Nah, definition 1 right there isn’t inherently negative. It’s certainly more involved than otherwise necessary and seems somewhat driven by emotion, so while it skips the negative connotation I think this counts plenty well.
They will turn off the live service and make it work offline?
I don’t understand. Industry bootlickers told me it was impossible and would cost billions to implement, hurting small indie studios the most. Yet, Nintendo does it voluntarily with seemingly no difficulties.
I would argue Nintendo does do a lot of pro-consumer stuff. Like making actually good games. It’s just their anti-consumer stuff is either so bad or just plain weird that we just scratch our heads and think Nintendo is going off the deep end. Still trying to avoid buying much Nintendo going forward.
Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.
You really have no idea how intellectual property works do you? The reason they’ve gone after emulation and rom hosting sites is pretty obvious, they have to protect their IP.
Why they’ve waited so long only to do it now? I honestly don’t have an answer for you on that one, but if I were to guess it’s because retro gaming has been going through somewhat of a renaissance as of late due to shitty AAA games and indie devs gaining so much popularity.
The bottom line is Nintendo lost the emulation battle once, and they don’t want to lose a second time. They’re more experienced and understand the risks of letting emulation replace services like Nintendo switch online, and so do publishers that own intellectual property from retro consoles. It sucks, but that’s corporate life, and you can’t really get around it without jumping through hoops or doing something illegal.
Your comment is very out of place as a response to mine, but since you brought all this up:
I don’t begrudge Nintendo for getting ROM sites shut down. I begrudge them for shutting them down without also making their games legally available for purchase where their customers want to play them. Those old games aren’t even legally available for purchase at all, because they want to just rent them to you forever, which is an enormous dick move. Then they further that with the dick move of trying to remove the place where we get those games the way we’d like to enjoy them, and getting them that way is a better experience than using their official solution.
So assuming you didn’t get lost and you actually meant to respond to my comment, I can’t consider them pro consumer when they’re not doing what’s in the consumer’s best interests.
Nintendo might be seeing the writing on the wall and looking to see how much profit they can make with this. If it goes well, we might see more of it. Corporations hate regulation and sometimes try and head it off long before it is coming.
Hi, industry bootlicker here! Nintendo is listening to their consumers. I was told corporations are evil and won’t listen to consumers and must be forced to do things by law. I much prefer consumers remain vocal about their wants because corporations do indeed listen. No government intervention required. I worry government rules could cause unintended problems that don’t benefit anybody.
Oh no! Not Microsoft Bingo! That’s a list of D list games nobody has ever heard of that all shutdown years ago. I don’t think the world would be a better place if the devs of Radical Heights, a free to play arena shooter that was launched and shutdown a month later in 2018 were forced to give their game out to everyone for free after.
Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.
You didn’t create those games. Games are products people work to produce. Radical Heights was a free to play game that was shutdown in a month. What would you force them to do? Release their server code for free so anybody can run a Radical Heights server that people can connect to and play? So a whole bunch of people who never gave the developers a cent have the right to demand the game be given to them simply because it existed for 1 month?
If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.
That’s just blatantly false. People bought the founders pack were never refunded for example. Those people being entitled to the server software or a refund is anything but greedy, even if that only applies to a single person.
If they can play against bots, which already exist in the game, or band enough people together with access to the game to play on a server one player is able to host, then yes. That’s what I’d expect at a minimum.
If they want to keep some form of DRM then that’s not my job to figure out. This wasn’t a problem back in the day when server software being distributed was the norm, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.
Though personally I’d be in favor of abolishing online DRM entirely, but that’s another story.
So you want people to follow a law without knowing how it should be followed? You signed a petition and now it’s someone else’s problem if they get in legal trouble or not? This makes the world a better place because it protects theoretical people?
At least try to make an effort to understand what I write.
I said it’s their job to figure out how to do DRM -if- they want DRM. If they can’t figure out how to do that then the answer shouldn’t need to be spelled out explicitly: No DRM. Simple as that.
If you’d rather see games you spent money on being taken away from you based on the whims of corporations, just to make sure others who might not have payed for it also can’t play it, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Control of the server is the DRM. Radical Heights sold hats for $15. How do they ensure only players who paid for hats get them and that non-paying players couldn’t just mod them in? They control that information on the server. Which accounts have cosmetics is controlled by the server. That’s the DRM. If they had to release the server when shutting down then they’d have no way to ensure only paying customers play the game since the person who runs the sever can modify it however they want. Everyone could get the $15 hats for free! Or maybe they charge $2 for the hats. There’s no DRM that could prevent this because control of the server is itself the DRM.
