if there’s one rule to modding valve games, it’s “don’t touch GabeN’s hat and skin sales”. TF2 despite being a real mess and valve’s server being practically unplayable, still brings in millions of dollars of gambling money, and now that CS2 keys are not tradable TF2 keys are in demand for laundering money. of course they are gonna take down a direct remake of their live service game minus all the bots and shitty cosmetics.
Not exactly. Plenty of CS mods give players knife skins and things while on the server for doing things in the server. They only work while in that server, but Valve doesn’t care. Releasing a product that could be mistaken for an official product is not smart though. They just released Counter Strike 2 (which was called CS Source 2 for a long time) so they have to defend their IP from confusion. This isnt likely about money because this wouldn’t hurt that in the slightest. Who had even heard of it before this post? It’s just something they have to do legally.
I mean that might be true, but those key reseller sites are also often grey-market. Sometimes they are legit, but sometimes they resell keys they bought with stolen credit cards etc.
I personally wouldn’t buy from a site that I couldn’t easily verify is legit (steam, gog, hb, etc)
Multiple indie developers I’ve seen (wube who makes factorio has been very vocal about it) have complained about losing significant amounts of money from grey/black market keys since they end up being on the hook for fees when people do credit card chargebacks.
I have purchased literally hundreds of steam keys from such shops over the years and have had a grand total of only 3 keys be removed from my account within days or weeks, and was granted refunds from the shops when I provided proof from Steam that the keys were rejected as duplicates. Every game I’ve installed other than those 3 have worked without issues. It’s an educated risk that I failed to mention because it’s been over 99% successful for me. Make your own call.
edit: Also worth mentioning that there are many games in my Steam account that were added after the games were delisted, such as the original GTA Trilogy, solely because I could still find keys on keyshops. If you want a delisted game, it’s worth considering.
They aren’t taking about dupes that don’t work and you get screwed out of money. They are talking about legit keys bought by stealing money from other people. If you buy such keys (no way to know whether one is or isn’t), then you are splitting the profits from fraud with a criminal enterprise. You get a discount, they get laundered stolen money.
Your reply doesn’t address the core problem in any way.
Like you said, no way to know one way or the other. Disapprove of me if it makes you feel superior. I’ve still spent a mint on Steam and GOG, and I’m still pirating. And half this community bitches about paying for anything so excuse me while I lol.
I’m for piracy when the ones being hurt are massive companies who can cover it by lowering their quarterly bonus .5%. I’m not for knowing your neighbors bike was stolen and then buying one “just like it” from a pawn shop at a steal.
This isn’t about feeling superior, this is about having empathy for the people whose money was stolen and frustration that this business model is profitable because of people who support it.
Do what you’re going to do, but folks reading this thread deserve to understand the moral implications of taking part in this.
Ok then, everyone is informed about things you cannot verify as true per key, and that you support piracy when it screws the right entity with employees, so you’re a model of selective morality.
Like he said, do as you will, everyone.
edit: honestly, I love the usual “it’s ok to screw gaming corporations” angle, when if you had a sense of morality worth talking about, you’d advocate zero piracy and that everyone should wait until games were something like 1/2 price or bargain bin, because at least then the corporations may reverse course on raising prices, and maybe not lay off so many workers. But when you say it’s fine to pirate that, you’re possibly contributing to those massive layoffs, regardless of how much money the company still has, because such decisions are determined by performance metrics. Like I said, model of selective morality.
They didn't say piracy is good. They said piracy is (by a massive amount) less malicious and less harmful than buying from fences for stolen keys like all the disgusting sites you're promoting.
I’m for piracy when the ones being hurt are massive companies who can cover it by lowering their quarterly bonus .5%.
That is selectively supporting piracy, like it or not.
And to be clear, the only site I actually promoted and linked to is gg.deals, where you can compare the prices at regular storefronts in one place, not just for keyshops. Where I got my keys were mentioned but not linked. As said before, options for every moral stance.
