Hey, you do you. Just don't try to sell me a moral high horse about exclusivity. I grew past console wars when the kids in the playground were excited about Terminator 2 coming out. If we're going to bring the conversation back to that level I demand my knees stop hurting in the proces of de-evolution as well.
Any good thing about Epic Store other than Free games?
Why would anyone want to buy it on Epic if it available on GOG, Steam or Itch? Personally, I will never because it didn’t even provide good regional prices.
I don't know, I don't care. I don't often buy things on Epic, myself. Seems to me that "free games" is a pretty big thing to dismiss out of hand, though. That seems like a good thing, free games.
In any case the fact that Epic isn't my store of choice for anything but exclusives and free games also means I don't spend my time posting stuff about how much they suck. That seems like an undue amount of effort and attention for my what? Fourth, fifth favorite online games store on PC.
There's also nothing particularly bad about it. Bit of a simple, feature-light UX. Free games is nice. They are smart enough about allowing third party logins, so you can easily import your games automatically into other, better launchers like GOG Galaxy, Launchbox or Heroic. Seen worse.
Ah, the killer retort of the online argument. "If you don't care about this thing I'm mad about for no reason, why are you explaining how I'm wrong about it?"
See, the answer is "because you whining about it on the Internet bothers me more than the thing you're mad about", which doesn't make anybody involved look good. I didn't say I was a dignified commenter, I said the console wars nonsense is too undignified even for me.
One reason is that the Epic Games revenue split gives more to the developers. That being said though, they do enter exclusivity agreements with publishers all the time, which is anti-consumer.
But MudMan’s comment was more about how the meme denounces store-exclusive games, yet games that are available only on Steam are also store-exclusive.
GOG is a bit of an outlier. They allow developers to list their games DRM-free so their customers can truly own their games. If store exclusivity is the problem, GOG is the solution - not Steam.
Some game on Epic cost more for me than Steam(BTD6, Brotato and some other). If a game is available on Steam and Epic, I will buy it on Steam. If a game is available on Steam, GOG and Epic I will buy it on GOG. If it’s available on itch.io then itch.io.
Yeah. Those assholes. Taking 12% of the gross of a game sales instead of Valve’s 30% at a time when studios are struggling.
That better overlay and browser is totally worth 18% of the total value of a game and shouldn’t go to the employees making the product or into more features. I need my virtual stickers!
Steam also has anti-consumer policies. They just hide it better.
You think the reasen that games that are on both platforms don’t cost 20% more on Steam is because the devs love Gabe?
He’s a fucking billionaire who makes infinite money running an app store that takes a bigger cut of the game’s income than the combined pay of all the developers working on the game combined.
He’s not your friend. He’s a leech running a glorified app launcher.
This is a conversation about steam, the platform not Gabe. Yes, he is a billionaire, yes that makes him shitty, but guess what? Steam is a fantastic service for the end user, and that’s what matters.
If they charged less.fpr the platform, they’d still be raking in more than they can spend while also not taking an extra 20% out of game development budgets versus the competition.
As a consumer I’m more concerned about Epic’s anti-consumer practices than what they are paying devs.
Talking about how much they could charge devs does not change my experience as a consumer. It does not provide a compelling argument for me to use a service that does noticeably make things worse for the consumer.
You think Valve taking an extortionate amount of the budget doesn’t affect you as a consumer?
Games have budgets. With Valve taking as much money as the actual development budget for many games, the end product is significantly impacted. Games are regularly released late while missing features and so buggy as to not work. The extra 18% of the gross taken up by Valve versus EGS could be used to put more resources into the actual game.
Walmart and GameStop provide a physical place, that’s it. The Developer sends them the physical product.
Steam provides unlimited downloads, user forums, automatic updates, remote play, user reviews, Steam workshop etc…
None of these other stores provide these things.
Maybe Epic should charge more than 12% and invest that money in improving their client, or at least do that instead of wasting it on exclusivity deals. Then maybe I as a consumer will give a shit about Epic.
Yeah I love Epic’s cloud saves… Wait… I mean I love their supreme 80% discounts… No wait, I mean I love their integrated friends li… Their API?.. No, I mean their customizable launche…Well, the two free games they hand out once a month are alright.
I love their tags and vast user game reviews the most, myself:
This game that is 🛁 relaxing, has 🌐 diverse characters and is 🐣 great for beginners has 4.7 stars, from the “players in the Epic Games ecosystem.”
It’s the action adventure game GTA 5, of course.
Epic deserves shit for being a shitty company overall. The lower sale tax is great for devs, but most consumers don’t care, because the program is a shitty Unreal application pretending to be a shitty web browser
Valve can definitely lower their sale tax, they get loads of money off trading cards and skin sales, maintenance of that shit is waaay lower than the petabytes needed for games. At least some of the money is spent making better consumer stuff, like Steam deck and increasing the number of games that you can play on Linux with Proton. Doesn’t explain the 30% either way
This happened to me. I tried to force the issue but it never felt the same.
