Linux is where it is because companies that care about making money contribute money to make it better. The same goes for projects like Blender. Linux became immensely more usable for the average user because Valve wanted to ensure that they’ll be able to continue making absurd amounts of money in the future regardless of what Microsoft decides to do. The licensing of open source software ensures us that we don’t even have to trust them to not pivot to BBQ sauce tomorrow, because the work they’ve already done will continue to serve us.

I personally have no problem with a profit motive on its face, and the above is why. If you want an easy underhand toss for something to criticize Valve for, it’s that their motive for profit encourages them to continue to exploit a loophole in our gambling laws to create a generation of underage addicts. They can simultaneously be the company responsible for breaking down walled gardens and creating a better personal computing tomorrow; and also the company profiting off of child gambling addiction that governments are too slow or too unwilling to do anything about.

I don’t see it, especially since Steam got to where it is now by stealing customers who rejected that same price hike on consoles. Everyone learned that Steam sales offer deeper discounts than digital purchases on consoles’ walled gardens and that online is free. If customers are savvy enough to do that, they’re savvy enough to find other storefronts in a world where Steam sucks. As I see it, anyway. I think I’d have to see the world change in a substantial way to believe otherwise.

But I think that being forced to abandon Steam, which is for sure an option they all have in a world with GOG and Epic, is exactly why Valve doesn’t really have that power. As soon as that guy sees the $5 lemonade, he’s going to hear the other guy yelling that there’s a dark alley selling it for $1 around the corner.

Do you believe Steam has the power to raise prices when those prices are set by vendors on their platform and there are at least two other major players? I suppose they have the power to try to exclude competitors, but those competitors would be buoyed very quickly by Valve attempting to do so. And even still, plenty of the biggest games in the world (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends) aren’t on their platform already.

A monopoly is defined as being the only seller, so I don’t think you can be one without being the only seller. But our laws (are supposed to) target companies that use anti competitive practices to drive the market closer toward that being true. There’s at least one suit that alleged it, but they had a difficult case to prove it. Valve doesn’t deal in things like locking up exclusive titles that make it harder for others to compete.

The advantage to Epic’s is that they offer cross play for free. I’m honestly not sure what the problem is.

I don’t think the presence of the library on Steam is doing that much work here. Epic’s been giving games away for free for five years to alleviate that issue, but it doesn’t work. And ultimately, you have to ask: what’s in it for me to buy a game from Epic when I get better features on Steam? On GOG, I have an answer to that question, but on Epic, I don’t.

They were declared monopolies because they were determined to have used anti-competitive practices to cement their market position. Valve does not.

The one that stuck out to me was Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has Denuvo, but the message didn’t identify it as such and read like Steam DRM. Dragon Ball FighterZ has no listed additional DRM on the Steam store page, but if I booted up the device offline then tried to run the game, it would refuse to boot until I went online. I ran into it a few other times other than that, but don’t recall which games they were. Sometimes it’s just an unlucky roll of the dice with when Steam decides it’s time to authenticate the game again.

Then there are other DRM schemes, like Ubisoft’s and EA’s, that are even worse. At best, they require you to explicitly set your Deck to offline mode before traveling; just not having an internet connection isn’t good enough.

They’ve got some of those things. They recently added a workshop equivalent, and they’ve had a multiplayer SDK for a long time. The multiplayer SDK is actually a problem, because it means multiplayer often only works on Galaxy, which is just DRM by another name.

And Steam’s DRM was pretty invisible to me until, ironically, I got a Steam Deck. Then I started running into games that needed to be authenticated while I was on a train with no internet.

All of new gaming hardware is decidedly less imminent now that this pricing nonsense is going on. Even if the tech exists, no one thinks they can sell at what they’d have to charge for it. It’s going to be a rough near term future for gaming hardware before it eventually levels out. Reports are that consoles planned for 2027 are now looking like they’ll be pushed back.

I’m not super used to calling that “hybrid gaming”, but my wife seems to have no problem playing cozy games on the Steam Deck, almost exclusively on the TV when I didn’t take it with me on the go. And we’re once again back to the best games and the best graphics not being all that correlated. The other part is that even if a random gamer has a Steam Deck, it’s unlikely to be their only gaming PC, and if they want the power to produce that larger image at better frame rates at home, they’ll play on that other PC, and that game will run its best there. On Switch 2, that one device is your only option no matter what. That means that if you want to play one of those beefier titles from the Switch 1, they’re not going to run at better settings ever unless the developer explicitly upgrades them; even then, there’s often the Switch tax compared to buying the same game on PC.

