Silk Song had x33 beat by almost triple the max player count. the fact that it didn’t get the inde title and they gave it to X33 is criminal. Silk Song beat it on price and player count and arguably story.

as an ammendum to this comment edit, catfriend edited the post linked and added this to the end

Edit: Regarding @nel0x , they did not have any history with the Syncthing (Android) project nor an expressive public profile when they applied to take over the Google Play Store entry in Feb 2025. I accepted this and transferred - believing in good will and we agreed on their task to be publishing what was on my repository to Google Play after their review. If they now desire to make their own app, there is, unfortunately no way to clean up the confusion caused if it is called the same other than kindly asking them to rename it.

Firmly agree, I think their primary issue is it’s hard to find a game that they refuse that would be a decent game to back that type of cause. This is just due to the nature of the games that get rejected on Steam. They’re the controversial leaning style games.

This one in particular for sure isn’t a good choice, because of the underage controversy but, all of these style games are also going to have a pretty vocal and not so small group against this type of effort.

I have to disagree to be honest. Not because I think that they should allow a naked guy with a young girl(gross), but because in the time that it took for steam to review the game and give a verdict, they had already changed it on their own to be a different model.

For them to refuse re-submission of the game is pretty dumb, considering that the offending content(if that is what it was) had already been fixed in the release build and steam was operating under old information.

If they haden’t already changed it for the release candidate I would be fully on board, but clearly they saw wrong in it as well which was why they had changed it prior to steams decision.

Steam forced an early release build of the game way earlier than they normally asked for, which meant it was exactly that, a pre-release build, meaning it had not gone through the proper channels for vetting or checking to make sure that what they wanted to publish was a final product. Then when requested for a review of the actual final build, steam refused. This combined with the fact that the only storefront that blocked the release was steam, I definitely think steam is the bad guy here.

BEING SAID, this might not be the reason anyway, reading the struggles of this games development process, steam had already posted concern about the live action portions of the game, so I’m expecting it might have been a combination of the nudity aspect of the game (even if not intended to arouse) and the live action portions. I assume steam was already looking for a reason to block this release, and when they were given one they just went with it.

omg yes, I loved when games gave a replay stories or replay core concepts section of the menu, it’s not that hard to add but it lets you recap as well!

unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You’re forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you and the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.

Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.

I saw a lot of Silksong and peak; BF6, blue prince, nightrein and there was a passing glance at split fiction I also had 1 creator I follow play death stranding 2 and KD2 one just started e33 last week so I been watching that. The rest fell out of my circle of 40 or 50 streamers.

Note: I technically saw at least 4 people playing silent hill F but didn’t count it as I never saw anyone stream it that wasn’t sponsored so I didn’t feel it was a good representation if it

I decided to go through and mark what I didn’t see

• Dk bomanza (surprisingly as many were Nintendo fans)
• .Indiana jones
• ghost of yotai (surprising because I watch a few souls streamers)
• hades 2
• ninja gaiden 4
• sinobi art of vengence
• Lego voyagers
• sonic racing
• all the fighter category
• all the vr category
• abaolum
• all the mobile games (makes sense)
• ff14 dawntrail
• avowed
• f1 25
• tempest rising
• ff tactics (probally cause port)
• two point museum
• all the impact category

So looking back, I guess I did see a few of them more than I thought I had, but there was still a good chunk that just never appeared on the creators I followed.

ooo thats a cool website. Just for the funnies I just threw the top 35 (as shown by fediverse observer) into it.

the nominations for most things this year was fairly disappointing. I hadent heard of any of the events, and the content creator one I didn’t watch and only knew of one by name,

I pegged myself as a fairly casual gamer and I do a lot of stream watching but, a good chunk of the games nominated I had never seen or never saw anyone streaming, many I had never heard of. It was surprising since most of my entertainment is via watching people play games or by gaming myself.

My only thing with this is the claim is a glass cannon if its true. If no company resources were given out in this ordeal, if I was one of the 40 employees involved I would be leaking the forum messages publicly to show how there wasn’t any inside information involved. Make the entire case fall apart because if it’s shown no public info was involved, the claim it wasn’t over unionization becomes harder to fight. But I guess that is a better situation for in a court scenario.

Personally, I don’t think either comparison is valid. These two items are nowhere near comparable to the original comment. With tennis if you don’t move, you can’t play. With the examples I gave above most of the game would remain available to the player, just in a single player or PvE environment. Survival RPG’s can easily be made either SP or PvE only, Dune actually came super close, they just decided to heavily limit the end game PvE compatible areas and locked the passage via a PvP area which is why I decided to just not get it.