So a dev is being required by law to give out their game without any DRM meaning anyone can play it for free and even give themselves the cosmetics the original devs were using to pay the salaries of the dev team. I worry very much that this would cause companies to stop producing free to play games or charge a subscription for these types of games instead (since subscription based games would be exempt). I wonder why people would risk this to “save” games like Radical Heights which, in all likelihood, would have no community. A game doesn’t shutdown after 1 month because it has a thriving community
Yes, you’re just explaining regular piracy here. I do not care. It’s a thing that’s already been possible for almost every single-player game in existence, and yet, there’s a constant stream of new single-player games releasing every day. Weird, right?
I have no authority over anything, so yes, they can. What I’d like to see is an option to buy an offline copy of the game and any add-ons I bought, but no one does that. What Stop Killing Games is looking for is for the server to be made available after the game’s end of life so that you can continue to use anything you paid for.
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.
The other answer from @ampseandrew already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:
Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.
Meh cringe can be effective as a descriptor, but it’s cringe to call people cringe as a personal attack. I’ve described situations as very “cringe-inducing.”
Cringe is a thing, but it's way too common that people use their own self-consciousness as an excuse to try to shame people who are just enjoying themselves on their own corner.
NPC’s is worse to be honest. It’s generally used to attack people’s social/political values and call them “sheeple” without using the term. Normie is gross but it’s mainly just dismissive and having too high an opinion of one’s own taste/interests.
NPCs is ten times worse because it is used to dehumanize people you don’t agree with, further alienates you away from normal society and pushes you deeper into cult like thinking.
“We can do better” or worse “X do better” is more cringe.
It’s just everyone judging everyone like they are worthless. Maybe people want to be part of the group maybe they have an identity with hardcore gamers. They don’t need to do better that’s their right.
it’s definitely a weird term but in more than a few contexts (mostly very online contexts) i’ve found it to be the only suitable terminology because there’s just nothing else which most of the people i talk to will “get” otherwise–it’d be nice to have something a little bit less embarrassing to work with, to be honest lol
“average person” i’m afraid lacks a certain it factor–probably the ironic steeping in terminally online culture implied by even speaking it–that’s implied by using normie. i find in many of these circumstances it just seems out of place also. in a semantic sense i’m not sure “average person” maps to “normal person” either, which is another thing
Yeah I’m not sure “average person” works the same… maybe “median person”? 🤣
The 10% nerdiest people hold 90% of the nerdiness?
But yeah I don’t think “average person” works, because it’s not a wide enough range and doesn’t include the opposite extreme end
“non-normies” is a very small group, in this context non-normies would be the most extreme gamers. The “average people” would not include a somewhat invested gamer, and it also wouldn’t include someone who is heavily opposed to gaming, both of which would be included in “normies”.
I don’t think someone heavily opposed to gaming would be considered a normie, they would be in their own separate extremist camp also apart from the average person.
As someone alternative that been active in local gothic scenes I also use “normie” to refeer to people that do not engage with subcultures. I didn’t even know it was considered pejorative until this post
I just think of “normie” as the new “vanilla” - every group that uses it, uses it uses it to refer to people who are not a part of that particular group, so its meaning depends on the context but should be self-explanatory and not (necessarily) derogatory.
As a software guy I like the word for its simplicity and ease of use.
For everyone saying OP should let their kid play Roblox and just ban spending money… just no.
Roblox exploits child labor for profit and they have terrible scummy business practices. If you have even marginal ethical qualms about child labor and/or capitalistic exploitation of vulnerable people, you should be keeping yourself and your family away from Roblox. In your mind they should be in the same category as multilevel marketing, crypto scams and door-to-door religion peddlers.
I actually think it’s fair to call them child predators. They’re exploiting kids for money instead of sexual gratification, but it’s the same power dynamic. Child exploitation is their business model.
My son just turned 6 and I was thinking of looking at the game (my sone really likes actual Lego, and his buddies are into Minecraft and Roblox), but another parent at a bday party a few weeks back asked if we played, and then warned my that I needed to keep a close eye on it, because the suggested games algo was pushing really sketch things to his daughter.
So I started looking and decided the shopping aspect was something I didn’t want to expose him to yet. But these revelations are making me glad we haven’t yet used it and never will.
