At this stage we’re just going around in circles. Agree to disagree.

Your point is confused and all over the place, partly because you’re trying to attribute your own point to something I said.

The issue is you’re completely missing the point that I’m making, which is that Steam isn’t pushing DRM, it merely doesn’t prevent publishers from using it or implementing their own.

This goes back to OP’s post where they’re trying to suggest that Steam is bad because of DRM, when really Steam merely allows it rather than pushes for it.

You then tried to make a point about being beholden to Steam’s platform to download your games because it’s less convenient than backing them up yourself or downloading the DRM-free installer from GoG but all that is moot because the discussion was DRM vs not DRM. Saying that GoG giving you an offline installer that does the heavy lifting is a plus point in GoG’s favour from a consumer ease of use standpoint but if the only thing that’s stopping you from copying and pasting the folder of the game is not necessarily knowing what the dependencies are, well that’s just convenience rather than stripping away your rights.

And speaking of rights, you have the right to choose whatever platform you like based on the features that platform has.

The purpose was to tell you exactly what I stated - that Steam does not enforce the use of DRM and nothing more.

You’re the one that wants to extrapolate that statement to mean much more than it does.

The point you missed is that the use of DRM is on the publisher/developer and not Steam itself.

Who’s claiming Steam is a “de facto” seller of DRM-Free games?

Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).

Steam lets you publish your game on their platform and hand out as many keys as you like to resell on other platforms (at no cost) while still doing all the heavy lifting of hosting and distributing.

Steam doesn’t decide what kinds of titles get published on their platform any more than GoG does, so the bit about remasters, etc. is a bit weird. Besides you the user should get to decide what you want to buy and play.

I love GoG, but I love Steam as well. They’re not mutually exclusive and you can have both.

This is a fan mod for Simpsons hit and run, FYI for those wondering

I appreciate that, but that isn’t really a solution for a saleable game. Concept art sure but that’s it.

Yewahh… How does that help?

Yeah I’ve never been able to draw in my entire life, believe me I tried. I have an eyesight impairment and that doesn’t help.

So I’m in two minds about this. I am a software engineer by trade and have an idea for a game I’d like to try making.

The problem is that I don’t even really know how to make games, not do I have any artistic abilities myself. I can’t afford to pay a load of artists for work for a game that might never be finished and might never make money.

So I’m stuck in this hard decision of do I try and make my game, invest a lot of money and potentially lose it all, or do I try and find a publisher who can front the money but lose creative control of my game? Or do I use AI to give me a head start in building something that I can use to garner interest in, in the hope that enough people like it that I can fund the development?

Essentially, AI offers me a way to create something that I would not otherwise be able to create and that’s really hard to accept.

It doesn’t really matter if people stick around to play a single game, they’ll almost certainly explore other games and stick around for the service. That’s the idea I think they’re going for.

I’d be curious to see how many CoD players stuck around.

Game pass is a big success for them as far as anyone can tell.

Bioshock was a cut down version of the “shock” gameplay - no inventory management, much more linear path, etc.

I remember at the time people complained that it was “dumbed down for console”.

I still enjoyed it though, but I can see why veterans of the genre would feel things are missing or fall short while newcomers would be blown away.

I sold all mine the second he started tweeting about trump. Good riddance.

Only if that channel was private. You don’t have to join a channel to be able to read its contents.

XMPP is a mess as well.

Why are you excited at the prospect of less competition in the gaming space?

You don’t have to like Microsoft at all, don’t buy their stuff, but they’re still a major competitor to Sony, Nintendo and Valve - and losing them would do more harm than good. Losing any of them would.

Edit: seems a lot of folks miss the point, I’m not defending Microsoft’s practices, I’m saying having more competition is better.

Sony and Nintendo are not angels either. Even valve has it’s bad points. You can by all means pick a side but less competition is always worse.

Don’t worry about not having any insights, I still valve-ued the pun.

I don’t think you can claim that the team behind concord is incompetent. I think they delivered something that nobody wanted but they delivered that competently.

I agree that incompetence generally doesn’t end up with a good product but sometimes even good competence all around doesn’t win. Sometimes it really is luck and timing.

Corporate meddling gets blamed for ruining things all the time but the truth few want to admit is that some amount of meddling is necessary.

Look at all the big flops Xbox has released over the last year - Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.

When it comes to AAA, it’s so expensive you need some amount of corporate input to make sure people will actually buy the damn game.

Of course there’s extremes to both sides - pretty much anything Activision ever touched was ground to a lifeless micro transaction shell.