They interpreted it better than I said it. Who’s acting superior now? This is clearly a real sore spot for you. I don’t pirate but I also don’t go around telling people how immoral it is to pirate. Plus piracy is part of the business model for some companies and it’s how we went from cable to streaming (although thats getting all fucked up again).
So yes I have much less moral problem with piracy. But like I said I didn’t come here to get all morally superior, I spoke up because you clearly didn’t understand the nature of the harm you are doing since you took the wrong message away that someone was warning about being scammed by these companies.
I don’t actually care about the morality of pirating, I said that bit to point out the total hypocrisy you have on display. It’s not a sore spot for me at all, I have no problem doing it, the same way I have no problem buying hundreds of games directly from Steam and GOG, or hundreds more from keyshops. You’re the one actually complaining about morality, you made it specifically clear you wanted everyone to know such implications.
Honestly, totally amazing that needed to be explained to you.
It’s almost 3am here, so I’m cutting off this nonsense now for something more productive. Sleep.
Been on the Internet for a while. 100% of people who say this are not entertained and are really saying this to stroke a badly bruised ego. OP, it’s clear to me that you got your ego damaged when people poked holes in your plan to make less money by buying things from shady sites. I hope after your sleep you come back to engage in a healthy manner without constantly trying to act morally superior or at least uncaring about real moral grey areas. Supporting these sites negatively affects real people.
It's weird cos you're the only person bringing up pirating first (others are bringing it up as a talking point you've raised), and that's not the dichotomy - it's not dubious reselling sites or pirating, it's Humble Choice, the topic of your post, where the games are already discounted, the developers have decided to opt in, and some money is actually going to charity.
Even if you bring up your original post as providing "options for everyone", it was written in the spirit of advertising grey market sites as an alternative to Humble Choice, and therefore it's entirely fair that others are bringing up the harms of grey market sites so that everyone knows what the risks are between them. I used to use those grey market sites as a kid more than a decade ago before I understood that they were a tool by scammers to make their money, and now I no longer use them. It would only be honest for you to have talked about that in your original post rather than ignoring it because the only alternative to you is piracy.
Even developers would rather people pirate than buy from key resellers
where they said developers would prefer that to keyshops, and in the order I read them and answered people, that was the one I read and replied to, before first mentioning it myself in reply to another person here
If you want me to stay in the piracy section, just say so. I’m there anyway.
I’ve also plainly stated in the same comment
I have also purchased literally hundreds of games directly from Steam and GOG, so the sum total of my soul in gaming is in the positive, as far as I’m concerned.
so the rest of your reply is ignorant nonsense, because piracy is not the only alternative for me. It’s one of many options for me.
edit: if you want to argue about the order I read and responded to messages, feel free to check my comment history. They are listed in order of creation regardless of last edit.
For me it’s simply EGS paying developers to lock games only their store.
If they were just competing, trying to deliver a better product I would massively support them, similar to how I support GOG, however when you start locking content to your storez you end up with “PlayStation vs Xbox” devision of content.
This is exactly it. They’re not building their brand by providing a superior service/experience or driving market prices down. They’re using venture capital to fund giving away games to get you to use their wildly subpar services. They’re trying to buy market position without the services to justify it.
You can get them both with the one license now, so you don’t have to pick. I like having the 2 options available and I don’t let my kids buy anything on the bedrock one where they have the Minecoin BS to buy stuff. They only have real money (paper) and no digital-compatible methods to pay for anything.
But the mods on Java edition are excellent, and the fact that it runs on any computer OS is a big plus. I can’t recommend anything more than Minecraft for a kids’ game.
I never understood the "Minecraft Bedrock was made so it could run everywhere" argument. Like, wasn't Java's moto "Write once, run everywhere"? Why settle for a garbage version of the original, when the original can run on every computational device made within the last decade?
When Java was made, nobody guessed that a phone or console would ever be as powerful as a PC. “Everywhere” really meant “Everywhere powerful enough (just PCs).”
Could MC Java be ported to a phone? Yes, but C++ is just so much more efficient for a small device.
