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Your point is that the issues don’t affect the core experience, and I’ve explained how that’s wrong, and you’ve ignored it.
You’re also now blatantly mischaracterising what I’ve said.
If you want me to keep talking to you, I need you to tell me that you are actually curious to understand what I have to say.
Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detailed and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.
I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.
That’s one way it happens, but in general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.
The wiki article starts with this:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.
And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.
The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.
Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.
So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,
Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory. The inventory could have just been a way to store game gifts and other things of actual value, now I never look at it because it’s just full of trash.
Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.
And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.
You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.
I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.
I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They’re not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it’s an inevitable trend regardless.
Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn’t around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that’s game over.
I think the last two games I bought at some high premium launch price were GTAV and Cyberpunk 2077.
That second one still stings. I played it longer than I should’ve probably because of the price, and I’ve not bothered with the DLC, even though people said it fixed the game. The price just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Honestly it’s not that Gabe or Valve is a FOSS champion, it’s just that FOSS is the only viable alternative to a potential Windows walled garden, so it’s what they used.
If SteamOS plays a significant role in killing Windows, the credit will still belong to the FOSS movement. They are the ones that laid the ground for SteamOS to stand on, and they are the ones who ensured it couldn’t be fenced in once more.
I said Noita is my favourite roguelite, but actually Heat Signature is probably tied with it. It has a completely different philosophy of soft failure.
If your character dies in space, they’re dead, but they can also be captured, then another character can rescue them. And if a mission is going sideways, you can huck a wrench through a window and fling yourself into space, as long as you’re confident you can pick yourself up with your space pod before you pass out.
It’s very fast-paced with quick runs. Each character that comes along has different traits, and you can have 4 different people on the go at once. Each character has their individual quest - which can be rescuing another character - and when that’s done you can retire them or keep them going.
It’s very open to how you want to play.
Oh! Also, if you’re trying to do your character’s big final mission and it goes wrong, usually you can bail and try again. I lost quite a few characters before I realised that.
I mean, I don’t know how much they anticipated. There are a lot of projectile path modifications that are clearly meant for tinkering, but the idea that they knew their players would do this is hard to tease out. It’s a simulation game built very much on “Things are what they are,” and they know this has deep implications.
Like when I was turned into a sheep, I wasn’t “noita (sheep)”, I was just “sheep”. The noita I had been playing as was effectively stored in a state of nonexistence until the transmogrification wore off, then the sheep was replaced with the noita. So transforming yourself - or simply causing yourself to temporarily cease to exist - can be a way to eliminate side effects of certain things.
If there is one thing that it might be worth spoiling yourself on, if you’re struggling to finish a run, is in the next spoiler.
Tap for spoiler
Learn to escape the Holy Mountain without collapsing it. Being able to return to edit wands, go back up in the world, and access health is a game-changer. Finishing the game without that trick is something I don’t think I’ve ever done.
All the big lore stuff is discovered after finishing your first run anyway as far as I can tell.
Other than that, I would look up how to design good wands. This can be a good thing to learn by doing for a while, but there are deep interactions that you could soend a thousand runs not learning. I think the shared science is a big part of what makes this game great.
My absolute favourite roguelite is Noita.
Beware though, it’s quite different to other roguelites in that the world it creates is suprisingly expansive. You can get lost in it, mentally. There are quests that can take you dozens of hours to complete, all on the same run, and even if you become so absurdly overpowered that nothing can threaten you directly, till you can fly inside the sun, you can still get turned into a sheep and die in a single hit.
Also the wand-building is complex, it’s like a programming language. People have built wands that can teleport you to parallel worlds, and the developers did not intend for that to be possible. And in a way I’ve never seen magic be done before, you can screw up and kill yourself with your wands, just like a discworld wizard. It’s so easy to do, it’s a rite of passage for any new player.
Some people don’t like spoilers on this game so here you go, but honestly getting just a little spoiled made me get properly into it to understand what the hell people were talking about.
Tap for spoiler
I was maybe 8 or 9 hours into reaching the hardest boss in the game, up to NG+24 or so, just a couple of hours away from my destination. I was teleporting, had hundreds of thousands of hit points, had immunity to every kind of damage, could tear through the terrain like it wasn’t there, had weapons that would evaporate any enemy in the blink of an eye even as they became exponentially more powerful with each NG+ level, and I was being careful. I had even pacified the world so nobody would attack. Then some asshole dropped in from off-screen with a wand of transmogrification, got hit by the chainsaw on my tele wand and retaliated while something exploded nearby throwing fire over us, and I, now a sheep, flopped around impotently for a few seconds on fire then just fucking died.
