There’s no reason not to publish messy code. Most code ends up being messy.

It could be malware, OP is not sharing the source code.

It could be malware, OP is not sharing the source code.

Share the source code or this is DOA.

Lol, they didn’t try to kill used games on console, when they announced the Xbox One they also announced that you would be able to digitally sell and transfer your games licenses and share you digital library with friends.

Gamers didn’t hear that though, and then those plans got scrapped when they had to rework everything before launch.

Yeah, who do you think is best equipped to examine the sales and financials?

It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?

Yeah, that’s lead to monopolies before numerous times. That does not change the fact that a monopoly is still a bad thing as as soon as there’s no competitors, the monopoly can jack up it’s prices or keep them artificially high.

Assuming there’s up front costs you have to pay to be able to compete with that monopoly (infrastructure, marketing, etc), then you’re looking at losing a lot of money trying to break into a market where everyone defaults to your competitor. And in that time, your monopolistic competitor can afford to lose even more money to bleed you out of the market and then go back to high prices.

And that’s just the financial barrier, that doesn’t count networks effects and platform lock in that can prevent customers from leaving.

Monopolies are always a bad thing, and inherently need to be heavily regulated as they structurally break capitalism. Quite frankly any industry that creates walled-garden or relies on network effects needs to be heavily regulated as well, and steam checks all three of those boxes. There’s a reason that they are THE most profitable tech company per employee, and that’s not because they’re charging fair prices.

They never tried to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s just what Tim Sweeney and developers got fearful of and made a big fuss about (not saying it’s not worth making a fuss about, but they never announced they would do it). Microsoft did introduce more limited versions of windows that had sideloading disabled by default, but these were low cost versions of windows generally aimed at children and grandparents / non tech people, not at their gamer user base.

Honestly, it’s fucking exhausting.

Cynicism is not cleverness and it is not informedness, it’s just reactionary bullshit that makes you sound edgy online.

Apple is a piece of shit company.

Learn how to compete without behaving anti competitively or quit your fucking jobs. It’s not complicated.

No, Krafton’s explanation was clearer and plainer spoken.

Krafton may be lying or misrepresenting the situation, but their explanation is both simple and believable, if not necessarily the truth.

The GDPR is good and has absolutely changed how things are done. I’ve been involved with multiple companies having to change their European data practices because of it.

I don’t know why you have so little faith in the EU when it’s an actually functioning government that is passing new consumer protection legislation.

The problem with Brexit not the lack of clarity, it was that it was a fundamentally dumb idea motivated but dumbness.

It was a bunch of people who blamed every problem on the EU for no sound reason and thus they supported a self harming policy.

This is a situation where the policy is fundamentally sound, it just needs some clarity around implementation details. This is literally how government is supposed to work.

The way we bought it just requires the server code to be available to run, if does not require any specific company running servers. And running servers is not a suable offense.

Yeah, the three fired heads owned 90% of the shares, so they got $225M from the initial sale, and were due to get another $225M from the bonuses. That’s why Krafton still paid out $25M in bonuses after the uproar.

I mean their codebase more generally.

Krafton has claimed they asked for 30% more content for the early access version, which isn’t that minimal.

Subnautica isn’t just a survival game, but a story driven game as well, and given how janky their engine was, it’s not a surprise that they’d want to overhaul it from the ground up.

I genuinely don’t know what about your comment is supposed to be mocking.

You’re just describing the situation presented in purposefully more confusing language than the article.

The law is specifying the end user result. Keep the game we bought available to play in the way we bought it.

Questions about server binaries and copyright are implementation details for companies to work out.

That’s still inherently more specific than ‘that plus nebulous notions of workers rights’.

Also, that’s not nebulous in terms of end user expectation, that’s just nebulous in terms of technical implementation.

No. This is dumb. Activist movements get nowhere when they broaden their goals to encompass all things that would be nice to have. They become nebulous and impossible to appease.

Stay simple, stay focused. Win one battle at a time. Stop killing games.

The point is that no publisher demanded anything.

The developers made the game they wanted and launched it and didn’t go the way they wanted.

Splitgate was always a multiplayer only shooter though.

When you understand how RSUs work and what you’re signing up for there’s nothing inherently wrong with rewarding someone for years of service.

However, their structure / terminology is inherently misleading and manipulative.

A company could just give you stock at each performance review. It doesn’t need to give you magic shares that need to be incubated before they hatch, it could just give you the actual shares they want to pay you at each point.

They don’t because that would expose that they’re actually giving you nothing in the first several years, and they want you to think you own part of the company when you don’t.