Try some computer-related past-times. Blender is a great option if you want to learn how to work with 3d models. But it’s much more than that, you can use other people’s models and make digital dioramas or animations.
An alternate route leads you into 3d printing or industrial design. Blender is great for organic shapes, but something like OnShape is better for accurate part sizes.
You could pick up some programming, learnpython.org could be a starting point, if you have zero experience.
You could try digital art. There’s a world of knowledge out there for you.
Radiation associated with Starlink satellites was detected at observing frequencies between 110 and 188 MHz, which is well below the 10.7- 12.7 GHz radio frequencies used for the downlink communication signals.
(The original article said 5M radiation, which should be around 60MHz.)
So Starlink is emitting RF in spectrum where they shouldn’t, which is avoidable, but takes effort.
My guess, and I could be wrong, is that this could be related to something other than the radio(s), such as switching power supplies finding opportunistic structures from which to radiate.
Starlink seems like a genuinely interesting and useful technology, in some ways.
But it also seems like it might not be worth having.
I’m thinking they might need to be deorbited, but I’m not confident in that yet. It sounds like it might be fixable in a new generation of Internet constellation satellites.
Idk how long the issue should be tolerated to wait for that, though. And while Starlink has a good amount of customers this kind of Internet is genuinely useful for, it’s still not a lot compared to all the other internet services.
Maybe Starlink deorbiting should come along with an expansion of the traditional communications network. But maybe it would be extremely expensive to reach Starlink’s customers with towers or cables.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles. Modest mid level titles from a studio between tentpole releases that would pay your bills and didn’t break the company if they didn’t sell well. It also generally related to the price you would be expected to pay. These days a AA/Indie game is $40, and a AAA title is $60/70. The rise of AAAA is a self aggrandizing to try and justify slapping a higher pricetag on products.
A great example would be an excerpt from Activision in 2004. Doom 3 in August would be AAA, then in September a bunch of AA games - cod game “united offensive”, X-Men legends, Rome:total war, and Shark Tale. Then in October a AAA title with Tony Hawks underground 2.
History Lesson enclosedNowadays it’s either AAA or Indie. Around the turn of PS3/x360 games became seen as a product and companies became more focused on individual games moneymaking, so fewer and fewer AA games got made in favor of big blockbusters. Game companies went broke trying to compete in this new market, and because so much rides on individual games that when they fail the company is in danger of going belly up - and so gets bought. This is why you heard about all those acquisitions and power consolidation in the past 20 years of the game industry. Big boys with money to spend buying up the losers tables when they lose their win streak. About the turn of the 2010s and the changeover from PS4/XOne, the Indie Scene exploded in the vacuum left behind in the wake of those buyouts. Older Millennials who had been in college for programming games graduated and came to market and began publishing through steams Greenlight and even finding publishers not bought yet to make it to market. Games that were either easier to make or play and needed word of mouth. Sometimes you would have a real break out like Minecraft, super meat boy, Celeste, that would catch the attention of big studios and get the offer of a lifetime to sell out and go big. And that brings us to today. Now because of market stagnation AAA has kind of lost meaning, because so many games are releasing in a poor state. In an effort to set a title above the others, a couple of people have tried to dub a game “AAAA” to try and reinvoke that sense of quality and polish that used to come with AAA. This started in 2020 with a Perfect Dark reboot (The Initiative) from Microsoft. The game has yet to release. It was subsequently laughed at and dismissed as silly corpo nonsense. Then Ubisoft stated Beyond Good and Evil 2 would be AAAA, this went under the radar because the game is vaporware and no one cares. And so this brings us to Skibidi Bonesacks where Yves (the CEO) called it a “truly AAAA game” to try and set it above games like assassin’s creed and call of duty. And because it’s nothing more than a buzzword to allow a ceo to stand on a stage self-felating, it released as a fucking disaster, like so many AAA games now anyway.
The meme is because Skull and bones is so bad of a fumble, to also just fumble its name. I picked it up from some review but I can’t remember who it was. Dunkey? Ah too long ago.
To elaborate a bit more than just budget/marketing, AAA games used to be distinguished from AA titles.
To be a bit of a pedant, “AAA” was basically the marketing term to denote a game with a larger budget. The term “AA” came around afterwards as a way to distinguish games that fell between smaller indie games, and larger budget AAA games.
I’ve been in the closed beta since February and I can vouch for this game being awesome. It’s been a great way to encourage me to take my dogs on walks and stay healthy. I definitely recommend checking it out.
To the dev, your game has motivated me to learn flutter/dart. I’ve been working with it for four months now and I’m getting close to finishing my first app, so thank you for the inspiration!
Awesome to hear that the game has inspired you to learn Dart & Flutter. Dart is an awesome language, and Flutter is versatile and easy tool for making some great looking UIs! But even more so, it always warms my heart to hear that the game has a positive impact on people’s lives. Keep it up, and thank you again!
Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
Heaven’s Vault is a game about archaeology and translating a dead language. You explore a unique solar system and discover ruins, in which you uncover artifacts, and bits of text. Through context clues, you translate the passages to uncover the storyline. It’s not difficult, so if you’re looking for a puzzle, this won’t really do it for you, but it’s more of a narrative experience. If you aren’t sure about a word or phrase, you can give it a guess (based on assigning words from a collection of possible translations to specific symbols), and the game will remember that choice and let you slowly revise your translations as you find new text that rules out prior incorrect guesses. There’s an interconnected storyline with multiple paths to follow, and a very unique world - haven’t seen anything like it in other games.
The game has a NG+ mode wherein you start with all of your translations from the first playthrough intact, but, most of the bits of text are considerably longer and more involved, letting you use your prior knowledge to uncover more of the story and the lore of the world, which is also neat.
Didn’t know that! Was going based off of the review score; 1600 reviews in 5 years seemed pretty little-known. All the same, don’t mind the downvotes - that’s the point of the thread after all. :)
This sounds really interesting. I'm gonna put this on my wishlist in hopes it goes on sale or something. Can't justify $25 right now due to circumstances.
If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy Chants of Sennar! It’s also about translating languages; it’s more puzzle-oriented and less story-based; there’s a story to uncover, but it’s not as clear-cut and narrative driven. Still a great game, however!
Sci-fi, you’re dropped down to a lush alien planet to do what humans do best: strip all of its natural resources! Combat is limited, but boils down to fighting off wild animals - the main gist of the game is building and optimizing things like miners/conveyor belts/smeltors/assemblers/etc to automate the pillaging of the environment with increasing efficiency… which admittedly sounds more like work than play, but this title caught me a bit off guard with how fun and - true to its name - satisfying it is play.
It’s a 3D first person game instead of a 2D isometric, and most of the differences stem from that. More manual building (they added blueprints but I don’t know how good they are), infinite resource sources which means setting up a mining outpost is permanent. Much less focus on fighting wildlife, though that is present.
Overall, it’s a much more relaxing, slower paced game than Factorio. Both are good at different aspects of the same thing.
Being able to build vertically makes it a very different experience. Using a hyper tube chain to yeet yourself all the way across the map is chef’s kiss.
The blueprints are helpful for mid to late game when you need to set up dozens of the same thing. It’s not a perfect system, but can definitely be a time saver.
The combat is totally different. There’s no raid/defense mechanism. The mobs have a fixed spawn point. They’ll stop respawning once you start building around that point. Once you learn the appropriate attack/dodge maneuver for each type, they’re barely even a nuisance to kill.
Just a warning: The current version has performance issues, it stutters like crazy even on beefy setups. It seems they didn’t get the level streaming implementation of UE5 right on the first try. This will probably get fixed for 1.0, but currently it’s painful playing in some parts of the map.
Ubisoft’s bread and butter were never assassin’s creed type hardcore games, but those trashy looking pet sims you could find in the bargain bin. The only reason they’re able to make the hardcore gamerz stuff is because of the financial security the shitty pet games brought in
There was an old flash game called “You Only Live Once”
It’s basically a rudimentary mario-like platformer. But once you die, the game just cuts to your funeral. Each time you load up the game again, it just shows time passing as your grave slowly ages and is forgotten.
This feels like it’d be great for a networked game where what you do gets passed onto other players so eventually someone can finish it. Souls-like or Death Stranding-like multiplayer style. The issue is it’d probably take a lot of effort to make in a way that be interesting and take long enough, and also if it can only be done once then that sucks for making money. I guess it could use procedural elements and make it replayable, but that’d probably remove some of the charm.
I would just talk to your kid and listen to his feelings and wants. What does he enjoy about Roblox? Can he find that enjoyment with some other games? Does he understand that its not a punishment, e.g. it’s not anything that he did and that you aren’t blaming him? Sure, you can suggest a few alternatives and they might take and be fun, but you’ll need to be attuned to his feelings around what he might see as a punishment for something that he did so that he doesn’t internalize it and hurt the relationship you have with him.
yeah this should be the immediate next step. The kid shouldn’t feel punished. It shouldn’t be a “you’re not allowed because I said so.” Kids can be smart and might be able to understand why Roblox is exploitative.
At least this is a better reason to take a way a kid’s video game. My parents banned me from certain games/movies because they had positive depictions of black people.
no, just very idiosyncratic white American racists. I don’t even know where they got it from. My grandparents weren’t racists and my parents never listened to Rush Limbaugh or anything.
Nah, they don’t watch that either. They’re very detached and only watch football or movies with Humphrey Bogart. My best guess is they felt some kind of resentment their whole lives because they were always the poorest ones out of their siblings. All my aunts and uncles formed businesses or got moderately wealthy, whereas I grew up on the lower middle side of that spectrum. And that turned into standard American racism.
What you're describing isn't real, but even if it was, it wouldn't warrant a refund. You can't play 100 hours then make up phantom bugs to get your money back.
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