Roblox sells the idea that you can actually make money with it, it has its own economy with job hunting and salaries. Mario Maker is just a community game.
Nearly everyone knows a bunch of skills “for nothing” or, worse, for fun! Gasp! Shocking, isn’t it?
Also, did you know that modding is a thing at least since the 90s? You know, people that made modifications to games without expecting any financial return or job opportunities? People must be crazy if they’re putting so much effort just to have fun and share it, amirite?
I couldn’t stop myself from being sarcastic there, sorry. The utter cynicism struck me so hard I didn’t know where to begin explaining how wrongheaded I think people are being about that. I would for sure prefer Roblox not encourage mtx so much but sheesh man. I don’t think Timmy is trying to make the next Genshin Impact.
Intent makes a big difference. The value of Roblox as a platform and as a business is based on the work done by children to develop for it, and it was set up that way on purpose. They created an incentive model to encourage it.
Nintendo’s value as a company is not based on kids creating Mario Maker levels, nor does Nintendo push kids to do so with the promise of earning money.
Considering the newest Mario game got a shitload of ideas from Mario maker levels, anyone who was good at mario making enough to be creative with the formula had their labor stolen as RnD for Wonder
Nobody dangles a carrot of earning money in front of potential FOSS developers. Nobody goes into FOSS thinking they’re going to get a big payout.
FOSS is not pay-to-play. There’s no equivalent to Robux for FOSS developers.
FOSS developers are consenting adults who volunteer their time for freely distributed software projects, not kids creating content for a video game company that charges them for access and then makes a profit from their work.
Shovelware demos are useless.
I remember the time I played the demo for farming sim and DOA:Dimensions to death on my 3DS. Those were actually good demos.
Yeah it doesn’t compare to old-school demos like stuff that came on discs with magazines, but at least it’s a lot better getting the option to try something instead of buying and refunding everything. And at least some bigger studios and indi games are picking up on this as well.
For sure. But I hope they use the Steam Demo feature (same game page with a demo install button) instead of doing a free and premium type of publishing like they do with phone apps
I mean… Aoe3 always had some sort of a demo version. Even the original base game had it. In fact, this is actually better, as now you are able to use 3 rotating civs, not just the English and the French, which you were forced to use before.
I am not sure what demos you mention in particular but the one I recently played is news tower and I am hooked. Just waiting for a good sale to snag the game and even stopped posting the demo mid way. I for one appreciate all the demos being put out even if it is short. Their only purpose is to showcase the full game and they do a decent job of that.
It’s the current Steam publishing meta. A free demo will create traffic for the newly created Steam page of your game, resulting in more Wishlistings, which is usually the only way to be featured and seen anywhere before release for indie developers. And that’s how your Wishlistings really explode and you make a lot of sales. Getting a demo out is by far highest priority for game publishing in 2024.
The thing is, we don’t need a demo trending page all that much. Since you says will find the demos only game store page, they ain’t looking at the trending list to find them
Built to showcase their specific VR hardware. That they built after getting burned from multiple VR companies who abused Valves good will of providing access to their patent protected VR tech for free, to help accelerate the VR industry.
Filled to the brim with DRM, at the point where you can’t even launch many singleplayer games offline
Actively against linux, for some fucking reason
Bad launcher (but this one is no biggie, you can and should use Heroic launcher instead of the official one)
Bad store in general compared to steam
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
Epic pros:
Free games
With coupons prices can get VERY low
When it opened I heard the percent they take from game devs was lower than the other stores (not sure if it’s still the case and tbh if it ever was)
Steam pros:
Pushing linux gaming like their life depends on it
Generally correct towards the consumer
Huge store and many information, from the game store pages to the workshop
During sales prices are good
Steam cons:
Drm
Bad official app Ux and messy ui
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games and that it’s owned by CDPR (the guys who developed the witcher series and cyberpunk)
I personally purchase my games on steam, since I think their contribution to linux gaming is crucial for linux to go mainstream
Choose what you will knowing this. If someone else wants to add something to this list you’re welcome to do so.
Yeah, and somehow they managed to invent like 90% of all "evil" MTX and DRM in the process, take a bigger cut than competitors and actively reject having a returns policy until pushed by regulators and competitors, all the while being super not evil.
I mean, do you have any good examples though? Because most of those things are blatantly false and/or happened 9+ years ago. If that's that's the worst you've got then Valve is must be amazing.
