After reading the description, it seems future plans involve NPCs and a story campaign. When or if that actually happens is always hard to assess.

As a person who tends to come from the technical side, this doesn’t surprise me. Without a deep understanding of the subject, how would you come up with an accurate formula or algorithm to meet your needs? And with lighting in a physical space, that would be an arts major, not a math or computing major.

Most of my best work (which I’ll grant is limited) came from working with experts in their field and producing systems that matched their perspectives. I don’t think this diminishes his accomplishments, bit rather emphasizes the importance of seeking out those experts and gaining an understanding of the subject matter you’re working with to produce better results.

It was a pretty good game a year or so in, and has only gotten better. I haven’t played for a while, but I put over 100 hours in first.

I used to think there was nothing more stupid in zombie movies than uninfected humans just leaving each other alone and killing off the zombies. Why would you bother taking guns from other people when you have so many just lying around after 90% of the people died? If everyone just killed 10 zombies, the whole thing would be cleared up. I don’t think that anymore.

Ah, okay, I didn’t get the reference. Pretty sure it was Simpsons MacGyver.

It’s an interesting form factor, and it isn’t like they saved that gotcha for 3/4 of the way through the article.

As a gamer, there isn’t too much I can do about it, except buy games from other stores where the developers offer their games. As a developer, if I’m worried about Valve becoming abusive, it makes sense for me to use more than one marketplace, or a different marketplace than Valve altogether. Since Valve doesn’t seem to have a lot of exclusivity deals, this either means it costs more for developers to maintain multiple distribution channels, or they don’t think it benefits them to have multiple distribution channels. That said, the continued existence of those other distribution channels leaves the option to leave if they don’t like Valve’s behavior.

As a gamer, all I can do is support other stores, and I do.

16% so far!

Remember, if it wasn’t for Larry Ellison, LibreOffice wouldn’t exist. I remember reading about those shenanigans while they were happening and desperately hoping a fork would appear soon. I wasn’t disappointed.

This is an anecdote, but it is also absolutely not speculation. I won’t install Epic, I avoid most AAA launchers/required accounts, prefer GOG, and get most of my games on Steam. Epic and many other studio launcher apps are hostile to the consumers or just a royal pain to use. I have a couple Sony games. Why should I have to be online to play a 20-year-old single-player game that I bought through Steam? So now I check if they have that garbage before I buy them through Steam.

I think Steam could afford to charge less, but I don’t think most smaller companies could get a basic store up for less than they charge (and the big companies have the tools to determine if thos is saving them money), and that still doesn’t get you everything Steam brings to the table, consumer confidence being the most important.

“There’s this flaw with capitalism.”

“No no, it’s a feature!”

We have plenty of examples of this.

No Man’s Sky came out to much fanfare, and was kind of shit. They took their massive profits (of which a significant chunk went to distributors, publishers, etc., just like back when physical copies were the norm) and used them to transform their initial offering into something that was far more like their vision than the original product.

Minecraft also followed this paradigm for a very long time.

Now, how many very successful game developers just took the money and ran? A lot? Yeah, a lot. The simple fact is not many companies are willing to spend already-earned profits for a fraction more sales.

And a societal structure that both does very little to catch piss poor parenting while also guaranteeing that a minimum amount of poor parenting can have large and devastating consequences.

To paraphrase one of society’s less brilliant thinkers, “Who would have thought heathcare advanced materials science could be so hard?”

I had a little discussion with a guy complaining about sodium batteries and how you keep hearing these wild claims and then nothing. I did a quick search and saw an article about a $2 billion partnership agreement to work on a pilot plant for sodium batteries. He claimed it was yet another sensational headline and doubted anything would happen from it. Less than a week later I saw an article about a plant in America being announced.

This stuff is hard. It’s not like Master of Orion where you throw money at a specific research and get access upon completion. Different groups around the world are researching a multitude of different ideas, some related, and after a while a bunch of these ideas are combined and associated and researched, and all of a sudden you have a new product that’s significantly different from what was available before. And then you see incremental improvements for decades, not unlike the internal combustion engine or rechargeable lithium batteries.

Yeah, it looks beautiful, but AR/pass-through is so handy.

There’s this beast, which requires some index components to fully operate and will put you out about $1500 USD with the required Valve Index components, but it does look pretty amazing.

This looks very much like an upgrade. Components of the VR system are not included, such as controllers and a base station. Buying those from Steam to go with this headset adds $570 CAD to the price for a new setup.

That said, allowing code into your spreadsheet takes away a lot of barriers to programming.

I’ve seen the movies and read the books, and I’m not a millenial. I also don’t have time to play all the games I’d like to, so I can take a pass on supporting the person spreading hate and occupy my time playing something else, instead.

I knew a girl who lost her uterus in an accident before she hit puberty. We lost touch, but im pretty sure that precludes her having a period. Is she not a woman? Is she less of a woman because of this?

I mostly agree with you, but I’m pretty sure NMS took home about $15M in the first month ($78M sales in first month). If they hadn’t, they might have closed shop, too. Now, we have a small group of millionaires who can make whatever they want.