This is a good policy. They destroy everything they touch, anyway, including their acquired studios.

The only Fallout games worth playing.

Another part of it is that if they discontinue support, they can’t stop the community from creating their own server software.

There are so many ways to approach this. The point is ensuring consumers retain the right to keep using what they purchased, even if they have to support it themselves.

I also got a 9070 XT recently, but at MSRP. I’m done supporting NVidia.

While it’s great that they’re doing well on the only truly open gaming platform, it’s a shame that they’re being rewarded for infecting their games with anti-consumer malware. Any company that uses Denuvo lacks moral fibre and deserves to fail.

Both. Definitely both.

Or better yet, consider a SteamDeck instead of supporting Nintendo in any way, shape, or form.

Contractors never count in layoff numbers, so this number would be much, much worse if you included them. The actual job losses could easily be more than doubled.

Get a Steam Deck. The existence of Family Sharing alone makes it a much better choice for portable family gaming.

Nintendo has numerous major anti-consumer problems, from game ownership, to hardware quality and longevity, to their abusive behavior towards fans, consumers, and competitors. It’s not worth it, there are better options.

The maximum discount you get is dependent on how long you’ve been a subscriber. 20% requires one year or longer of membership.

I use it about once every two months. Most recently, Clair Obscur.

I want to respond in a rational, reasonable way, but this is so factually incorrect and utterly unhinged I am not sure where to even start. Ordinarily I’d be all about dumping on Bethesda, too.

Yes. They do it with the monthly subscriptions, too.

The 20% discount on purchases is very nice, though the monthly offerings are extremely hit-or-miss. I’m not sure I’ll stay subscribed at this price, though. The value of the subscription is simply too unpredictable.

game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device

I know that’s the legal argument that manufacturers make, but it’s always been bad faith. Long gone are the days when a console does one thing: play games. Now they stream, have web browsers, social media, apps… they’ve been general purpose for many, many years. Being locked down anti-competitively is not an excuse for something to be locked down anti-competitively.

If you subscribe to Humble Choice, you get a discount on things purchased through them. It’s a solid 20% after a certain amount of time. The keys are usually Steam, but not always.

None of those are games for children. Nor are they similar to casinos. Are you trying to argue that selling cosmetics in games is inherently unethical?

Publishers have their own storefronts and… surprise, not a single one charges 30%, 20%, or even 10% less due to avoiding the Steam tax.

And yes, I frequently am willing to pay slightly more to keep things in Steam. It means easier Steam Deck access, family sharing, Steam Link, and other benefits that I would miss out on via other platforms, even if they were cheaper (which we established was not the case).

The PVE survival gameplay - which is most of the game - is very, very good. It never stops being tense and scary. Worms, sand storms, quick sand, etc… they created an incredibly compelling game world.

It does fall a little flat when you try to focus on missions/quests, because they are geared toward making you explore. If you get ahead of them, you will find yourself repeating things a lot. Even focusing on missions, you’ll repeat certain things a little too often. The story is surprisingly good once it gets going.

The PvP portions of the game are an out-of-control dumpster fire. At around 80h it suddenly goes from being an excellent PvE survival MMO to being “Escape Tarkov: Desert Edition”. The game seems built around this idea of faction conflict, but the PvP is a completely unstructured free-for-all. It’s awful. They’ve said they will make some of the endgame PvE instead of solely PvP, but it doesn’t sound like they plan on actually fixing the PvP at all.

Overall, I recommend it. It doesn’t succeed at everything it tries to do, but it does try. And even if the developers seem a little stubborn (especially with their lazy, half-cooked PvP approach) they are definitely listening to feedback.

Steam has the grip it has because nobody else is even trying to compete with them on like terms. Steam doesn’t engage in anti-competitive behavior and even shares their technology with competitors freely. They are successful because they continue to give consumers and sellers what they want, as opposed to engaging in unethical behavior like Microsoft, Epic, and major publishers do.

Stellar Blade ships with malware. Nobody should be paying for it or following its example. It’s really distressing that this even needs to be pointed out.

Not owning digital content isn’t a Valve problem, it’s a “government is deeply corrupt” problem. You can thank the DMCA and laws like it for the loss of ownership. Want change? Run for office, call and harass politicians until they repeal anti-consumer laws like the DMCA and enshrine digital ownership as law.

Exhibit number 4,923,768 for why patents should not exist and need to be aggressively banished from civilization.

