Only thing I’ve been running personally has been Reno DX, to add HDR while not departing from the original look. Nice to cleanup all the colour banding on the dynamic lights in dark areas, such as the constant spotlight on Hornet. And yes, it works just fine through Proton, although I had to install it with a prepped zip file from some Reddit thread.
Here’s my last judge fight if you want to see the results (note that YT only offers HDR output on HDR compatible displays).
I’ve been playing 7 remake a bit and I know a lot of additions were meant to flesh out the world in what’s actually a really small chunk of the original game. But I found a lot of the additions, though not all, to feel more like unnecessary padding than good fleshing out.
Last game I ever bought was minecraft, back in 2012(?) for $15. Played it non-stop for a decade before the community imploded. Got my money’s worth. Haven’t bought a game since. No point unless they have a similarly active multiplayer community. It’s a pirate’s life for me.
Somewhere in that neighbourhood, yes. That’s how much I’m willing to pay. My old carrom board lasted me two decades, and it was $30 (with discs). That’s the yardstick I measure games by.
It is to be noted that that $30 does not account for the amount of powder used to lubricate the board or the replacement discs. Just as I did not include the cost of upgrading my PC to run minecraft 1.18, the dogshit optimization update.
It is also to be noted that I bought minecraft only after I was sure that I would enjoy it. That’s why I played the cracked version for 3 years before my purchase.
That does seem a little out of bounds. I think my personal is about 30 cents per hour. My favorite games are probably in the realm of 1-5 cents per hour.
The ones I look back on and cringe are MMOs. Those were surely pushing 50 cents or more per hour. Maybe if I had been a hardcore dungeon/raider and sank 12 hours a weekend into them they would be alright, but my filthy casual ass didn’t put more than a few hours a week into them. It’s honestly why I still avoid any subscription to this day. It’s always the other side gambling you won’t use their product, and that always strikes me as setting up bad deals.
My usual thought process is going to the movies sets you back maybe 10-15 for two hours. If the game is under that it’s usually fine by me, they are usually way under that even though I tend to move on from most games rather quickly.
See, that’s wild to me. I would buy a movie for that price, and it would be watched multiple times over my use of it. I don’t go to the movie theater because, aside from the experience often being ruined by other people, why would I leave my house to have the same experience I could in my house? The other people don’t add to it, the overpriced snacks don’t add to it, and the accumulated filth on the floor and chair definitely don’t add to it. Having a larger screen to look at doesn’t really do all that much. In my memories, the fact that I watched it on a 50 inch screen or a 50 foot screen doesn’t even show up. I remember the story, not the method of input.
Uh, but back to the point. I think most of my movies that I own have been watched at least 4 times, which means give or take $12/6 hours. That’s almost too high, which is why I don’t buy movies much anymore. Netflix was fine for a while, since it was probably a couple dozen hours binge for the month subscription, then cancel it again. I really don’t like ‘moving on’ from games quickly. A short one with a story is alright, but I want 50 hours of enjoyment, minimum, out of a game. Otherwise I could just find another game that I really enjoy for that long.
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
Too many investors coming off cheap, obvious ripoff games for a mobile telephone.
The trump family of asshole con-men just bought EA. Everything from now until they’re sold off for scrap is not only completely worthless, is actively hostile to users.
It’s a sign that the cons and grifting has 100% fully come to Computer games. Many have exploited them before, but not like this.
I am not going to discuss the ethics of piracy because I genuinely don’t give a fuck (also the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between ethics and morality and insist whatever they do is Good so it is even less productive than slamming my hand in a cabinet).
But if your goal is to actually not support those companies? Don’t play the games. Because “Wow, Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is still going to encourage others to buy it. Even if you say “Wow, I am so glad I pirated it because Spider-Man is fucking awesome” is going to encourage people who don’t know how/don’t care to pirate things to buy it (and people are going to think you are an obnoxious edgelord).
And yeah, I’ll parrot others: If you think games are in a bad place (from a monetization and content perspective… not from a funding and censorship one) then that just tells me that you don’t actually care enough to follow indie devs.
Man ea and Ubisoft games suck so bad I don’t even bother pirating them. I’m not even being facetious, the last ea game I played was the dead space remake which was passable but also totally skippable, and I borrowed a friends ea account to do that, getting bored half way through and stopping. Had he not offered I’d not have played it at all. I think the last ea game I paid and played through was mass effect 2.