Again, when you understand what they’re actually offering then you go in eyes wide open, but they are intentionally trying to deceive people into thinking they’re getting a reward earlier than they actually are.

I mean, these are nice changes but the real customization we want is to hide the four double sized ads, not our recently played games.

Well if you’re going to give them another shot, you should try the Outer Wilds.

Much less abstract puzzle solving, and it tells quite a good narrative (no combat).

You don’t have to like it, but out of curiosity, why is this different from a 90s point and click adventure? Isn’t Myst and Riven and stuff basically this, but first person and without combat?

Because I was thinking of being a mystified child staring at Myst on my friend’s computer more than once while playing Tunic.

It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren’t-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn’t work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

I think the word you’re looking for is “puzzle”.

I would not describe Control as mostly somber.

Things about it that are somber / serious:

Things about it that are whimsical:

Things about it that are both:

I have complete faith in Remedy, both of the Alan Wakes and Control have been surprisingly funny and whimsical, often in unexpected ways. Quantum Break had less humour and was a bit more self serious, but Microsoft also had more control of that project.

Valve literally hosts petabytes of game data and allows any user to download them at any time. That’s not nothing, data storage is

No, it’s really not. Azure and AWS storage is dirt cheap, especially if it’s cold storage and you can have a second or two delay when retrieving the file. If it was expensive, they wouldn’t be the most profitable tech company per employee.

Steam has so many backend features that allow devs to skip so many networking steps that can otherwise be a huge nightmare.

No, it doesn’t. It provides a small handful of APIs around friends and matchmaking, which Xbox and Epic also provide for half the fees, in addition to the generic Azure and AWS versions.

Not sure why you think they are literally just a webpage that has a purchase button next to a game.

I’m a software engineer whos built both an app store and 3d rendering engines. I know exactly how little work it took Valve to build Steam and how much work it took Epic to build Unreal.

They are not remotely comparable. Gamers are just lemmings who love Valve cause everyone loves Valve and talks about Valve, when in reality Valve has overcharged and ripped them off for decades.

for building most of those games

providing an engine does not build the game.

Well good thing I said “most” of a game. Go ahead and write your game logic and then tell me how you get it to render graphics on a screen without any engine code.

Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?

I’m not defending valve, I’m attacking epic

Yeah, in the context of a discussion about whether or not Valve is overcharging customers.

Jesus Christ, keep up.

Yeah, for building most of those games. Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?

If you’re building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it’s handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you’ll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you’ll pay Valve for hosting your exe file in cloud storage with some reviews and comments.

Think 5% vs 30%.

Given that they offer half the fees of Valve, it’s more like 'we don’t want to keep having to pay Valve 30% of our entire Revenue on every game we want to sell when we can make a profit running a store that charged half as much.

Oh yeah, let’s all repeat the playbook of GoG, first you just have to spend a decade establishing yourself as the only publisher able to get former Soviet gamers to pay for games rather than pirate them, then turn that trust that you built with two third party developers into a storefront selling their classic titles for them for 6 years, then use your established customer base and goodwill to try and transition into being a proper AAA storefront.

Totally viable business strategy /s

Another thread where gamers praise Valve for ripping them off for years, and think Tim Sweeney is the devil for trying to break into the market.

Valve never had to because they established a monopoly so developers did that on their own without Valve paying them. Meanwhile Valve has ripped off the entire gaming industry for its entire existence, charging absurd fees to gamers and developers and you guys are all so bought into their monopoly that you blindly praise them for it.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire. No billionaire earned their money. Every billionaire exploited people for it.

The epic launcher is exact as spyware filled as the steam launcher.

Also, tabloid journalism predates magazines.

Some of the replacement stuff is bad, but some is good. I personally get more out of my favourite podcasters going in depth on their feelings on a game than I get out of whoever is running reviews at IGN right now.

Like even in movies, pre-youtube, pre-social media, people flocked to individual reviewers they liked, more so than publications. It’s why Roger and Ebert / Siskel got so huge, people agreed with their tastes, trusted them, and sought them out specifically. That’s not that different from today’s world of following your preferred YouTuber or podcaster, but rather than everyone following the few individual who can publish, you end up with a giant web of individuals following and influencing each other’s opinions.

And to be clear, I think games reviewing has merit and value, it’s just that outside of reviewing and technical analysis, there’s not much in the way of stories to cover on a regular basis. So you end up with dedicated games journalists having to write about tripe half the time just to fill word / article counts.