I spent a lot of years playing EQ1, and I don’t think any game will ever really capture that magic again, but this sure looks like it’s a great attempt at doing so.

What! I love this conceptually.

The issue here is that I, as a gamer, want to know if developers espouse opinions that I strongly disagree with, because I don’t want to give them my money. So if a developer was (for example) in the Epstein Files, I would want to know that before buying their game. Reviews are an effective way to communicate that information, and I’d be rather upset to see them go.

You can’t reasonably allow reviews outlining some developer behavior and disallow others - that’s straight up censorship. As much as I disagree with the 'I will downvote games by someone who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death" stance, I think it’s their right to take that stance. I’m not really sure how you reconcile those two things without just banning them both.

What Steam could do is have a separate review category (from ‘normal’ ones and ‘off-topic’ ones) to categorize character profiles of the developers, and let people opt in or opt out of having those included in the aggregate score. Alternately, they could categorize reviews by the reason (e.g. “Performance / crashes”, “Unfun”, “Too hard”, “Too Woke”, “Developer is a horrible person”), and let people choose which categories they care about.

If DMCA is going to continue to be ‘guilty until proven innocent’, it really needs to come with some really fucking severe penalties for false claims. Using automated claims services should not be an excuse.

This was fun in Smash Ultimate for the switch; if you had amiibos, you could load them in as characters and they’d (supposedly) learn from what you did when playing against them. We used to pit our amiibo characters against each other and treat it like Pokemon battles. It was a good time.

I’ve played online games before where the entire point was to write a bot to play the game for you; I don’t know what the genre is called, but there’ve been a few of them over the years. The game is essentially just an API and the efficiency and complexity of your self-written bot determines your success or failure. It’s fun.

This is functionally that, except… you… don’t write the bot yourself. So… what the fuck is the point? Like, seriously. I’m not judging you - if this interests you, I would be legitimately interested to hear what the appeal is.

This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.

People who enjoy a game are more likely to have more playtime, therefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. This is exactly what you’d expect to see on any game, barring situations like the developers making changes that ruin a game that previously was good.

So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.

Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. If a game - especially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. I don’t have enough hours in the day to play games I don’t enjoy hoping that they’ll get good eventually. Why should anyone feel the need to do that, whether they’re giving the game the benefit of the doubt or not? It’s the MMO argument. “The game gets really good around the 100 hour mark!” I don’t care. I’m not sticking around for it. There are plenty of other games to play that are fun within the first 2 hours. If a developer expects people to slog through an unenjoyable 2+ hours to get to “the good parts”, they probably deserve the negative reviews.

I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.

How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.

The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?

This thing looks slick. How does it do with sleeping it mid-game session and resuming later? That’s the biggest make-or-break feature for me with any of these handhelds.

If the 17000 employee statistic is accurate, $780M won’t even last 6 months. That’s just shy of $46k per employee, and according to Glassdoor, the average salary is considerably more than that.

It’s only really an issue for AAA titles. There’s millions of indie games out there that will run just fine on 10 year old hardware. If this kills the AAA game industry, I think it’s doing us all a favor.

It starts very slow, so be forewarned, but if you’re looking for a long-haul incremental game, I’ll recommend Evolve. I’d estimate roughly 2 years to “finish” it. Legitimately a very good incremental game.

It makes sense to me if you’re talking about information that wasn’t public already. For example if you obtain someone’s private communications and make them public to smear them. This is just stating information that’s publicly available to a large audience. How do news organizations not just constantly get sued for defamation any time they print or state anything negative?

Edit: I assume, anyway. The article doesn’t say anything about this streamer obtaining privileged documents that they used to get this information or anything, so I’m making the assumption that they used publicly available sources.

It’s important to note that defamation laws in Korea are very different from those in the United States and many other countries. Of particular note is the fact that defamation can still be claimed even if facts are used in the related statements, and the fact that the aggrieved party need only show that the statements hurt its reputation and that allegations were made publicly (i.e., widely available to many people).

What the fuck, that’s draconian. “You publicly stated factual information and it hurt my business!”

Pretty sure that’s an NES - look closely at the controller, it’s got the 2 red buttons which were pretty iconic. That’d suggest they were 5 between about 1985 and 1990, which suggests they’re 40-45 now.

Judging by the CRT monitor at 18 and the LCD at 23, I assume OP is around 40 now. Maybe they just omitted the ~17 years worth of panels where they got out of the house and did something else.

