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I’ve had 3 of their motherboards die, one came without the USB3 header properly attached, and each time they wanted me to pay them for replacements.
I had a phone of theirs, the motherboard died and they wanted $300 for the replacement. It took 8 months for them to send the phone back to me and it was still broken, parts of the phone that were working like RGB and NFC no longer were.
This is how I feel about it:
Best chance to own a game is a DRM-free digital store (GOG, a few games on Humble, itch.io, some others). But own always means “a license for personal use”. Has been like that forever. Even if you buy a disk - you own the (physical) disk and a license to use the software contained on it. You can’t of course own “the game” because that would mean you’d be free to distribute it. It’s all just semantics… You own a game for personal use! Just like you own a baseball bat… but still aren’t allowed to purposefully use it to bash somebody’s head in. Ownership has never been a 100% or nothing thing.
It’s just that DRM turns that ownership effectually into a usage license.
There is no ownership for digital files, because ownership would mean freedom to distribute. Semantics. So, we all have licenses to everything we “own” digitally.
As such, I don’t really feel slighted by Steam because this has been my understanding the entire time. Digital ownership =//= ownership. It’s the same for if you ever bought music from iTunes in the 2000’s.
I would feel different if Steam actively used DRM on everything (developer has no choice), and things like Steamless to remove Valves trivially easy DRM weren’t as accessible/were actively prevented.
I buy games on Steam and if they act up then I use my license in fair use for myself and format shift or whatever else I see fit to make my game functional, and I doubt that I would ever be taken to court or that the account could be compromised from doing this. Quite frankly, once the games files are on your computer Steam can’t do too much unless you let it.
And for me personally, I don’t mind the tradeoff for cloud saves, per game notes, community control schemes and per game personal bindings, access to community forums - I understand that not everyone feels this way, nor should they, but given that everything digital is a license anyway, it seems clear to me that Valve is interested in providing a service beyond a storefront for games, while competitors aren’t doing much of anything outside of litigation or twiddling thumbdrives.
The alternative to this is not using Steam, getting what you can from Itch.io and GOG, and not having access to pretty much everything I just mentioned unless you set it up yourself somehow (cloud saves are feasible but that’s a hassle, and everything else would be much harder, save community forums). Which is absolutely fine, but I like the services that Steam offers and I was never under the impression that I “own” the game any moreso than I “owned” my PS2 games. What’s more, there’s no license limit to these titles, so I can have my account for 20 years and play the games on as many computers as I want. I have encountered storefronts that limit your licenses to 3 to 5 uses, or sometimes slightly better ones sometimes have authorization revoking.
All this said, the gaming landscape is certainly struggling, it seems quite telling to me that all these companies are more interested in engaging in litigation to tear down competitors than they are in bolstering their own platforms to make them more appealing to gamers.
I can’t answer your question but I will say it seems like the website name is trying to go for aesthetic naming, such as “level 80” being what the URL is supposed to indicate. If the website is mostly gaming articles, and the sites name is 80.lv, I can understand what they’re trying to go for.
Let’s just hope for their sake Latvia’s servers don’t go down. Or maybe they are Latvian (I doubt this though)
And from the corporate side of things, it’s not very business savvy to miss out on an entire generation or two of gamers buying games.
If you and I are parents and our Steam library has 1,000+ games, our child likely wouldn’t buy those games. But if they need to create a steam account for themselves, now those games are back on the table, securing future revenue for Valve.
There’s workarounds sure, like family sharing or just ignoring the ToS and sharing passwords. I think the real tell will be for our grand/great grandchildren, for once we are 100 or 120 then Valve will probably start wondering… Is averyminya really still alive and kicking, or did he share his library?
Well there’s not really any major 3rd person MOBA’s, and Deadlock is not very similar to Smite in gameplay.
I think it’s an interesting addition to a not very well explored genre – I’m not the biggest MOBA fan but this one is a lot of fun (for me) because of the emphasis on movement and patience.
I wonder if the dev team wanted to play a game that doesn’t really exist yet and so they made this, since it seems more like a passion project.
Article update:
Update #1 - 14:31 UTC: Rockstar have now put up an official FAQ for BattlEye where they state:
Is BattlEye compatible with Steam Deck?
