Hmm true. I was thinking that steam has a lot of games and respective builds it has to compress, even if the decompression benefits are clientside only.
Each new game update would also be compressed too - I have no idea how Steam handles the update to work out what files need replacing on their end though, which might involve decompressing the files to analyse them.
Basically. Though official scripting support is what turned Roblox from a social lego game to one of the largest videogames on earth. In my own time on roblox, the biggest thing was cloud persistence for the scripting API that allowed people to make studio-level games.
Modding on GTA is still technically unsupported and unofficial. You really have a restricted sandbox for anything that R* will accept on their servers.
GTA is more like a secondlife or club penguin than it is a roblox atm.
EDIT: so modding is going towards an “official” capacity apparently. That’ll be what turns GTA from clun penguin to Roblox, proverbially.
web Devs aren’t ignorant to optimizing but the kind of interfaces used in web are very different to that of desktop. Cross platform technologies can work, but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Web tech was designed around the asynchronous and comparatively slow nature of the network. Now, those same layout and rendering engines are being shoehorned into an environment where the “server” is your local disk so it’s suddenly doing a bunch of work that was intended to be done iteratively.
Same goes the other way of course. Software designed for “native first” experiences like Flutter aren’t as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
It would be like wondering why physical game disks aren’t popular on PC - it’s a fundamentally different technology for fundamentally different expectations and needs.
AI is being driven by LLMs hosted on the cloud, so why would anyone in their right mind buy a Laptop with “AI” “inside” it?
Even the most technophobic consumer understands this - you can Google something today with a PC from 2014 and it’ll spit out AI slop for you to slurp on. AI chatbots are embedded into every website you can think of – you already have AI shit in your device, it’s just being outsourced to data centers.
AI accelerators should’ve always been an add-on card like GPUs, or at least embedded into GPUs (like some are) but this whole embedded-into-every-chip-imaginable AI bollocks is a waste of silicon and largely a marketing gimmick to uplift CPU prices.
CPU vendors are struggling to keep justifying new generations and they’re getting desperate. For 90% of people (conservative guess) a CPU needs no more raw processing power than something from 2010-2014 and 4-6 cores; The kicker is, that this requirement hasn’t been touched for years - the host OS has just artificially bloated itself to push sales.
Did they? I’ve seen moreso that projects distributed methods to extract these keys from “real hardware” instead of actually distributing keys, or that projects “made money” from emulators, or that X or Y discord distributed pirated ROMs - Honestly I think Nintendo’s goal was to make the takedowns vague so successors couldnt work to new guidelines without fear of being next.
Ryujinx was supposedly even more strict with handling of proprietary info and community moderation, which only got it a few months of safety beyond Yuzu.
It feels more like Nintendo knows they have capital to leverage against FOSS developers, but prefer to wait and scoop up a bunch in one go. Plus, it takes time to pick through usernames and dig up personal info to threaten enough people to kill the hydra before more heads can spawn.
(genuinely though, if you or anyone has sources to the explicitly illegal stuff being done by Ryujinx and Yuzu, I’d happily retract my own comment which is only informed on speculation from the time)
Then not even sell the damn things
Sorta true. Nintendo has been monetizing emulation for years, ever since they started releasing “virtual console” games on the Wii web shop.
The Switch now offers NES/SNES games as a benefit of their online service, and has released a handful of games as standalone releases which are literally just nicely-packaged emulators (Mario Sunshine and Galaxy 1/2 bundle for example)
If emulation and “piracy” of old consoles is allowed, then Nintendo fears it won’t be able to charge as much to repackage identical technology as full-price game releases.
Software parents, specifically game mechanic parents, are fucking insane. You should see the stuff Square Enix has patented following death stranding.
I get the whole “they just reskinned my game mechanics!!!” but also: I don’t. It’s like saying Go, Draughts, Chess, etc. are copies or “infringing” on one another for being a board game set on a grid with black/white pieces.
Even the idea of intellectual property is shaky for me but at least it’s more clear cut whether you’ve directly copied or deceived someone with a similar design of a character.
Steam subscriber agreement removed a clause that forces individual arbitration instead of court.
Before this you couldn’t sue and this couldn’t do a class action, but law firms decided to just file thousands of arbitration clauses at once which cost like $1500 each to valve no matter who wins.
Valve then decided to change the SSA (whilst trying to retroactively kill outstanding arbitration cases with another clause) to save them money.
If you’re in the EU, UK, AUS, or a bunch of other countries this never applied to you and you could take valve to court in your own country.
If consoles want to remain relevant in the age of the gaming PC, they have to try harder than being locked-down gaming PCs.
Free and simple multiplayer, subsidised hardware, and physical game ownership were staples of most consoles for years but now the urge to turn every device into an “everything machine” has kneecapped the very purpose of these devices.
At best, these are slightly less hassle and slightly more social than a gaming PC. At worst, they’re as anti-social and user-hostile without the cost benefit that once made them genuinely preferable.
inb4 Trump claims the chinese are putting mind control chips in American shampoo