Steam reviews are one data point in your pocket. And I’ve found they average out to be pretty useful.

The engine is Godot, which he chose specifically because it was open enough that he could rip out the existing rendering code and replace it.

It’s an automated tool for pulling the latest fixes to get a game running as well as it possibly can with as little fuss as possible. Basically a bunch of scripts to automatically pull mods and configuration options and such, especially for Linux compatibility.

I do think parents have plenty of responsibility here. I don’t think that absolves Valve. We put regulations on who can legally gamble because we know it’s addicting, and I think it’s a problem how little Valve have done to prevent it from being done by those who aren’t legally supposed to. I’m not advocating for government intrusion to collect more PII, nor am I convinced necessarily that that’s what NY state is asking for, but it’s certainly what Valve would like you to believe they’re fighting against. I would love to see things legally categorized as gambling that currently are not, and the space that Valve is operating in may be less of a gray area than their competitors operate in due to the resale market.

That was the same set of goal posts.

Even before you get to the reseller sites that Valve is definitely aware of, benefiting from, and doing nothing to stop, the way the system is intended to work is still using all of the tricks out of the slot machine playbook.

Far more sources than just a credit card. You can sell something from home during lunch period to another student for enough money to buy a Steam gift card, and their parents would never know.

“Well, they clothed, fed, and loved their child and sent them to school for an education, but they also gave them an iPad and bought them skins in Fortnite, so they’re lousy parents.”

I’m not a big fan of Valve’s use of loot boxes. But I’m also not happy about the proposed solution of “Just collect blood samples from all users”.

It also might not be exactly what NY is asking for, even if that’s how Valve would like to frame it. The actual ask might be to just stop profiting from gambling.

I’m not a parent, and it’s certainly a strange metric to judge one by whether or not they gave their kid V-Bucks for their birthday, because that’s nearly all of them these days.

And we’re all proud of you, but try explaining that to a child.

I’m not a lawyer, and even having perused the official filing, it’s still legalese that I can’t swear I fully understand. There are two possibilities of what NY state actually wants:

1. just stop selling loot boxes
2. you can sell loot boxes, but only if you’ve verified that your customers are of legal gambling age

And I don’t know for sure which is true. Of course it’s in Valve’s best interests to represent this to their customers as the government trying to violate your freedoms, because it gets the public on their side. Remember the Epic case against Apple, where Epic knowingly broke a contract with Apple allowing in-game purchases to cut Apple out, then they had a trailer parodying the 1984 Apple ad to garner public support with “Free Fortnite” ready to go.

You didn’t learn budgeting in one go. I learned it in part by not being able to afford every video game I wanted. Part of how this generation of kids will learn budgeting is by only having a finite amount of V-Bucks and not being able to get every skin that they want, but they’ll keep playing Fortnite, and they’ll keep seeing new skins they want.

I don’t really partake, so I’m always hesitant to have a really firm line in the sand, but we’ve seen a ton of harm come from the constant access to gambling that we’ve got now via sports betting that we didn’t have before deregulation in the wake of Draft Kings, so I’m inclined to lean toward it only being in designated locations. The problem here is similar in that you can access it everywhere and definitely exacerbated by not even doing the bare minimum amount of countermeasures against underage gambling, because they want to pretend that it isn’t gambling.

I’m not a psychologist or any sort of expert who can properly evaluate something as “gambling” or “not gambling”, but I’ve seen kids going through pack after pack of Magic cards at the shop and I’ve seen people going through scratch-off after scratch-off at the corner store, and to my eye, it’s the same picture.

You don’t need V-Bucks to play Fortnite, but kids aren’t also known for having fully-developed skills like budgeting and delayed gratification. Perhaps it holds today’s kids’ attention longer because it’s changing in a way that games didn’t when we were kids.

You can buy gift cards for Steam from the drug store or Walmart with cash, and there are many non-gambling ways to spend money on Steam.

You’re on a gaming forum. You didn’t play video games as a kid?

I’d highly recommend you check out People Make Games’ videos on Counter-Strike gambling, which include testimonials from child gambling addicts. And if you still need more convincing, there’s also some videos by Coffeezilla.

