I believe it’s Steam Keys can be sold anywhere but they have to be for the same price as buying the game through Steam itself.

Also, Japan. My understanding is that everyone and their shiba inu plays MonHun in Japan.

That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title.

I can understand. I haven’t played this game but I do have an expensive rig. If turning on dynamic lighting causes the game to stutter, then the dynamic lighting feature is broken. That’s not my machine’s fault. I don’t know exactly what settings aren’t working, but it seems like there are a few nobody can actually use. Negative reviews for a game with broken features is justified.

The person who wrote in “married sex”. I bet that deviant is probably into hand holding too.

It’s a flash game from 2008 and satirical.

Just let the freaking creatives do their job and stop having some committee decide for them.

Reminds me of a joke I heard about Concord.

“Our marketing team was heavily involved in the making of our character designs”
“I can tell”

Every government does. I can’t think of a single law that exists because people signed a petition and not because there was massive social unrest surrounding the issue.

always read the contract. No matter what they tell you, what’s written there is what can be enforced

My friend signed with a publisher when he released his game. The reason he did it was because they offered to port his game to consoles as well as localize it to several languages. They said the fees for those services would be taken out of sales. My friend agreed because he though it gave him far more reach than if he just put the game up on Steam himself.

They charged him $50,000 for the porting and localization. The game hasn’t sold anywhere near that amount and he doesn’t expect it ever will. They will continue to take 70% of revenue (after Steam takes their cut!) until he makes up that debt. He’s lucky he asked for a cut because originally the contract read 100% to publisher until he pays off the debt. He wouldn’t have made any money at all!

Damn $32.50 a month for the full tier? That puts them way above every other MMO.

Who would buy cigarettes? Who would buy a Cybertruck? Who would buy meat? Just because you wouldn’t choose it doesn’t mean it’s a choice that must be banned.

Would you rather buy a game that you know is going to die in a year, or the same game but that can be played for as long as you want?

I would rather I get to make that choice instead of it being imposed onto me. You can make your choice. I can make mine.

Companies dont tell you beforehand that they are going to shut games down. They usually dont even know they will, so I dont see how your example holds up here. Maybe you could explain.

But what if they did? Some places have already put laws requiring sellers to inform purchasers if they are selling a licence instead of ownership. If the terms were clear at the point of sale, and I agree to the terms, what’s the issue? You’re allowed to think it’s a bad deal, but why does that mean I’m not allowed to accept it?

Its like if Samsung would remotely lock your TV making you unable to turn it on again because they stopped “supporting” it.

Right. If they explained that at point of sale they would be doing that, and I was alright with it, what’s the problem? I understand you wouldn’t accept that deal. That’s fine. You wouldn’t buy that TV. I don’t see why I must be prevented from buying it too.

The government should update consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games (and related game assets / features) they have already sold without recourse for customers to retain or repair them.

If a company says they’re going to disable a video game a year after I purchase it and I won’t be able to retain or repair it and I agree to those terms, can I still buy it?

It’s not going to get the signatures because the average person does not care about this. I play a lot of games and even I don’t care. If you don’t like the game, don’t buy it. Why does there need to be regulation to stop me from buying it too?

The headline makes it seem like it’s just gamers but it’s more about the overall gender divide in South Korea. It’s a very interesting read. Men in South Korea feel like they’re struggling to get by and women wanting fairer treatment is being seen as wanting to make things even more difficult for men. It seems like it’s heading towards a tipping point.

I am always reminded how precise and verbose one must be in text since it’s so easy to intend one meaning but have people interpret another.

I said I wondered why, my dude. Past tense. As in “I initially wondered why Samsung wasn’t on the list, so I looked up the list, and saw it’s only for Chinese companies.”

I’ll play journalist and link the actual list (PDF). I wondered why Samsung, a company that literally produces military weapons, wasnt on the list. The list is specifically just for Chinese companies. There is apparently a law requiring the Department of Defence maintain and publish this list.

I just think that if the dev doesn’t care if they get paid or not then they should offer people back their money. I would assume few people would ask for their money back, but it just seems like the right thing to do. I’m not sure why I’m getting downvoting for suggesting the dev offer refunds. Is offering consumers a choice bad?

if you bought something that went on sale next month, does that mean you are entitled to a refund?

Steam literally gives refunds if you buy something and then it goes on sale.

Interesting that the dev decided to make the game free after a month. They announced that they’d rather have more people play the game even if it doesn’t make money. While that’s nice, some people actually did pay for the game. I hope they get the option of receiving a refund if they’d like.

It’s a Japanese patent. I’m not sure how it would hold up internationally, but Pocketpair is also a Japanese company and this lawsuit is entirely within the Japanese legal system. That probably gives Nintendo a bit of an advantage since they’re such a large and iconic Japanese corporation.

