reddit: nico_is_not_a_god pokemon romhacks: Dio Vento
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Honestly even the absolute best case for this game is still “the more you care about it, the better it is for you to wait until it’s out of Early Access”. Early access for an “exploration first” game means your exploration is going to find a bunch of “come back later” walls, placeholders, and bugs. That’s the point of Early Access after all. I’d have enjoyed Subnautica a lot less if I’d played it during Early Access and was waiting on a patch to let me explore the Aurora.
Can you even buy this without a Steam account though? It’s the Steam Controller, sold through Steam, designed to work on Steam. A third party driver to convert it to Xinput will probably drop within a week of its ship date (just like it did for the first Steam Controller), but if you’re against having a Steam account I’d wonder why you want a Steam Controller in the first place. There’s plenty of non-Steam controllers after all.
They made Slay the Spire 1, right? They pushed the anti-infinite changes to main after getting review bombed for a beta patch, right? I’ve seen some people say that the readjustments in the beta are “compromises” to placate the whiners, but it’s much more likely that they used their experimental weekly beta patch to “overnerf” and “overbuff” so that dialing in the final changes becomes easier. If the right number for some value in your game is a 7, you find it faster by changing the 10 to a 5 and then buffing it than you would by incrementally nerfing it one by one.
Neat. I tried the previous version of GameNative for this game alone and it didn’t work out of the box, googling gave me some tweaks that didn’t work and ended on “just install the closed source GameHub and trust that instead”.
Is it possible to “break” the Steam connection once you’ve got the game installed? I actually don’t want cloud saves or auto-updates on the phone version of the game.
Yeah, but if you can remove negative reviews text but not the contribution to “mostly positive” or whatever, the audience has to take it on faith that you “only censored the racists don’t worry. We’re getting brigaded”
Without the ability for devs to delete text, the customer can always… Read the reviews. If the good ones are all “lol cute dog” and the bad ones are actual criticisim, skip the game. If the good ones are actual reviews and the bad ones are “waaaah there’s a black guy in my medieval pseudo-euro fantasy waaaah”, you can be certain the game’s actual reception among non-idiots is higher than “mostly positive”.
Reviewers that aren’t the developer’s friends or mouthpieces are the main useful feature of Steam Reviews at all. Seeing “chuds are mad about this” next to the “buy now” button should be a selling point for some people, but actual bad videogames (including predatory games, ai asset flips, early access abandonware) should have a bunch of paragraphs that might hurt the game’s sales right there.
This solves the current problem but reintroduces the one that steam reviews exist to solve: giving the game’s developers control over the most visible discussion channels for the game allows for removal of negative reviews or user backlash. Think about how bad subreddits can be about “removing toxicity” after a GAAS cranks the monetization dial up when the devs are on the mod team.
At some point, the responsibility is gonna end up landing on the consumer to actually read some negative reviews and dismiss the game’s “negative reception” entirely if all the thumbs-downs are yammering on about “woke devs” or “DEI” or “the chinese translation is bad”.
Consoles, especially Nintendo ones, make it practically impossible to publish as “just some guy” yeah. It’s almost always a calculation for the dev: is is the vastly increased audience exposure (and sales that come with that) worth dealing with this blatantly predatory “partner” company? And the main useful thing the publisher does is deal with the even bigger, even more predatory companies Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft.
Steam’s DRM will still lock you out if you’re logged out (not in “offline mode” that can only be entered by logging in online and then toggling it). Some games on Steam are truly drm-free and navigating to the executable will start the game without even running Steam at all. It would be nice if Steam exposed which games are truly DRM-free.
Note that native Steam shortcuts will never work without being logged into Steam (in normal or offline mode), because they’re steam:\\ protocol links. To play DRM-free Steam games steamless you need to navigate to the actual file or make an OS shortcut to the executable.
It makes sense because GOG was never going to drive year over year growth for the publicly traded CDPR. Operating as a private company, it doesn’t need to provide shareholder value and can be sustainable by simply “being profitable” forever, like Steam. Publicly traded CDPR holding GOG was a ticking time bomb but for once it seems to have been defused.
GOG isn’t “attacking” steam for market share though? It has a legitimate niche in the market: being a storefront that bans all DRM and also doesn’t require a launcher/account to buy and install games. GOG’s main competitor is piracy (because DRM free means trivial to pirate), so its main features to compete with that are ease of use, trustworthy installers, and consistent + easy access to game patches that pirates don’t often keep up with.