But I’d also like to see more companies held accountable for this than just Valve.

They’re kids. They don’t know anything yet, and they want to play what their friends are playing.

The children getting V-Bucks for birthdays and Christmas didn’t earn any money in the first place, but they ask for V-Bucks and Roblox money rather than full entire video games.

I’m sure inflation has eaten into their margins, including salaries (though they’ve done layoffs in the intervening years, so who knows), and I’m sure the game is not at the height of its popularity and spending anymore. That said, they’re raising prices because they’re confident they can get away with them, not because they’re in dire straits.

It’s still going strong. It remains one of the most profitable games on the planet.

It’s the project they’re currently working on. I don’t know why they announced it when they did, but at their current pace, I’d expect it to come out in the next two years and change.

I think I’d be okay if we never got another Fallout game. What we’ve got is satisfying, including the Wasteland and Outer Worlds games, and the Fallout show is great too. Maybe if Bethesda had a tendency to knock our socks off with something new every time they put out a game, then I’d be excited, but that’s not the Bethesda we know.

SiN Gold: Online PvP, LAN PvP

SiN Reloaded: Online PvP

Come on, man.

Yes. The friend that I watched play it via Discord I think has the same card.

Designers and asset artists are still developing a game without coding it. Even the music in something like Rift of the NecroDancer constitutes level design, and in most cases music still can be used for conveying critical information if not just tone. It’s all still developing a game.

Getting into game dev for the money is genuinely a bad idea, as your odds are terrible. There was a famous talk in the indie boom that showed you were mathematically better off opening a Subway franchise than getting into game dev. Technical roles definitely come with a pay cut compared to what you can find elsewhere (and I know that from experience), not to mention less job stability, so you’re taking that job because you like the work and the end product more.

I don’t buy it. If achievements were addictive, more people would finish games, and one of the things that we learned from achievements data is that even a 50% rate of finishing a game is rare. The Skinner box conditions behavior when you know that doing a thing sometimes results in a reward or the avoidance of a punishment, and that doesn’t mesh with an achievement that only rewards an action once rather than continually handing it out occasionally for repeating an action.

Not for my friends who played it.

They tell you exactly what rewards you with them in most cases. They’re finite and not random. They’re hard coded and easily searchable. The point of a Skinner box is that the mouse doesn’t know when the next reward comes. I’m not prepared to say “most” definitively, but at least many achievements don’t require any repetition and are given out for one bespoke action exactly one time, often just as checkpoints for how far you made it into a story.

We have very different understandings of what a Skinner box is, and I don’t think achievements count.

I really like seeing the breakdown of what percentage of players have done X, Y, or Z compared to me. When achievements were first implemented, it was the first time developers had real data about how people played their games, and it influenced how games would change after that. I don’t think many people are circumventing them via mods percentage-wise, so they’re mostly a good representation of the sample size’s behavior. I rarely go for all of them, averaging about 35% of achievements per game, but I did just 100% Escape from Ever After not long ago, and part of that was getting all of the achievements in it, which was a fun little extra activity to do in a game I really enjoyed.

If you really don’t want that record attached to you, you could prioritize playing games from GOG via offline installer, I suppose.

Thanks. I usually don’t even think to check for demos these days.

What does this series actually play like? I don’t think Monster Hunter is for me (though games inspired by it frequently are), and the story in World was pretty atrocious, so putting “Stories” in the title didn’t give me much confidence that I’d find a story with any value to it.

I gave it 5 hours. That’s a real shot and the point of this thread. And I also thought the story that I saw thus far had a tendency to info dump too much, which I found inelegant.

It’s good because other people thought it was bad is certainly one way to frame it, lol.

For what it’s worth, on a platform with the proper horsepower, I’d say the PvP experience makes it one of the best fighting games ever made, but if the single player content is important to you, you’re better off sticking with Street Fighter 6, the last 6 games out of NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat and Injustice), or Tekken 8. Definitely do not play Mortal Kombat on Switch.

Could be, but I didn’t have the patience to see it. If that’s what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can’t say why they put it down, as I didn’t poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it’s not just me.

But I wasn’t exploring failure. I was just annoyed every time I had to talk to Kuno or anyone else.