I don't want a situation in which good games vanish in the crowd.
Let's be clear, Steam and GOG differ in quantity, not in quality. Same with itch. Have you seen some of the new releases in the past month or so? We have this problem where people want everything in one place, but we also have this problem where people want to find things in that central place. The market is saturated, especially since you don't have to know any programming to make a game. Making a game is like making a vlog in difficulty, and you'll even see peopel do both at the same time. Obviously, the pareto pattern says that 80% of them are trash, And only 5% are not mediocre, and only about 1% are going to become known, and 0.2% actually get popular (and sometimes this seems or actually is unfair). The challenge of steam, gog, and all these other platforms is to somehow manage that for us. Of course, gog has some obvious politically derived biases, and biases based on corporate connections. This means GOG is not going to be a reliable arbiter.
So how do you deal with a massive platform? Well, can I recommend we take a site that you won't buy games from for a minute? Seeing as you won't buy games from the site i'm going to mention, would it not be reasonable that your own biases might not apply? Ok,
hopefully this link doesn't get trashed, since i put a few anti-biases (but also removed NSFW games) in the search. What do you see there? The the search is sorting "games" (including visual novels) based on their popularity on the site.
The first one you'll notice has a bit of it's own politics on the site. However, there's plenty more, but they're not on the top like this one. I assure you that Hatoful boyfriend being on the list (might move around before you get around to clicking it) is pretty high on the list. Live2d foxgirl game is really interesteing, given it's got an uncensored version on the other side of the site. Eventually you'll be able to get your hands on Absented Age, which is on the list, and you'll notice that it has a ton of positive feedback (They're working on an english translation, supposedly, so whether or not it's trash, we'll soon find out since it'll be released on steam and drm-free on dlsite). You'll notice Recettear, as well (not english, so it didn't need to be removed like the gog edition). All the way back on page 4 is
Scarlet Curiosity whcih i remember reading somewhere won some award and got translated due to it's popularity, and now is a title on PS4.
But the point wasn't to talk about how great dlsite is. The point is to show you what's wrong with platforms like steam and gog. You see, the primary filter is by current popularity, and they do indeed move around on a daily basis, so by the time you're reading this, what you see vs what i see are different. Now GOG and steam have these features, as well, but they don't have a dedicated indie section (which is the default on dlsite, might i add, as professional games are thrown into a different section). The 東方 (touhou) games are clearly biased popular, with the top game at any given moment being 東方18, unconnected marketers, the most recent official game in the series. Oh, the problem is revealing itself? We have indie devs who are of a much, much higher status than other indie devs? We sometimes have "indie devs" that aren't actually indie devs? Oh well, the site's popularity-based promotion seems to be based entirely on user input, of various types. But, now, does GOG and Steam apply the same rules? When CP2077 and The Witcher are topping the sales, especually during major sales, do we honestly believe that? What about some ofthe other games? How about the reviews? Gamergate didn't happen in Japan, so games are going to be reviwed most likely based on the actual material vs advertisement (whether or not the customer was satisfied, although they do have an approval process for written reviews), not "Tonight We will Riot is part of my team" or "Tonight We will Riot is against my team!"
When you realize the problem, and the source of it, you realize that maybe curation is only adding to the problem, but making it seem like less of a problem.
nightcraw1er.488: It is, am not going to divulge any information as to why I know this, however we have different requirements for different countries, and one of those is that only year of birth is allowed to be captured.
toxicTom: In Germany the problem is that a "contract made by a minor" is "pending void". If the parents say NO, it's like it didn't happen. So asking the DOB is a last line of defence for companies. If "the minor" lies about it, the company could actually sue for damages (if the "minor" was not "too minor" - little kids go free, because kids do shit all the time).
So, you can ask the DOB if you have a "valid interest" in the data. Companies - with above explanation - can claim "valid interest". And they do - most German online shops ask your DOB at account creation, and as a required field. If it were "illegal", like you wrote, they wouldn't do it.
You do realize this applies to US and UK as well, right? Probably more, but I'm aware this is one of those lesser known things about the US and UK law. When i took my law class back in highschool, one of the things we were interested in asking was if this was the case, what prevents us from going to walmart, buying things, and forcing them to take them back with legal threat. The simple answer was, "Walmart can legally ban you from the store in response to abuse of this legal principle."