The best thing about GOG is the ability to never use a client or launcher at all. The ability to just download the installers from the website and store them locally means that your GOG games will outlast the following: GOG as a company enshittifies, GOG as a company dies, your account gets banned from GOG, you lose access to your GOG account, your favorite game gets a game-ruining update from its developer, some song license expires and devs are forced to patch or pull the game…
You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that’s now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or “first three months free with Discord Nitro”. This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you’ve been personally enshittified on, but there’s no “answer to your question” other than “mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam”.
See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and “cheap” aren’t compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5’s bootROM keys just leaked, it’s likely that’ll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.
You also didn’t really ask a question. You asked “how do i make games work with my budget” without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you’re playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your “future of gaming” might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was “how do you deal with this” - my answer is “I don’t buy apple products or use subscription services”.
Piracy never ever actually hurts big companies. Game consoles make their entire business on selling “just plug it in and click the prompts and play the game, ezpz” as a lifestyle. It doesn’t matter how fully hacked a console is or how easy it is to hack them, the percentage of users that’ll mod and pirate is always miniscule.
Look at sales numbers for Pokemon X and Y, which released when the 3DS was ironclad. Compare them to Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, which released when 3DS piracy required a $100 flashcart and an ancient system firmware with no downgrade route. Compare those to Pokémon Sun and Moon, which released when five minutes with an SD card and a magnet would let you pirate the game directly from Nintendo’s own fucking server, complete with fully functional online play. Notice a pattern? No you don’t, they all sold like hotcakes.
Every first party Nintendo game released after 2016 other than Super Mario Odyssey was available to pirates before legitimate buyers, until the Switch 2 came out. That entire near decade of Nintendo was exclusively releasing games for compromised platforms. Nintendo did pretty well financially during that period, I’d say. Wii piracy was trivial as soon as the Twilight Hack dropped, yet late life Wii games sold gangbusters. And on the Wii, pirates legitimately got a better product because they got to bypass the Wii’s dogshit DVD lens and disc load times. R4s and clones and upgrades existed for nearly the entire Nintendo DS lifespan. GBA games were playable on the PC before the console came out in the United States.
Eh. Nintendo’s been bumfucked like this for the majority of the Switch lifespan. detecting and banning modded consoles is a cat and mouse game that favors the cat. Piracy favors the mouse, because piracy happens in your home on your hardware. Online play is you trying to play ball in Sony’s court.
Softmodded consoles probably won’t even be able to play online, let alone cheat online.
Paying a bunch of salaries when your revenue streams are Shovel Knight (good but old game that kept getting free DLC and made a lot of its money before release) and… Shovel Knight Dig. They had to go back to Kickstarter for Mina, after all.
If it was one guy or a tiny team, SK’s success would be enough for them to be “set for life”, but a business is more expensive to run than a team is. They probably don’t expect Mina to be a phenomenal income stream either, since (like SK) it’s already mostly done making them money.
They got told “no, and never” by Steam 3 years ago. It’s absolutely a marketing move to bring it up now. The Epic and Humble removals were rug pulls, though.
Does it being a marketing move mean that it’s not worth criticizing Steam for having a one-strike-you’re-out system? I don’t think it does. If your game has (something valve considers reject-worthy) and you get rejected, you should probably be allowed to submit it again after removing the thing valve rejected you for.
It’s a downside of the award show template. If the “best game” is, say, an RPG, then there’s no logic that should say it would win “best game” but not “best RPG”, right? If it wasn’t an award show you could go from the top down instead of building up to GOTY and it’d be spread out more. Expedition 33 is GOTY, so “best RPG” is now de facto “best RPG not named Expedition 33”. But even that collides with awards like best soundtrack or best performance by a VA.
If anything, Golden Joystick “sandbagged” E33 by not including it in “best indie” - Sandfall is absolutely an indie studio by every meaningful definition of the term.
On the other hand, even if they don’t “make back” the loss, you can look at it as: how much money is Valve willing to pay to become a “mainstream” living room console competitor? Lose a couple billion dollars on Machine, but get 400k “give valve money, probably” machines plugged into TVs. Sony and MS have other divisions and they AND Nintendo have shareholder responsibilities. Those conpanies cannot tank a single year of number go down. Valve can, and surely there’s a price that Valve would be willing to play to be “the xbox”.
This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.
I know there are some cool new ways to run PC games on stuff like this. If you have them, how does this run the PC versions of games like Isaac, Gungeon, Slay the Spire, or Vampire Survivors? I know these all (or mostly) have Android or Switch ports but for one reason or another (usually mod support) the PC version is superior. I’m looking into this device as a lower weight, lower power alternative to a Steam Deck, so support for 2D indie PC games is a must.
It is not “Krafton free”. Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn’t just “the publisher”. There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there’s some number of lifetime sales that, if they don’t ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they’d be legally required to pay out the “bonus” that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it’s still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.