Steam Announces The Festival Of Rail Publisher Event, Featuring Dovetail Games

Steam Announces The Festival Of Rail Publisher Event, Featuring Dovetail Games
Credit: Train Simulator via YouTube

If you find yourself having trouble going to sleep at night, Valve has announced a possible cure on their Steam platform called the ‘Festival of Rail’.  Featuring Dovetail Games studio, and a lot of trains.  If the idea of gliding smoothly along tracks in realistic cockpits sounds appealing, you’re in luck, as both Train Simulator 2020 and Train Sim World 2020 are both on discount along with a good deal of DLC for each title.

Train Sim World 2020 (that came out halfway through 2018)is the better reviewed of the two among train driving enthusiasts and offers far less DLC as well.  Looking at the two train simulators, it’s difficult to discern as to what, precisely, is different, but the common consensus is that Train Sim World 2020 has far less stuttering and frame drops, and doesn’t crash to desktop unceremoniously.

Train Simulator 2020 states on their Steam page that it released halfway through 2009, and the reviews aren’t tremendously favorable to the title that has an astonishing total of $4,715.95 of total DLCs, and that’s with the vast majority of them being over half-off in price.  Train Simulator 2020 has far more content if you’re not concerned with outrageous prices, and their routes are also far longer than TSW.  The title absolutely shows its age though, as the graphics leave much to be desired.

Regardless of which appeals to you, you’ll find the same overall content when you remove the more esoteric stipulations; you’re driving a train, there are reportedly a lot of bugs and general jank, and the developer seems to typically bypass requested community fixes in lieu of additional content at a very high cost.  If you’re a train aficionado, however, it’s unlikely to find as strong of a showing as what Dovetail has put forth.

There are two more titles that are featured in the Festival of Rail, and they are similarly slow in pace; Fishing Sim World Pro Tour, and Euro Fishing.  Much like Dovetail’s train series, it’s two separate titles that both feature generally the same mechanics, with middling reviews that aren’t entirely promising.

Along with an almost obscene amount of highly-priced DLC’s, reported bugs and crashes to desktop, and some may begin to wonder who publisher Dovetail is targeting with their titles and pricing.

There is a silver lining, however, in the publisher showing, although oddly they aren’t developed by Dovetail, but by Microsoft.

In Microsoft Game Studios ever-popular Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition a large variety of planes developed by Dovetail are on steep discount encouraging players to finally treat themselves to some of the fancier planes featured in the title.  All of the offered DLC’s total to $2,773.17, with the vast majority of them being on steep discount, so parties interested must again either select one or two, or take out a second mortgage.  At least Flight Simulator doesn’t crash to desktop, so that’s nice; seemingly since Dovetail only added a couple of planes instead of the base game.

Overall a pretty bizarro sale featuring wild DLC monetization and occasional states of working as intended; there’s an audience out there for them, so Dovetail will likely continue to churn.

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