How is a password protected zip file different from an encrypted blob? And a quick Google will show you dozens of devs asking how to do this in different engines, because it’s a very simple way to delay access to something, it won’t be permanent, but it can allow you to do stuff like pre-loading that game/DLC and activate them remotely.

You crypto heads always bring up the Argentinian Peso even though it’s still actually more stable than even Bitcoin.

I bought the Argentinian Peso because I am Argentinian, and lived through the devaluation of our currency, and the Patacones and Corralito, maybe because you haven’t experienced something similar you don’t understand just how much of “money” is based on trust.

People aren’t buying Argentinian Pesos thinking they might become rich one day, because it’s an actual currency, not a speculative asset, which is what crypto is.

You can speculate with anything, the fact that people speculate with crypto has no bearing on it being money or not. Also you might be unaware but people do speculate with dollars/pesos in Argentina, that does not disqualify either of those as money.

But ignoring that, most of the world does actually accept US dollars

No, you’re wrong, outside of Argentina and the US (and a few tourist heavy places) I have never seen stores that accept dollars. This is a misconception Americans have, dollars are not accepted worldwide, you need to exchange it for the location currency, just like how trying to pay for stuff in the USA with Euros or Reais would not work.

it’s the most traded currency in the world.

Bitcoin is more traded than some small countries currency, if that mattered then Bitcoin would be more of a currency than that one.

It’s also safe to say in nearly every country you can probably exchange USD to the local currency fairly easily.

Also possible to exchange Bitcoin, that has no bearing.

If you can find me a city where more stores accept Bitcoin rather than the designated currency, then sure. I’m not sure a single one exists.

Than the designated currency no, but than a specific currency absolutely, I’m 99% sure every city I’ve lived for the past 5 years has more places that accept Bitcoin than Argentinian Peso.

And that’s bitcoin, which actually is well known and traded. What the person in the article lost wasn’t even that, not any other well known crypto like Ethereum.

Still, it’s a problem of definition, money is an abstract concept, one where is very hard for you to find a definition that includes all of the countries currency but doesn’t include Bitcoin.

But here’s the most important thing that goes through everyone’s heads, just because something is money doesn’t mean it has inherent value. People who invest in crypto, be it FT or NFT, are no different from people who invest in gold or art. And scams involving crypto are no different from other scams, you don’t go around saying emails are scam because people use them to scam others.

All of that being said, crypto bros are the other extreme from you, thinking that crypto is a magical solution to everything and can’t see the glaring issues that will make it impossible from being adopted in any meaningful scale (and it boils down to cryptocurrencies having the same attributes than paper money, bit people not taking digital security seriously the same way they do with securing paper currency)

Here’s a steam forum of someone asking why some devs do that from a year ago: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/7/4423184558852867037/ so it is done by other devs.

By that definition the Argentinian Peso is not money because it’s not stable, nor is the dollar since the majority of stores in the world don’t accept it (mostly just the ones in the USA do, and a couple of others here and there, but definitely not the majority worldwide). And if you’re going to start randomly limiting locations, I’m fairly confident you can find a specific neighborhood or city where more stores accept Bitcoin than dollars, and worldwide I’m fairly confident more stores accept Bitcoin than Tuvaluan dollar, does that mean that that is not money?

Password protected zip file is also a way to deliver content an indie dev might use to lock content, so that on its own is not enough, but also the “payload” was connecting to a remote server, which is not indication of bad behavior, lots of games connect to remote servers and receive commands from there, e.g. event X starts now, or something. Except in this case it allowed a reverse shell.

No automated scan would have captured this, only a paid professional dedicating some time would (and only because this was an obvious attempt, a more subtle one would go unnoticed even by an expert) and that is not feasible.

Have you seen the malware? It would have passed that test.

That’s not analyzing the code. Also almost assuredly steam does that. Finally that wouldn’t catch this since it was a back door, as long as the attacker didn’t use it it would not be detected by any automated means.

And it is very easy to detect you’re in a virtual environment and not do those things, or have a date to trigger the changes or something. The game had been out for a while when this happened without any issues. I just dug a little bit and it was opening a back door apparently, so as long as the attacker did nothing at that time it would have been impossible to detect. You had to know that it was malicious to look for it, then it was quite obvious, but with Valve needing to vet millions of games it’s not feasible to do a full scan of every update of every game.

What is your definition of money then?