But everything we know about concord is trekking6 us that the team itself, including the big bosses, were overly positive internally. Nobody had the balls to interfere.

If they had just one exec who was willing to piss the entire team off, maybe the result would be different.

TL;DW the stuttering is also present on console and doesn’t appear to be shader compilation.

Ray tracing actually will directly change the way games are made. A lot of time is spent by artists placing light sources and baking light maps to realistically light scenery - with ray tracing, you get that realism “for free”.

DF did a really interesting video on the purely path traced version of Metro: Exodus and as part of that, the artists talked about how much easier and faster it was to build that version.

I think you just need to look at the PS5 Pro as proof that more GPU power doesn’t translate linearly to better picture quality.

The PS5 Pro has a 67% beefier GPU than the standard PS5 - with a price to match - yet can anyone say the end result is 67% better? Is it even 10% better?

We’ve been hitting diminishing returns on raw rasterising for years now, a different approach is definitely needed.

This is why they’re one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They’re very good at “business”, which is just a way of saying they’re good at maximising profits.

All corporate social media accounts are trying to sell you stuff.

Who said anything about Netflix giving up a market, they just offer a worse service. But hey, iPhones offer a premium service, right?

Netflix being older is hardly relevant to this discussion.

Maybe you’re unaware, but the higher quality streams are only available on devices netflix has certified. You can still use netflix on GrapheneOS but you won’t get that quality, it’ll be downgraded.

This is a common problem for cheaper Chinese devices as well.

I feel like a huge aspect that this article and the GrapheneOS developers are overlooking is DRM content.

They’re focusing on user security for a user’s own data, but there’s a whole other side to it with companies wanting to protect their own data - think Netflix and the like who use the same systems to ensure that nobody’s been tampering with the device as a way of bypassing the copy protection of their media.

Now I’m not saying I support DRM at all, I’m very firmly in the camp of being able to own the media you purchase without restriction, but my point is that it’s not as simple as Google being dismissive, lazy or ignorant but rather there’s a lot of commercial sensitivity at play and if Google fucks it up, they could potentially lose certification of the entire android ecosystem.

You uhhh…you might have missed the sarcasm on that one.

That context is exactly why Karl’s content is what it is, it’s the same reason so many YouTubers use click bait titles and stupid thumbnails - it gets more hits and more hits is more money.

If it takes you a week or more of your time to make a single video, of course you’re going to want as big a return from the video as possible. And if the choice is 3x the return for the same effort then it’s a complete no brainer.

He makes billions of dollars from YouTube videos or something

If the game is good I’ll buy it, if it’s shit I won’t. I don’t see how these NPC’s will make the game good and I haven’t personally bought an Ubisoft game in several years.

I understand where you’re coming from, but you’d have to really go out of your way to ignore a lot of stuff in the game to just get the gameplay without any of the dialogue or text that is absolutely dripping with satire.

You make money by both selling more and spending less.

Think about it, you can have none money left over at the end of the month by working extra hours at your job or by spending less money on something - but what if you can’t work extra hours because there’s none available? And what if you need that extra cash at the end of the month? The only thing you can do is spend less.

Phil is kind of saying the same thing you’re saying here, but it’s not easy to just “sell more”, not when everyone else is struggling to have that extra cash to spend.

The games industry right now, as a whole, isn’t growing. That means companies are selling less. Phil end everyone else would love to sell more, by all means if you’ve got some solid ideas on how to do that then every games industry veteran out there will happily listen to you, but the sad and shitty reality is that sales are down and when you’re a business, if you can’t increase sales you’ve got to cut costs.

And that means job losses. It fucking sucks and we can have debates all day long about the merits of capitalism and all that, but that’s the reality of today. That’s the game. Phil is being honest and up front here, it’s a shitty game but he’s playing it and if he wasn’t playing it, someone else would.

I don’t know why you’re getting down voted, it’s completely reasonable to ask for sources.

Here’s an example, look at the tweet referenced which shows an except from the legal filing: https://twitter.com/gamr12/status/1765098920521461869

Essentially, the Devs were writing articles and posting messages about games working before they were officially released. As in, before people have legal means to purchase them.

You might argue that it’s not uncommon for people to get pre orders early, sure, but this is clearly pushing it.

No he’s right, Yuzu’s Devs were openly encouraging piracy. It was all over their discord.

That’s why they settled so quickly, they were fucked otherwise.

There were several sequels, but they were all terrib-ohhhhh, I see what you did there

I’m convinced its a mistake, especially given that origin hasn’t dropped the price

So a cartridge?

I feel slightly obligated to buy it day one.