There is a 2-part solution:

• Build a game people enjoy playing more than winning.
• If you need an anti-cheat solution, design one on a server side.

Freelancer 2. Will not forget.

I heard they are irrelevant for Proton as it has its own fsync.

Hey that’s me there, and I say do Valve too. They are special but that kind of public discussion through court won’t hurt anyone.

I feel you. Nice job.

One indie that stuck with me is Immortal Defense. Try it some time if you like hidden gems.

another player to try an compete with Steam

Here is the mistake. It does not trying to compete. It only tries to catch as many fish in its bucket as possible, while leveraging (burning) Fortnite money.

It’s a wasted effort, and it will never come close to Steam like this. It may even die along with Fortnite, or degrade further.

They didn’t start the fight. They were sued. If you think “picking a fight with Nintendo” is something you can do any time, and on your own volition, you must be missing something.

Getting popular to that point was not in their plans. You can’t judge their success.

And yes it can legally exist. See other creature collector games (that are just not that popular yet).

That sounds like a “look someone managed to pull that off so it’s definitely possible” argument. In other words “you can enter the collectable creatures scene by spending that amount of effort”. And it shouldn’t be that way. The price in effort shouldn’t be that high.

Actually, it should be the customers who decide if your product is worth the effort of playing it. There are a lot of rehashed games in various genres (e.g. horrors, walking simulators) and wee see no issue with them even though they are using exactly same mechanics, or sometimes even assets. What matters is users’ reception. If users think your product is worth it - it means you spent enough effort already. If your product would be a low effort creation users wouldn’t spend money on it in the first place.

I’m sure if Cassette Beasts could accumulate that kind of playerbase and profits, Nintendo would’ve sued them too.

I just assume that as long as everyone is fine with derivations produced by AI (text, pics, music), all derivations that don’t look exactly like original Pokemon are fine (also real people put some effort into those). Palworld compared to Pokemon is a much better product than, say, Fifa XX compared to Fifa XX-1. Also Pokemon series is notorious for useless editions of the same games masked as separate products - that level of rehashing feels much more illegal to me.

Cool as hell but its weight is 0.7 kg.

I’m pro competition. However a lot of people are deceived into thinking Epic is a competitor to Valve. They do not deliver similar levels of value and service.

Price competition is silly in digital marketplace, where you know any product can go on sale randomly at a very high discount. Thinking “I’ll buy it here now because it’s 30% cheaper, cool” sounds like a recipe for selling your loyalty, for cheap. Though in reality it would never really be 30%, so you’re aiming to sell yourself even cheaper.

When I buy something, I don’t want to be stressed about whether or not it is available elsewhere cheaper. The only case where I think price parity is meaningless is worldwide, but that’s only because regional pricing should be a thing, so that’s a different matter.

Price parity is pro consumer. This is what consumer cares about. What they shouldn’t care about is developers’ revenue split because it doesn’t affect them.

No one would be selling on Epic for a lower “discount-like” price, even if it would be allowed. This notion was never about “hey dev, get your users a cheaper price”, it was always about “hey dev, get yourself more revenue if you choose our platform” (a lie too though since Epic is simply not a good selling platform). Else, you would have seen cheaper games amongst those Epic exclusives that never hit other stores.

Easy. On EGS most games don’t sell at all, so 0% of $0 is still $0. They get most of their money from Fortnite.

Chromium as CFE I mean, not the browser. It consumes RAM and even CPU at all times, and Steam doesn’t work without it.

Not relying on CFE should been considered even more critical for handheld devices, as switching to more native solutions will save the battery time.

About that RAM argument, Steam includes Chromium that can consume up to 1.5 or even 2 GB for some people depending on circumstances (I checked myself when I had the Deck, it used 1.5 in desktop mode). I assume the OS on Switch is much more optimized. I wish Valve switched to something else, something more native.

Then Oblivion Remastered 2 since the current one will be outdated by that time.

• for the US

Here is an idea. Services that are proud of their user count tend to not hide real time data.

From what I see, there are no places where console networks share their data directly. It can only be found in financial reports or something.

Info

https://th0mas.nl/2025/01/12/tetris-in-a-pdf/

but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.