They straight up don’t want people reselling games they own. They could do it easily, they just don’t want to.
Yeah, Steam does cool things, but the moment you start thinking that very huge corporation somehow cares about you, you’re doomed. Companies don’t care about people, they care about numbers. Especially huge companies like Valve.
I don't know if many companies allow you to resell your digital goods in the first place (other than, funny enough, Valve themselves who let your resell digital Steam assets).
It’s not a trend they abandoned - Counter Strike is still a huge source of deceptive digital item trade. It also spread to Team Fortress 2 in the meantime.
See what I mean? That's nuts. That's a nuts sentence right there. Imagine having a brand so sticky that people go "but did they do something really bad recently?
For the record, Valve's games run loot boxes today. Like, right now you can buy loot boxes from Valve. CS gambling is also still happening, although I'm not into it enough to know how much better it is these days.
They invented the battlepass, too, that's a Dota 2 thing. Hey, remember how people refer to buying cosmetics for games as "buying hats"? That one's from TF2. Oh, and technically the trading cards you get for purchases are NFTs,, since the term doesn't require the tokens to be stored in a blockchain.
And then there's the dev side. Everybody was super pissed with them on that end while they were figuring out greenlight processes, which... I'm not sure if they did or people just kinda got used to what's there. And if you're around devs you'll know that Valve's whole deal is to tell people what to do and give them zero support to do it. And there are other horror stories about shadowbans and Apple-style manual rejections and delistings and stuff, but at that point you're getting more into inside baseball and I wouldn't expect it to be shaping public perception at all.
Well I'm not going to be eternally mad at Coca Cola because they put cocaine in their soda a century ago, there's got to be a cut-off point somewhere. If I'm going to hate them it's because of the things they are doing right now. Valve over the last eight years has been pretty well-behaved considering their market position gives them the capacity to be way worse. There's nothing stopping them from
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
But what does that have to do with comparing it to epic? Epic isnt giving you a physical market, they are taking the next step towards digital ownership loss. Epic took the idea of loot boxes and gave it hyper cancer in fortnite, and uses that hyper cancer cash to fund giving you free games. The list goes on and on. Epics vision is not to undo the damage steam caused, its to worsen the damage to try and push it further.
If this was about the shit trends steam created, sure ok. But all of these problems with steam are things they did in the past establishing themselves, and are things epic is now actively doing to establish itself while taking each one a step further.
If these are problems for steam to have done, then supporting epic over steam is making the exact same mistake again, yes?
I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.
So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?
EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.
CS2 is just a bad game tbh, but the loot boxes are still the same as they were when they put them in tf2. Fortnite specifically grinds my gears because of the active pointed targeting of kids. I like gambling, I dont mind adults choosing to gamble. I used to play mtg, the actual inventor of loot boxes. But fortnite wants to be the childrens gaming hub, and also sell loot boxes and battle passes. Thats pushing the line past where it was set.
But, like… Again, valve did these things and then set the line. Epic is pushing that line further. If the conversation was “hey why is valve shitty?” you would have a point. But thats not the convo. The conversation is “why is epic worse than valve?” And the answer is valve set shit standards that it holds to, but epic is trying to take those standards and push them further so it can be valve2, with worse established practices.
Youre saying “well valve made these bad decisions, whats the statute of limitations?” Ok, epic is actively trying to repeat those decisions. Why shouldnt we have learned from history, and not reward them doing the things you wish valve hadnt done?
Or do you prefer we have this same conversation in a decade, about epics decisions in the past tense?
So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.
But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?
That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.
Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.
That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.
I’m pissed with ford for single handedle fucking our infrastructure, can’t live without a car now. But anyway things that company’s do 10 years ago or 90 stick around
Technically, Denuvo isn’t DRM, it’s anti-tamper. It protects the actual DRM from being modified or removed. It’s closer to an anticheat, as it ensures the game wasn’t modified.
Fun fact: my autocorrect changes anticheat to Antichrist.
Oh, is that the bar? I hadn't received the memo. That's cool, then, because Activision, Epic, Microsoft and Ubisoft didn't invent Denuvo either, so we're all good.
All their platfomrs support it and sell games with it, though.
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
The user is being hyperbolic, but is referring to their substantial role in popularising loot boxes, as well as the marketplace that has spawned a real gambling industry around it. Kids gamble on 3rd party sites for marketplace prizes and Valve does very little to interfere.
