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I don’t want to simp for a corporation, but what is Valve doing that’s anticompetitive?
Like, don’t they need to be doing something to limit competitors’ access to the market to be anticompetitive?
Steam requires base price/same price parity for selling Steam keys, but they’re literally giving their services away to developers for free in those cases, so that’s pretty clearly not anticompetitive, right? And there’s no requirements that I’ve seen written anywhere that they require price parity for non-Steam-key sales.
And, based on the massive numbers of bundles of games I’ve bought with Steam keys with total historical-low game prices below best-ever Steam sale prices, they pretty clearly don’t even enforce this rule strictly (it seems like so long as the total bundle price is in line with individual title sale prices, they’re fine, even if consumers get other games as well.)
So I’m not sure what the basis for this suit is. Not saying it’s healthy for the market to have an effective monopoly in this space, but the reason Valve is maintaining its marketshare is because they’re consistently offering the best value to consumers compared to other storefronts, which isn’t illegal.
/Insert “prove me wrong” meme
… he claims there is no point producing proof because they wouldn’t be believed.
He also dismisses any evidence created by others as untrustworthy.
What a load of shit. It’s up to the person making the claim to provide evidence. People have claimed the opposite, and backed it up with “low-quality” evidence. Refusing it would be pretty easy, if it were true; get someone independent to verify in a pre-funded, blind trial.
The only reason not to do this is because they know their product reduces framerate frequently enough to be a problem.
True, but I expect that wasn’t meant literally; it was expressed that way for rhetorical effect.
Most of the capitalist system we’re in has incentivized short-term cashflow over long-term revenue for most stakeholders (annual bonuses, for example), and AAA gaming is almost entirely following those trends, too.
This statistic is misleading. They have no way of knowing what people paid for those games. The “value” isn’t just the Steam price.
As many people have mentioned here, most games in big Steam libraries come from bundles. It’s pretty typical to get games for, like, $1-2 each in those. I regularly get 8 games for $10, of which I only really want 1. I play the one I cared about and get my $10 worth. There’s no “lost value” so long as I got my money’s worth from the title I played.
I take an even bigger view: if I buy 10 bundles for $10 each, and get 1 absolute banger (for my preferences) and a few others that are fun for a bit, then I’m happy. I often add 20 new games to my library in a month, and only immediately play 1. That doesn’t mean I have “$400 value of games I’ve never played.”
Clickbait explained:
[When on a quest] you’ll see bright blue birds fly into frame and perch on signposts and tree branches and stone arches, their beaks pointing the way to the hobbit you’re looking for.
It’s a lovely fairytale touch.
Sounds like it might be an interesting game for people looking for more Stardew-Valley-inspired cozy games to play.
I was surprised with how many people were watching Star Citizen streams on Twitch. I don’t know if there was some sort of event on or something, but it was near the top of the Twitch leaderboards.
I was one of the suckers that bought the game in the initial campaign and I haven’t played it yet. It looks like there might actually be enough content now to be worth checking out, but I’m not convinced it’s worth pushing past the jank to play when there are so many amazing, polished games to play instead. I’ll wait until I hear it’s reasonably stable. (Which it clearly isn’t, yet; the streamer I briefly tuned into the other day was saying that he can’t complete a quest line the intended way because of a game-breaking bug that’s been around for months.)
The Team Fortress 2 community has come together in an attempt to brute force developer Valve into fixing a bot problem that has plagued the hero shooter for years.
To add to what the other poster said:
I’m not an expert, but my understanding is that noise cancellation works by inverting sounds waves to deaden the sound. So, like, if you add sin(x) and –sin(x) you get 0.
This system is actively adding inverted sound waves to cancel most sounds. What makes this system unique is that it samples the voice and uses the unique “voice print” to selectively not invert the sound waves from the targeted voice.
Or that’s what I’m getting from reading this, as a layman.
idk… I feel like Valve might be the one with the power to stop this already with refunds. It sucks for them, since they’ll lose their cut of the sale, but if they refund thousands of copies at full price, it adds a financial disincentive for publishers.
If Valve made it a policy to automatically refund games to anyone who asks after DRM is added, that might help encourage more users to request refunds, so publishers might be less inclined to add Linux-breaking DRM (good for Valve), and get more goodwill from gamers, but it will also cost Valve more in fees, and encourage publisher pushback against Steam’s perceived monopoly.