Same thing with Ubisoft. I briefly had gamepass and played AC Odyssey for three hours before losing interest, same with their terrible Greek botw wannabe.
Neither company has released anything I’ve even been interested in since that, years and years ago.
That said I still buy rockstar games, the amount of money, effort, and attention to detail that went into Red Dead 2 is simply breath taking, but by the same token i bought it for twenty bucks after pirating it to make sure i liked it and it ran well.
Other than that I’m on the same page as you. Also I’m not criticizing you, just pointing out a slight difference in opinion. I pirate two dozen games a month
I am going to have to whip out this criticism for anybody that has made these kind of rants.
STOP. FOCUSING. ON. AAA. GAMES!
I'm not kidding, that's your problem and that's anyone else's problem who get sick of gaming as a whole. You keep kicking that can down the street for AAA game development to pander to you, but end up disappointed over and over and over. But you still kept your hand out, you still bought their games at Day 1, you still bought their DLC, you still waited for all and any patchwork. You were still there!
Meanwhile I and several dozen others by now, have been in the pirating game for years before you and anyone else had the guts to finally join in after having your face slapped hundreds of times by this point.
And people have been also telling you for years as to what the better alternatives that was out there were, but nooope! Still stuck to AAA development.
I think you can generalize it even further to don’t reward bad behavior. That should include purchasing goods and services from organizations that try to exploit people or commoditize art.
There’s a scene like this in one of the Telltale Sam and Max games that really deserves a better reenactment. Went something like this:
Sam: “So, Bosco, how much do you want for this…’Deadly virus’ that’s really just a tissue you sneezed into?”
Bosco: “A hundred trillion dollars.”
Max: “WHAT? That’s insane!!”
Sam: “How crazy can you get to think we’re going to pay something like that?”
Bosco: “All I know is, I keep finding the dumbest junk around my store, and think up the most ridiculous price I can imagine for them! And you two keep paying it! So who’s crazy now, fool?”
I started pirating games again when the official version of The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, but a pirated version (which I got just to check if I could get it to work) ran just fine.
Once I figured out how to run that version of the game in Linux (as well as how to sandbox it with Firejail), that knowledge meant I could just as easilly run other pirated versions of games.
Now, generally I’m the ultimated patient gamer (notice how all of that was for The Sims 3, which is from 2009, with its latest DLC being from 2013), but in my Redbeard persona I can just as easilly get recent AAA games as I can any other (probably more easilly, even, as those are the game torrents with the most users).
So I’ve downloaded a number of those, and installed a couple.
And you know what: even the supposedly best ones are BORING. Even highly regarded large open world ones, with their beautifully crafted supposedly alive worlds feel shallow and formulaic in terms of game play and don’t really hold my attention for all that long. I literally have 4 or 5 downloaded recent AAA games waiting to be tried, which I simply can’t be arsed to install because everytime I do try one it just turns out to be dissapointing. I find myself going back to Indie games I’ve played again and again like Project Zomboid or The Lone Dark, or even really old AAA games like The Sims 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all bought and paid for, BTW).
Even when the only costs are my time and storage space, modern AAA games aren’t worth it over Indie games of older AAA games with far less dazzling graphics.
As I refuse to pirate Indie games, by now I’ve pretty much given up on piracy simply because if you exclude Indie games, all the other games are kinda shit.
Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.
The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.
Also, I’m more confident that old games will work out of the box from gog than Steam. Unfortunately, as a Linux user, out of the box proton supports on Steam is just too convenient. I can’t think of many gog games that natively run on Linux.
Through Heroic, while there are some exceptions, you get nearly the same out of the box compatibility. And if you don’t get that compatibility and don’t have the patience to troubleshoot, the refund system for GOG is very generous. I just tried The Alters today, which I knew had issues with Proton outside of Steam Deck, and I got it working just before running out of patience and refunding the game.
I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now, and most of my games library was on GoG, though I also have a number of games on Steam.
Using Lutris for GoG games, in my experience the rate of “just runs out of the box” games (via Wine) is pretty much the same as for Steam (via Proton), both being somewhere around 9 in 10.
The Steam App basically wrapps the whole Proton, VKDX and so on with automated configuration, including game-specific configuration scripts, and that’s the same as launchers like Lutris and Heroic doing just with Wine instead of Proton, but if you’re trying to use those tools directly without such a launcher its like trying to run Steam games without Steam and just doing all the Proton/VKDX configuration (both general and game-specific) and launching yourself - the old way of running games in Linux from a decade ago which was a complete total PITA.