Not to mention that Steamworks DRM is practically non-existent anyways (and that it also wasn’t necessary to use, it’s rare, but some games just don’t protect their game with any DRM).
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Since I can almost guarantee you major publishers would not publish on steam without some sort of DRM, yeah Im fine with them having an easily crackable form of DRM. Especially since they're not exactly jumping to prevent people from doing it.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
Let’s also not forget that game developers have no choice but to release on steam if they want to have any chance on breaking even since they have that huge of a market share and that Epic challenging that already lead to better deals for developers since Valve hat virtually free reign before
The difference between Steam and Epic is that Steam gets modders who mod their Source games. These mods don’t exist outside of Valve games. Valve is paying someone who loves their games and makes content for those games. They are smart in recognizing talent and bringing it to their development teams.
Epic finds existing games with existing communities and build a wall around it so Epic becomes a gatekeeper to the fun. They stop games from working on other storefronts or pay for “exclusivity” which means stopping people from playing the game.
Considering they have bugger all cost with distribution points being hosted for free by service providers it’s an overpriced over glorified website with online payment processing. 30% cut is massively tax for very little
You don’t own the games on any digital platform, neither steam, epic or gog. You’re only being sold a license to use it, and the license can be revoked whenever the company feels like it.
Thisbis actually true for most of the physical media back in the day, the only difference is that they didn’t really have a method to revoke the license… But that nice old cardboard box you have in your attic, with the nice shiny plastic disc… You still don’t legally own the software on it.
You are absolutely correct, but it’s a con for Epic too. Your comment makes it out to look like you don’t own your games on Steam, but by omission you make it seem like you do own your games on Epic.
I just want to make it very clear that you don’t own the games on either platform. But also want to mention that even if you buy a good old CD/DVD with the game on, then you still don’t own the game…
It’s absolutely awful that it’s practically impossible to own a game, and it’s even more awful that the platform can take away a game you paid for, let alone that they don’t even have to refund you for it…
A con for GOG is their site is slow as fuck. And god forbid you want to go back to a previous page, you’ll likely lose where you were looking 9 times out of ten. Especially so on mobile.
Pros: Can be the only place you can get old games that would’ve been unavailable otherwise
The older games are often really really cheap, especially during sales
Steam’s, Epic’s, Ubisoft’s, Battle.net’s and whatever-EA’s-thing-is-called-now’s sites are also slow as shit. What is it with these platforms which prevent them from loading a webpage in less than 10 seconds?
What tracking does Epic need? “According to our analytics, 100% of users scroll to the free games banner on Tuesday at 5pm CEST, then leave and don’t come back for a week. What a mystery!”
In Steam’s case, the slowness looks more like a side effect of it being a Chromium Embedded Framework application (similar to Electron) with a lot of extras bolted on. It’s just not built for efficient use of resources.
Do you remember how to configure it? Last I checked I went through every account and settings page on the store site and seemingly separate customer service log in and no clear way to set it up.
Not a clue sorry. I’m personally not one to go out of my way to set up 2FA even though I know it’s good practice to do so (unless it’s work related, then I do)
Epic has already been caught scanning and collecting data from files on people’s hard drives that are totally unrelated to Epic or its games.
Epic’s habit of interfering with game availability, through exclusivity deals.
Ties with Tencent (super anti-consumer chinese state-owned megacorp)
To be more clear about it, Tencent is Epic’s largest investor, so they obviously have a great deal of influence over and access to anything they want from Epic (likely including user data) and they directly benefit from Epic’s growth.
Steam pros:
Also:
Actively funding and supporting development of linux gaming technologies for more than a few years now, to the point where linux is now very much a viable gaming platform.
Steam cons:
Drm
Given that DRM on Steam is entirely up to each game publisher, I don’t think it’s appropriate to list under “Steam cons”. I’m not even sure that any of my Steam games have DRM.
If you mean that most Steam games expect to find an instance of Steam running, you should know that is not DRM, and it’s trivially replaced with the open-source Goldberg Emulator or a similar tool.
Gog
I don’t know anything besides the fact that it has drm-free games
Another plus for GOG is that they let you download games with a web browser. No special app required. (I think Itch.io does this as well.)
The story I read was that they didn’t collect or report anything, but just flagged a user if the cache contained a known game hack site, and that they stopped doing that years ago.
Not comparable to what Epic was caught doing, IMHO. Still, if there’s an article with more detail, I wouldn’t mind reading it. (Maybe it was part of their anti-cheat system of the time?)
