It’s because the stock market doesn’t care about anything except the next quarter. Valve can think long term because they’re privately owned.

Valve are the ones that popularized loot boxes. They’re never going to tackle them.

I doubt Epic would give out the number of free games they do if they were public. Investors hate anything that takes more than a quarter to give returns.

I doubt they’ll care, if only due to self-interest. Most of the corporate sites are trying to ban or deprioritize links because they don’t want people to leave their site and stop viewing their ads.

You act like Epic, GoG and itch.io don’t exist. Steam has plenty of competition. They just suck in comparison.

The Steam Next Fest is how I found most of the good indie games I’ve played. Making a good demo will put you above 99% of the cruft out there.

I’m going to guess they mean narrative-driven “games” like Hellblade or Indika, which were all narrative and almost no game.

I’ve seen several small creators say they get 10 times the engagement on Bluesky. That includes sales through promo links, which can’t be faked. It’s becoming clear that X’s numbers are mostly illusory at this point.

In case you haven’t heard, a bunch of the original KSP developers are teaming up with the DayZ guy’s company to make a spiritual sequel: Kitten Space Agency.

The problem is you can’t go back to that well repeatedly. We’ve played the first two games. The unknown is pretty well known at this point. It’s like monster horror movies: none of the sequels are any good unless they pull an Alien/Aliens and switch genre to action.

I’m my experience, that’s most right-wingers in Texas. They’ll bitch about corporate power, the consolidation of megacorps, the little guy getting fucked over and then just be completely unable to process that the last 40 years of Republican rule are why that’s happening. They’ve decided their identity is Republican and questioning that is something they’re not willing to do, even if their ideology runs counter to it.

Skyrim was at least an improvement over Oblivion. It showed they had the ability to recognize and fix the mistakes of Oblivion and still create an interesting world.

The problem is Starfield isn’t a one off. It’s the latest in a line of progressively worse games. Every game they’ve released since Skyrim has been worse than the one that came before it.

I wouldn’t call most of the modern ones real RPGs either.

The original XCOM is the source of grid based inventories.

Star Control 2 is the first RPG that did the standard dialogue interface where you talk to someone and choose from multiple replies.

GTA3 is the one that started the trend.

30h of gameplay seems very reasonable for a $20 game.

Some review bombs are for legit reasons. I’ve seen a few for games that dropped support for a language well after release.

Of course they are. They literally allow you to ignore all of the most difficult game mechanics. With a great shield you literally never need to time dodges. As a mage, you can easily do ranged damage, so you don’t need to time your attacks or worry about positioning. Using a summon means the boss doesn’t even attack you half the time, and some of them are so powerful that they can beat many bosses on their own.

It’s actually a far better difficulty system than the standard “the game mechanics are the same, but enemies do less damage and have less health” system that most games use.

It has difficulty options. They’re just not in a menu. If you want to play on hard mode, use fist weapons and never summon. If you want easy mode, be a mage carrying a great shield and summon every fight.

Tons of people. I doubt BG3 would have succeeded if it wasn’t so unabashedly horny.

Eh, maybe after they added the NPC icons to the map. At launch, there was basically zero chance you’d complete any NPC quests on your own.

What ever happened to the Chocolatier game he announced?

The originals had it as a trait that you picked at character creation.

A bit. We’ve recently had Arkane and Rocksteady forced to make multiplayer games by their publishers and fail at it.

As long as Steam continues to grow, sure. This is pretty good proof that Epic isn’t putting much of a dent in their marketshare though.

You have to translate from CEO double-speak first. What he meant was “Gamers are masochistic morons, so we thought we’d make more sales by making piracy harder than by making the game better. Our launch flopped, so we’re going to try it the other way around.”

Starsector: It’s an Elite style open world space game. What makes it special is that it’s been in constant development for over a decade and has a crazy number of ships, weapons, lore and features. And a vibrant modding scene.

Also the devs are vehemently against DRM, so the only place you can buy the game is their own website. Or not buy. They put the full version up for anyone to download.

It was basically impossible to self-publish before Steam became massively popular. You needed a publisher to make the physical games and get them into brick and mortar stores. If the publishers all decided something, you didn’t have a choice but to listen.

I haven’t played in nearly a decade, but it used to be an open secret that the Eve economy wouldn’t function without high sec bot miners flooding the market with tritanium.

Mindustry did something similar to this (tower defense instead of RTS). It’s actually a really fun game. It worked by simplifying the factory part enough that you could slap down things quick and dirty in between waves of enemies.

2023 is the year the free money stopped flowing. Without limitless 0% interest money, tech companies that have been losing money for their entire existence have to start making a profit or go bankrupt.

You can actually zoom into a Mass Effect style over the shoulder camera position if you want.