The “update” is from a month ago. Pocketpair shared the patents they are accused of infringing and the payments Nintendo wants.

The patents are for “throwing an object in 3D space to capture a target” (throwing a pokeball) and “moving characters to a virtual field when an event is triggered” (entering a battle) the payment requested is 10 million yen or 64,000 USD. A paltry sum for a billion dollar company suing over a game that made tens of millions.

The patents were awarded to Nintendo after Palword had already released a trailer for their game showing gameplay. Pocketpair also released an earlier game called Craftopia which is Palworld but the pals are just straight up animals. It has the same systems Palworld does but didn’t sell very well.

A newer update is that Palworld has since released a patch that modified how their capture and summon system works, likely in an attempt to make Nintendo happy.

Palworld Update v0.3.11 Notes:

Player: Changed the behaviour of summoning player-owned Pals so that they are always summoned near the player

UI: The reticle will now only be displayed when aiming

Edit: there are actually 3 patents. The third one is for the player character being able to ride on another character.

Anyone who gives steam $100 can upload as many “games” any “game” they want. There is no quality control.

It’s a common scam to throw some free assets together to make “collect coin” and then swap the coin asset out with a stick and call it “collect stick” and then swap out the stick with a brick and call it “collect brick” then upload all of them to Steam and bundle them into a 50 game pack with a sale price of $100 (95% off!) and hope someone buys the collection thinking they’re getting 50 real games at a steep discount.

Here’s an example. It’s a 33 game bundle for 99% off its original price of $8,579! They’re all the same “game” with different free assets made by the same dev who uploaded 167 versions of this “game” to steam on March 28, 2024 and priced each around $200.

What about Japan?

That’s the joke

I would ask for a refund.

No they specifically only target companies that cannot defend themselves. World of Warcraft has battle pets that you can capture by throwing cages at them and then train and fight them against other battle pets. Nintendo isn’t about to file a lawsuit against Microsoft.

It seems like it was a DMCA takedown request. Anyone can submit these to content hosters and the hoster has to follow the process, which typically means removing the content until it can be proven that it isnt violating copyright. The problem isn’t the takedown request, but that it was given to itch.io’s registrar instead of itch.io itself. It’d be like asking to takedown youtube from the web because someone reposted your video on it.

New report claims people with hobby spend more time watching videos about hobby than doing hobby

It might not be the engine. Some companies just don’t care much about optimization when they can just tell their players to buy better hardware.

Take GTA5 for example. It had a notoriously long load screen when starting up. Ranging from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending on the read speeds of your storage drive. A modder ended up finding the problem. The code to load up the items in the game opened and read a file, but there was a bug that caused it to read through the entire file for each item loaded. The file was being read thousand of times. The modder changed one line of code and the loading time was reduced significantly. This was a bug that plagued GTA5 for years, caused by a single line of code, that the company didn’t fix because their fix was to buy better hardware.

Oh good, I thought it was just me! I have an older card and can barely keep 30fps with everything set to low. Good to know even top of the line $1,000+ cards can’t keep 60fps on max settings.

I wonder if they’ll be able to patch that. I remember Starfield had framerate issues on launch but a patch fixed it.

Valve wrote literal research papers on player experience and level design. The stuff they came up with have just become the norm in other games. For example, Valve found that players never look up without a reason to. They came up with ways to get the player to look up without directly telling them to with level design choices. Things like rays of light coming in from above, or ropes hanging from the ceiling.

It wouldn’t be a STALKER game if it wasn’t filled with bugs on release

I’m interested to see where this goes, but it’s a class action lawsuit. Most of the times these are just a law firm looking for money. I’d assume Ubisoft will negotiate a settlement where the lawfirm gets $1 million and anyone who bought The Crew will get a $5 credit towards another Ubisoft game.

Palworld had trailers featuring gameplay in 2021. Besides that, there are lots of games where you throw an object to add a character to your party. Including another earlier game by PocketPair called Craftopia. World of Warcraft added “battle pets” where you can throw a cage to catch animals and add them to your battle pets roster to fight against other trainers in 2012.

These headlines keep saying $90 mount but it’s basically “$90 access the mailbox and auction house from anywhere, and also get a mount”.

It sucks that you have to buy a subscription and pay for the expansions.

That’s what got me. I was paying $20 a month and after a year or so and then they ask for $60 to play the new content. What did you do with my $240 in subscription fees? Is that not to pay for new content?

*cranking the brightness up*

Hehehe

Yes, and the most outspoken Gamers™ represent a minority. There’s a reason studios don’t pander to them.