Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.

Have you actually looked into what contract janitors make? Its not crazy amounts of money or anything, but it is enough to live comfortably in a place like Seattle, which is more than you can say for a lot of “better” jobs.

They’ve gone straight from crypto to AI. Technically there will be lots of them, but gamers won’t see any.

Does it matter? They’ll probably cost $3,000 and they’ll sell, like, 5 of them.

Mainstream news was already starting to turn into ragebait in the 80s, and by the mid 90s there was no integrity left. Video games never had any standards. If you think that things were good back then that is just the proof that you had lower standards. It’s okay. We all had lower standards as kids. That’s perfectly normal. It’s important to acknowledge it though.

Nah. There were a few print magazines with some integrity, but there are still some websites with integrity. The really popular stuff has always been PR though. You just had lower standards as a kid.

Video game journalism has always just been third party PR, but journalists almost all absolutely love Fromsoft games. It’s user reviews that complain about them being too hard.

Of course, by “call out” they mean sort of vaguely point out that they exist without actually saying anything meaningful, and that will still somehow be too political for the “gamers”.

Fallout 4 kind of in a weird place where it’s simultaneously a bad Fallout game and arguably the best Bethesda game. How much you like it really just depends on which of those things you’re more into. I’ve personally never really gotten the appeal of Bethesda games. I usually end up spending 90% of my time going through my inventory analyzing the price to weight ratio of all the worthless junk I’ve accumulated, and the worlds have always just felt really shallow to me personally, but clearly I’m in the minority. I am sort of curious why more people seem to have agreed with me on Fallout 4 than on Skyrim though. I guess maybe it’s just that the people who talk about it the most are more likely to be Fallout fans than Bethesda fans.

Okay, but if you aren’t making a single multi-billion dollar game that doesn’t need a storefront because it functionally is one, then Steam is by far the biggest and most dominant player out there.

No, you don’t understand. The only acceptable amount of money is all of it. If you are making less than all of the money, then it can never be enough and your daddy will never love you.

You can do that, but some of the features only work if you launch the game through Galaxy. Cloud saves only work that way. Some games need it for online matchmaking or leaderboards. It handles updates. If you care about achievements or statistics you won’t get any of those without Galaxy.

Just downloading the game from the website is usually good enough for actual old games, but it’s just a second class experience for most newer games. That bothers some people more than others. I’m mostly just annoyed by the principle of the thing, really.

Oh wow. The invasive programs given total authority to see and control everything on your computer at the most basic level made by companies famous for their terrible security practices can be used to do things with your computer that you might not want? What a total shock and surprise. Nobody could ever have possibly seen this coming.

Hey GOG! How about you make an actual Linux client instead of giving me another useless way I can’t play my games? Because unfortunately I live in the third world shithole with abysmal internet known as the United States. Cloud gaming is about as useful to me as a safe to store all the gold I don’t have.

It is sad but unsurprising to hear that Tuulik was one of the people recently fired. I had almost kinda hoped the studio would move on and make non Elysium games eventually. There were still talented people there, and when you look into it most gaming companies are run by scum. It seems unlikely at this point that they’ll even be able to do that though. It really just does exist to siphon money off Disco Elysium sales at this point, I think.

As for the copyright, yes, you are technically correct. Nothing can be set in that world. I’m also not a copyright lawyer, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but from my understanding outside of the actual content of the game there’s really not much that’s copywritable outside of some names. If they just change the names and set a new story in a new city with new characters there’s really not anything anyone can do to stop them. Even for the city they’d really just have to change the details. You can’t copyright idea of a vaguely eastern European vaguely post-Sovietish sci-fi/fantasy city. Maybe they’d need to change one big thing revealed near the end that I don’t want to talk about because of spoilers. This is all replying to someone who said they haven’t played the game and don’t want to be spoiled after all. Even for that they’d just have to change the name and some of the details of how it works though, I think. A lot of what makes it what it is is to vague to be copyrighted, I think.

I don’t think it has anything to do with their creative accomplishments. I think it needed clarifying that no one he is not personally involved with outside of work wanted to continue working for him. Frankly you claiming to be confused by that is concerning to me.

There were six writers, and dozens of other people, for most of the development of Disco Elysium. Why would it be any better for just three of them to get the rights? This was always going to be a mess where people got screwed in ways they didn’t deserve. I can say that Kurvitz ended up being the one that got most screwed and that genuinely sucks, but also there was no way it was going to turn out any better. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

As for Kurvitz in the future, I don’t know how this will turn out, and it’s true that he can’t write any direct sequels involving any of the characters or locations explicitly in the game, but basically nothing else about the game is even really copywritable. He can still write stories in the same world with the serial numbers filed off. I don’t know if he will. He might spend the rest of his life being bitter about what was stolen from him, but if he wants to go back to what he’s good at he always has that option.

Nobody ever explicitly says that, and if you press them they’ll deny it, but people say things that only make sense if they believe that all the time.

Sure, they were all absolutely important to the game, and that matters, but saying Kurvitz, his girlfriend, and his best friend all left together when no one else wanted to isn’t really impressing me with how great of a person he is to work for. I don’t think he deserved anything that happened to him, but I am absolutely certain that the only thing holding the studio together was a collective desire to see the game finished from everyone involved. There was never going to be a Disco Elysium 2. There is no force on Earth that could have held that studio together with all the talented people involved past the release of the game. It sucks that the scum of the Earth got control of what’s left of it, and it sucks that Kurvitz lost the rights to his life’s work, but in the end it doesn’t actually change much other than one asshole getting like 60% of the residuals on sales of Disco Elysium. Which to be clear is a bad thing. I’m not happy about the situation. This was all lightning in a bottle though. It was never going to happen again.

Well, I certainly don’t know any details, but I’d imagine they mostly do that with older or more obscure games where it’s just not worth the time to make sure everyone gets their pennies sorted out properly. Probably not so much with modern game of the year winners.

I know this is an unpopular thing to say, but it’s… more complicated than that. Lots of people worked on the game, and most of them stayed at ZA/UM after the lead creative guy got screwed over. The people at the top now are pure bloodsucking parasites and don’t deserve your money, but saying that Robert Kurvitz was solely responsible for the game is unfair to the dozens of people who also poured their hearts and souls into the game, and don’t ever want anything to do with him again.

I agree. I always thought SR3 was kinda boring, and I was pretty much done with the series, but SR4 just worked for me. Yeah it’s dumb. Yeah it’s the beginning of the end for the studio. But man, there are very few games that really nail that perfect combination of goofy fun and stupid that just really works for me. SR4 is maybe the single best version of that ever.

That’s in the first month of release, when users are at their highest, the code is at its buggiest, and everyone is getting their first impression of the game.

Eventually they’ll have to be more reasonable, but I can see this making sense for the first few months.

I’ve been replaying Subnautica. It feels like a completely different game the second time around, but still fun. Plus they’ve got it running much better now than it was on launch.

China makes most of the silicon wafers that chips are made out of. Not because they’re the only ones who can, but because they have the resources, infrastructure, and manpower to do it cheaper than anyone else. High end chips aren’t manufactured in mainland China though. Taiwan, South Korea, and the US do most of that.

It’s still way too early days for RISC-V to have something like that yet. Somebody will probably make something like that eventually, but since there’s no single corporation that controls RISC-V it will probably remain optional.

In golf you start a long way from the hole, so when you first start a hole you’re probably not trying to make it exactly, you’re just trying to get the ball to go a long way to get near the hole. That’s known as a drive. A driving range is a place to practice doing that.