I’m guessing Steam decided against being able to leave your games to somebody else when you die because of how most EULAs I’ve read work: they are often non-transferrable licence and so in most cases the store has no choice in the matter. Now GOG are willing to say they will do what they can given this limitation, but I can see why Steam wouldn’t: it’s a whole lot of work for realistically not much benefit. It’s probably easier for Valve to gift the same games over to the new person.

For reference, the 1TB Steamdeck OLED at Gamesmen is $450 AUD more than what Valve will be selling it at. Unless I’m mistaken, Gamesmen are the only retailer selling the Steamdeck online that isn’t a marketplace (such as Big W), so Gamesmen is probably the best place to but at the moment since they will be forced to take on any warranty claims unlike resellers on marketplaces which may able to just dodge that by closing up shop.

I have a pretty new AMD system I use for gaming. The vast majority of games run in a Windows VM in Proxmox with GPU passthrough with exception to Fortnite which runs directly on hardware on a different boot drive specifically because Easy Anticheat blocks VMs. That dedicated install becomes less and less attractive by the day.

I regret go inform you that Russia already runs it’s own Steam. It just has thousands of contributors and doesn’t make any money. Even Steam has trouble competing with it!

I literally just bought one of these in Sydney.

https://www.msy.com.au/product/amd-ryzen-9-7950x3d-am5-4-2-ghz-cpu-processor-68895

It sounds like they are selling the Linux version on their website. The way it’s worded in the title makes it sound like a web app.

Black Mesa is amazing! I’ve played through both Half-Life and Half-Life: Source many times over and Black Mesa blows both (not like Source is much better in the first place) out of the water. Honestly it’s difficult to recommend because one of the things that makes Black Mesa so impressive is how much they improved over the original so I feel the need to tell people to play Half-Life first, then Black Mesa.

Xen was also amazing! I see some comments here about not liking the Xen bosses which is fair enough but I loved them! Gonach (especially the very end) was quite difficult though. The end of Xen feels like a massive power trip too!

They said the quiet part out loud! Get ‘em!

Pie in the sky idea, but anti-cheat feels like something that should be built in to OSs as part of anti-malware. So instead of game devs inventing their own invasive anti-cheats chock full of kernel-level vulnerabilities, you build the kernel-level parts into the kernels and then applications can request assurances such as: don’t allow my program to be debugged, patched, don’t allow anything with these checksums to run or these kernel APIs to be used. The things kernel-level anti-cheat software are supposed to do can absolutely be useful in a wider security context, but it’s hard to trust those building them because they compromise security in another way or are believed to be using them for malicious purposes as well.

I’m a little confused about what you mean. Is the implication that nobody (particularly employers) would care about being able to optimise a game because US games are so inefficient as demonstrated by their massive install sizes? That’s my guess but let me know if that’s incorrect. If my interpretation is correct then I don’t think that would make much of a difference. It’s not about needing to hire people who can do optimisation, it’s about the skill that went in to it and standing out from everybody else. If you were capable of learning that, on extremely old hardware with what I would assume requires a lot more manual work to do basic tasks compared to more modern game engines, imagine what they could do with all the extra tools!

Back 4 Blood is got a lot of traction initially by saying it was a spiritual successor and made by the same people as Left 4 Dead (1). Of course, nobody plays it anymore because it turned out to be a meh game, but boy did people check it out!

Making a game on the N64 today shows you can work within the limitations of much less powerful hardware. From a hiring perspective, it means you can say “I ported Portal to the N64” which says a lot more about your skill set than “ I made a 3D FPS with these neat twists”. It stands out.

I don’t know the name of the devs, but I would certainty pay more attention to their next project if I knew that it was made by the same people, which you can include in the description of your next game.

Cutting Sapphires for 100gp

The days of asking my parents to change the Club Membership to a Runescape membership.

I’m gonna build a firewall!

I’ve played Jak 1 on OpenGAOL with 101% completion. It’s an amazing job. i can’t wait to do the same for Jak 2. Those games are a little painful to emulate what with the hacks required to fix shadows.

I’m surprised it’s not per-seat or per-user. Not like the dev is getting more money if the user re-installs the game. Also not a fan of it being monthly. I get why you would charge twice if the user installs it twice since you may not be able to track concurrent installs without DRM, but that should only apply if you choose a per-install licence. Per-install also opens you up to malicious users installing/uninstalling to make you pay.

There should be a per-seat/per-user perpetual price if the dev never updates the Unity engine itself. I get charging per-seat/per-user monthly if they devs are pulling in new versions, but that should stop if you cease updating.

Came here after a friend linked me to this: https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280