Steam Deck does not support BattlEye for GTA Online. You will be able to play GTAV Story Mode but unable to play GTA Online.
Note: GTAV and GTA Online are not officially supported on Steam Deck and all technical support questions should be directed to Valve’s Steam Deck support content and community.
I’m still currently waiting for an official statement from Rockstar on any plans to enable it, since BattlEye as mentioned below is supported on Linux / Steam Deck.
Does it have to be equivalent? There are plenty of builds that will work just fine for gaming, they just aren’t 1440p or 4k, or 120hz.
There’s also that these computers can do a lot more than just game, so while you’re not getting “top of the line” graphical fidelity from your console, you can actually use it to browse the web, or run some software in your home.
Then there’s also the fact that if you want to play online it requires you pay a subscription. So even just the $10 a month for the subscription is $120 a year for every year you didn’t buy a PC instead.
So, are PC’s really more expensive, or is it the fallacy of needing the absolute best and then paying out the nose in after-ownership fees for the entire duration you own the console?
We are a small circle. For every 1 of us that do not care, if you would simply go to Facebook or reddit you would see that there are more than 10 who do care.
This is the dynamic of the public sphere, where broadness to reach as many people as possible means allowing for a narrative that can be interpreted in such a way that each individual can be right in their perception of it.
While I saw the trailer for GTA6 as being a poor imitation of real life, in that the events of GTA4 and 5 were more creative in their situations because they were larger than life. These are things that are so crazy but they still could happen in real life. Instead of continuing that trend, the trailer is a 1:1 recreation of actual events that happened in real life… IMO, that is a drastic shift, as to me it would indicate that the creative direction is referencing, or recreating crazy events that have actually happened. Where previous installments tend to have commentary about the events.
Btw, doing my best to compare the actual trailers between the games, not what we know after the fact. Of course, GTA6 could completely go a different direction and those 3 instances of real life could be the only time something like that happens. I doubt it, but it could be. My whole point here is that you and I can analyze media and pick up on facets about the themes or the narrative, and in response in the public sphere the response you get in return are, “bro it’s not that deep it’s just GTA”, or “bro is literally writing an essay about a game”.
These are actual responses I got to a pretty heartfelt comment I made about the trailer. Media literacy, analysis, basically anything that isn’t the surface level just doesn’t matter to like 80-90% of people. Not one response I got even attempted to dig deeper into what I was trying to say, the closest it got was justifications about why R* did real life events for the trailer, and how the game won’t be a mishmash of memes.
So, I write all this to say, we are a small portion of the population. Also, I think R* is one of the last few companies to have “good grace” with its fan base from the era of when hype would last. A decade ago it wasn’t uncommon for a game to be announced at E3 and that game would be present in people’s minds for 4 to 6 years and each mention of it gets them more hype.
In the last 6 years, this has died in the majority of spaces. Metroid Prime 4 had hype, it still does but it’s drastically diminished. If the exact events right now were happening 1 or 2 decades ago, Prime 4 would still be extremely hype.
Cyberpunk was another example of this, at the end of the era where it has good grace, it had an extremely long hype, and then marketing brought that even further and then lost it all - likely a significant reason why hype overall isn’t as prevalent.
Finally, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the same situation as GTA 6, where it had a few years where everyone knew it was coming soon, then it was announced, and now the years are going by waiting for release. So with that said, hype still does exist for a lot of games as long as it’s within 2 years, but beyond that it’s basically forgotten about or could even be criticizing at this point for its extremely long development time, unless the studio has a large enough fan base for it to not matter, like Halo, CoD, Battlefield, whatever.
We’ve had the tech to drastically cut power consumption for a few years now, it’s just about adapting the existing hardware to include the tech.
There’s a company MythicAI which found that using analog computers (ones built specifically to soft through .CKPT models, for example) drastically cuts down energy usage, is consistently 98-99% accurate, simply by taking a digital request call, converting it to an analog signal, the signal is processed then converted back to a digital signal and set to the computer to finish the task.
In my experience, AI is only drawing 350+ watts when it is sifting through the model, it ramps up and ramps down consistently based on when the GPU is utilizing the CUDA cores and VRAM, which are when the program is processing an image or the text response (Stable Diffusion and KoboldAI). Outside of that, you can keep stable diffusion open all day idle and power draw is marginally higher, if it even is.
