The reason I don’t think it’s all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you’re not really sure what killed you.

Yeah, that’s why I don’t care for POE anymore these days.

It is a classic Roguelike

I get that Roguelike is basically a vaguely defined genre now, and though Torchlight 2 in a great game it’s definitely not a “classic Roguelike”.

We used AA on our CRTs back in the day. Of course we were all running like 1024x768 as the resolution so it was a lot more needed. The higher your resolution the less you need it.

This is like Black and White mixed with Civilization.

Me too. There’s little challenge or risk. Progression is really slow and can’t really be sped up. Borderline an interactive screensaver.

Pretty much, all I can think of is Steve Carrell yelling “but I hated it!”

It was basically Fern Gully

Is there anything backing up claims that it has AI generated assets?

I’m on Linux and Valve and Itch are the only ones with first class Linux support. Everyone else you have to dick around with running their launchers through wine or lose features.

That’s not what Valve’s policy said at all. It basically says you have to promise you aren’t infringing and disclose how it’s used so customers can make their own decisions.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3862463747997849619

It’s basically the most conservative fence-sitting position they could have picked.

If you have proper full continuous deployment infrastructure setup then you can do minor updates of things like dependencies automatically. I’d guess that’s what’s happening here.

I’ll pick up Reforged if they fix the performance and campaign bugs.

Steam gets all of my gaming money until other vendors support Linux.

Yeah, “people don’t like the racist authoritarian because she’s a woman” sure is a hot take.

Have to pass because there’s no mention of Linux

Man, just imagine the shitstorm if a game launched at $50 on Epic, then a year later increased prices to $62 everywhere due to Steam’s terms and conditions so that the dev could maintain the same profit from steam.

Of course that will never happen because there’s zero consumer benefit and instead they just launch at $60 on Epic. If that did happen and the savings were benefiting the consumer then Epic might have a point.

And they’re hemorrhaging money

Because it was like that in Starsiege: Tribes and was obviously the way to go after you played that compared to moving with the mouse and aiming with the keyboard lol.

I think the only items it’s violating are being non-modal (which is violated all the time genre defining Roguelikes) and by not being ASCII (ditto, pretty much every genre defining roguelike has a tileset these days).

That list was surprising light on Roguelikes.

Stoneshard seems much more classic Roguelike to me than lite.

I played the demo and got turned off by constantly saying “Orruk” instead of orc and lack of base building.

Physical sales could see as low as 10% of the sales making it to the developer. Made Steams 30% cut look likea bargain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct2Drive

Steam didn’t allow 3rd party titles until late 2005 but Direct2Drive launched early 2004.

Stardock Central was 2001.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardock_Central

The contract is forced on you in order to obtain employment when there is very unequal bargaining power. It’s also a contract that’s largely deemed illegal in actual courts. He disclosed information that is no longer business relevant and instead just an object of historical interest at this point.

I suppose if you were forced to sign a non-compete to work for a fast food restaurant that you’d also honor that and not work for any other fast food restaurants if you had to quit?

In the US, contracts are routinely deemed unenforcable by courts for being overly broad. A contract with an indefinite duration frequently falls under that category.

It’s stuff that happened 20 years ago.

I’m surprised 17% of them are still going 3 years later.

Scaling a well written system just requires throwing more hardware at said system. Yeah, you could tune it and tweak it, but that isn’t an ongoing and constant process.

Okay yeah, this conversation obviously isn’t going anywhere if you think the solution to scaling into hundreds of millions of users is just throwing hardware at the problem lol.

Can you tell me that last major feature added to the Play Store?

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2023/11/power-your-growth-on-google-play.html

Yeah, hundreds is probably a low guess but I’m also excluding Android itself. There Play Store itself has a ton of features most of its end users aren’t aware of that are important to it’s overall operation and development ecosystem. Off the top of my head it does things like code signing and authentication, security scans, governance and enforcement of rules, payment processing, etc.

That is a lot, however my point is just that margin is a pretty worthless statistic for software since it has such high upfront costs.

How much R&D went into creating the Google Play store? Probably 100s of millions of dollars so far over the course of about 15 years. Do you not know what R&D is or something? In the US tax code, software development is considered R&D.

And yes, I am a software developer.

Yes, if you exclude the research and development costs then most websites have high margins. Keeping it running is the cheap part.

It wouldn’t even remotely resemble the first game if it’s wasn’t 2D. If you want 3D Risk of Rain then there’s Risk of Rain 2.

To some extent Discord servers have replaced forums and now you have to try to search through a chat room’s history to find out info instead of using a forum. Seems like a pretty big downgrade.