You could buy any Asus gaming mouse with user replaceable switches and order a bag of Huano silent switches from AE. (if the noise increases or the switch dies just replace the switc+h)
This is not a cheap option, but could potentially endure for a longer time.
I remember it was fine when I played it 14 years ago. Not as good as the original, but quite enjoyable. The remaster is comically bugged though, at least on Xbox.
-I finished Mafia 2 long before I finished Mafia 1 and I loved it. But after playing Mafia 1 DE, I replayed Mafia 2 and the story felt worse than Mafia 1. -F***ing police. They are everywhere. -Stupid achievements like “drive 1000 miles”, “collect 150 posters”.
I like free games, eg Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Minetest, Unciv, etc. Why would people be against free games, especially here where people are generally FLOSS advocates?
I’m not against free games, and if I was interested in a free game I would actively search for one. But usually if you’re searching for trending games it’s because there’s a sale going and you don’t give a shit about the free to play games at that time. Especially considering that the big free games that are “trending” are the same games every single sale.
I like the better separation between the two for sure
It’s less that I hate free games, it’s more that a lot of games on Steam that are free are either the freemium model, where they are basically mobile games with inapp purchases you’re expected to buy to make progress, or some some shovelware trash that’s a one trick pony and generally just a knock off of something more popular and better executed.
Yes there are examples of great free to play games, but overall so many of them on steam are not worth downloading and clog up the trending list since if someone really wanted their game full of microtransactions to get noticed, they can just work a bot net to register new accounts and download the game to cause the steam algorithm to pick it up and put it on the trending page despite it having a poor user count.
When your core gameplay loop is all of 15 minutes long that feeds into a 40-60 hour repetitive grind to unlock a slightly better item, new title or recolored cosmetic, combined with a complete absence of quality or competent writing, innovative mechanics while it’s apparent most of the budget went into marketing and pre-rendered cutscenes that can be just watched on youtube, yeah it’s bad to give potential customers a 30 minute demo that displays everything your game is without hinting any additional benefit for purchasing the full game.
Oh my God this is so much nicer. I was getting so sick of trying to navigate the category and having the same live action free to play games appear every time. I have some games that I can remove from my ignore list now
This is literally an example of why Steam gets praised as the only good game store. They make a change, users complain that part of the change sucks, and they listen to the feedback
Steam does provide a good product, no critique there. My point is the fact that they too are employing anti competitive measures and serve a billionaire. I wont stop criticizing that.
I see your point. A reason why I brought this up is because valve does not see criticism for the things they also do wrong and especially on this platform, rarely does anyone look at them from a non favorable view. Thats not because they dont do wrong but because they are good at marketing and other gaming companies are a lot worse than them.
The underlying issue here is that we are in this mess because our parents and grandparents didnt do this (enough). So yes, going against corporations is kind of my hobby.
I don’t see how posting to lemmy in general is going to influence people that disagree with you both because I don’t think there are many people here that do and also I think that your comment in particular is so far removed from the topic of this article that it borders on being a non sequitur entirely, and I’m worried you may get the feeling that the people downvoting you are against your message and not the fact that your message isn’t relevant beyond being a knee-jerk reactionary cry against Valve, one of the only privately owned companies that seems to listen to user feedback as thoroughly as the article demonstrates.
I don’t believe Valve is a monopoly and I’ve directly been able to talk to Gabe Newell via email multiple times over multiple years. Maybe some of their inter-business dealings could be better for their business partners, but as a lifelong steam user that so far has felt comfortable buying almost every hardware product they’ve put out I continue to feel comfortable supporting them because they seem to actually care about their customers from what I have directly experienced.
I don’t mean any of this in a confrontational tone, and I apologize for the general shill vibes of that second paragraph. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, I think your message is correct and good and I think there are better more effective ways of acting on it.
I don’t know what a solution would look like here. In your opinion, what should be done to stop Valve from being anti-competitive? What specifics should I be raising awareness of and looking into? What should be done by/about Gabe Newell?
I would like to know more about what you believe the solution here is, because at its core I see Valve as the end result of very talented and self-driven people doing an amazing job at delivering a very good product. I would hope that would lead to success, and I am given to understand that Gabe (to focus back in) is not a disinterested corporate figurehead as the position is with other software companies.
There’s some amount of anti-competitive behavior that is just… Doing business in a space with competitors. I write private code that I use myself and within the company I work for that I choose not to share with my competitors, is that anti-competitive behavior? This is a dumb example, but also I haven’t seen a direct convincing argument as to what Valve is doing to deserve the label.