BUT ignoring the false equivalence fallacy, if the player is willing to spend money on the game in the first place, it shouldn’t matter. Even more-so when the game is basically Ark Survival on Scorched Earth with a dune skin on it and a few additional mechanics added on. There was no decent reason that the game could not allow for a PvE only mode or at least the ability to self host your servers. They said they couldn’t do either under the excuse that they wanted the game to be an MMO(which arguably they failed to deliver on as well)

As for New World? As a person who played it from beta(which I do regret because its not my style game, I just really wanted to like it), New Worlds downfall wasn’t the dev’s trying to cater to everyone, it was the lack of a story/ambition to want to play. It was the same gameplay loop over and over with no drive to want to continue the story. This combined with the failure to have a decent “end game” (story line wise) at launch killed it’s userbase. They promoted a very heavily PvP based cooperative system and then massively fell through on the promises. This combined with the inconsistent servers and the boring game-play elements, made player retention extremely difficult. That’s not appealing to masses, that’s failing to deliver on promises and making a shit game.

And that’s completely fine. But by the developers choosing to go that route, they just outcast the people like me that will not buy that type of game.

Being said though, I find it difficult to understand why a studio would want to go that way. Like, I am the player. If I want to make the game easier on myself, then I should be able to. If I’m willing to spend money on your game, It doesn’t really matter how hard it is.

I get that if a game has an endgame that is heavily PvP based, that it might affect PvP by allowing a PvE only mode. But, to me, I don’t really care because, regardless of their decision, I wouldn’t be in that PvP area anyway. It’s just one outcome is I spend money on their game, and one outcome is I don’t.

Many games I can see them going this route on, such as Overwatch 2 or Dota, but survival RPG games, I don’t see the point of having that type of system for, And I definitely think they’re losing money by going that route.

I’m the same way. I might have got BF6, I played the beta and fell in love cause it felt like BC2 which was my favorite BF game.

Sadly the hoops I had to jump through to even get it to work on a windows system, let alone getting it to work on my Debian system, combined with the price tag was enough to hard push me away from buying it.

It’s a shame because the game was stupid levels of fun, and felt organic. They just are out-casting their userbase by their decisions to block Non-Windows systems.

Minecraft.

I usually hate creative builder games with a passion, I joined fairly early in the alpha process and fell in love with the blocky design.

Then when i thought the game couldn’t get more engaging, forge was released for it and mods started being made and it opened a whole new universe that I’m /still/ playing today.

Honestly, Ark was so close with that aspect with the Obelisks. It would have been so cool to allow for char based PvP toggle (meaning when the char was made it had a setting if it was PvP or PvE), then allow for the Obelisks to teleport you to the designated PvE vs PvP zone. Have PvE invisible to PvP and if the structure is owned by a player in the other zone, it doesn’t exist. Have a designated spot on the map accessible like the boss arena system that allows PvE and PvP players to mix and mingle/fight if they wanted to.

This would allow for using the same map for both modes, so lower system resources, it’s just the structures itself only show for players in the same PvP mode. So a base could exist in the same location on both PvP and PvE and the two modes would be non the wiser.

That does sound promising and does raise it a little on my list. It’s defo better than nothing.

Yea, but I’m still not interested in spending money on a game without PvE modes. If it requires me to enter a PvP area, I’m not interested regardless of the amount of time I can spend in PvE only areas.

Honestly, I liked how runescape did PvP areas, you didn’t have to enter them, you could obtain the material via other means like the grand exchange. This is a good way of doing a PvPvE without hindering your PvE audience. How dune did it was more of a slap to the face, since its a small area thats shared with everyone that wants PvE and PvP, requires entering PvP areas to get to and has a limited resource so on congested servers it’s a big nuisance. it felt like more of a “this can say we tried” than an actual implementation.

Yea, that was what I had found during research, end game stuff locked behind a PvP gameplay with a small section that can technically be done in PvE but has a long cooldown and requires going into PvP areas to get to.

They don’t /have/ to, but I will say if they don’t it removes any chance of me ever buying it.

I was up and ready to buy Dune launch week, but then I noticed there was no full PVE mode and I had no way of creating a PVE environment by self hosting or by other means. This blew all interest I had in the game.

To me it makes logic sense that a studio that offers a PvPvE should offer a PvE experience as well. The framework is basically already there, and in some cases won’t even require more resources to do. In the case of Dune they could easily have made PvE use the same servers, but have players marked as PvE invisible to other players not in the party, or give them a ghost effect to people not in PvE mode so they know not to try and fight them.

Any studio in my eyes refusing to acknowledge the casual non-pvp group are just throwing money away. I have easily dumped 100$ into both Ark SE and minecraft with how many times i’ve purchased them for different platforms, and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I would have never have bought either if they lacked the ability to go PvE only.

It’s not just you. Customer curated content in general on steam has gone drastically downhill over the last year or two.

Like review bomb mitigation can only go so far when the company refuses to block people from writing reviews that write enough off topic reviews.

The discussion forums are the same way, its all award farming ever since they released the ability to give steam points to people.

the main hurdles from my understanding are processor/chip specs. They are generally super locked down in terms of who they run with/allow usage. From what I understand the liberux project ran into that issue because their goal was a fully open sourced Linux phone, and they had to make compromises and are still fighting issues.

