Were all Take Two games automatically updated in secret and now hijack your machine with root access to spy on everything you do? ❌
Do Take Two games contain code to report telemetry and user information(including application/system activity) to a home server? ✅
Is this EULA change extraordinary and particularly egregious in comparison to others that most people have probably already agreed to? ❌(IMO)
Are people riled up because e a YouTube video went a little viral and now they’re all playing telephone to the point where it’s now gotten to the point of random dumdums are review booming a 13 year old game claiming it’s turned into literal spyware? ✅(again, IMO)
Should you be surprised by any of this if you’ve been even remotely paying attention for any period of the last 30-40 years? ❌
Do we need more than just angry idiots in the battle against corpatocracy? ✅
We should be done coddling the late comers at this point. Yes welcome them and accept them, but at a certain point your level of ignorance became a detriment to your community and you should be made aware of that fact.
A bit more than what, not really sure what your point here is? All of those bullet points are similar if not identical to terms in other EULAs half the people in this thread have already clicked thru.
I’ll say it again, if you think this is anything new you haven’t been paying attention. I’m all for calling this fuckery out and pushing for something better. But like where yall been?
Still no actual answers from anyone on how this is ‘more’ than what I described in my op. Sure it’s a more detailed list, but it’s really not the “gotcha” everyone seems to think it is. That is, if youve been paying attention.
Let’s ride the wave. Turn this into a huge controversy known industry-wide. Then, next game that comes out with EULA like this, we say “THIS GAME HAS A BORDERLANDS-STYLE EULA”. Pretend it’s new to exploit the shock value and get the gamers riled up. Then, the industry gets better.
Tell the frog that the pot wasn’t always this hot.
What point are you trying to make? You say you’re “all for calling this kind of fuckery out” but then you’re criticizing people for calling it out? And who cares what other EULAs might say? The point is that the license agreement for this game and others owned by this company didn’t say this shit before, and now they do. The company is actively making their user agreement more hostile to the users which is what people are pissed about.
That it takes more critical thinking to accomplish the organized action needed for real change than leaving a bunch of negative reviews.
I never once said ‘other company’s do it so just deal with it.’ Fuckawhataboutism. I said “if you think this is new, you haven’t been paying attention.” What I shouldn’t have left unsaid was ‘the review is a nice start and show of intention. but we need a lot more dedicated, well organized action, to actually accomplish any change.’
But people read into things what they want to hear.
If you look at Valve’s TOS or any other game developer who has games with an online component, you will see the exact same language regarding data collection. The language being added is to comply with laws, like the GDPR, which requires specific language indicating what data is collected and how it is used.
The data that is being collected is the same as it was 10 years ago. There’s nothing new here, just a YT video that got a lot of views and social media being full of people who don’t fact check anything.
Some people will always find an excuse to change nothing.
It doesn’t matter how many similar EULA’s people have already accepted. The best moment to not eat it anymore would have been the first time it happened, the second best time is right now.
Also, retroactively amending an EULA is a different quality, since people have already paid for the game and would be locked out after the fact if they didn’t accept.
I’m sad you read this as an admission of defeat and an attempt to deter others from fighting. Was hoping for more of a ‘you’re late, you have a bunch of homework to catch up on’ vibe but I’m not great at communicating all the time.
It seems like you’re giving of a “victim” vibe with this by stating you wished for only a particular type of “positive response” when you’ve posted a misleading comment and doubled-down with “EULAs half the people in this thread have already clicked thru” which you have no way of knowing.
Were all Take Two games automatically updated in secret and now hijack your machine with root access to spy on everything you do? ❌
10.2. Updates, Modifications, and Sunset. We may provide patches, updates, or upgrades to the Services, Virtual Items, Content, or your Account that may be required for you to continue using the Services, including automatic or “in the background” updates without notice to you.
