Valve didn’t decide to pull it, and the game is still downloadable if you purchased it before.

Yes, that is the big thing many people are missing. Valve takes a 0% cut from Steam keys sold outside of their platform. The 30% does not apply.

The only rule Valve sets out here is that you don’t sell those Steam keys for less on other storefronts. Which imo seems fair enough if Valve is doing the distribution and asking for nothing in return.

The big sticking point is whether the 30% cut isn’t too high in the first place.

What? That wording isn’t even relevant to the case. That’s just Valve saying they will do a review of the price changes on Steam. They set out no specific requirements (other than a minimum price of $0.99, but will try to catch errors based on their pricing recommendations). It’s similar to how Valve reviews new store pages and provides recommendations to devs on how to improve them. They do have rules against games set up for card farming scams, but that makes sense.

Wolfire’s case is about how Valve as an extremely large player is impossible to go around, so game devs have no choice but to accept their 30% fee if they want to reach most of the market out there. Valve then uses these fees to entrench this supposed monopoly position (Wolfire specifically cites the acquisition of WON back in the day, which Valve eventually shut down and merged with Steam).

Wolfire argues that a fair price is much lower than 30%, and that Valve should lower the fee and therefore have less funds to fight their competitors, creating a more competitive environment.

But that is what the policy is about. Steam doesn’t have a price parity policy regarding general game sales.

It is true. Valve does not enforce price parity for non Steam keys. Here is an example where the dev says that they are offering a better price on EGS because of the better cut:

https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/

Pretty clear example of the same game having a lower base price on Epic than on Steam.

Wolfire claiming Valve does this is something different from Valve actually doing it, and that’s where the dispute lies. According to Valve, Wolfire’s explanation of the price parity policy is incorrect.

Here’s the policy itself: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. **It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers. **

The policy is pretty leanient regarding the “worse deal” aspect. You’re allowed to have a sale on one platform but not on Steam, as long as you offer “something similar” at a different moment to Steam users too.

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

Even if you violate this policy, Valve will still sell your game, they may just stop providing you with Steam keys to sell.

I don’t see Wolfire winning this tbh.

I think they did briefly mentioned they improved the sticks, but they never clarified what exactly.

Never really noticed a difference tbh, I think it’s mostly similar.

Good point, I block all ads so I never noticed.

Ah I block everything like that anyway so I never knew lel.

A version of that game has been out since 2019: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.azurinteractive.pinball

I was confused because I’ve had this on my phone for years now.

It will read a dump from the ROM. The project obviously can’t be held responsible for how you may have obtained that ROM.

Those are the references to where the assets are located in the original ROM (that’s the data inside those json files). There’s no actual asset in there.

You can’t do what you say, because the original ROM is required to get the assets. Just this repo gets you nowhere w. running the game.

Decomps are legal because no copyrighted material is being distributed. They typically require the original ROM to run (eg for assets).

If the tariff is too great the cost becomes unspreadable. Spreading cost requires other regions to still afford the new price, and with numbers like this that’s unlikely.

About one-third of Switches were sold in the US. Spreading a 145% tariff means hiking everyone’s prices by 40-50%. That will murder sales in other regions.

Better to eat a 30% temporary loss that adds pressure on Trump to reverse-course than to eat an even higher loss and face backlash worldwide for making others pay for Trumps idiocy.

Breath of the Wild is 8 years old at this point. Asking $70 for that is pretty egregious in my opinion. Maybe for TotK that’d be more acceptable but for BotW I think it’s a very steep price. Especially given that it’s common that rereleases usually include dlcs by default.

I’d expected $60 for the full package, not $90, given that the amount of development work was likely pretty low (the game was finished years ago after all). So 50% higher than expected.

The SM64+Sunshine+Galaxy bundle game was $30, for comparison. That’s three full games that they needed to put in effort for to run on the Switch.

Screen size, resolution, the APU, storage size, controller connector, buttons, the lot. They did state that they worked on the stick drift issue and found ways to mitigate it, but they weren’t specific unfortunately.

It’s so weird, I was actually kinda hyped seeing they improved almost everything on the original Switch. Hardware-wise it seems good. But the software after really just became this turn-off? The Mario Kart gimmick of riding between tracks looks dull, the 24 players is cool but offset with the wider tracks it seems less impactful, and then all the prices…

I’m holding off I think. Maybe when there’s better games out it becomes a better deal. Or when Nintendo does an OLED refresh (if we don’t have a Steam Deck 2 by then that is).

Yeah I think it’s a bit of a stretch. Though some people claim that because she’s not explicitly called trans in the game, she isn’t trans. Though that debate is mostly held in the dark depths of the Steam discussions.

"Sir"ona Ryan, is what people speculate.

Sure, but that’s not the hate being addressed here. Those were comments specifically about there being a black guy as a main character.

The fact that it’s a buggy barely playable mess is par for the course for Ubisoft.

Presumably it does run through Wine.

You lose out on the reviews of people who tap out after a couple hours of constant crashing and bugs.

