It’s almost as if they factored the cost of licensing a third-party IP into the price.

If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.

I saw one game that was a 5 minute black screen with someone talking teenage-level philosophy. There was a handful of clicks to make in the whole playthrough.

Steam has a lot of low-quality games. The volume of stuff shipped with Synty Studios assets from Humble Bundles is crazy.

Indie games are doing great. Shovelware is doing meh as it always should be.

Gabe Newell talked about this years ago.

“When you look at the fact that these people have $2000 PCs and they’re spending $50 a month or more on their Internet connections, clearly they’re willing to spend money.

So, from our point of view, what we saw more and more was that piracy is a result of bad service on the part of game companies…”

Half-Life was the same. The game doesn’t spoon feed you a narrative, the same way real life doesn’t have a narrator (at least one outside of your head).

You need to pay attention to your surroundings, listen in to NPCs talking, read posters on the wall, etc to piece together the story.

It was and is one of the cooler ways to do storytelling in my opinion. Cutscenes etc are fine but for a first person game, I love the immersion of the story happening around you rather then being loredumped on you while your agency is taken away from you.

Newell talked openly about this entire topic at LinuxCon years ago. It’s been 12 years and they’ve been true to their word.

The amount they’ve contributed upstream is insane, and the money they’ve provided to Linux-ecosystem contractors is also insane.

They’re profit motivated, 100%, but at least they’ve done so while being a good citizen in the FOSS movement (bar the Steam Client itself). SUSE, Canonical etc are all for-profit orgs that help push FOSS forward.

Profitability and Free and Open Source Software aren’t mutually exclusive.

Loads of games in TTS are fully scripted. As both a BGA and TTS fan, I still lean towards TTS. It’s more fun and supports way more types of play and with the Community Workshop, there’s so many fun custom games on there too.

From the Source engine updates analyses, I think it’s going to be voxels (thus deformable world), a physics engine to support voxels, fluid stimulation, fire simulation, acoustics simulation, NPC AI emotional simulation and adding senses like smell to NPCs.

Steamdb lets you filter out games with less than x reviews which I’ve made liberal use of over the years.

I’d just take a look at the Steam Deck Verified pages as that’ll give you a good idea about a game (at least though Proton).

Apple already has the Game Porting Toolkit which is made by CodeWeavers - D3DMetal can run a lot of Windows games like Proton’s DXVK/VKD3D. MoltenVK is a little behind to fully empower VKD3D on macOS; it’s not as smooth sailing as Proton.

The biggest issue is that Apple are still hoping developers spend the time to work on converting shaders to Metal, implement Game Center, UI and Accessibility features etc so the game feels like a native app.

Which is dumb. As was Metal (they should have just made Metal as a Vulkan abstraction layer).

Valve took the smart route and while they love developers using the Steam SDK, at least with the Steam Overlay they can still offer a native-like feeling experience.

Here’s hoping Steam Machine etc is incredibly disruptive as if it’s a decent workstation too, there’s a dwindling number of reasons to not use Linux (Adobe / Affinity / Office / AutoCAD / MinecraftBE / Fortnite).

I’d say the second one was even harder too.

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Really well articulated.

Valve have enabled a critical mass of “target platforms” that enables both the community and developers to get things working on Linux, which all other distros are about to benefit from.

I’m likely going to buy all the new Valve hardware out of principle. The Deck is incredible, but I still have my beefy gaming rig. But my living room wouldn’t mind a Steam Machine (and my girlfriend is definitely after both a Steam Frame and Controller 2.

I’m taking time off work in a couple of weeks and I’m moving over to Linux completely - I too have felt the inertia of dual booting and find myself in Windows far too often.

The failure of the Steam Machine is why Valve hosted Khronos group at their office to kick off Vulkan and funded LunarG etc in the early days to get things moving quickly.

Valve took their time but this new hardware range is based on years of learning and solving the problems from their original foray into hardware and Linux for gaming.

