Yeah. Valve runs the loot box system and the marketplace in which the winnings from those loot boxes are sold.

You pay Valve for a random chance at a rare item you can sell (with Valve taking a cut).

Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.

My point is that SteamOS is similar to Android from a business perspective.

They’re making an OS for free that anyone can install, but they’re doing it to get people to buy software from Steam.

Yeah, you don’t have to use Steam as your software provider, but Android users don’t have to use the Play Store.

Guess where almost all apps are purchased on Android? Valve wants to be the Google of the mobile PC gaming world.

I actually typed Origin when I meant to type EGS, which charges 18% to Steam’s 30%.

They offer a free operating system anyone can use that’s name after their company and designed to play games sold through the included store for a 30% cut of sales.

What saints!

If Google did something similar, I bet everyone would say they’re a great company and not at all evil…

Gabe is a billionaire monopolist, not your friend.

I really don’t get the love for Valve. They charge double the fees of some other digital platforms, and people flip the fuck out when a developer is like "we’re releasing on origin because paying Valve would cost more money than the entire net profit of the game.

Gelsinger didn’t do “nothing.”

He was clear from day one that it would take years for Intel to recover. It takes a long time for their products to make it to market, especiallyhlwhen they have to buipdnfab facilities. He was essentially fired for his predecessors lingering fuckups.

The biggest product that’s launched he actually had some control over was the second generation of Arc, which launced days after he was fired and has been a massive success.

Piracy being the only way to get a game isn’t beneficial to the dev, and Balatro is the kind of game that deserves our money. It could have easily been jammed to the gill with paid boosts premium decks, etc, but instead, they just made a good game.

18 is the highest rating. It’s equivalent to the ESRB “AO” rating, and many storefronts will not sell it, period.

And they didn’t even bother playing their planet card.

I think what he means is multi-player games are typically cheaper than single-player because the devs make 6 maps or whatever and let the players loose.

A full campaign requires a lot more work to keep it interesting for more than a few minutes.

The thing is gaming is a weird industry where the consumer price is essentially fixed tegardless of platform/marketplace outside of sales.

Ideally, games would cost more on Steam to make up for the increased fees. That would create a market where Steam would probably have to lower its fees to be competitive. And if Steam did that, EGS would need to improve the quality of its service to remain competitive.

Or maybe Steam could be a boutique marketplace where the games cost more but the UU is better, while EGS is an unholy mess of a UX, but the games cost less.

But what we have right now is neither. With the customers being shielded from the price differences, the negative effects of Steam are invisible to most people and the market doesn’t properly function.

Is a better launcher really worth 18% of the gross value of a game?

If a developer decided to cut 20% of their content, and their excuse was “we want to use that budget towards a better third-party game launcher instead of using it to develop the game” would you be okay with that?

Because that’s what you’re suggesting they do by choosing Steam over EGS.

As much as I like using Steam, I’m on Epic’s side here. They sue over anti-competitive practices of other marketplaces that take almost triple the cut that Epic does on game sales.

If I were a developer and one platform took 12% while the other took 30%, I’d push my customers to the 12% option no matter how much better the in-game overlay or whatever was on the other platform. Game studios are closing left and right, and that extra 18% is a big deal when games are struggling to actually profit from the development.

I don’t understand why people are so in love with a Steam monopoly. Steam has a lot of neat features, but the main feature I’m looking for in a game is the game itself, and I’d prefer more of the money to go to the companies making the games.

And maybe if Valve didn’t take home a larger profit from game sales than the developers themselves, they’d go back to being a full-time game studio to make their money.

Agreed. But I was responding to the claim that the remasters suck. With the recent updates, that’s not as accurate unless the music is the most important part of the experience for you.

The improved controls, higher resolution, gameplay tweaks (fucking David Cross RC missions in the original were ludicrous), and restored lighting make a pretty compelling package. If the remasters launched in their current state they’d be considered excellent.

They actually updated the remaster a few weeks ago and it is a huge difference.

Now the only glaring issue is the music, since the originals came out before game studios knew to secure licensed music rights in a way that would allow future re-releases in different formats.