The games were free for a long time, and a community patch made them work. That was a significantly better deal than having to pony up 40 bucks for an EA patch that’s barely functional.

There are a lot of bugs that crash the game. It’s barely functional for most. Just look at the Steam reviews.

These games were free before, and with a community patch were still playable. This rerelease somehow got a worse patch than the community patch and costs 40 bucks.

True, but that’s why the original comment seemed surprised, that a service like Slack doesn’t have this given how many corporations use it.

Well you could make it work, for example some random pattern in chat backgrounds that trace back to whoever is the user. That would still show up in a screenshot.

It’s because supposed stablecoins often also end up being scams.

I suggested we play Sniper Elite 4 to my girlfriend recently. She’s not usually one for shooter games (she’s more of a Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing/Cozy Grove/Coral Island type of gamer), and I wasn’t sure she’d like it. She thought she wouldn’t, but she’s happy to try out a suggestion of mine every once in a while even if she thinks we won’t play it much.

We loaded into San Cellini island and she initially struggled with the controls and how to aim and shoot. The gravity and wind effects weren’t super easy to grasp either (she’s on the Steam Deck as well, making it slightly harder to aim too). She accidentally shot a couple times as I was giving her a quick tutorial, which attracted a Nazi soldier to investigate and try and shoot her (which scared her a bit as she got hit). Off to a rocky start, and I could tell she wasn’t enjoying it at all.

We got to the first tower, where the game gives you a pretty good view of the area and lets you fairly securely shoot a bunch of Nazi soldiers. Time to shoot! Here we learned she gets a bit jumpscared if the game suddenly shows you a slow-motion killcam, especially if I was the one triggering it. Again, not a great start for her.

She struggled, but did hit a couple of them. Then on the 3rd or 4th kill, the game showed her the magic words after the kill: “TESTICLE SHOT”. This caught her completely off guard, immediately exclaiming “WAIT DOES THAT MEAN I SHOT HIS BALLS OFF?!”. I have never witnessed her doing a complete 180 degrees turn on her opinion of a game. Suddenly the game became extremely enjoyable for her. The first time she had a killcam where she could see the Nazi balls pop one after the other was like giving her crack cocaine or something. Total bloodlust.

We’ve played through the entire campaign in a span of two weeks, then the DLC, the overwatch missions (twice to play both roles) and now the survival maps. Every evening after dinner she asks if we can “shoot more Nazi balls”. Her spirit animal is Hugo Stiglitz at this point.

God I love that woman.

Honestly the presentation was very underwhelming. Improvements in raster seem fairly small and don’t warrant an upgrade. DLSS still lacks in visual quality and has annoying artifacts, and I worry that the industry will use it as an excuse to release poorly optimised games. Counting DLSS frames as part of the frame count is just misleading.

NVENC is cool, but I don’t use that often enough for it to be a selling point to me.

I’ve been enjoying the memes about the presentation though, because what the fuck was that mess.

This sounds a lot like what Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance has been doing for ages, and that expansion came out in 2007. The only difference is the unit limit but that’s mostly for performance reasons (and is rarely hit in competitive matches anyway).

How are these mechanics next-gen if they’re more than 15 years old?

But then perhaps you could articulate what the exact issue is? Like, what ill effects is Steam being a very major player having on the gaming industry as a whole?

But the barrier to entry for publishing a game on Steam is super-low, it’s honestly dead simple. And even though Steam takes a sizeable cut, they do tons of work in exchange w.r.t. promotion, distribution, community management, the modding workshop, Steam Input, testing Steam Deck compatibility, etc…

For indies it’s one of the easiest routes to publish a game. And given the relative success of indies on Steam, it seems to work quite well.

I’ve toyed with this game concept in my head for a while, really happy to see some studio just built it. It looks a lot like what I had envisioned!

Instant wishlist for me!

You can download them manually if you want. Updated drivers is rarely that important for performance. Maybe for newer games, but not for 98% of what’s already out there.

And they also mess things up occasionally. Like all those Minecraft performance mods that had to change how the game looked to the driver, because if it looked like Minecraft it’d tune itself and get worse performance instead of better.

I found a mod for BL2, which turned off that shading. Looks way better imo. It’s just too overdone.

The requirements listed things that W11 doesn’t technically require, like TPM. The OS works just fine without it. It was a business requirement, not a technical one, that got people upset.

82% positive just means that out of everyone who decided to buy it in the first place, 82% feel like they got what they expected. If you don’t expect greatness, then perhaps this game is exactly what you thought it’d be.

It was a little trickier than I remember, they actively promoted illegal ways to obtain the keys, provided the tools to illegally bypass the DRM with them and (and this is what likely caught Nintendo’s attention) they were very actively monetizing it. This was enough to get Yuzu branded as an illegal tool sold to do piracy with.

Ryujinx was far more nebulous as few details were leaked, it seems there Nintendo just swung it’s big legalese dick around. Probably helped by the Yuzu settlement.

The Switch emus included certain decryption keys, which was a pretty balant violation to be fair.