I’m not a us citizen, and there’s a big difference between the government uses my taxes for war to a game will use my money for war. You have no choice over the taxes, but by knowing this and still buying the game, you’re saying that your hours of entertainment are more valuable than people’s lives. And yeah, not buying the game won’t bankrupt the Kremlin, but it’s like throwing gasoline to a fire, you’re fueling the war, imagine someone whose house is on fire and throws gasoline in it because “the fire won’t extinguish if I stop throwing gasoline in it”

Like [email protected] said in other comment:

Purchasing Escape from Tarkov directly supports Russia’s war in Ukraine

That’s fucked up, games should not be removed from your library.

Thanks for this. I wasn’t planning on buying it anyways but now if I ever do want to play this I will sail the high seas before giving them a penny.

The same reason why there are many political parties, or restaurant brands, or even games: everyone thinks that their way is better, or are trying to improve on something that they like.

I get that it can be daunting for someone wanting to start, but just like with other topics you should start with something simple to dip your toes and move on from there. My personal recommendation has been Linux Mint, it has sane defaults, works out of the box for most cases and it’s popular enough (and based on another popular distro) which makes getting help easier.

Trying to pick your distro from the sea of available options might feel impossible, but 99% of the stuff is the same, so picking something that works out of the box for you is a great start, and you can learn what you need to make a meaningful choice afterwards.

Let me give you an example on the sort of differences you can expect: do you think that updates should be delivered as soon as possible or leave some delay to catch bugs/issues? If a delay how big should it be?; How much stuff should come installed by default with your system? Should you get a bare ones system to build up or something at least functional for everyday tasks to adapt?; Should you be able to edit your system files or should they be locked so it’s harder to break stuff?. These sort of questions might seem pointless, but they’re the core differences between Linux distros, and if you’re answer to them is I don’t know/care anything that works out of the box would be good enough until you develop an opinion on the matter.

Yes, things like original email and Nickname are some of those questions because after they change the public might have no way of figuring it out. Notice the support tech asked for those informations and when provided with it he said that he couldn’t verify ownership, this means OP reported wrong information for the identifying questions.

I’m not saying the service is great, asking him to access an email he claims to have lost access is dumb, but everything after that the tech support person did his best, and I don’t think he should have disabled 2FA, since it could be a social engineering attack.

The thing is, and I think you’re missing this, he got those wrong. After being asked for email and Nickname he provides them and the support person says “I’m unable to verify that you own the account”, that means he answered wrong, yes those might be bad questions because some random person might know them, but he didn’t.

Steam remembers my card, so I don’t have to input it there everytime. I get that you wouldn’t want to put your card info somewhere shady, but Steam is not that. Also, most banks nowadays have virtual cards you can use for that sort of thing, some even have one use cards that self destroy after a single purchase. So the safety that PayPal used to offer is not that important anymore.

Ah, if that’s the case then MC statement is kind of pointless, so it’s not them putting the pressure, but you still have to go through the people putting the pressure to get to them. I thought that if you put your card number on steam it had some more direct form of charging than going through stripe.

If this is true then I honestly hope Steam and Itch go “ok, then, PayPal and Stripe are banned from the store as payment forms until we can figure out a way of limiting content you can pay with them”. Honestly I don’t think enough people use either of those payments forms, and even if they do currently they almost assuredly have a card they can use instead, and are more likely to switch payment methods than to stop buying games.

There are lots of games where combat is not even an option, like Life is Strange, Before your eyes (do play this one with a camera and a box of tissues nearby), or Firewatch. But games where you’re expected to fight but can find ways around it the first example that comes to mind is Metal Gear Solid 3, you can beat that game without killing anyone, there’s even an achievement for that and one of the bosses will be particularly easy if you go this route.

Spec Ops has no “pacifist option”

I mean, the whole point of the game is that you could have not killed anyone, you could have stopped playing, you choose to keep playing, you choose to kill all those NPCs, the game never forced you, turning off the game was always an option.

Steam used to accept Bitcoin, they stopped when the transaction fees made it unusable. Every time I remember that I get really pissed off, had the block size been increased back then Bitcoin would still be accepted in the many places it was (Steam wasn’t the only one, lots of stores online used to accept it), but because they kept promising a magic solution that never manifested people lost hope and jumped ship (which did solved the problem as nowadays only investors use Bitcoin, so a lot less transactions, a lot more value in them, and higher fees matter less)

Expanding on that, and explaining why this is not Digital hoarding, I have a HUGE catalog of games, lots of which came from bundles and such, if I was able to sell back games to steam, even if for a few cents, I would delete a big chunk of that. But as is I have no reason to do it, I can put them in a “never played” category and forget about them until I randomly find a game in the store that mildly interests me and notice it’s already in my library.

I never said they were good, and you didn’t complain about them being bad, you complained about killing the franchise, and whether a franchise is dead or alive IS measured by popularity.