Hard disagree on “little”.

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.

Popularity should not be dictated by what web devs prefer. As long as they build for desktop, I won’t pardon excessive resource usage. And I’m not talking about Flutter. Better performance oriented frameworks exist, see sciter.

It’s not CEF that does most of the impact. It’s the contents web devs make it load and process. And web devs generally not being very competent in optimizing is just a sad reality.

Let me guess… It uses CFE or Electron?

Literaly previous tweet is from October and it’s about how there are no plans to shut down.

If there’s one thing, I hope we can all take away from this experience, it’s the importance of open, honest communication between developers and players.

Yep.

Think of it as a “this game is not yet available for purchase” seal. It may also mean “we know our game is not up to standards (it wouldn’t sell well on Steam), so we chose to let idiots at epic decide if they want to pay for it, and hey it worked so that’s something”.

Developers have full control over servers in most cases. A viable server side anti cheat should be a thing. For every case of “client sending false data to server” we can come up with a solution to verify that to some degree. Finally, it should help a lot to rely on player generated reports and utilize replay recording on server.

But no, developers will continue to rely on 3rd party solutions (made by people who never developed a game), even infect their co-op-only games with it, and complain “uh oh we can’t handle Linux cheaters”.

What’s more interesting is that DRM developers don’t have enough experience with game development. They have no idea how the game code should really work for everyone to not be affected by something that is injected inside (and they are injecting a lot - some executables get inflated by more than 1 gb I think).

Steam getting better isn’t linked to anyone becoming a billionaire. That sentiment sounds like people can’t stop looking for things to blame Valve for.

Is it too difficult to accept that every single company failed in competing with Steam? I’d say they didn’t even try their best (especially Epic). Must’ve assumed that just serving a website with a web app is all they needed to get as rich as Gabe.

Hard disagree on denuvo. If it’s no problem for you then you must have tons of experience in re. Which puts you into some 1%-ish group. Depends on the type of mods you do of course.

You can. Google steamless.

Steam DRM is nothing like stuff people should be aware of. Ask any modder for confirmation.

Well did it help Epic when they added achievements? Guess not much. Either they never marketed this feature enough or most spending users never cared about achievements on Epic.

If you mean just the percentage of users I might agree. But those people don’t really correlate with the users who provide most of the profit of the platform.

My profile is also not public but it’s visible to friends. Also I can make it public when I want.

There are also achievement statistics.

I see. Still, I can see that for many people achievements with no value are no better than their absence. Platform provides value, and for now only steam provides a lot of it with almost each purchase.

Are you serious? Obviously people don’t care about achievements on a platform that has almost no community-related functionality.

It’s barely anonymous, and poorly encrypted. The latter is the reason Durov is in custody

There is no logic here. If it was poor it would be very easy to track anyone including criminals. You can check the news to find the reasons.

There have absolutely been cases where a backdoor/weakness/lack of encryption used to catch criminals before

I meant telegram related cases.

Some are staying safe, others are being caught precisely because of this.

I didn’t see any proofs of that.

Using better encryption schemes is definitely part of that.

Part of what? I don’t get the point here.

is not any different from just having TLS for transport

Yes, in simple terms, all encrypted transfer protocols are similarly protected from mitm attacks.

That just means that they store both your data in some encrypted way and the key. They can still read it trivially.

They can and they said the decryption keys are always kept separately (there are probably more layers than I can describe) from the data to make sure the servers are not used to decrypt the data locally. They can be lying for all I care. The bigger problem is that people somehow assume this a huge threat, while all previous cases didn’t involve anything like that. People are getting into trouble for their public content - protected by some encryption but visible to anyone interested (who then report it to oppressive authorities).

While some go extra mile to explain to you how you should use e2e for your family group chats, real criminals do their stuff everywhere (especially on telegram) for years, staying safe. Problem is not how weak or strong the encryption is, but that once you are under oppression and do opposition activities, you’re going to learn by yourself how to deal with it. Signal will not save you from people in your group chats if they are there to report on you.

That’s not correct. Toy may call it TLS but it’s a custom protocol. Data is not kept unencrypted on their servers, according to their docs.