I don’t try to criticize people for pirating games. They’re expensive and a lot are greedy.
What I do tell people though is support good games.
If you end up playing a pirated game you really enjoy, you should try to support it if you can, even if it’s from one of the bigger publishers. It’s basically our only way to truly tell a publisher that we like something and to keep making it.
Not counting un reasonably priced re-releases though. I totally get that (looking at you Nintendo for Galaxy 1+2)
I tried CP2077 (post fixes) and No Man’s Sky pirated. Within 3 days I bought the retail versions because I loved them. Played a LOT of shitty pirated games since, usually no more than 2-3 hours. Steam wouldn’t refund me for that amount of time, so I figured this was fair.
I’m planning on yo-ho’ing CP2077, but no way an I paying even if I enjoy it. CDPR has fucked me over enough with The Witcher trilogy that they owe me a free game to make up for the time and money wasted.
After that, I might be willing to give them money again for something else, but I’m not paying for Cyberpunk
Bit busy so can’t make a long comment. Just wanted to say, welcome to the ‘dark’ side. I highly recommend to check the instance in on for everything you need (Megathread). It tells you where to look, which safety measures to take etc.
I wanted to purchase Metaphor Refantzio because the game seems good and then figured out they blatantly said “you don’t own Metaphor even if you purchase it”. Thus decided to pirate it (it isn’t cracked but it is playable).
If something isn’t respecting your values, I’m of the opinion that you make a stronger statement by not even pirating those games. If you’re spending time playing them, you’re also not spending time and money playing some game that was meticulously made to respect your values. You’re fine playing indie games, but you’d play more of them if you gave up playing these AAA games that you decided to pirate. You talk to your friends and on forums about the games you play, which will at some point convince someone else to buy and play them, too. If you want them to hurt, so that they change, don’t even give them the time of day.
That’s right, it’s exactly what I think, you are one way or another helping a game to be known. The same strategy people talked about why Microsoft don’t shut every Office cracker, they want normal people to use it and get used to it, so companies will use it too, eventually, and they can audit some IT companies, charge a hell amount of money if they use pirated software.
I agree with everything, but I’ll still pirate AAA games, just for the experience. I classify publishers/developers companies like this:
Companies it doesn’t even worth playing to avoid indirect marketing: Ubisoft, EA
Companies that at least it worth pirating: Activistion, Rockstar, etc…
Let’s be honest, the games are good, probably made by some people who love what they were doing, but then it was put behind a shitty business model, because developers are just trying to make a living while executives trying to harvest all the money.
I think as the time goes, developers will start making their choices better, leave predatory companies, start or join indie companies, and I, at the same time, will migrate to a more indie focused gaming.
You follow your own moral compass. My feelings are, if I was short on money, I’ve got a backlog and a stream of games being thrown at me for free (legally) such that I’d never have to pirate and never be bored. I’m willing to pay more for a good product, and I so thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 1-3 that I bought the deluxe edition of 4 that was a no-go for you; they’re one of the few AAA devs keeping LAN alive, and that is worth me throwing me money at them to tell them they’re doing it right, on top of just making a very fun game. The companies whose games you’re pirating are the ones that need the attention the least, but every game you could be instead funneling time and money into benefits so much more from each individual sale. Plus, the reason we’ve got so much anti-consumer bullshit in games now is because piracy was a boogeyman for the industry for a long time, so I’d rather not give them any additional data points to make things even worse when we’ve already got an entire era of video game history that disappears when their servers go offline. That’s how I see it anyway.
The times I don’t feel gross about pirating, personally, are when the pirated version is supposedly the better version of the game (like emulating an old console game instead of playing a compromised PC port) or when the game is delisted and no longer available through ordinary channels, like Battlefield 2. You do what feels right to you. Pirating Nintendo games is an option to me, but they bother me as a consumer in all sorts of ways, and I instead spend that time and money on games like The Thaumaturge rather than playing through Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo will be just fine without my sale. The team behind The Thaumaturge may or may not have made enough money to make a second game. If Nintendo was a less shitty company, I’d be buying and playing Metroid Prime 4. Maybe I’ll end up discovering and enjoying something else during that time that needs my dollar more instead.
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