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
I want to note that Steam isn’t inherently a DRM platform, as there are many games on Steam which are DRM free. Even ones that require the Steam backend can be bundled with Steamworks, serving all the same backend requirements without Steam needing to be installed on the machine.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Epic does, and how many of the ones Epic has are exclusives that don’t count?
Many of the articles do have references on the DRM status. Here’s an example indicating verification by a staff member. I personally tested a bunch of the games for DRM and noted it back when I contributed. Until recently, most of the games released on Epic were DRM-free. Even the Sony games were notably DRM-free on Epic before they were released on GOG. Nowadays, it’s more common for the new ones to use EOS and have it function as DRM.
yea, they steam has some drm-free games available... but steam is a drm platform.. one that also helped normalize one-time-use codes and tying 'purchases' to a non-transferable online account. valve did more to shred the used pc game market than any other company.
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origin does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
So if we just assume this random wiki with no sourcing is correct…
Steam has more games than everyone else, DRM on Steam is the developer/publisher’s choice, Steam still has more DRM-free games than Origina does, and how many of the ones Origin has are exclusives that don’t count?
Steam UI is messy but they have a ton of functionality in their store/system. Epic took ages to even get a functioning cart, Steam has tons of features which are not even tied to the games in their store like remote play and Steam VR. Family sharing is also really cool for example. Also Steam basically killed piracy for a long time due to amazing Steam sales + convenience of use.
Your first line is straight up misinformation. Epic has remarkably few games with DRM, mostly from big publishers implementing their own. I’ve yet to find an indie that can’t be launched directly as an .exe. Same with Cyberpunk 2077, launches directly without issue.
The only singleplayer game I can’t play offline is Hitman, just like on Steam, because their publisher sucks.
In Grotto, you play the role of a soothsayer living in a cave who is occasionally visited by members of a tribal society living nearby. They come to you with problems, and they want you to present your opinion, but you can’t speak. You have access to constellations of stars, which each hold different meanings, and you must present your answers in the form of a single constellation, which the petitioners are left to interpret.
You’ll feel a bit of frustration as your intended message is missed completely in favor of something that the petitioner wanted to hear, and the same constellation might mean different things to different people, but that’s just part of the game. The story unfolds around you and its progression is communicated to you only through the explanations your petitioners give for their visit. Each is a uniquely unreliable narrator, so what you believe is for you to decide.
Two endings, and an interesting story with some occasionally unexpected consequences that might make you feel bad, so if a game giving you a case of the sads is unappealing, maybe take that into consideration.
Valve are well within their rights here. This isn’t new content or transformative. It’s literally trying to remake the same game using the same engine. These devs knew they were playing with fire. Never come between GabeN and his hats.
Black Mesa is a remake of a single player game that Valve wasn’t planning on remaking any time soon, more profitable to make it official and take a cut
TF2 actively still makes them sht tons of money, no profit in splitting the fan base
Imo, Trademark. Black Mesa is a concept from Half-Life, but “Black Mesa” to the best of my knowledge wasn’t a registered trademark. “Team Fortress/Team Fortress 2” are registered trademarks however, and that significantly changes the value and functionality of the specific terms.
Yes, but it’s easier to give permission to use concepts that don’t infringe on trademark than it is to give permission on something that could be argued in court as muddying a trademark.
I know they require permission either way, but what permission they’re actually asking for changes based on what terminology they use
Well my point is that since the content is directly related, it actually doesn’t matter what they called it. It would’ve been exactly the same amount of infringement if they called it, “happy fun times at the science lab”.
The only differnce is it would’ve been less obvious to identify.
I get your point, my point is the infringement would be less egregious without trademark and thus easier for Valve to turn a blind eye to, or even potentially officially endorse via some potential deal à la Black Mesa.
But hey, I am fully willing to concede that I am just a layman with enormous distance from this topic and no specific expertise or insider knowledge, so the possibility of me being wrong is high
My thinking is that it was hot garbage that was trying to milk the TF2 name to grow their own fanbase. And valve didn’t want to be associated with that.
My guess is that Black Mesa looks great, had passionate people who were really communicating and engaging with Valve/community, didn’t infringe on the Half-Life trademark and it felt like a step forward, which is why it was allowed to continue AND even be brought to market.