I’m not trying to talk you down from a Switch 2 if that’s your preference, but if someone’s asking me for a recommendation for a gaming handheld, the Steam Deck is going to be what I tell them until I rule it out due to some other need. I definitely wouldn’t start with a Switch 2. The Deck just hits a compelling price with a good software experience and, perhaps most importantly, a library that dwarfs what Nintendo could ever hope to match by following the traditional console model.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t region locking on the NES and SNES largely implemented via the shape of the cartridge? Frank Cifaldi and the VGHF just put out that NES history video, and it had some kind of authentication chip that could only be provided by Nintendo, and it was in the NES but not the Famicom. And on Gamecube, I seem to remember you needed an Action Replay to break the region locking, but I never dabbled in it myself.

I played it all on desktop, but it looks like it got an update a month ago and is now Deck verified. Friends of mine played it on Deck before that and didn’t mention any complaints, but I wasn’t fishing for them either.

Most of “the newest games” are well within the spec of the Steam Deck. Of the 4 non-exclusive games nominated for GOTY at the Keighleys, they’ll all run on it just fine. Some of the biggest games of the year end up being the likes of Peak, Schedule I, or Megabonk, and not only are those games only available on PC (at least for a while), but they’re not even pushing the spec of the Steam Deck to its limit. With RAM pricing issues going on right now, high end studios are likely going to target a lower spec. And the companies that can afford to make a game that hits that higher spec are few and far between anyway, compared to the AA and indie studios that made most of the best games of the past few years.

General availability seems to imply that supply was not a constraint by the time we got to the holiday shopping season.

I doubt the ability to brick your console remotely played too large of a part in this. It’s far more likely the asking price combined with the general economic situation for the average consumer, combined with a worse screen and a lesser launch offering of titles. For my own biases, when you see how consoles have required online subscriptions and how your old games don’t automatically run at higher settings when you buy the new machine, I wonder how much more gas in the tank consoles even have without some fundamental transformation.

cool

Quite frankly, it doesn’t. This thread is about the removal of adult content from multiple different places that happens in suspicious proximity to the removal of other adult content, such that it sure feels like it’s all connected.

So why did Epic also remove the game at the last minute?

“the stuff affecting adult content on Steam”

You filled in the rest. I didn’t imply that.

He said steam is trying to clear porn games.

No, I didn’t.

In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.

Quite the opposite. The reason I suspect there’s something legal behind behavior like this is that it is so laser targeted to this game. Especially when it was immediately followed up by their competitor eager to host the game (which had already removed the content named in Steam’s initial reason) and then changing their mind at the last second.

What I see in common between Horses and Github is that it appears that they see it as a bad idea to explain publicly why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that smells like a legal reason to me.

Exactly. Steam is so laissez-faire about adult content that removing one game, without elaborating, and allowing so many others sounds exactly to me like it violates or risks violating a law somewhere, and so they’re covering their asses, maybe even preemptively. I’m not a lawyer, but their advice is often to just shut the fuck up. Epic sure was excited to host it when Steam declined and then did the same thing. For all I know, the reason GOG can host it but the other two won’t is that maybe GOG doesn’t operate in a country where some law makes that game a problem for them.

What about the last 20 years of Microsoft make you think that adding value to their products has anything to do with their business model?

The part where they tried to make an Apple app store and it didn’t take. The open ecosystem of Windows is the thing that allows it to continue to exist and dominate. And the open ecosystem of open source software actively enhances their ability to sell companies server infrastructure, which makes them more money than Windows does.

I don’t see it. Indie developers would comprise the vast majority of open source projects. Many of them add value to their own products, and they know it, which is why they’re largely a services company now. And the timing is so close to everything going on with adult content in other places.

This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses. No one’s saying anything about any of it, which feels like that’s on advice from their legal counsel.

I haven’t played it, but the same elevator pitch is given every time someone describes it on a podcast: it’s like someone made off-brand Half-Life and merged it with the survival genre. I’ve heard a lot of good things.