And I’m so thankful for it!

GCompris or TuxPaint are great for younger kids. They’re free/open source and have versions available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Or spin up TES3MP with some friends and experience it together!

Sadly not, first time I’ve heard of it.

I’m still rocking my OG Steam Controller so I still use that for anything mouse-related on the couch.

What about a trackball mouse?

Steam Input can be used to turn your joystick on your existing pad into a mouse. You could add a button for a speed modifier.

It won’t be perfect or good for precision mouse stuff but it’ll unlock a lot of games for couch gameplay with your existing setup.

Is it any good?

And they’re patching in memory so enjoy giving full system permission to their tool and excluding it from your security products as this thing is architecturally similar to malware.

The very definition of enshittification:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Interesting that one of their complaints was the first person perspective and how it limited their peripheral vision.

Also Steam already has this feature. I can bounce between Linux, Mac, and Windows with my saves. I don’t need something for Windows only…

Where’s the giant creature? If I can’t have a 100ft tiger throw its faeces at villagers, I’m not interested.

Seconded. When this came out, I was hooked for months. Perfect FPS roguelike.

Do you mean Zen Browser? Zed is a text/code editor.

It’s Genshin Impact.

Given how immensely fun Untitled Goose Game was, I’m cautiously optimistic for this one.

Your question mark key seems to be sticking.

The only part that makes it somewhat clear what the mode is is the part they explain the differences between local co-op and online mode.

This is a list of gameplay changes compared to a standard local co-op run:

They could have been a little more explicit and called it “online co-op mode” or something, and had a paragraph explaining what it is not just how it’s different to something else.

Guess it’s “Patient Gamer” for me on this one.

I have a feeling you’re right about this. I do wish Microsoft would take the Apple approach as Apple steamed ahead with deprecating kernel-mode access.

Love them or hate them, Apple take security a lot more seriously than Microsoft these days and it’s a real shame MS see security architecture as a nuisance rather than a core responsibility of their business.

Nope. They’re developing an alternative set of APIs for userspace in conjunction with security vendors for their products to use but it’s all still a long way off and will be optional to start with.

Given the volume of mission-critical devices security products are installed on (which the CrowdStrike fuckup highlighted), getting them out of kernel space would be a huge risk reduction for the world. And security vendors would love to get away from that risk as pulling a CrowdStrike costs a lot of money setting things right with customers.

But an anticheat used by consumers on their personal devices for a game, not such a big deal.

While I’m sure MS will eventually deprecate and then kill off third party kernel drivers, it could take a decade since MS has so much business (both internal and within their customer base) that relies on legacy crap.

Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite were by Irrational Games (2K Boston). Bioshock 2 was by 2K Marin.

Ken Levine shut down the studio after Infinite as they disliked the stress and scale of development - missing the days of small development teams.

That was back in 2014. Levine’s new studio, set up immediately after the closure of Irrational, has yet to release a game but supposedly their first project, Judas, is not too far from completion (it was meant to be out this year in March but, so far, there’s no news).

Rimworld or Crusader Kings. Their DLC expands the possibilities of what can happen during a game and are entirely optional. Their existence doesn’t take anything from new players who only own the base game and you can pick and choose what you want to add to your game to expand it how you so choose.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.

Also what’s the game in the screenshot?

And artists are getting paid peanuts in return.

Album sales have plummeted and Spotify are slowly replacing real artists with AI generated music to avoid needing to pay them.

Music streaming is an excellent example of what we don’t want to happen to another art form.

Probably little incentive to do so given how much money they’re making from Twitch, YouTube, etc.

As one of those old farts that picked up Minecraft during the 0.0.x days, this isn’t far off. Wrong perspective though.

OpenMW and TES3MP is a great way to enjoy Morrowind in a modern engine and with friends.

There’s plenty of mods available for OpenMW so you can make it look stunning and add loads of new functionality.