Unfortunately it’s not just well within their rights, it’s their legal obligation. The stupid situation that is America means that for them to be able to maintain their claim of ownership on the IP trademark, they have to both actively use the trademark and actively police unauthorized use of the trademark by others. If they don’t, they risk losing the right to claim the trademark, which wouldn’t just mean independents running servers for the game, but also would mean unscrupulous entities could produce and sell merchandise featuring the trademark en masse without having to seek permission from or pay any commissions to Valve.
It’s shitty, but it’s more shitty because of the stupid system we’ve built than because of any intentional malevolence on Valve’s part, imo.
Important caveat: I am not a legal professional and it is entirely possible my understanding of trademark law is flawed, but this is my earnest understanding of the situation.
It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners, however, to challenge each and every actionable infringement. And there is nothing untoward about waiting to see whether an infringer’s exploitation undercuts the value of the copyrighted work, has no effect on the original work, or even complements it. Fan sites prompted by a book or film, for example, may benefit the copyright owner. See Wu, Tolerated Use, 31 Colum. J. L. & Arts 617, 619–620 (2008).
Yes! As a die hard Grim Dawn fan I can say Last Epoch is awesome. Grim Dawn is still better imho, but Last Epoch comes close. Both are excellent games one could easily put 100+ hours in and have a blast.
I just wish that I could start at a higher difficulty on Grim Dawn with the appropriate scaling. I don’t want to do the campaign 3 times just like old days.
Didn’t they just change the game with the last patch (still being updated, my God the devs are GOATed) so they you can play to 100 in any difficulty? I still imagine you get pasted in elite and ultimate if that’s your issue though.
Path of exile charges for inventory QoL and with the ludicrous amount of different stuff that drops, it’s arguably kind of mandatory if you’re trying to complete seasonal objectives
For PoE you consider 30gb installed (on PS5 mind you) a large file size? Yes it has mtx, but it is not once pushed or advertised to you, and none of it is required for anything. They does improve the QoL of the game however.
CoD + WZ is around 240gb I think. Most modern AAA games are usually 90gb minimum.
Some years ago they pretty much rewrote the entire base game code (or some parts of it) and tidied it up, reducing the overall size. It may be larger installed on PC (I’m on PS5) but I can’t imagine there being too much of a difference.
The MTX for PoE are within the “nice” ones. There’s extra stash tabs, but you don’t need to consider that until after the campaign. And then there’s cosmetics. No pay to win. And the MTX are on your account, so they will be on PoE2 as well.
This is honestly pretty funny. Even another government agency recognized how bad the response was. That was literally like someone asking how old you are, and you respond by telling them the definition of age.
I wonder how much it has to do with how much of a shithole the Fandom network is. Between the godawful UX, aggressive SEO to bury competing wikis in search results, and scummy business practices that effectively prevent wiki admins from migrating to other hosts, the idea of maintaining a game wiki probably isn’t all that appealing these days.
They don’t actually let admins shut down their wikis or remove content from them. They can leave and start a new wiki, but they have to leave the old one in place (for which Fandom could potentially just find new admins), and they can only link to the new wiki from the Fandom wiki for a period of two weeks. With Fandom’s SEO, there’s a good chance the Fandom wiki will still be ahead of search results of a new wiki even after migration. Source
I wonder if this could be mitigated (or even nullified) by a cooperative game developer, through DMCA takedown notices sent to Fandom. There is a lot of art on these wikis, after all, and I imagine the copyright holder has some say in who is allowed to distribute it.
Thank you. I’ve been dabbling with the idea of establishing a non-profit for my lemmy instance. I’m not a user of game/movie/etc wikis, but I do love looking after my servers. I wonder if a non-profit owned wiki site bear any weight over time.
Man this was an issue already some 10 years ago when touhou wiki went self-hosted. It took a whole year for google to get memo and link the new one above the old.
Nowadays I assume it’s pretty much impossible to reverse the flow unless if your game is huge and highly sought after.
Honestly if I was migrating away from Fandom I’d do everything I can to burn every bridge. Go through and edit every page to have every link redirect to the better wiki. Ignore their 2-week period, and don’t inform the Fandom overlords that the wiki is being shut down (it’s not like they’re going to check without being prompted).
I’d make them ban me, and then good luck finding an admin.
Buying a steam deck significantly increased by gaming time. The ability to immediately suspend and resume my gameplay, and not have to go over to my desktop helped a lot. I’ve played more this past year than I have in the last 3 years combined.
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