Denuvo is used by these companies because it’s shockingly effective. IIRC it has yet to be cracked on any game.

Games that end up being available on the high seas have generally stopped paying for the Denuvo license.

A few years back, a really nice graphics card was like $650, so $3,000 got you a lot of performance.

I built a $3,000 performance desktop a few years back, and the main games games I ended up playing on it were things like FTL, Shovel Knight, SNES emulators, and other games that could be run on an overclock ham sandwich.

I think that Borderlands still had the best gameplay loop because of its more random loot system.

You didn’t have the legendary items dropping from specific enemies, so instead of farming bosses for a specific item, you just run around playing the game. Every time you opened a chest it was exciting because there might be something good inside.

Oh, and the legendary guns could be stupid powerful. I got a Hellfire with my Lilith at level 25 or something, and it still melted enemies at level 70 because of the elemental effects.

If I could get that loot system with BL2’s story and level design and the Pre-sequel’s OZ kits I think it’d be perfect.

If you do what you love, you’ll be constantly working the rest of your life.

My understanding is they keep adding features even though they’re supposed to be done because they still play the game constantly themselves and end up wanting more content.

Threads by Meta is on the fediverse. So by describing the fediverse as good, it sounds like Threads is just like Mastodon.

The topic is too complicated to quickly explain to a novice. Because now you have to explain FOSS, and why that’s sometimes good, but not always since bad actors have used FOSS .

So that’s impossible with the fediverse? No way a company like Meta could have a fediverse platform?

Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.

You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.

Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?

Supposedly, the full map is measured in petabytes.

This is actually a perfectly reasonable use of streaming assets for full-resolution, since almost no players will ever experience even 1 percent of the map.

It took about a year for it to get near-full compatibility with old games since it was emulated on the 360.

360 was absolutely backwards compatible with the OG Xbox.

While they’ve shut down online services for some of the older consoles, the backwards compatibility of the Xbox has always been excellent. I was playing Crimson Skies for the OG Xbox on my Series S a few weeks ago.

I’ve enjoyed my VR but rarely. When I game, I’m usually doing it to relax. Getting everything up and running, clearing space, etc so I can wear a device that makes my face sweat while I thrash about isn’t relaxing.

VR is the gaming equivalent of going to a fancy restaurant with a formal dress code. It’s nice once in a while, but most of the time I’d rather just make a sandwich and stay in.

Nobody remembers OnLive…

Day Before was basically a scam though, and they kept the servers up for a few weeks.

By all accounts this was a real game. It’s just that nobody wanted to play it.

In the last 2 years we’ve seen these live-service games fail at launch time and time and time again. The execs need to just accept that Fortnite already exists and you can’t force that kind of success.

The d-pad on the 360 controller was garbage. It was the only thing holding it back.

I think they’ve found a great place with the One/Series controllers.

I also really appreciate that with the jump to the Series X/S they didn’t change controllers. They had one that worked that people liked, so they kept it. And it works via Xbox’s proprietary wireless protocol, USB, or Bluetooth, so it works on pretty much anything but a Playstation or Nintendo.

It would be neat if it could pull step count logs from fitness devices and watches so it didn’t even necessarily need to be running while you’re doing your walk.

Until you get pretty late in the game, it really suffers from a lack of variety in combat options, but by the time you get to the variety, you’re basically locked into just doing whatever moves interrupt the enemy or whichever super-move is warmed up.

Dave Feloni, the producer behind Mando, Boba Fett, and Ahsoka isn’t some outsider who knows nothing. He was the producer of the Clone Wars and Rebels, and has a deep love of the franchise and its lore. In fact, what alienate many people about his shows are that they are so incredibly respectful of what came before that newcomers don’t follow it.

To understand everything in Ahsoka you needed to be familiar with so much lore that wasn’t in the films that it felt more like homework to understand for some viewers.

They had pre-arranged intersections with set traffic patterns and multipliers and stuff scattered about, so it was a puzzle as well as a driving challenge.

Is that an online propaganda troll simulator?

But they took out crash mode. Yeah, you could crash whenever in the open world, but I loved the puzzle game aspects of the old crash mode.