The Octonaut
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- 61 Comments
You want examples of Chinese companies disregarding copyright? Uh.
www.aliexpress.com? Or, yknow, the actual article we’re commenting on?
I have no issue with people going after China. I’m not a hexbear/ml stooge. It is possible for two things to be bad. It is possible for something about a bad entity to be neutral or at least unsurprising. Which is how I would describe China’s lack of real interest in engaging with, from their perspective, the global order’s new fad interest in intellectual property rights.
No, but this might shock you, other countries have different definitions of what theft is. Theft is taking something from someone.
The funny part being that it is literally enshrined in American law that game mechanics can’t be copyrighted, so its not even in the definition of theft in America either.
abduct Chinese paper makers, imprison them, steal the technology
sneak into China, impersonate religious figures, hide silkworms on your person, sell to a Roman emperor
sail into China, pretend to be a botanist. Steal tea and grow it in your starving colonies instead of food
“Why don’t China care about western patents and copyright?”
Yes but
- it doesn’t let me charge and play at the same time
- I could hot swap in and out batteries, but it doesn’t report battery percentage
- It also doesn’t auto-pause when the battery dies, like other systems do
- It runs through them quickly
- it acts finicky/unpredictable when the battery is very low, rather than reaching a consistent threshold and stopping working
- In combination with a bug/anti-feature I’ve posted about previously, my Steam Deck sees it as a new controller every time the batteries are replaced, despite the Bluetooth MAC/BDA not changing.
For me, I want one with internal rechargeable (and replaceable) batteries, more reliable Bluetooth, and multi-device targeting (ie those 1,2,3 toggles you see on stuff like mouse/keyboards - I use mine on my Steam Deck and also on my desktop - dont want to mess with pairing each time. Plus if I end up with with a Switch 2, the trackpad would be interesting for mouse mode if those could connect (no idea)).
They are targeting exactly one person that they are in litigation with. I am shocked that Kotaku would misrepresent something in the lede and then contradict themselves later.
However, because Williams allegedly evaded Nintendo’s attempt to serve him, and then didn’t appear in court, Nintendo argues in its filing that this meant they were unable to find these identities through discovery, and as such is seeking the subpoenas. The company, currently worth $67 billion, says these will be “limited in scope,” designed to identify “the account holders and the sources of any payments made, and where applicable, aggregate traffic and access statistics for Pirate Shops’ websites and related online locations.”
TL;DR: Stop trying to make money from piracy. Dolphin is alive and well after 20 years of emulating Nintendo products. Not sure how people aren’t connecting the dots with what Nintendo chase and what they don’t.
I love my Steam Deck. It’s literally beside my hotel bed right now, while the Switch is at home with two kids under 10. But:
- the docking and detaching experience is frustrating as hell
- it is significantly heavier and yet feels more fragile.
- it has profiles but not comparably to the Switch in terms of use and UX
- and the controller experience is very hit and miss.
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- It spent 2 months just literally randomly shutting off bluetooth - you had to go into desktop mode and re-enable with a Linux command until they patched it - but that’s not even it - whenever it did that, it also disabled the sticks!.
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- I have multiple entries in the controllers screen - none of which can be renamed or show indicators as to which controller they are - where every now and again the Deck decides sorry, I don’t recognise that controller anymore. Please come walk across the living room and awkwardly stand in front of the telly pressing buttons on the Steam Deck’s face to re-pair things.
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- Oh and controller layout schemes are a cool and powerful feature but way too complicated for me to explain to an 8 year old.
If “I just want to pick up a controller after work and forget what Philip in Marketing said he thought the project was going to look like”, or “I want to buy games once and share them with my kids” or even “I’ll throw this in my bag to kill 20 minutes at the waiting room” are factors, the Steam Deck is very much not superior in every way.
Again. Love my Deck. Almost exclusively buy “Verified” games now. Halfway through a Nintendo game that somehow is easier for me, a software dev to find ajd emulate on Deck than on a Nintendo console. But the Switch has been a remarkable console to have in my living room. The first console I bought (actually now that I think of it, that my wife bought for me) since Wii and before that since PlayStation 2. I’m not really a console player. I have 1000+ games on Steam. Still Switch excels at many things and the sales figures should make that obvious.
It is usually also followed by “but I can download my installers and then I can have them whenever I like” as if it’s a sane idea to store terabytes of offline installers for the day that GOG goes out of business.
I mean, I also have terabytes of offline installers for the day that Steam or GOG go down. On other people’s computers. In a, uh, distributed distribution system.
GOG themselves literally said that you do not, even very recently. You own a license like every other customer, and it can be revoked at their discretion.
GOG choose to exclusively sell games for which they can sell DRM-free versions, which is a great option for consumers. It is not a straightforward decision however as this is, whether it is a priority or not, a tradeoff for the things that Steam integration provides - cloud backup, mod workshops, multiplayer functionality etc.
Steam also sells plenty of DRM-free games, and offer customers the informed choice when selling Steam DRM and Third-Party DRM controlled game licenses.
This is not an argument that Steam or GOG are objectively better. But it is a straightforward lie to state that the license you buy from GOG is legally different from the one you buy from Steam. What is different is the possibility or otherwise of DRM software being used to control your adherence to the license.
While it’s nice to have a development team that doesn’t have to chase every single possible dollar, and they might go on to make something even better, that final 10% part isn’t true.
With the game engine itself now finished, tested by millions of people, a huge amount of work has been done that feels wasted. Putting content into a game engine not only isn’t the hardest part (maybe is the most creative part, which can be… hard) but also is usually different people than the ones that create the engine. The engine itself literally has the content split such that another story can be dropped into it.
Maybe mods can pick that up if the process of adding a story get documented?
Maybe their next game will use the same engine, probably with tweaks if some of it is D&D fixated. So maybe rather than make a new D&D game they are starting from 70% into an un-chained RPG game. As an audience it is possible to be both disappointed by the decision not to create more of a thing we love and understanding and supportive of it at the same time. Music fans deal with this all the time. They’ve obviously earned a lot of trust.
Well I’ve definitely given it a fair go.
It’s had so many free updates because it is a visual game and so every reason to make a new trailer is new marketing. Every trailer is 3 second jump cuts of something visually interesting. Ocassionally giving away that the gameplay is still “aim the same tool that does the same thing at a rock, plant or creature until a number goes up in the ship. Use the bigger number in the ship to improve how high the number is allowed to go in the ship. Use the ship to get to a new rock, plant or creature. Oh and learn words?” I just genuinely do not understand what people are getting from it. Maybe there’s a plateau in the point in the game I’m at and I am simply another 4 hours of pointing at rocks, plants and creatures until I unlock the fun, but I am old. I don’t have time to unlock the fun. To be fair I’ve never been the grinding sort.
And I’m definitely into “explore space and build things in a non-story, non-linear way”
OK Lemmy’s being weird but here is where the screenshot of 2500 hours in Kerbal Space Program goes.
You have to actively turn it on by renaming game files.
But even then, we’re talking cartoon nipples not hard-core tentacle hentai.