Valve is an independent company.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I’ve found to be actually good.

I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:

• Foreign (Non-American)
• Indie
• Small studio

Basically all of the good games that I’ve liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I’m sure if you think about it, the great games you’ve played have also been this way.

Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won’t have fun, and it’ll be expensive.

Go play EDF5 with some friends. It’s jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.

Raft is great, too.

Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.

And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.

Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it’s been solid.

But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.

It’s like the loss of a union, except it’s industry wide.

There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don’t have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.

Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn’t that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you’re voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.

It’s ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn’t be supportable.

Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn’t be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.

Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they’d: “be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all.”

But remember:

• Foreign
• Indie
• Small Studio

These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.

STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

I think in this dynamic, Microsoft+XBox has done by far the most damage to gaming, and so has the least amount of karma and trust. Whereas Sony had free, great online multiplayer services on even the PS2, Microsoft quickly ripped off everybody else’s consoles, relied on Halo to sell, has the worst everything, and has pushed the majority of anti-consumer practices in both gaming and the wider technology markets.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT’S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY

Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.

Government is for the people, by the people, that’s the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it’s the government’s sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.

The government MUST serve the people.

If it can’t, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.

The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.

Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.

Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.

That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.

I’m a little out of the loop. How so? Have they always been said way? Edit: I’m an aspiring dev and want to know as much as I can, and if they’re shitty, I wanna know.

Apparently he was CEO in mid-2004 when EA bought Renderware and basically killed it.

COINCIDENCE???

It’s global warming. All the natural disasters, insurance and repairs are extreme and accelerating, and those funds need/want more money and are collecting in every way they can.

I can’t believe it either - our inability to prepare for global warming has caused Unity to charge per install.

I’m not sure you can solely blame devs or players, as there’s absolutely a call and response, sort of mirroring effect that begs the question “chicken or the egg”. Which is why I believe it’s an economic phenomenon.