So according to MythicAI, the groundwork is there. Computers just need an analog computer attachment that remove the workload from the GPU.
The thing is… I’m not sure how popular it will become. 1) these aren’t widely available and you have to order them from the company and get a quote. Who knows if you can only order one. 2) if you do get one, it’s likely not just going to pop into most basic users Windows install running Stable Diffusion, it’s probably expecting server grade hardware (which is where the majority of the power consumption comes from, so good for business but consumer availability would be nice). And, most importantly, 3), NVIDIA has sunk so much money into GPU powered AI. If throwing 1,000 watts at CUDA doesn’t keep making strides, they may try to obfuscate this competition. NVIDIA has a lot of money riding on the AI wave and if word gets out that some other company can cut costs of development both in cost of hardware and cost of running it, and the need for multiple 4090s or whatever is best and you get more efficiency from accuracy per watt.
Oh, and 4) MythicAI is specifically geared towards real time camera AI tracking, so they’re likely an evil surveillance company and also the hardware itself isn’t explicitly geared towards all around AI, but specific models built in mind. It isn’t inherently an issue, it just circles back to point 2) where it’s not just the hardware running it that will be a hassle, but the models themselves too.
Google pays a lot to stay the default browser.
The other search engines mostly use overlapping indexes.
Said search engines are also not anywhere near competition to Google.
Quite frankly, I can only think of 4. DDG, Ecosia, Bing, and Kagi.
Most people don’t know about Ecosia or Kagi. Most people hardly even know about DDG.
I wouldn’t consider YouTube as much of a monopoly because despite it being mostly the only one, from what I understand they haven’t paid out to stay the only one, and don’t really leverage market dominance against others (they probably do but I just don’t hear about it often.) The main reason alternatives don’t exist is simply because of the mass amount of data the YT needs
I’ll expand on this idea a bit, because I agree. Games are designed with a specific intention in mind, and part of that is 100% form factor. Some games are just made for portable consoles. Some games are just made to be played at a desk with a mouse and keyboard.
This doesn’t mean they can’t be played other ways, it just means the person’s subjective preferences may overlap best with the specific hardware and intentions the gamer has. For example, I’ve beaten Doom 2016 on Switch. It was enjoyable enough, but having played it on PC I just knew I wasn’t capable of achieving the same combos and inputs. Likewise, a game with ranked mode isn’t exactly ideal on Steam Deck, and a big part of that of course is that others have “better” input mechanisms.
When I was growing up I had a PS2 for a couple years (eventually got stolen) and then only had a laptop for a number of years that mostly played flash games. These indie games and a direct translation to indie games available today - typically made for specific styles of input, simple keyboard/mouse inputs. Then with the Wii there was a pretty big overlap between the NintendAA available games and indie games that were using the wiis specific style of inputs.
When I got a PC and started amassing a larger collection of games, I noticed that over the years I was shifting away from the simpler indie games that have consumed such a large portion of my gaming life. The Switch had some, and I’d have a short period from time to time, but I realized it was mostly because the PC at the desk is just not the greatest form factor for a lot of indie games. The portable aspect is a comfort, being able to sit back and relax on the couch, or in bed, versus having to sit in a chair and using a monitor that’s stuck in a mostly not very movable position (I even have a VESA mount). It’s just not quite the same.
I’m sure there are variations on this that can make it untrue, like having a console hooked up to a 75+ inch TV while relaxing on a chair or recliner. But I think for the most part, form factor in gaming is a huge aspect in game design. Like, Starcraft and Mobas aren’t really gonna be played on Switch, save a few exceptions and similarly, the multi-thousand dollar gaming PC isn’t usually the dedicated indie game computer.
It seems to me that Valve despite all the criticism it receives for the high fee on the sales of copies is doing a terrific job on resolving that problem.
The only issue I have with this is that Valve seems to be the only company that gets this critique, yet they seem to provide way more services for said 30% fee.
