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.

The thing is, for a game like Clair Obscur or Elden Ring, I’d echo those same complaints, but I still enjoyed them; in Elden Ring’s case, despite those complaints, I’d still call it one of the best games ever made. You might share those criticisms but still find plenty to love about it.

These probably mostly are the consensus most anticipated games of 2026, but I’ll throw a few of the ones I’m most excited for in here.

If you like fighting games, this is looking to be a great year. We’ve got Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game (which may still be a working title?), and the one I’m personally most excited for, Invincible Vs.

I love Batman Arkham combat, and if you do too, you should keep your eye on Dead as Disco.

The FPS genre has largely disappointed me in the past decade, but despite the absence of any multiplayer modes, Mouse: P.I. for Hire looks to be delivering what I haven’t been getting from this genre for years. We should also, finally, presumably, maybe, see a release for Judas.

Similar disappointment has followed racing games, but the indie scene has been trying to pick up the slack, and we’ve got a AA endeavor from racing game veterans that looks cool, complete with a story mode, called Screamer.

In the survival space, both Palworld and Enshrouded are set to leave early access in 2026.

For metroidvanias, I’ve got Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement and the beautifully animated The Eternal Life of Goldman on my radar.

And in the RPG space, I’ve got my eye on Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy and The Expanse: Osiris Reborn coming up, both from Owlcat. Like The Expanse, Exodus is also planning to fill the Mass Effect void, because it’s unlikely that a new game called “Mass Effect” will do so.

I know how it works. Do you know of a game on GOG with dedicated servers that the company is paying for that also uses GOG’s matchmaking to find those dedicated servers? Because at that point, they may as well run the matchmaking themselves and open up the possibility for cross play, and I can’t imagine what value they’d get from GOG’s services. For instance, I’m pretty sure I’m hitting GOG’s matchmaking servers for the likes of Star Wars Battlefront II, but all that’s doing is registering player-run servers that it then connects me to.

If they’re using GOG matchmaking to find dedicated servers, then those binaries are in our hands already, as far as I know. Feel free to provide a counter example if you know of one. The whole point of using the store’s infrastructure is that the developer doesn’t have to pay for it, and I’ve never heard of a store that offers hosting for bespoke dedicated servers for different games.

I played Clair Obscur, liked it, and it’s in my top 10 for the year out of about 18 games. But man, the reception of that game in the Game Awards and such is wildly out of sync with what I thought of it, and it makes perfect sense to me that it wouldn’t end up in an outlet’s top 20.

And that likely stopped making financial sense once online multiplayer operated at larger scales. On PC, GameSpy servers came with ads. Even downloading patches for games meant going to an ad-supported third party web site.

I feel like a lot of understanding behind the financial decisions around online games could happen if we explained to the kids what GameSpy was. Online was never “free”. Before microtransactions and Steam footing the bill, there were ads. But we had self-hosting as a backup plan back then.

The most benefit-of-the-doubt read on this that I’ve got is that, as a publicly traded company, the small margins GOG operates in might not be worth CDPR’s time when they can get higher margins for the same investment elsewhere. Adding some of my own hopium and conjecture, based on the “Why is Michał Kiciński doing this?” section of the FAQ, I hope this means a semi-near future of closing up the last few gaps in GOG’s DRM-free promise.

One of my biggest pet peeves with GOG is how it handles multiplayer. Some games add a warning when multiplayer is only available via LAN and direct IP connections. I need a warning when the opposite is true, because if it relies on GOG Galaxy or some other server, it’s just DRM by another name. To their credit, this warning is usually there, but I’ve come across a few games’ store pages that left it to the imagination, and I’d have to go to the forums link to find someone complaining about it to be sure. Other games, like Doom 2016, just omit multiplayer from the GOG version entirely, because they can’t even fathom how to make multiplayer work in a self-hosted way.

What I’d like to see (I’m a programmer, but I’m not deep in the world of gaming software engineering) is for GOG to provide a drop-in multiplayer server that can serve as a self-hosted version of GOG Galaxy’s multiplayer functionality, so that even if the developer doesn’t see it as financially viable to ensure their game’s multiplayer lives on, GOG can do that for them and make any online game LAN-able. If that’s possible. In my head, it sure seems possible.

What you can play right now in Star Citizen is arguably better than what Duke Nukem Forever will ever be.

Same (unless they make some drastic changes), but I agree with Cifaldi’s outro here on all the ways that this system was super important to the medium’s history, even the parts like total control over the system’s library that today is nothing short of bad for the consumer.

I’ve enjoyed a survival game here and there, but it doesn’t look like the multiplayer of Grounded survives offline, which is a deal-breaker for me, especially when so many of its peers have it.

Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.

I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.

Pillars of Eternity II is one of my favorites, if you haven’t played it, and I loved Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 this year. I do consider Avowed to be more of an action game than an RPG though.

It’s probably easier if I just list the titles. I’ve already got them ranked. I enjoyed all of these games, and none of them were stinkers.

1. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
2. Avowed
3. Split Fiction
4. The Outer Worlds 2
5. The Alters
6. Dispatch
7. Borderlands 4
8. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
9. Blue Prince
10. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves
11. StarVaders
12. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: The Order of Giants DLC
13. Knights in Tight Spaces
14. Rift of the NecroDancer
15. Mafia: The Old Country
16. Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping
17. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
18. Keep Driving

If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.

They have an incentive to put games in front of you that they think you’ll like, so I figure it really just is tough. Their hit rate isn’t so bad for me, and what I hear about console storefronts is that the recommendations are even worse. Regardless of platform, relying on a recommendation engine to get word out about your game strikes me as a bad idea. But speaking for myself, I played 18 games that came out this year and easily left at least that many others behind just because there isn’t enough time to play through them all.