I’m not sure they’d want the legal hassle.

As long as Steam allows skins trading these sites will exist. I can’t see them removing this feature from their community because of activity off their platform.

Locking a trading account and nuking the inventory just means that one site will shut down - the operator will likely just set up a new one and a while bunch of users will be angry at Valve.

If enough money is at stake Valve might even find themselves sued by the site operators. “Tortious Interference” is what it’s called here.

If consenting adults enter into agreements outside of Steam, what business is it of Valve’s to interfere?

I’d say the explosion of gaming in general through the 00s helped make PC gaming more mainstream. Consoles with online gaming helped blur the lines between platforms.

Then there was also World of Warcraft. It may have only reached ~10 million people then, but it seemed to reach well beyond those who were part of the traditional PC gaming culture.

Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous is an amazing game if you can look past the politics though. Also, the spyware thing is pretty standard now - it’s usually called “telemetry” in most EULAs. I haven’t read it closely enough to know if they’re overreaching any worse than others, but they did walk back including the AppFlyer tool after pushback from users.

More likely to be Chinese Yuan. The symbol is similar. About 6 Yuan to the dollar I think.

Parents, copyrights, and trademarks are grouped together as Intellectual Property. They’re all quite distinct however.

Yes, just wanted to contrast the reception they got. Bethesda games don’t generally attract as much ire for the bugs. People expect them and tolerate them (to an extent). Cyberpunk 2077 was a totally broken mess according to the internet, while the Elder Scrolls are the greatest thing ever.

I had crashes to the desktop about every 4th area transition in Oblivion and it still didn’t bother me too much, since it had just saved and took less than a minute to get back into the game.

Some bugs - even total crashes - can still be put up with just fine.

In my experience it was much less buggy at launch than for example Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I didn’t experience any game-breaking bugs, just ones that harmed immersion. There was a bit of T-posing, the occasional floating prop/animation bug, and once I got launched into the desert when climbing through a window. No crashes to desktop, no broken progression. It probably helped that I was happy with the game they delivered rather than getting hung up on what may have been promised.

Me observing that it’s cold out and offering to sell you some gear so you can avoid frostbite isn’t extortion.

Me threatening to break your legs if you don’t buy something is.

Hope that helps.

Sometimes taking what seems like the right stand on an issue can deepen the harm - be careful about getting too extreme.

For example when the whole “gamergate” thing was going on and people were like “Why can’t I just enjoy Tomb Raider?” - one side was standing up for diversity and inclusion by denouncing them as basement-dwelling incels who should self-terminate. So that naturally drove some to those right-wing assholes.

Sometimes it takes a bit of work to change someone’s context so they can get closer to your perspective.

They’re just a consultancy service - hardly worth investigating. Seems that they purport to offer expertise on how a developer can improve diversity and inclusion in their products.

Like any consultancy, whether they can actually do this and whether their clients will actually implement it effectively are another matter entirely.

The Steam group creator seems to think either they’re garbage or that their clients’ approach to diversity and inclusion is garbage. (Or maybe they’re just some alt-right incel Nazi <insert favoured pejorative here…>)

This particular take that’s going around seems to be almost as stupid as Sweet Baby Inc’s attempted takedown of the Steam group.

They’re just pointing out reality - gaming media is “woke”, if your product doesn’t check the diversity and inclusion boxes it will be criticized, “hire us to help”. They’re basically a PR firm.

This isn’t them threatening to cause the damage, they’re not The Mob - “Say, that’s a nice game you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”

And even if you do have the talent internally you can still seek specialised feedback on your work - most authors work with editors for example.

The only reason this case is notable is because of the reactionary response to the “woke” games industry (and games journalism in particular). This is just another round of nonsense in this culture war, so people on either side are staking out ridiculous positions.

A recent one I saw had pretty good options for this - Pathfinder: wrath of the righteous. Had so many different knobs to tweak to get the difficulty just right.

If you sign up to use Steam to distribute your game then one of the things you agree to is to make it available on Steam at the same price you offer anywhere else. This protects Steam’s business and ensures that Steam customers aren’t disadvantaged.

However, it also applies even if the alternative channels don’t make use of Steam directly (e.g selling on Epic). This is where the Wolfire Games lawsuit comes in. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

Cyberpunk probably isn’t the best comparison - the basic core of the game was just fine on release. It was the last generation console performance that really killed it. I’ve had more game breaking bugs with the Phantom Liberty expansion than I had at its original launch (though there are far fewer cosmetic bugs now). Would love it if Redfall does improve though, Arkane have put out some of my all-time favourite games.