Apple started charging 30% on everything over two decades ago with iTunes, which continued into their app store in 2008. They only recently started a “small business program” that is application based, reportedly unresponsive to the users, and by default still charges 30% to app developers making under $1m in revenue. So, instead of making it based on how much you earn, they force you to apply and ignore you, effectively still making it a 30% base rate. IMO, sort of predatory since they don’t really advertise the program. I feel like if it mattered to them, they would automatically apply the rate to >$1m revenue, instead of making it per-app (or dev account) application based and letting users sit in limbo wondering if they were accepted or not.
Google takes 30% as well, also having introduced a 15% on the first million of revenue for subscription based payments, so if I understand correctly, it’s not even individual sales getting that lowered rate. Oh, but don’t worry, in case you were worried music streaming services can go as low as 10% rates, so if you have a datacenter that you can stream licensed music to app users over well hey, you’re in luck little guy!
Microsoft actually moved down from 30% entirely to 12%, it looks like. They don’t really offer much, so good on them for that. Know your worth, am I right? But it’s only for PC sales, which seems kind of odd considering the hassle it can be to apply and develop for the Xbox. So, not as good, but still alright. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo… (30%). Hm, odd that it never seems to be raised as an issue for the consoles, oh well.
All of these were pushed by Epic who was mad they couldn’t make more money off their mobile game, except Microsoft which I think just followed suit. But from the backend when you look at what each of these services offer for their costs… It’s a bit laughable that Valve is the one getting critiqued for this point when they offer at least double the amount of services to the publisher/developer. In short, these fees cover the cost of a bunch of background junk as well as to generate some revenue for the store selling it, but don’t offer much else in terms of support for the users or the developers. Meanwhile the Steam Overlay can completely change your controller scheme, use community templates, access to per-game notes, all of which can be transparently overlaid on your game if you want, and the Steam Workshop for internal modding/community content, in addition to whatever other peripheral things like cloud saving, in-home/remote streaming and remote play together, the recently added recording feature, and generating as many Steam keys as the dev wants for certain purposes.
I just do a double take everytime I see it not being directed at the companies that actually do seem to be abusing their fees and don’t offer nearly as much feature presence. Like Valve seems to be attempting to innovate, even if they are just taking ideas from things like Moonlight, and Parsec. They didn’t lock it down either, you can jank it up by playing Non-Steam games or emulated games via Remote Play Together with your friends. Ever wanted to relive the days of DoubleDash? Did Slippi not exist in this timeline and you wanted to play Smash Melee with a friend?
Like, there’s things to complain about for Valve. But is the 30% for what they offer really unreasonable, especially when compared to current competitors? I personally don’t think so. If Epic wants to start making their launcher as fully fledged as Steam is then we can talk. Until then, when I see this argument presented I have a hard time reading it as anything but “big Valve bad” with the subtle implication that Epic is the saving grace of the gaming industry. Otherwise, Epic is able to offer 12% because they don’t host nearly as much for the user, and have had to actively rely on Valve for things like community support, VR support, and don’t have basic things like repair game installations, or re-installing a game in its folder (you know, to prevent having to redownload 90+gb every time their launcher breaks the game). It’s also hard to see them as a good guy when they also have had shady practices, such as not paying out devs per claim during the “Free Claim” giveaways, but rather only upon when the user actually downloads the game. In addition to that, they just throw tons of money at you to make it exclusive, then they ghost you and good luck getting any actual support from them if you need something.
Tl;Dr hypocrisy of picking what 30% fees are okay and which are screwing over game developers, I look at it from the perspective of received services for said fee.
P.S. to OP of comment, I am merely responding to you, I know your comment isn’t saying that Valve or any of these companies are at fault for it. Franky, I don’t think 30% is an issue if the fee that’s taken has fair returns for it, and I think this whole fandango is only an “issue” at all because of mad old Tim Sweeny.
Quality over quantity.
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Meta is so well known for having good moderating. (/s)
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Meta is so well known for promoting posts that are active hate-speech. (For example, CW in Link: suggested “Threads” posts on Instagram have shown transphobic posts to me Which kind of goes back to point 1, terrible moderation. Btw, my partner is involved with Queer Activism on facebook and so it’s not like I am being targeted for hateful ads. This is just what they decided to promote, probably because it got a lot of comments and shares. Oh, why do we want Threads users who are actively sharing this rhetoric? Seems antithetical to the entire concept that the fediverse was founded on.