I have no way to speculate which of those incentives is more important for Valve.
The nice part is that the indie game dev space has grown enough now that there are dozens of amazing games coming out every year, so AAA titles are becoming increasingly irrelevant for a growing number of gamers.
I’m trying to think of the last AAA game I played, and I’m coming up blank… Maybe Doom Eternal a year ago? Almost all of my playtime is indie games. I’m debating getting the Monster Hunter bundle from Humble, which might be the 2nd AAA game I play in as many years.
The last time I paid full price for a AAA title was Diablo 3, which I almost instantly regretted. What a disappointment.
Edit: Not getting Monster Hunter. I forgot that Capcom added DRM that breaks Steam Deck compatibility. I probably won’t bother playing it, but I suppose I could just download a pirated copy.
Agreed. The Deck is plenty powerful for most games, and even a lot of newer releases play fine with lower graphics settings, and with the Deck’s screen size and resolution, lower settings aren’t noticeable in most games.
I’ve seen a lot of reviewers also mention that they don’t notice or mind lower framerate on the Deck, either, and I agree; there’s something about the form factor that makes the framerate less important.
Releasing too many SKUs will just confuse the market and lead to fragmentation. 4 years is the absolute soonest I will think higher specs might be justified.
The OLED model was a good choice; a nominal increase in performance with a fantastic display and the exact same shell dimensions. Developers don’t need to target multiple devices if they’re trying to make their games work on the Deck, and accessories all still work (aside from maybe screen protectors, I guess?)
Similar to Siralim 3 in most ways. I think Siralim 2 was fairly significantly different, but it’s been so long I don’t remember clearly. Sorry!
Siralim 1 was not very good, by comparison. It’s not a good comparison for 3/Ultimate. And really, Ultimate is just a straight upgrade from 3. There’s no reason to play any other version, imho.
Siralim Ultimate is an amazing game. It’s a bit like a Pokémon game where you collect a team of 6 monsters to fight for you, but there are a few key differences:
First, it’s 6v6.
More importantly, each creature has some sort of ability that breaks the game somehow, like “Cast a random spell every time it defends” or “Automatically defends at the end of every turn”. And you can put these traits on artifacts they can equip, and add an additional trait from creature breeding, too, so each creature can have 3 traits.
Essentially, the game is about building the most broken OP 18-trait combo that you can, then see how powerful you can crank the enemies.
There are a lot more systems, too, like craftable spells, your character’s abilities (and how they synergize with your creatures traits), special god bosses you can beat to eventually unlock their OP avatars to join your team, maps like Path of Exile, a creature draft mode, and more.
If you get into it, it’s the kind of game you could play for hundreds of hours, theory crafting and building hundreds of unique builds.
I have been playing since Siralim 1. Siralim Ultimate is the 4th and likely final game in the series, and it has all the best systems from all the previous games, with all the un-fun mechanics stripped out. It’s very well tuned for only including good mechanics.
The bundle is worth it for Siralim Ultimate alone, imho.
I have no problem with Unity paying him that much. My problem is the income tax system allowing him to keep most of it.
The highest marginal tax rate in the US for individuals peaked at 92% in the early 50s. If we had sane marginal income tax rates at higher income levels, then there would be no problem with executive income. (Granted, we also need to fix taxation on other forms of compensation and capital gains, too.)
Agreed. Preying on children who don’t understand what they’re signing up for is shitty to begin with.
Then, add that deepfake AI porn is unethical and likely illegal (and who knows what other kinds of potentially-illegal images are being generated…)
And, as you point out, the files having existed in the computer could, alone, be illegal.
Then, as and extra fuck you, burning GPU cycles to make AI images is causing CO2 emissions, GPU wear, waste heat that might trigger AC, and other negative externalities too, I’m sure…
It’s shit all around.
That was surprisingly easy to understand for an incredibly technical subject. I’m so glad there are some über-geeks who are willing to do this level of work to preserve gaming history.
It was particularly interesting hearing how newer Intel processors are missing some of the recently-added instructions that are useful for PS3 emulation and equivalent instructions aren’t planned to be reimplemented for years. That makes it pretty clear that maintaining emulators that operate at this level requires constant maintenance and tweaking to adjust to different chipsets as they evolve.