I remember playing that one Conquest map where you’re attacking a ship or station in space and have fighter dogfights before taking ground inside and pushing through it for hours at at time with my friend group back then. That and the ‘junkyard wars’ style one. Those maps were absolutely peak.

I’d bet some significant amount of the hype was from people thinking “Oh, sick! The Marathon franchise is getting a revival!” without realizing that the new game had essentially no relation to the Marathon franchise they remembered. I don’t know who they think is sitting around thinking, “You know what I want? Another live service extraction shooter.”

[email protected]

From my perspective, this is another reason it’s a bad idea to have an American company (even a somewhat user-focused one like Valve) be a steward of modern digital services. Local culture puts too much emphasis on the theatrical elements of morality.

Yeah, I hear you. It should be based in a sane country like Australia or the United Kingdom or China or Japan.

Point is, making this an ‘America bad’ problem is just ignoring that it could be so much worse if it was based elsewhere.

This was from 2021, so prior to the Steam Deck… that was really their break-out moment, I think, with regards to hardware. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were neat but didn’t really capture their respective markets, and the Index was widely considered one of the best VR headsets on the market but that’s a relatively small market, and it priced out all but the enthusiast tier consumers. The Steam Deck on the other hand had mass appeal and basically ushered in a golden age of handheld PC gaming… not to mention the immense hype around their recent hardware announcements. Could be that their hardware team is making more now.

Sure, but the point I’m making is, it’s not Steam’s fault; they’re simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.

It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.

This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.

Tangential to the point of the article, but this:

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn’t explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

actually strikes me as the best / sanest form of prepping, as long as everyone does it. Imagine a scenario where the water chemist has a plan to save their town from a contaminated water supply, the electrical engineer has a plan to save their town from a wide-spread power grid failure, the EMT has a plan to save their town from the collapse of the emergency response system, etc., such that no matter what disaster befalls them, someone is there who’s ready to step in and apply their expertise for the betterment of the community as a whole.

Ah yes, my favorite DOS games, Red Alert and Unreal Tournament.

It’s a price reduction. It’s cheaper than it has been for the past 20 years. For a quality MMO with no subscription fee or microtransactions that they’ve been running servers for for 20 years. I’d say it’s quite fair.

Calling it “abandoned” is a little silly when you’re replying to a post literally about the game being worked on, isn’t it?

Not only that, this is free if you previously bought any of the 3 expansions. If you didn’t, and don’t want to now, this announcement really isn’t for you, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I firmly believe that anything “written off” in that manner - this includes movies, too, in particular - should have to be released into the public domain as part of that process.

Any business that’s paying less taxes is harming the public good; we should at least benefit in some small way from that.

Oh, man - I can do you one better. I still have one of these, still hooked up and running. We use it as a game server for some low-requirement stuff… currently Vintage Story.

For what it’s worth, this wired alternative is almost identical to an xbox one controller except for the rumble motor, which is markedly lower quality. If that doesn’t bother you, it’s also less than half the price, and works out of the box in all distros I’ve tried.

Which competition are you referring to?

Another Crab’s Treasure is excellent.

Etrian Odyssey HD is a good game but has Denuvo DRM for some reason so do with that what you will.

TW:WH3 is kind of a mess with an absurd amount of overpriced DLC; what you’re getting here is only a small piece of the game.

Can’t comment on the rest, as I haven’t played them.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile unlocks and offers to let you switch to ‘Pretty Princess’ difficulty if you die too many times in a row.

My favorite will always be the ‘Spent 15 Hours at the Alien Strip Club’ achievement in High On Life.

Loving this DLC. Quite a different tone from the main game. It also uses mostly standalone equipment from what’s used in the main game, so you can play it on a fresh save or on a completed one and you won’t ruin the experience (by ‘having everything’ already).

It’s also a marketing problem. I find games all the time on Steam that are a year+ old that I would have bought long ago if I’d even known they existed. It’s a problem with small indie developers - they either don’t know how to or don’t have the money to market their game and just hope putting it on Steam will get it visibility.

Nothing, it’s a new account that’s clearly created to advertise, look at the name.

Her best card, in my opinion, but still janky because of the shard mechanic. It limits how many of her cards you can reasonably run in a deck which I just dislike. Great game, though!

Just wish her cards weren’t so janky!