Looking at the sheer number of nominations e33 has gotten, I would be absolutely shocked if it didn’t win game of the year.

It’s defined as “Recognizing a game that delivers the absolute best experience across all creative and technical fields.”

While that’s pretty nebulous a definition on its own, the fact that seemingly every other creative and technical field has its own award category, and E33 is nominated for most of them, speaks to it being a shoe-in for the GOTY category.

I’m not disagreeing. Epic’s 12% would still be hugely profitable for Valve.

True that text is small files, but some Skyrim saves are easily in the dozens of MB for example. I’m sure you multiply that by millions and it adds up. Surely them needing to store many copies of the game files themselves is a larger file size footprint for them though.

Lol yep they’re an extremely wealthy company with that 30%. But it seems like almost every other storefront operates under those margins for digital sales (not just in gaming). I do value the cloud saves, I think those would actually add up a bit for their storage requirements as well as hosting all of the game files in presumably many locations globally.

15%, they’d still be a multibillion dollar company

Well, I agree that the writing is really good. But the gameplay hook is what really makes it a great game tome.

I suppose so, but maybe they don’t want to grow too large. Microsoft absolutely devouring studios the last few years has not produced any truly great games. Valve clearly know how to make a good game still, when they want to.

I agree mostly, but Valve employees are reportedly paid an incredible amount of money compared to the market average, so underpaying would probably only refer to the hefty (but industry standard) 30% cut of game sales they take from game publishers.

Also, I’m pretty sure Portal 1 was in development by a studio that was bought by valve when they saw the game prototype. Not exactly “Gabe Newell making Portal”. Though I do think that was a savvy investment (Portal 2 being the better game also).

I see what you mean, but this device is a little overtuned for an office PC, at least GPU wise.

I love that they gave him a massive bulge. Found him in a run last night.

For sure, the popular opinion on reddit/Lemmy skews towards absolutely self-hosting everything they can, and multi-trillion dollar tech companies controlling AI skews the opinions of the technology negative. I have a BIL who runs self-hosted AI though (requiring 2 x 4090s in series for his use-case), so it can be done. The tech is only as shit as the user allows it to be (environmental concerns, obviously its pretty objectively shit)

You are going to get downvoted, but you’re right. AI doesn’t need to be used for every part of the entire development process for it to be “made with the help of AI”. There are certain parts of the workflow that I’m sure is already being done regularly with AI, for example commenting code.

Mindlessly feeding prompts into chatgpt for the entirety of the core code or art would be terrible.

Cyber dopamine’s test needs to be retested for this to be true. I love gaming on Linux and also regularly use my steam deck yada yada yada but come on.

I was wondering if such a tool existed. There’re some publishers that do deep sales on games released not that long ago, and I would think that there is a trend between game discount trends across games from the same publisher. Surely there is a way to map that to predict when a game will hit X value.

More challenging climbing, similar vibe. Loved the demo

Just started and completed Ender lilies this week. Combat was very floaty but it was an overall enjoyable metroidvania. Different combat movesets added novelty.

Robotics has already replaced jobs in commercial laboratory settings for decades. Autosamplers are pretty inexpensive.

6 of the 8 games were on my ITAD wait list so I’m thrilled. Best month I’ve ever seen.

Onimusha 3 is a banger

Thank you for input that isn’t just negative rhetoric.

This is looking to be a good game. More in depth climbing than Jusant, and a very compelling art style. I found aspects some of the game demo a little jank/unnatural, but it was fun.

Shocking initial decision to do that. People making decisions from up high don’t really understand how niche this game is and how they cannot afford to be this anti-consumer… leave that to the FIFA/Diablos where the fans are already willing to do that for some reason.

Steve just does that as a bit, Photoshopping his head on to the protagonist’s body. These guys are like the Australian Digital Foundry that focuses on hardware. They’re very thorough.

Sounds like the right move. A game with a cult fan base like this is relying on positive word of mouth to bring new people in.

Locking 2 factions behind a day 1 paywall when the game already has shaky PR was a death sentence for the success of this game.

I would stress that it’s unlikely this was a Dev decision, likely the publisher wanted these parts of the game nickel and dimed.

💪💎💪

I was thinking that. Way too little money to do evil

Hard agree. My expectations were “more hollow knight but with a slightly different game feel and maybe ramped up difficulty” and it’s delivering that exactly.

“More hollow knight” might sound reductive, but HK was a 10/10 metroidvania so I see no issues with more of that.

I agree that the change in movement has made it challenging again. I’m sure veterans like Fireb0rn are still crushing everything.

As an Australian I’m extremely patriotic about Team Cherry. Great team.

Oh for sure. Those two games are peak platforming for me.

I’m loving Silksong by the way.

If hollow knight movement involved jumping up and down and dashing left/right, silksong involves moving in more of a saw-tooth pattern. Platforming and combat challenges are feeling fresh as a result.

Haha exactly. Celeste B sides will give you that feeling too if you’re up for more masochism.

You better believe that Rockstar will be doing preorders as well. Those sales will be spread out over weeks, so won’t experience the congestion caused by Silksong.

Path of pain changes a man.

No problems buying it on Humble Bundle. Steam was down for me too though I got it to cart.

Absolutely /thread

It’s the single most wishlisted game on Steam (including AAA games), which is pretty crazy

Crazy that AAA games take that many developers no wonder they all feel a bit samey.

It’s a prequel to episode 2.5 I think.

Does it look like this APU is going to be used in a Steam Console, VR headset, or the Steam deck 2? I had assumed console, but it seems a little underbaked in 2025, so maybe a mobile device makes more sense.

Valve tend to be getting it right with their hardware choices since the steam controller, so I’m sure whatever they do there will be good design sense behind it.

Steam review scores are more robust than what 20 games critics thought about a game and is more resistant to review bombing than metacritic. The score is not meaningless IMO.

I’ve avoided being hyped for Silksong for years after realising it’s taking a long time, but Hollow Knight is one of my all time favourite games.

Not expecting this to top E33 for me for my personal GOTY, but if this is basically just bigger Hollow Knight but with a twist with different movement and combat mechanics, I’ll be thrilled.

Agree with DA2 and inquisition but DA: Origins was a great game. Graphics don’t make the game but they weren’t that bad.