Usually, I'm against pre-ordering in general. I wasn't going to preorder Mania (for pc), but I ended up doing it anyway to show my support to the team - and to hopefully show Sega that they should do this again.
My main gripe with Steam (and all other game stores) is that we're all in fact *renting* games, not buying them. I don't really care if I'm paying in advance or not, the whole thing stinks either way, so pre-ordering is actually the lesser of 2 evils, because you get a discount and you get to download the game as soon as it's out.
Once you buy a game, you can play it any time for as long as you'd like. I don't think that's renting...
It actually doesn't list a timezone, just 10 AM. I just assumed it's CST, since that's the timezone I live in. It could be 10 AM EST. :P That's the thing that's confusing about it, usually they have timezones listed but not for Mania.
If something were to happen to Valve, regardless of how likely, or their servers... BOOM, all those hundreds, if not thousands, you spent on games goes up in smoke along with your games. Buy -> Download -> Crack -> Storeaway. Steam is a timebomb, take precautions.
Well it would be worse if there was an additional preorder fee- but from what I can tell there isn't one so it's not that big of a deal. Also, I think you left this @ behind.
I don't know whether this means anything, but it's as I'm posting this it's 1AM BST on the 8th of August and Steam says the game is coming out "in approximately 7 days". 8+7 is 15. Surely if it's due to be released at 6PM BST it would still say 8 days remaining, rather than 7.
For Steam, "approximately 7 days" means anywhere from "7 days and 0 hours" to "7 days and 23 hours". For Sonic Mania, the counter goes down at UTC 1700 each day.
If you're that paranoid, you could as well decry physical games since they can get stolen, lost, burned in house fires, or have their discs scratched.
Paranoid?! Who said that? I know you're watching me! :v: Lol! Seriously though, advocating precaution in any scenario isn't paranoia. The thing with Steam is that they can take all your non-cracked games away from you and you can't fight them legally about it. It's as though you're a kid in a neighborhood and there's only one kid with all the games who you pay to come install them on your PC, but you have no real authority or ownership and then that kid moves away or gets hit by a car... Steam is a high level scam that could fold and cause millions to lose what they paid for. Is it unlikely, yes for the foreseeable future, it doesn't change how insane the concept is. :specialed: But this is getting off topic, so I'll leave it at that. I'm loving everything I'm seeing about Mania, I haven't preordered unfortunatly... I don't even know if they ship to South Africa. So yeah, I'll probably be getting it on... Er hem... Steam.
I honestly still hope it is a midnight release but it does look like Steam will be releasing this at their standard release time, at 6pm BST on August 15. Reading around it's looking like some platforms, like PS4 do have the game going up at midnight local time so it looks like Steam users will be the ones playing this last. It'd be cool if Taxman or Stealth could come in here and let us know. Perhaps one of us should email Steam/Valve to find out for definite? EDIT: Just to note, I did attempt to contact them earlier but couldn't find their contact details or a mechanism in which to submit a support ticket via their support site. That's the only reason I haven't personally done so yet.
Since it's being discussed, I'm going to quote myself from last month: http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=35709&view=findpost&p=897548 I pre-ordered on Steam and PS4, but plan to buy the Switch version as my primary. When I go into my PSN pre-order, the countdown timer is counting down to midnight EST on the 15th so that one seems pretty much confirmed. My current plan is to start the game on PS4 as soon as it launches, play until I decide to sleep, then buy it on Switch as soon as it's available to start over again there. I also took a vacation day on release.
Yeah, but Steam won't be available forever. You may or may not believe their promise that if they ever go under they'll release patches so you can keep playing your games, but I doubt they're legally obligated to do that or that releasing patches would be high in the list of priorities of a company that's going bankrupt, so so your games are ultimately at their mercy. Steam is actually slightly better than whatever the consoles have, since Windows PCs are not going anywhere anytime soon, while consoles break down all the time and your purchases from the previous generation don't mean anything when you upgrade to the next-gen console. Steam is a form of DRM, and physical games with DRM are not much better, but when you own a DRM-free game, as I believe it should be with anything you buy, you're legally entitled to make backup copies of it. If you lose a game, that's your fault for not taking the necessary precautions. The problem with the current model of game commercialization is that the consumer doesn't have any power over the things they "own", the power is all with the companies selling the games, who are free to cancel services at any time and to re-sell you things you already bought in the past because the previous version isn't supported anymore (even if you still own the old hardware, the old version might not be available for download anymore). I do get the practical side of purchasing things digitally... distribution is faster, cheaper, hard discs and flash memory are faster than optical media, we don't waste space with media or boxes, and the final product is generally cheaper, but those advantages don't change the fact that we don't *own* anything anymore. We're just paying for the right to play a game or watch a movie, but there are absolutely no guarantees that the things we pay for will be available to us forever, we have absolutely no control over that. I don't care about this too much really, because I haven't been a gamer for ages. I play mostly old stuff, emulated or from my own collection. I do buy digital games occasionally if they're dirty cheap, to the point that I don't care I'm just renting them, or when I want to support a release, such as the Sonic remasters or Mania, because in these cases my love for the products is bigger than my hate for the distribution model.
Then you aren't in the demographic for Steam games anyway. Games are entertainment that most people just consume like watching a movie in the theatre, only to either trade-in or never play again after completing it. The very few of us actually backup and keep a library of offline / cracked games for future use are not on Steams radar at all.
Damn, there's no chance that the Switch might release sometime at midnight? That bites. Gonna be a hell of a sleepless night.