In many ways, to provide my viewpoint, they’ve directly supported both unofficial modifications to their storefront by users (Decky Loader, for loading steam deck mods), modifications to their hardware (OLED screen mods, replacement parts on iFixit for reasonable prices), and even support Windows on the deck and are beginning (through reading commit logs) to support competitors’ hardware in their custom OS. They’ve singlehandedly pushed gaming on Linux into the mainstream eye and are doing well with it.
All that to say that I don’t think the way that Gabe became a billionaire was bad, and while I would prefer he use his personal wealth to better society I both don’t know enough about what he does with his money to know whether or not he’s already doing that and also think that any solution here would genuinely go against fundamental liberties and personal freedoms that I personally agree with. I’m not an absolutist on this, but enough of what I do know about the history of Valve and Gabe in specific lead me to lend him some amount of goodwill, because he has through his works and actions earned it from me.
I don’t disagree that billionaires are bad. Personally, I strongly believe in a Star Trek post-monetary future.
I wouldn’t call Gabe Newell a friend, although I suspect I don’t disagree with many of his opinions.
You are able to email him at gaben@valvesoftware.com, as is anyone else. I’ve emailed twice. Once when I was 13 to inform him of a bug in portal 2, and once a few years ago to inquire about steam being ported to arm.
There was a lot to explain about my position there and it may be a bit disjointed. If there’s anything I can clarify on my thinking, I’d be happy to.
I was referring to the very vocal crowd that can not ever accept steam being criticized for dominating the market and serving its billionaire owner, however „less bad“ he is. There are no ethical billionaires.
It could be viewed as a measure to get free games away from the main focus so valve can make more money.
The only reason they are in their own tab now is because users complained about how they were on the main tab, that’s the whole point of this thread. Get your head out of your ass.
Because your criticism sucks. You want to take something good from people Because “rich man is rich”, who cares as long as product good and not overly taking my money.
The irony of someone who uses “AI” and spicy autocorrect to rank employees trying to complain about a company people love to work at, and provides a good product.
Let me see if I got your statement right: you took the comment I made on another post to spare people having to click a link as me talking about myself?
In any case, steam does provide a good product but it also uses anti competitive measures to stay on top of the market and is owned by a billionaire. There are no ethical billionaires, sorry.
Whatever you‘re doing, you might wanna do less of it. Valve has been doing these kinds of things for a long time and anyone who understands markets knows that there is no monopoly without taking out the competition.
In any case, I know you wouldnt admit it if I presented you with rockhard evidence that they did it and thats okay. I‘m not doing this for you.
I am back on Elite Dangerous after taking some time to focus on Deep Rock Galactic in the first half of the year. I now have a second flight stick and did a little community class on flight assist off flying. Plus there have been lots of updates coming out. Taking advantage of the new engineering changes to build a really good combat ship and then going to focus on getting to Elite in combat probably, which also helps me practice my faoff flying.
If you take a screenshot in horizons and then take the same screenshot in odyssey, you’ll see that blacks are crushed to absolute shit in odyssey. You can even raise gamma to max and you still will not recover that shadow detail. The devs clipped it. They tonemapped the game incorrectly. It becomes blatantly obvious when you play this game on an oled screen haha.
I.e., take screenshot in horizons where tjere is a large shadow or no light hitting a part of your ship. Replicate it in Odyssey. It’ll be obvious. Or try raising gamma to max and you’ll see that zero shadow detail is recovered.
Also idk if you’re familiar with reshade, but if you google and install Lilium’s HDR shaders, it makes it even easier to see how crushed shadows are. It shows you a waveform visual that maps brightness. (Graph works in sdr as well as hdr)
Interesting, I think I’ve probably never noticed because I use night vision pretty much all the time when I’m flying my ship. I’ll look into reshade but I’m playing on Linux via proton and I’m not sure I want to hack more on an already working setup lol
Fair enough. The real issue is when you play in HDR (via inverse tonemapping) on an OLED. It’s just missing sooooo much shadow detail. It’s a well known issue that they never fixed and probably will never fix unfortunately. I’ve been experimenting with ways to recover the shadow detail using reshade add-ons, but so far no luck :-(.
Got one over on the reddit thread. Still waiting for it to come through because apparently there’s a delay, but I’ll invite some folks once it comes in.
Very much appreciated! I’ll send it to the next person in the thread. Is the invite just an item in my Steam inventory? Or something within the game itself?
bin.pol.social
Aktywne