Oh yeah, they absolutely killed Fallout, the first game released by Bethesda (Fallout 3) was such a franchise killer that only sold 20 times more than the original game, and their latest game fiasco only doubled that. And let’s not talk about that fiasco of a TV show, that couldn’t even make it to most watched on Amazon, had to settle for the 2nd most watched show on Amazon, with only 4 times more viewers than Fallout 4 sold copies… In short, yeah, the new direction is such a fiasco that only managed to bring 165 new customers for every 1 that the original had.

Sources:

https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Fallout

https://wccftech.com/the-fallout-tv-show-has-registered-100-million-viewers-to-date/

Good luck, and let me know how it goes, it should be just that really, just don’t touch the controller until you’re through

That’s weird, that’s the solution, does your controller has some drift that could cause it to still be firing some thrusters?

Obvious spoiler ahead is obvious: Just let go of the controller when you enter that area, you’ll float peacefully (albeit very close to them) until the exit portal.

Honestly, I’m absolutely happy with my Steam Deck, I think it ticks most of your boxes (it even runs Linux, so it’s essentially a portable Linux computer designed for gaming), so I think it’s the better option that you’re looking gor. To your points specifically:

it’s really geared towards family/party gaming

There are plenty of party games on Steam.

it’s Nintendo, so you get the whole usual games (Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.)

This is the only reason to get a switch, if you want a Nintendo console and Nintendo games this is the way. Everyone who gets a switch understand this is the reason they’re getting it. If this is as strong a point to you that it makes you overlook everything else, then get the switch.

like most consoles, it’s plug and play and can be enjoyed in the living room (I kind of gave up trying to set up a proper gaming experience with my Linux PCs, given that I don’t have the hardware for it)

Steam Deck also has a Dock that you can plug to your TV, you’ll need controllers but even so it should be much cheaper in the long run since games are extremely affordable compared to Nintendo.

the battery life is not great to say the least (2.5 hours takes me back of the Game Gear in early 90s!)

Haven’t seen many benchmarks of the switch to be honest, but that does sound bad, the Deck only gets that bad battery life if you’re playing Cyberpunk or something, for more casual games it can get upwards of 6h. Plus you can get power banks that fast large it while playing, which I assume is also possible on the switch although the switch 1 used to have some issues with power banks.

the screen seems to be pretty bad too (at least it’s a step back from the OLED one of the Switch)

All but the cheapest Deck models now use a 90Hz OLED panel

the joycons are still not using a Hall effect sensor, meaning they might still be prone to drifting

While the Deck’s default sticks are not hall effect, they are easily replaceable and Valve sells hall effect replacements on ifixit, so if you ever get drift in your sticks it’s fixable.

most of the games will not be sold as proper cartridges but as download codes

If you’re going down this rote Steam sells download codes for much cheaper

the whole thing (console, additional gamepads, games) is quite pricey

The Deck is about the same price, but like I said you’ll end up saving in games since you start with your whole Steam Library and can get more games much cheaper.

it’s Nintendo, famous for their anti-everything (anti-homebrew, anti-emulation, anti-piracy)

The Deck is by far the most open console you can get, you can even replace the entire OS if you want to, but StramOS is great and you shouldn’t need to.

Both are good games, but they’re very different from each other. Also neither is made by Bethesda.

You probably missed one entry that told you they were blind but not deaf

I have been using Nova for a LONG time, and wasn’t aware of them getting bought, what nefarious thing is it doing now? Do you have some reports on it? Although I can imagine the sort of things analytic companies are doing.

Oops, thanks for the correction I’ll update the post

The reality is that mostly people aren’t going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it’s still a win.

While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that MS-DOS Windows was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to DOS Windows, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there’s some bigger migration, and in fact we’ve seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it picks up speed.

• It lacks a d-pad
• It lacks a right thumb stick
• The thumb stick it has is not capacitive nor drift free
• It only has one back paddle for each side
• Ergonomics of the deck are way better, at least for me
• It lacks the ... button (although this is minor because Steam+a opens the same menu)

Don’t get me wrong, the SC 1 is a great controller, but the Steam deck is better, getting a Steam deck like controller would be awesome.

Me too, didn’t even know people thought it was a bad game until recently. Honestly I don’t get why, I wasn’t expecting anything different from what I got, there were definitely some dialogues that made me chuckle, and a lot of storylines were very tongue in cheek, and while gameplay was nothing to write home about neither is fallout and this was sold as “fallout in space”, and definitely delivered on that.

Dead cells, there are people out there with hours of gameplay that haven’t completed the tutorial.

You should definitely play it, it’s a cool game.

I get what you meant but a couple means 2, so someone uploading once a week for a couple of weeks means he uploaded 2 videos, which could just be coincidence, not a pattern.