Limited replayability? It’s top of mind for me when I’m rattling off replayable games.

I love the story of that game, too, but being unable to progress at those points makes for a good strategy game while also being antithetical to its message, lol.

Split Fiction is published by EA.

Even just split-screen multiplayer has value. Replication is handled by the engine. User accounts are handled by your storefront. Anti-cheat is something you’re thinking about if you’re designing an e-sport, but if you’re just making a fun video game that you might play with friends, it’s a nice-to-have. Why are we even collecting data such that GDPR is a problem? I know these are all things that multiplayer devs tell you they’re thinking about as to why this is so complicated, but we’ve lost the plot here so much that they’re building a game that they’re already expecting is going to reach millions of people without even being sure that they’re going to hit thousands. Which is how we get to an article like this one.

We’ve come a long way from the days when one programmer added multiplayer into Goldeneye at the very end of development, that could never happen today.

Why? I can’t name a reason why this couldn’t be. Even extrapolating out for added complexity of network multiplayer, maybe it wouldn’t be feasible to add in just a handful of weeks, but if you’re already developing with client-server in mind, the same thing can still be whipped up today in a reasonable amount of time.

Even the rest of your comment makes it seem like if there aren’t thousands of concurrent players weeks after launch that it’s somehow failed as a multiplayer game. The industry has broken all of our brains so thoroughly that most of us can’t remember a time where that wasn’t a goal, and I’m arguing that it’s better if we didn’t make it the goal. If you make a multiplayer mode that you can play with friends, that has bots to fall back on when you don’t, and is designed to scale to very few players in a match, that multiplayer mode offers just as much value in week 1 as it does 20 years later. It’s not falling back on a single player mode, nor is it a failure as a multiplayer game in a competitive market if you build something that can withstand reaching a small audience, like the industry used to. That we used to get both modes in tons of games back in the day is what made these games “the full package” rather than only a single player game or only a multiplayer game, and I reject the idea that one of those two things has to suffer for the other to be good.

Halo didn’t have Xbox Live until the sequel because Xbox Live didn’t exist yet when Halo 1 was built, but it did still have network multiplayer. And that was still very much serving multiple masters, just like its predecessor.

I seem to recall the reason they dropped the first one being that the tech stack it was built on couldn’t support the number of players trying to play it at once.

Halo was a game with a single player campaign, that could be played co-op, and also had versus multiplayer. It served many masters. This game only serves the latter. Halo’s multiplayer was played for years by a core group, but probably the most common use case was that it was played only a handful of times with friends, everyone had a great time, and it didn’t matter that people didn’t keep playing it after those handful of times. What would make FPS games great again, to me, is if we remembered all of that stuff about Halo rather than trying to be the one viral success out of tens of thousands of game releases every year, where failure results in tons of job losses because your company has no Plan B.

Thanks. A lot of rally games have come up over the years, but to my eye, surprisingly few of them have any multiplayer to speak of, let alone local, so I have yet to try one.

Our demographic is dwarfed by the type of person who only plays 4 or fewer games per year. These people play Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, EA’s soccer game, GTA, etc. Call of Duty is one of the highest selling games each year because it sells to people whose only video game for the year is Call of Duty.

I played it at release, and I had a negligible number of technical issues on PC. Not everyone had a bad time with it back then.

This is number of copies sold. It really did sell that high. And if that blows your mind, wait until you find out Human Fall Flat sold like 40M copies.

Well, I know at least one part of this is pretty out of date. Baldur’s Gate 3 just got confirmed a few weeks ago as having sold over 20M copies. We have so many round numbers here because companies generally only share milestones.

That might be a solid recommendation for others, but speaking for myself, licensed cars and tracks do nothing for me and in most cases will probably put some drag on my enjoyment, because real racing asks you to do things like “not checking the car next to you” that would put real people in harm’s way; and damaging licensed cars in video games is generally frowned upon by the licensors. And also speaking for myself, the store page says it has no local multiplayer, which is my primary use case for a racing game, so its omission is a deal-breaker. Most of the genre has gone this way in recent years, catering to the crowd that likes licensed cars and real tracks, and that’s why I haven’t had as many racing games to play of late. There’s still some stuff for me, though.