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What happens to the rest of the fediverse when it’s overrun by millions of Threads users, hundreds of thousands of them promoting this sort of content? All defederated instances will now have to pick and choose - something we already do, but I would say we only need to look at Lemmy.World to see why this is a bad thing, as imagine Threads communities become the regularly used ones, so now any instances that defederate don’t have access to the most active community. In turn, this either kills the defederated communities by keeping these communities small, or actively encourages those new to the fediverse to just join Threads since it has “the most active” communities.
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Now that there are millions of threads users, what happens to smaller instances that are now being overrun by traffic that their server couldn’t handle, or malicious users on Threads - with Lemmy’s moderation tools this can be a cumbersome and difficult process since, from my understanding, this becomes a case-by-case situation for the Instance Moderator, all while the Threads Moderating Team will likely do nothing and ignore the inflammatory users. From my understanding, you can have 1 Threads account per Instagram Profile, and users can have 5 Instagram Profiles. Obviously, this is also a Lemmy issue, but with Instance Admins having control over their users, Threads as an Instance Admin historically hasn’t seemed to be great.
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The Fediverse is some ~1.5m users. Threads is already 100m. As mentioned about server load, there’s also just the entire idea of it being so big that it naturally becomes a vital resource. E1) Extend. As it becomes widely used, Meta starts taking an interest in the future of ActivityPub. E2) Embrace. And finally, now that it is established and smaller instances are either defederated or have some form of, effectively a shadowban, all that is realistically left is Threads content. E3) Extinguish.
Is the fediverse being more accessible a good thing? Absolutely, not many are arguing that. The idea is that Threads gets so big that ActivityPub either can’t exist without Threads, or Threads leeches the userbase from the rest of the Fediverse. Someone you like is on Threads but not the rest of the Fedi? Well, why have a Lemmy.ML account when you can just have your Threads account?
Before you know it, we’re back to only having one website again for all of our social media needs.
Commenting so I can come back to this later with the site, I can’t recall the name at the moment
Alrighty, it looks like the list has grown and I can’t remember what site I had used previously, so here are a couple options. It looks like they all roughly have the same format of: create account, fill out games from database, possibly account and app linking options.
In no particular order:
How long to beat: create an account, has a games library for your profile
Keep track of my games: create an account, “pay what you want”-ware (free), can import gaming accounts (Steam PSN etc) to fill out list.
Backloggd: Create an account, can fill out games to your library and has space for reviews and other user profiles
Grouvee: Create an accout - homepage is pretty minimal
Gametracker: Seems more “game team” oriented but it has a spot for filling out a games library
GameTrack: Has an IOS app as well, can link gaming accounts for achievements, can make lists to sort games
Playtracker: Create an account, looks like there is a software download for the computer
Stash: Has both Android and IOS apps,
Of all of these, the feature sets look basically the same, the main differences seem to be UI layouts and more niche options of sorting/filling out. All of them look to need an account (expected). Since I can’t recall which, if any of these, I had used in the past I will just say that the websites for Playtracker, Backloggd, and How Long To Beat looked the “best”.
Hopefully this helped and didn’t just give you more choice anxiety, lol.
I think the offsetting cost factor basis is that a PC is a computer that can be used for more than gaming and the console is pretty much useless after 3-5 years (considering the PS4 @ 2013, PS4 Pro @ 2016, and the PS5 @ 2020, and how PS4 Pros are beginning to struggle today, and OG PS4’s being obsolete). Are PC’s more expensive upfront now? Sure. But you also don’t have to re-purchase your games each generation at the whim of the publisher, like you’re likely going to end up doing with Sony and Nintendo, with the added benefit of being able to use it for other projects after its contemporary gaming lifespan.
Basically, if you built a PC in 2013 you’re probably still able to use it today as a server or hobby project PC (digital art, music, etc). PC’s were also cheaper back then before NVIDIA made GPU’s cost $1,000. Good luck re-using a console.
I see you don’t replay games, so why even own a console if you only play a game once?
Haha, I played it quite a lot and I did not have the same experience! Respect to speed runners cause my goodness…