I… stopped playing after that one, I’ll be honest. But I will return.
And rather than simply being repetitive, the way the world loops creates an ennui that’s kind of haunting to me. The whole game is littered with versions of people trying to achieve immortality, and if you manage to reach a point where you actually can’t die, you feel like you’ve soft-locked yourself, because dying is how you get to the end-screen. You can just end the run from the menu, but it feels fake somehow.
10/10 would try to kill god and confront my mortality again.
You know why villagers cause so much lag if there’s too many and they’re allowed to roam free? Well, rather than optimise their pathfinding logic they just… recalculate their paths every goddamn frame. They also take shortcuts in calculating their paths to reduce this overhead, so their movement is derpy and frequently kills them.
You could make the path then record all the blocks they will interact with, and only recalculate if one of those blocks changes. Boom, millions of operations eliminated, and you’ve got some spare time to make sure the paths will actually work. You could also stagger pathfinding so if a bunch of villagers need a path all at once - like you just blocked a path to where they were all going - you could spread out that load, and prevent lag spikes.
But they don’t do that, so people end up sticking them in tiny boxes on top of carpets so they stop trying to pathfind. Just absurd stuff.
Honestly the big mistake Starship Troopers made was making them win the fight. The only thing a fascist understands as a repudiation of their worldview is if it is shown to be weak, but beware, that will piss them off.
And funnily enough, most corporate movie studios aren’t going to take a risk like that. Having a movie where we follow human protagonists to their defeat at the hands of aliens is not ever going to fly in most of the conservative US, so the studio will play it safe and pander to the fascists.
Almost like fascists’ entire thing is just to worm their way into influence within a liberal capitalist democracy, and their actions are tuned very well to that end.
A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.
You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.
I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.
The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.
Well then read into it if you want to make pronouncements about it. It is the revocation of a license that was sold in perpetuity. That is quite different to no longer providing a service in general. It is selectively denying service to a certain group without legal cause. There were no terms in the contract with Mojang that they could unilaterally remove the license if you didn’t do a specific digital dance on their terms. If it is unlawful, the lawsuit will determine that.
And my point is that if it is indeed unlawful, then telling people years in advance makes no difference, especially if, in some cases mentioned in this very thread, people tried to transfer and couldn’t and were given no way to fix it.
And if you bought in alpha, it is for “every future version” of Minecraft. I made it into that group by like a week.
If Microsoft wants to keep profiting off of Minecraft’s name, then they are making “future versions” and they need to honour that. They don’t want to do that? Okay, call it “shitty block building game rip-off #15,084,831”. But they won’t, because that name is valuable for good reason.
It would cost them literally nothing and gain massive goodwill to give that out to like the tiny minority of early players, many of whom won’t even use it, but something about being a corporation makes it impossible for them to do literally anything good. It’s frankly baffling.
Yup, if you’ve played Obduction it’s like that. Full 3d environments made with modern rendering. I tried the latest Myst remake and this one feels like a modern game, although I imagine most of the early 90s design foibles are still there.
I haven’t played many of the other remakes of the original, there have probably been too many, but it’s nice to see the later games getting this treatment.
Yeah, 3 and 4 were where they hit on a really good balance between the pre-rendered graphics and a smooth experience with the skybox-style wraparound images. In V they went to full 3D rendering which was clunky because the computers of the time just weren’t up to it. I think now we’re finally seeing how good these games can look and work in 3D.
Did you ever finish it? If not the conclusion of the game was pretty satisfying, and nothing is spoiled by being told about the door thing. It’s actually more memorable for me than the following ones, maybe because I spent so long wandering around in despair. I actually tried replaying it a little while ago but just bounced off the extremely clunky 90s design and the technical limitations. I think this remake will be a good chance to try again, and see the environments rendered nicely.
If you like factory designing games, I can recommend anything by Zachtronics.
They’re all esoteric programming/automation type puzzle games, and they all have their own unique solitaire games built-in for whenever you get tired of the main game.
My personal favourites are SpaceChem - scifi molecule factories - and Opus Magnum - steampunk alchemical molecule factories. Something about the molecules just works for me, don’t know why. Plus the Opus Magnum solitaire game is really unique and fun, and it has a user-made level feature, so you can keep playing.
Last Call BBS is a collection of minigames they made as their final release before shutting up shop, so it’s a lot more casual than the others, but a lot of fun.