I wonder if there’s a debloated version of Windows 11 that removes the TPM requirement…
Regardless, I’m this | | close to switching to Linux; I just need to make sure I can get OneDrive and full MS Office running in Linux reliably, since I need both for work. The Steam Deck has convinced me that I don’t need Windows anymore for gaming, so it’s only work holding me back. (Work pays me a stipend to maintain my own work computer hardware, so I do work on “my” machine.)
Edit: Looks like it’s actually pretty easy to do.
The idea of this campaign is that lobbying for law changes is very expensive and consumers won’t have the cash to compete against industry giants. It sucks. It’s classic regulatory capture.
Instead, this campaign targets consumer protection laws in jurisdictions with teeth. France, in particular. If we can get a regulator to issue a substantial fine in France, then we’ve effectively won without needing legal changes.
Companies will need to choose to not do business in the EU or meet the requirements implied by the agency’s decision; the hope is that there’s a flat judgement that making the game unplayable requires a full refund to every consumer, or a fix to make the game work offline.
Then, companies will need to ensure that they have a plan in place to allow for offline play. If that’s “baked in” to the design from inception, then it’s not a big deal. It worked for the industry for decades until they realized that live service games offer new revenue streams.
As an added bonus, there’s hope that microtransaction/DLC purchases will also need to be maintained; this would effectively mean that, if they take the MTX/DLC/purchase DRM servers offline, they would need to allow anyone to use any of their MTX/DLC, presumably by including a window to download the files to run everything DRM-free.
I hope that all makes sense. Essentially, The Crew might be the weakest link that brings this entire unethical business practice to its knees.
Classic enshittification: extract values from both sides.
Consumers get a worse experience seeing unwanted ads
Advertisers pay for clicks that are erroneous
Roku’s numbers go up
It’s a shame there’s no easy way to flash custom OSes on smart TVs, in general. Even just nuking the whole thing to be a dumb display would be amazing.
Proton is not an emulator, it’s a compatibility layer. They don’t try to emulate Windows system functions, they just translate Windows system calls.
They make a difference, legally, since compatibility layers don’t recreate any functionality from the original process, while emulation recreates the internal operations of the system.
Regardless, emulation is legal. I wonder about the legality of this DMCA; Yuzu is open source, so there’s no copyright infringement on their code, right? It’s licensed under an open source license. And there’s no Nintendo code being copied, nor Nintendo assets. I’m not a lawyer (or even American), but I think this is DMCA abuse.
Most of my small list of tweak/utility mods are already updated. The only one that wasn’t was the skip fishing minigame mod, but it turns out Eidee Easy Fishing is better anyway, so I switched.
If Steam didn’t curve developers to sell at the same price, then developers on Epic could compete with Steam on lower fees by passing those cost savings on to consumers.
Right now, there’s no reason to buy on Epic: it’s just a worse Steam at the same price (aside from the free games, of course.) If they charged 20% less across the board, then that might move the needle enough to get the volume to start to complete with Steam.
The price-match clause is anticompetitive; it should be a revenue-match clause, imho, so developers can sell direct downloads for 30% less (no fees) or on Epic for 20% less (10% fees) and not face any consequences from Steam, for example.
I really enjoyed the demo. I played about 20-30 hours, I think, which is a lot for me. It’s a really enjoyable game. I bought it in a bundle with a game I already owned (StS) to save an extra 10% (the bundle deal still applies even if there’s just 1 title in the "bundle’).
I haven’t played the full version yet, but I enjoyed climbing to diamond rank with both the classes available in the demo.
I got a Steam Deck since then; I think it should be a nice touch game with the back buttons (or DPad, maybe?) bound to rotate and the touch screen for moving items. (Or face buttons if you’re left-handed, of course.)
I don’t know if it will have lasting power for me, but I already got my money’s worth from the demo and I expect the other two classes will get at least as much time from me.
It’s a game where you build a combo of items, depending on what pieces you luck into finding, then try to solve the positioning puzzle you built for yourself to maximize item adjacency synergies. The buying is strategic, but the bag management is more an optimization puzzle.
If that sounds interesting to you, then you’ll probably love it. Try the demo; it’s free!
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Weird to hear that. My only issue so far has been how hard it is to get movement speed on boots. Granted, I’m only just about to start Cruel, so my playtime is low compared to many, but I’m absolutely loving all the boss encounters, particularly with the dodge mechanics. And not needing to worry about socket numbers, colours, and links on gear.
Maybe I should read what others are saying, but I have nothing significant to complain about so far, aside from move speed being a bit too slow.