That’s just the thing - the publicly visible rules are about the keys, but the email that’s part of evidence isn’t about the keys. (Also, steam isn’t just distributing the game, but providing other services for workshop, cloud saves, multiplayer, forums)

Valve gives you free steam keys for your game on request, which you can sell off steam, without paying Valve a cut. This has a specific rule that disallows selling those keys for a lower price. However, not sure if it’s this case, there was an email from a Valve employee submitted as evidence telling a game developer that selling their game for less in general would be undercutting steam, and something they wouldn’t want. If the email is real and not a misinterpretation, Valve indeed was/is pressuring developers to not sell games cheaper elsewhere.

Also, sales and giveaways are exempt from the steam key price parity rule, which I would assume epic’s free games would fall under, if you applied the rule to that despite not involving steam keys.

I don’t think the example at the end of your comment is relevant, since to my knowledge it’s the publisher deciding on pricing and doing sales, and steam is still taking the same cut.

I also think it’s generally not a great thing, since it basically puts the value of the game at $5, making it not worth getting off-sale, while also creating urgency to do so during a sale. I respect Factorio developers’ choice to just not do sales at all, and state so, so that buyers know exactly what the price is.

Yup, and this kind of stuff is why I support the lawsuits against Valve - in the sense that I do want oversight and fair judgement on the issues being raised, especially since one included an email from a Valve employee saying a developer isn’t allowed to sell their game cheaper than on steam.

I imagine if Valve isn’t doing anything wrong, it’ll just waste some time - but it could also do good for game developers and players, by reducing the cut, but also potentially by opening up Steam’s tools for networking, input, workshop to not be locked into their platform (since that can definitely keep devs on steam in cases where they might want to diversify)

Larian has been adding free content to BG3 over time

I think they said the content updates are done, in the last content update?

modding support

As far as I know, terraria only supports resource packs, changing textures, sounds, text, that kinda stuff, right? tModLoader is a community project made by fans, and the game devs’ contributions to that are in the domain of being receptive, supporting it being on steam, and potentially answering questions or making small changes to facilitate mods.

But on the topic of changes, can’t forget how they added new content and put it behind a new difficulty, and then ended up doing that again. And then they added a special seed that has new content that bumps up the difficulty another level.

I’m on the fence about the topic, but you’ve gotta be dense to believe CSAM has nothing to do here. The accusation is one of CSAM, so the argument is whether the scene is CSAM or not.

In a perfect world the question would be simple, but in the reality we live in, you have to consider if the art will be misused - and that’s assuming the artist is honest about their intentions in the first place.

Unless something changed, players who don’t own DLC can’t play as the DLC characters. I believe they can interact with all the rest of the content normally, just locked to the vanilla character selection (which is still broad and fun enough, and further expandable with mods).

I’ll add Luck be a Landlord as a game that’s surprisingly fun, has no time pressure, and lets you save and quit anytime.

Also worth noting is that FTL has a great mod, Multiverse, adding new features and lots of new content. I’m not sure how well FTL works when you have little time, but if it works, there’s a lot of unique content to see.

This is certainly an odd suggestion, and not what you’re really asking for, but makes me think of Space Station 13. It’s a janky round-based multiplayer roleplay/social intrigue game. It’s free, and the game is opensource (though not the engine), which also leads to there being many servers with unique variations. It’s cheating to suggest a multiplayer game when talking about single player natural language processing games, but using actual players is probably the easiest way to pull it off.

The reason it reminds me is because on a roleplay server, you’ve got something like 20 people, each with their job to do, talking to each other, talking on common radio, etc. - and if you’re lucky, a player playing as the station AI, complete with a (modifiable) lawset they have to follow, Asimov’s laws style. And of course, a few antagonists that have objectives to do.

If you’re curious, I personally recommend BeeStation, though there are a lot of fine choices for the server, just maybe stay away from the 18+ ones.

I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.

It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.

I really hope not, that feels like crypto all over again, with inconsistent payouts and varying electricity prices… And on top of that probably awful service since people tend to have the weirdest internet connections.

Though if you remove the part where it’s used to stream games to other players, that sounds too niche to be viable, but could be cool. If going in that direction, I’d imagine it more likely to be gaming servers for businesses, like VR gaming spots, where they have multiple gaming computers hooked up to headsets.

I’m not a soulslike fan myself, but I don’t think hollow knight is very soulslike - the combat is very snappy, avoiding locking you into animations or making you consider your momentum, and I have the impression soulslikes also tend to be way more environmentally lethal, so to speak.

It might have some of that visual/lore/exploration vibe though.