Ummm, since we are being critical, I’m going to say that low effort bug reports get sent to the recycle bin on my dev team. Also, what’s up with the tone of your post? You sound like you hated Cyberpunk 2077 in general and so you felt the need to scream it from the rooftops.
I’ve played Phantom Liberty now for a couple days and I’ve never seen anything you’re reporting, so you’ll need to give more detail, like are you playing this on PC or Console, and which console? What are your settings? Also lose the bad attitude man, we are all here to have fun.
At least the “character getting ejected” bug can have a direct connection with framerate issues and the corresponding settings. Most of the other stuff you’ve mentioned can be impacted by localisation, subtitle and accessibility settings.
And when you DO migrate it to a Microsoft account, and DON’T want them to have your phone number, they’ll fake “There’s been suspicious activity on your account, we HAVE to have your phone number now!” until you give it up.
Can confirm, I found creating a new Microsoft account and doing literally nothing with it for around half an hour is suspicious enough to lock the account and require a phone number.
People are getting pretty spicy with the responses. OP was just underwhelmed by a game getting a lot of hype. Like lots of people are going to like it, but not everyone. I think theyre just trying to generate discussion, not say “everyone who likes starfield is an CHUMP!!” or something.
All Paradox Interactive games ever created 😂
The worst I had was Hearts Of Iron IV. I played a 2h tutorial only to not understand a single thing the real game threw at me afterwards...
You gotta just start with an easy country. The CK2 community used to call Ireland “Tutorial Island” since it was low key and a good place to learn the mechanics, same with Spain in EU, or Belgium in Vicky.
About what Hearts of Iron? I tried that game once (3 or 4, don’t remember) and basically gave up when the tutorial ended and I still had no idea how to do anything.
It’s not nearly as complex as it initially looks imo, but I also play with a million mods some of which make the game needlessly complicated so maybe the vanilla game just looks simple in comparison to me now lol
Also, the tutorial has suffered bitrot quite a lot. The game has seen many significant changes since release, but the tuturial was only partially updated to reflect them.
I come back after a major patch or every 6 months and its all changed again! Which is good as it keeps it fresh, but the tutorial is very lacking on the changes.
I still don’t know how to play hearts of iron IV. I’d love to learn but I’m a trial by fire learner. It’s really hard for me to make it through a 2hr YouTube tutorial with monotonous robot voices.
There was a moment in my evil playthrough of fallout 3 where I robbed a man’s house, killed him in his sleep, ate him, then slept in his bed. After a moment of clarity, I closed the game and never played that save again.
Windows applications can still access the Linux functionality when running under Wine, though of course that has to have been purposefully coded in.
However you can run wine itself inside something like firejail to properly sandbox the whole thing - I have Lutris in my Linux gaming machine configured to do just that for all games by default (my firejail config even blocks networking).
There is a launch configuration option under each game (under System Options tabs, if I’m not mistaken) called “command prefix” were you can put the firejail stuff (so if you put just “firejail -someoption” there your game gets launched with, for example “firejail -someoption wine …”) or whatever other sandboxing command you want to use (such as bubblewrap).
In the main Lutris options, there’s a section with the default values for all those launch options for games, so if you put it in the “command prefix” there, all games get launched with that command prefix unless you override it in that game’s launch options (so, for example, if you’re blocking networking for all games but want to run a game for multiplayer over the net, you override the sandboxing wrapper options in that game’s launch options specifically, which won’t affect any other game).
fun fact: this expression comes from the time before alarm clocks (or clocks in general), where towns had someone whose job it was to go round the town and knock on windows and doors in the morning, waking people up. Knocker-uppers.
They would also wait for the men to leave for work and then attempt to seduce the women who stayed behind. It lead to a lot of contention from the resultant pregnancies. This angered a lot of men and women who left for the new world. This is why Americans use the phase to mean something related but functionally different. I made all of that up, but thank you for citing an actual historical fact that added context to my previous comment.
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