I don’t read this as grandfathering due to people leaving. I’m reading this as “oh shoot some countries don’t let us just jack a price by 50% no notice so we legally need to provide a window”

payday still exists? I haven’t heard of the game in years. I’m surprised they even attempted this as a whole because it sounds like it’s only going to piss off their remaining userbase.

BEING SAID, I think their main issue here isn’t the fact that the price went up in the first place, it’s that they decided to make it almost 25% more as the increase after having it be ~52% off for ages. This rollup should have defo been more gradual if they wanted people to not be pissed about that. An instant 50$ increase in price is a tough amount to swallow for a 12 year old game, regardless of if DLC is involved, even moreso when it boosts the price to $170

Sans once again lives up to his name, that mechanic is so cool

I know they don’t wanna rock the boat after the ridicule they had after last review updates but, their review comments and forums could really use a little more tender love and care. Especially in the toxicity department. I know that a big portion of responsibility is publisher but, there is a lot of easily identifiable toxicity that if they did more moderation on (or even read existing reports) would be resolved really fast and make both areas a lot better for the user to enter. Like I personally don’t even allow comments on my reviews anymore because it very rarely allows for an actual constructive discussion, usually it devolves into toxicity from someone.

I mean I haven’t played one of their games in a few generations now, but like, this defo isn’t helping the chances

Sadly both Mastercard and Visa have supported this practice and thats the 2 big ones.

honestly, my opinion of epic is starting to improve more and more with every legal case they open, It’s about time someone with money stepped up.

They are bringing what everyone knew was going on into official record and forcing countries to do something about it. I’m rooting for em

The argument here is that they don’t need to open source or switch over to an FOSS license.

They just need to not actively prohibit people from doing custom servers and they need to release their own server files wheb their support period ends.

If that ends with violating a license agreement they have with another company that is exclusively a that company problem because as shown in the past, law supercedes agreement and contracts.

It will basically put branding companies at a either they don’t agree to let their stuff be used in games and not get the money for it, or they decide that it really doesn’t matter all that much if a community project can use their stuff. Simple choice

Definitely keep signing, I’m really concerned at the speed it rose , and I’m really hoping there wasn’t something else at play here.

I mean I wasn’t planning on getting sub 2 after the shitshow that was below zero, the studio is clear they didn’t understand what caused the magic in the first game, and failed at delivery in the second one.

I think you might need to reread the rest of my comment, because I think we’re on the same mentality.

I’ve read the article, and I read the last development update, which seemed to be leading in the direction that they had fully intended on making a project.

Their previous update is actually what made me have the mentality that I currently have, not the article you posted.

The previous update was a progress update saying that they were beginning internal testing and they released images of what looked to be a fairly progressed game. And they had seemed super hopeful for the future. That is not an update that screams this project’s on the urge of being shut down.

I stand firm with what I said that this game would have had potential. And while they didn’t make the greatest development decisions, I don’t believe the choice to shutter the project was their choice. That’s a lot of wasted effort for a team like that, and if they lasted this long the choice to close wasn’t theirs.

It’s just the bean counters didn’t like how much it was costing for the game. So once again, what would have been a great addition to the gaming market was squandered due to greed.

This is also why the indie market is starting to take off as well as it is again. Because unlike big corporations and studios, if an indie game starts to show signs of maybe not making a bunch of money, they don’t give a shit and they release the product anyway. Where if a large studio game starts to falter, the parent studio just shuts it down.

I think that’s the longest way I’ve ever seen of “Our parent studio decided this game isn’t financially feasible and told us to stop”.

This project is definitely a parent studio decided that they didn’t like the game, so they decided to cancel it. Especially after Vintage Story proved that that type of game will sell, not at the metrics that a studio like Riot would want, but it would sell.

Judging by the graphics in it that they’ve released so far, it definitely looks like they were a good portion into development as well, which is a shame.

I wasn’t aware there was a replacement that was suitable. I will have to look into that soley on the fact there seems to be a linux native release, thank you.

Nexus Mods is far too late on the monetization aspect. The restrictions placed on mod downloading sucks, and it hard pushes buying a membership. Not to mention they basically gave up on vortex and its a buggy mess even if you run it native.

One interesting detail is that all three games have a delivery-by date that’s a few days past the release date

Ah so basically worthless to a consumer if they wanted it release day then. So this will help existing games, but it’s not going to help anyone who wanted a game release day.

A price hike, after the new Xbox PC relabel launch?? Absolute shocker I tell you

fair it was basically worthless

Wait, they’re making a grounded two? I didn’t think that game would be valid for a sequal. I wonder what they will change/introduce

So far the mounts sounds fun!

I don’t foresee Google as in a hardware/phone supplier company ever doing that. The chance of monopoly due to other clauses are too high.

Being said, I do foresee them introducing a way in Android to restrict sideloading completely, so it imitates how Apple has their environment. However, I don’t foresee it becoming super popular, especially with how hard the EU is pushing for people to have more freedom with their devices.