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It’s the same for me.
I don’t care if somebody uses Claude or Copilot if they take ownership and responsibility over the code it generates. If they ask AI to add a feature and it creates code that doesn’t fit within the project guidelines, that’s fine as long as they actually clean it up.
I’m more concerned with the admitted OpenClaw usage. That’s a hydrogen bomb heading straight for a fireworks factory.
This is the problem I have with it too. Using something that vulnerable to prompt injection to not only write code but commit it as well shows a complete lack of care for bare minimum security practices.
"Art isn’t about artistic expression. Billions of people make paintings and most of them go unseen. Museums, on the other hand… They don’t make paintings, they make experiences. For a nominal entry fee, consumers have access to an evolving and ever-changing catalog of content.
This is the future we envision here at Remedy. High quality games that build upon themselves, creating an experience that grows with the player. For that reason, we’re announcing that the Alan Wake series will no longer be individual games, but instead a live-service experience with episodic content."
- also that guy probably
Literally create all the service problems by normalizing launcher DRM
I hate DRM as much as the next person, but if Steam didn’t exist and digital downloads still became a thing, there would still be launcher DRM. Thanks to corporate greed, DRM is an inevitability in the industry.
Games distributed on DVD were packed with DRM fuckery, needing to be inside the computer to launch and using kernel-level drivers to enforce it. Before DVDs, you had games on floppy disks. Those came with physical codewheels that the player had to use to decode a password before it would start the game.
even their precious HL’s engine was IIRC a rewrite or fork of the one for Quake
IIRC, even the HL2 engine was just an improvement on the HL1 engine with a commercial physics engine bolted on top.
Much like Google used to, Valve doesn’t really do anything new. They take existing ideas and remove the rough edges to provide a more polished experience than what is already available.
To their credit, that’s exactly why they succeeded with most of their ventures. Gabe Newell understands consumers well enough to know that most people don’t care about anything other than user experience. Or, as he put it, “piracy is a service problem”.
Agreed on both points.
If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.
People also shouldn’t be idolizing corporations. They’re not our friends; we’re only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we’re well acquainted with.
But you’re all rabid to hate on epic
If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.
There’s no denying that Valve’s contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.
What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don’t have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn’t make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.
Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney’s self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge “the Steam monopoly” by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.
Can you recommend me other (non atomic) distros that play nice with both secure boot and nvidia drivers?
I wouldn’t exactly recommend it because of the learning curve, but I have the exact setup you’re looking for working on NixOS.
Lanzaboote made it pretty easy. The downside is that you need to put secure boot into user-managed mode, and some asshole anticheats might not like that even though only Microsoft-signed executables were used in the boot chain of Windows.
For gaming, you can’t go wrong with Bazzite. It’s meant for gaming to mostly just work out of the box, so you likely won’t need to tinker with anything.
It’s that tinkering that introduces stability risks. Adding third-party package repositories and trying to install newer software on top of older LTS distros is what tends to end up breaking them.
How would this impact F-Droid in any way?
F-Droid itself builds the APKs to ensure that they’re reproducible and not signed on a development machine that could be compromised.
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/FAQ_-_General/#is-your-building-and-signing-process-secure
With these changes, either:
- They use Google’s developer identity process to sign every APK they build with their own developer identity, which Google is likely not going to allow or is going to quickly find an example of a “malicious” app so they can blacklist all of them; or
- They stop building APKs and just trust the developer provides a non-malicious, pre-verified APK;
- They find a way to mediate the process between the original developer and Google. Knowing Google, they would make it as needlessly painful for everyone involved to discourage and punish alternative app stores.
To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear before the Oversight Committee and explain what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purposes
In other words, explain what you’ll be doing to add censorship to your platforms.
They really could not have picked a worse demographic to try that on. Not only do online gamers despise censorship and policing, their vocal minority is known for being extremely toxic and unrelenting. The icing on the cake is that a good number of them are right-wing, too.
Have fun dealing with the shitstorm you’re about to create!
People with high end systems (5090s etc) are apparent having a lot of performance issues, and are unable to run the game at 60fps/4k without AI upscaling or frame generation.
It’s even better when you realize that the performance degrades the longer you’ve been playing that session. It’s unoptimized and leaky.
Skills and traps don’t do enough damage to feel especially useful either.
There’s one trap that actually is pretty strong if you know how to abuse it.
I’m not going to spoil where or how to get it, but flying beetles that home in on the enemy and repeatedly bump into it to deal damage can be pretty busted… especially when they still attack during phase change animations that stop the player from moving.
At least in the US, it’s full of regulatory red tape that was designed to pull up the ladder behind the current large payment processors.
Even Musk and his ample bribe money, under the most corrupt administration in decades, hasn’t managed to get full approval for his “X Twitter Money” payment service.
