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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!

The X series (X3 and X4 in particular) might be fun. Very sandboxy. The late-game turns into more of a management game than a ‘fly around blasting stuff’ game, but you don’t have to go that route if you don’t want to.

He did at least once; he streamed it and had no idea how to play the game, spent hours in silence being heckled by chat.

He should make it interesting. Pledge, say, 300 billion to a number of humanitarian charities if he doesn’t succeed in making a highly reviewed AI game in 2026. Put it in an escrow account in the meantime.

Alternately, you’re playing an RPG, and you’ve reached an emotional climax. Mid-cutscene while a character is delivering a gut-wrenching dialog, an ad for Raid Shadow Legends fills your screen.

Hard no-thanks from me, but I could see this maybe being a viable option for folks who just can’t afford to buy games which, given the state of everything, might be a growing percentage of the population.

It’s not so much about the shovelware crap they release every year, but rather about the IPs that they own but aren’t doing anything with.

I am loving Hades 2, but I hope they don’t make Hades 3, or at least, not right away. Supergiant’s entire catalogue has been fantastic, and the diversity of genre and game style has been a great time to play through. It feels almost like a waste for them to make a third Hades when they could make something else as unique as Transistor or Pyre. Seeing the interesting worlds they concoct is a big part of the joy of playing their games.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I actually like these “DLC Subscription” type things, particularly for older games with tons of DLC. There’s a huge barrier to entry for someone trying to pick up an older game, and being able to pay $5 or $10 and ‘demo’ all of the DLC for a month is a nice way to see what’s worth buying or if the game is even going to have enough longevity to make buying the DLC worth it.

Obviously when it’s accompanied by a huge increase in the price of the DLC, it sours it considerably, but at its core, the subscription itself is not a bad thing.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed still holds up as, in my opinion, the best kart-racing game out there, for sure beating out all of the Mario Karts. Got high hopes for Sonic Racing Crossworlds.

Similarly, very much looking forward to Palfarm, assuming it’s real (which it seems to be). Fuck Nintendo.

Why does this work (and why is it a morally grey area)? I’m so confused by this. Did they post the instructions themselves?

Edit: Nevermind, I see you explain it in the post; the content after the screenshot wasn’t showing up until I refreshed.

I wouldn’t have beaten the ‘true’ final boss without them. No way in hell.

Nine Sols did this perfectly. It’s another very hard metroidvania, but it has some options you can enable if you want to that adjust the difficulty in a variety of very tangible ways. I wish that was standard.

It really wouldn’t take much. Just some accessibility options to address some of the most punishing mechanics would do it. Would be great if mods solved this.

The high points of the game are very good. The low points ruin it, in my opinion. I get that frustration might be fun for some people, but I find it discouraging and I don’t feel like Silksong wants me to be successful. It feels like it wants me to feel frustrated and angry, and that’s not an experience I want to have. I doubt I’ll finish the game, which sucks, because I loved Hollow Knight, and I love the parts of Silksong that aren’t just making me mad.

I bet they’re going to get a ton of sales off of this, because the campaign - especially the beginning of the campaign - is a masterpiece. Absolutely fantastic gameplay. It’s not until you get most of the way through and into the endgame that the cracks start to show, but oh boy do they show.

Strongly recommend that anyone who plays this this weekend and enjoys it give the reviews a good read if you’re considering buying it. Also, you should know that the game will be free to play once it’s out of early access.

All that said, I do strongly recommend giving it a try this weekend if you enjoy ARPGs. It has a very different feel compared to other ARPGs on the market and if it clicks with you, you’ll really enjoy the campaign. I’d strongly recommend playing Solo Self-Found, or at least just ignoring the player market. You can trivialize the gameplay if you buy gear from players; the game feels very much balanced around SSF (and player to player trading is a terrible experience anyway).

If they didn’t want to over hype or give false hope on development for the game, maybe they shouldn’t have hyped the game off the back of their first game more than 6 years too early, idiotic choice imo.

Hey, just in case you’re unaware, they kickstarted the original Hollow Knight, and one of the stretch goals (which was met) was a second playable character (Hornet) as a DLC that backers would get for free. While they were making that DLC, the scope just expanded to the point of it being an entire standalone game (Silksong). They had to communicate to backers that they were forestalling the promised DLC in favor of a sequel; the cat would have been out of the bag then whether they wanted it to be or not. Better for them to announce the sequel publicly at the same time, rather than have it leak via their Kickstarter update.

Based on the username, I assume it’s either auto-translated (with obvious problems) or it’s a non-English keyboard and has problems with some characters as a result. Not throwing shade, just making an observation, for the record.

Maybe I’m in a minority here, but geez… I find it super hard to watch videos that have constant cuts during the speaking like this. I’d much rather just have the video be 5 minutes longer and include the natural pauses.

“Decent reviews”, but it’s a 71 on Metacritic. While in a normal world a 71/100 probably would be “decent”, I, and I think the majority of people, see a 71/100 and assume it’s a steaming pile, because of how absurdly skewed review scores are.