…no I won’t name the reasons why. Do your research

Oh. Oh no.

I will explain the reasons why, because it’s important to understand this without sounding like the antivax equivalent of a white knight.

First, forget the word monopoly. It’s a red herring. We are going to talk about trusts. A trust is any kind of organizational structure (one or more companies) that control or seek to control a market through centralized leadership. Trusts can lead to monopolies, but they are distinct and do not need to be (and rarely are) monopolies. The key defining feature of a trust is the use of market capture strategies that are unethical, anti-competitive, clandestine, underhanded, etc (“legal” or not).

Valve is neither a monopoly nor a trust, by definition. While they control a huge portion of the PC gaming market, they operate with transparency, do not sabotage competitors, share their technology freely with potential competitors, and do not push any anti-competitive policies (like exclusives, rules preventing offering products cheaper on other outlets, etc).

There is healthy competition in the PC game space, but Valve has held the lead by offering the best, most attractive platform for consumers. From social features and integrations, to regular discounts and sales, to a healthy and robust community review system, to automatically elevating great new content that might otherwise be missed, to enabling new platforms and technologies (VR, Steam Deck, Linux)… they provide things that customers and sellers love.

Compare their competition. GOG is great but their DRM free policies (which are great) limit their use by sellers. Publishers all have their own stores now, but those are unattractive for a wide variety of reasons - splitting your library, using even more proprietary software to access your content (new stores and launchers), and for all that inconvenience you don’t even get a discount when Valve isn’t taking a cut. Finally, there’s Epic. Market share is Epic’s game to lose, and they are losing on their own merits. Their product lacks basic consumer features that Steam users expect (social features, performant storefront, trustworthy reviews, etc) and they have repeatedly engaged in anti-competitive behavior through the use of exclusives. At one point, Stardock’s Impulse platform was well on its way to becoming a legitimate competitor, but then came the fateful decision to sell out to GameStop, who destroyed it.

Steam is no monopoly or trust. They are simply successful because they are well liked and they are well liked because they give customers and sellers what they want. Nobody else is even trying to compete with Steam right now. Epic could, but they aren’t, and only Tim Sweeny could tell you why.

Why do so many games have such broken, awful, undercooked end-games? It’s endemic.

The end-game gets extremely grindy very suddenly, like running into a wall. Until you reach that point, it doesn’t feel grindy in the slightest.

The PVP implementation is a dumpster fire that undermines everything the game (and source material) is supposed to be about. If they aren’t going to do lore-appropriate faction-based PVP, then they should just remove PVP entirely. It’s amazing how wrong they got that when everything else is so right.

Otherwise, the game is incredible. It’s tense, scary, satisfying, lore accurate, and never, ever dull.

I wasn’t aware that assets readily available on the Epic Marketplace were considered “trade secrets.” Nexon is operating at Nintendo levels of evil in this case.

It’s already overpriced, but they will keep doing this as long as enough people tolerate it to make the numbers go up.

We already no longer own games. It’s been that way since the DMCA robbed consumers of digital ownership. If your game includes DRM or a EULA, you don’t own it.

This is my own approach, to a T. If you make me wait, I’ve lost interest. There are so many amazing games out there, many from more deserving indie studios, that the competition for my attention and money is fierce. This goes for delayed releases and releases that launch with malware like Denuvo. It’s very unlikely that I will ever touch either, even at a steep discount.

If you expect to own the things you pay for and not have them taken away from you whenever the other party wants, then yes, it matters quite a bit.

That’s very disappointing, given it’s infected with anti-consumer malware. People never learn.

Even if they eventually remove it, they missed their chance. I have never purchased a game that shipped with Denuvo, even after they removed it. For example, Lies of P.

Even if it’s on deep discount, Denuvo is so incredibly unethical that the idea of ever rewarding those developers with business rubs me the wrong way.

Subscription at launch

No thanks.

Using Smart Assemblies (blockchain technology)

Oh, hell no.

Even if it were available on Linux, GamePass isn’t the value it once was.

Pass.

I didnt realize Steam would do that. There have been several times where EULAs changed or malware was added a year or more later and I just assumed I had no recourse.

Clearly you ask for too much.

I like the idea of competition, but there is no excuse for the Epic Game Store being so awful. It could have been rebuilt from the ground up many times over in the years since it launched. It’s abundantly clear that Sweeney has no intention of improving it or giving consumers the features they actually want.