Yeah, I agree with you on that.
If discoverability was better, I’m sure Android would get way more ports of good games. With the way it is right now with shovelware and Google pushing microtransaction-riddled crap over one time purchase games, though, it’s treated as a second-class platform because it’s not nearly as profitable as other platforms.
Which part of my comment was denigrating indie devs? Indie games are great. Android gaming is currently not.
If I’m looking for a good non-mobile game, I don’t go looking in the mobile game store. I go looking on PSN or PC, where the focus is on the kind of game that wasn’t designed as a phone-first experience.
The fact that Android has some good traditional games or ports of indie gems isn’t something inherent to Android. The overwhelming majority of those games were on PC or console first.
Oh, there’s no doubt about that. I’m not disagreeing that Android has some good-looking games. The problem is that games like GRID Legends Mobile are the exception, not the rule.
The Switch is crap, yes.
The Play Store is also overwhelmingly crap, though.
If you exclude all of the mobile games from both stores, the Switch simply has a better catalog of games.
You’re comparing apples to oranges.
The mobile gaming market is leagues larger than every other market combined. That doesn’t mean the games are even remotely comparable to console games.
It’s an entirely different target audience. Mobile games are focused on quick sessions and design patterns designed to encourage spending money on microtransactions. Games made for the traditional gaming market are mostly designed for longer play sessions with more mechanically complex gameplay. I as well as many others prefer the latter.
Nintendo’s store is full of shovelware, but at least you’ll find more traditional games than just ports of indie hits. Or, buy a Steam Deck and enjoy something better than both.
The OP is really blowing smoke up Android’s ass when it comes to the quality of native Android games. Most “top” mobile games are freemium crap riddled with microtransactions.
What it does have, however, is emulators. Including one for the Switch itself. Paying $350 for decade-old hardware and $80 for games is just bad value compared to a $300 used S21 and $0 games.
5.6% of [respondents] users said they wouldn’t pre-order [on Epic] knowing it would influence exclusivity, 2.7% said they would.
They really brought in those big dollars with making Borderlands 3 a timed exclusive on Epic. A whole 9%. Meanwhile, 91.6% of respondents preferred Steam. Bravo, Randy. Bravo.
Disappointingly, 53.9% still would buy it on Steam if it influenced exclusivity going forward. Even if it is Steam—which has a record of providing better service than its competitors—exclusivity helps nobody.
GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.
It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.
Steam will end up pushed out of the market
This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.
Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.
EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.
And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.
Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.
or they will also become Streaming Platforms
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.
I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.
To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.
To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.
They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.
Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @[email protected] said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.
Another great post as usual!
For people interested in what’s been going on with Limited Run, here’s a 90-minute video that goes into a lot of detail about the sketchy stuff they did before this latest controversy:
Emulation is legal
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.
With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.
And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.
This is my problem with your argument, you’re saying that because of piracy they’re entitled to crack down on emulation.
My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.
I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.
Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong: Nintendo deserves no sympathy here. They could do many things to make their games more accessible, but they chose not to.
That’s not to say asshats like this deserves any either, though. The homebrew community and emulator developers step in to make Switch software interoperable, and they end up being the ones getting screwed over by both Nintendo and the people who provoked Nintendo.
I don’t normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.
It’s one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That’s just called being poor or being someone who doesn’t believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they’re being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.
It’s another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you’re profiting off of someone else’s work. Not only that, but you’re also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn’t a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.
In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.
my favorite are 3rd person rpg with exploration as an important element in learning about the lore/story
Not PC exclusive, but if you haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, it might be something you would enjoy. It’s literally Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s not going to guide you through every little piece of content. You can miss something on one playthrough and discover it completely by chance on your next one.
Valve wins by doing nothing… it’s a tale as old as time.
Steam’s market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it’s hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they’re also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you’re not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.
Epic Games is also a private company… and they’re the posterchild for “fuck the consumer, we want a monopoly.”
It might have something to do with Epic being partly owned by Tencent and Disney, but it more likely comes down to the philosophies of their CEOs. Gabe came from a corporate shithole and runs with the diametrically-opposed view that good service = loyal customers = profit. Sweeney, not so much.
There’s a few of them. Notably, the guy who didn’t care that AI art is built on the back of copyright violations getting pissy about his AI-generated art not being eligible for copyright.
But more importantly here, I don’t think most artists in the gaming industry are in much of a position where they can stand by their artistic integrity. If every publisher pushes studios into using AI to be more “productive”, the choice becomes between slopping or starving—and most people don’t like starving.
We as consumers are the only ones that can afford to push back against this shit. Our survival doesn’t rely on buying DLSS 5 games so we have the ability to boycott them to send a message.