It’s “of out hot” and “eat the food” - if we interpret “of in” (derived from “oven”) to be putting in the food, then “of out” would mean to take the food out, and thus “of out hot” would mean you take it out hot, and eat it

I don’t know about making fun of a dialect, but it’s not quite utter nonsense - “oven” sounds like “of in”, so it can be interpreted to mean that it shouldn’t be called oven, because when you put the food in it’s cold, you only eat it when taking the food out, when it’s hot.

The sentence structure is so absurdly wrong it makes me wonder if somebody was genuinely trying to make a pun and ended up with that, or if it was intentionally butchered.

Having a FP4 myself, I do suspect it’s significantly slower than alternatives at similar prices - not a problem for most uses, only things that would actually stress the CPU, but it could bother some people.

Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It’s not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it’s progress!

What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.

Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.

I’m not sure which puzzles you’re referring to - do you mean stuff to reach an ending, or the obscure, very much optional, deep secrets?

It’s been a while since I played it, but I don’t remember grindy puzzles in the main content, bar the big one, but that one felt exhilarating to figure out and solve.

As for combat, it is difficult, but I remember beating the whole game without turning down the difficulty (which I remember being a thing), so it seemed fine to me… But yeah, people misrepresenting a game is always a risk.

I will point out that (IIRC) Tunic does have significantly more mechanical progression than some other examples, like Outer Wilds or Toki Tori 2, but they’re all lovely games

Is it? Or did they choose Arch because of the ease of setting it up with all the latest software the community was already packaging?

The steam version of trackmania is quite weird - I looked for a way to pay for it through steam for a while before resignedly going into the Ubisoft payment in the overlay… Only to be directed to steam for payment. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to pay through Ubisoft when launching it from steam.

Outer Wilds. The game isn’t very text-heavy, but what there is feels important and personal. With the way the story is told, it is quite possibly my favorite story overall. I don’t want to say too much, since knowledge is key in that game, but I would highly recommend it.

As for android games… If you like puzzles like sudoku, check out Simon Tatham’s Puzzle collection. Simple ad-free online experience with a varied collection of puzzle games.

Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.

I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.

It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.

I do just want to point out, Valve didn’t do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.

That’s not an official/proper feature on steam, there’s nothing in the interface to select an older version, right? Just the beta system that lets developers have multiple branches available, which is often used to keep a limited number of previous versions available.

I’m not sure, but I think it could be the promotional video for the Cave Johnson announcer pack for Dota, there was a bit where he was goofing around while supervising the recording.

So what you’re saying is, an extraction shooter where you play as a bodyguard for the VIP NPC, with some fun risk reward mechanics related to straying from the NPC for loot, and deciding which items to keep for yourself and which to give to the NPC? Sounds quite novel, could be fun

including Alyx

Huh? Am I missing something? All of Valve’s VR games show up as Windows only, running on proton. I think Deadlock is in the same boat, though maybe they’ll add cross platform support before release.

Can you get the money out on console though? I think that’s what ultimately makes it gambling and why people are giving Valve shit about it, because you can trade in-game items for money using unofficial platforms (that go against the TOS, but are still out there)

While it might not fit the vibe (and you might already know it), I feel like Songs of Conquest needs to be mentioned, being a Heroes spinoff. It’s an interesting twist on the formula, with lovely graphics, some things streamlined and some interesting new mechanics (like the essences for spellcasting).

Thanks! I’m mostly confused by the post not linking anything, not sure if that’s just a posting style I’m unfamiliar with, or if OP forgot to put a link in.

Was there supposed to be a link or something?

I like Valve, but I will point out what’s been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could’ve chosen other options that don’t help the community, but they didn’t choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.

It’s not like Bethesda called their games “Fantasy” - “Civilization” is such a generic name that I respect putting the author’s name before it to avoid any confusion.

Considering they supposedly cited performance as a reason, they might’ve been about to pull a Cities skylines 2 indeed

I generally agree, but I’m not gonna continue buying on steam just because they’re developing new tech - I happily buy games on steam because of the features steam provides.

That said, DRM-free games is something steam does not and probably will not provide - it’s a niche GOG is comfortable with, so many people who value freedom on software will choose it as their first platform of choice.

In that sense, the hardware is completely unrelated - it does nothing towards the goal of DRM-free games, and in case of the index, locks more games behind a platform.

What take even is that? I can understand some complaints about Linux support for how much people praise the deck, but why would they make their own handheld… And VR headset? I feel like hardware shouldn’t be locked to specific platforms, and I would rather blame Valve for not releasing steam-independent software for their headset.