“Was hoping for more of a ‘you’re late, you have a bunch of homework to catch up on’” You’re expecting others to hold your hand and inform you of every event or action taken by every company. I guess I’ll do my part since I have been trying to let other people know for a while now,
Steam Discussion deleted after questioning the “EULA” of Stormgate, another post by me after I tried to inform others and was suppressed, meaning the reviews is the only course of action that most have at their disposal. Even posting on their official subreddit did no good with the exact same type of response you’ve presented here,
They didn’t collect such information (they technically couldn’t), they are giving examples of such types of personally identifiable information.
Yeah, it’s excessive, they don’t need half of this. However, writing it this way makes it near impossible for them to screw up by accident. If you play games, you probably agreed to a handful of ELUA’s like that by now.
This keeps getting brought up in every controversial game these days and the answer is always the same: They aren’t.
Most of this is not out of the ordinary.
Imagine thinking all of this information about you isn’t already owned by several corporations lol.
Some of these stuffs are required in X countries not yours, stop thinking the entire world is all about you buddy.
You’ve officially become part of the problem and an ally to the very same reason why we can’t “accomplish the organized action needed for real change (than leaving a bunch of negative reviews.)”
I get that and agree, this is just a crappy and kinda dumb stick to be wasting the energy on because it makes the side opposing the injustice look like petulant children instead of enabling effective action.
I see this kind of comment before and I will never understand it - “other companies do it so just bend over and let us do it to you too!”
People say this all the time about Denuvo too: “Other games already have Denuvo, why are you crying about it here when you’re playing other games?”
And see, that’s the problem - we aren’t playing those other Denuvo games. And same thing applies here, guess what, a lot of us aren’t buying games from gross companies like EA with these shit terms. So when a company we are doing business with suddenly changes their terms to be shit, that’s a valid complaint. Some of us have already been boycotting bad business practices in the industry, so the idea of company changing terms towards the boycott after we’ve already invested in the game feels like a betrayal because it is.
So maybe stop focusing on what you assume the rest of audience is doing and instead go back to focusing on what the people at the goddamn podium are trying to pull?
Why does everyone insist on adding the ‘so just bend over and take’ part whenever someone points out another source of wrongdoing? Like what do yall always take it to mean that the speaker is implying a whataboutism argument? And not maybe as ‘oh shit this has been going on longer than just this maybe we should learn about that too and we might figure out why it hasn’t been stopped yet.’
If “everyone” keeps reading a sentiment you did not intend out of your message, perhaps it is time to consider that you are doing a poor job of communicating your point.
Or you’re being disingenuous and just don’t like being calling on your hissy fit.
Would it shock you to know that ALL of these are in the Steam terms of service also?
The only really sus one to me is the forced arbitration clause, and Steam also had that til they were pressured to remove it by multiple legal cases, including a class action brought to them by Steam users just last September. It is only sus because it’s outdated - companies are generally removing them now rather than adding them. legal.io/…/Valve-Removes-Mandatory-Arbitration-fr…
RE: remaining top 5 bullet points, 3 of the remaining 4 bullet points are uncontroversial bullet points about anticheat. The fourth is banning modding, which is also just a heavy handed anticheat attempt, and not uncommon for online games to add to their ToS to allow banning at their discretion. Either way its clumsy at the least as some mods can be harmless eg HUD mods for colourblind people and deserves some negativity - but not to this level, given everything else is just so boilerplate.
Collected data types: these are all for if you buy stuff with a credit card / paypal / etc off 2k/parent company Take 2. Remember, they sell games with in-game purchases. They also have an app which has location permissions option which is what the precise location is about.
So yes - again, as OP said, this is nothing controversial if you have paid attention to ToS meaning and content over the past 20 years.
Aside from the forced arbitration crap - which Steam, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Google, AT&T - and hundreds of other major companies all snuck into their ToS over the years, and many have now been legally pressured to remove by consumer rights group. That is stupid because it shows their legal team is behind the times, companies are mostly removing their forced arbitration clauses nowadays because it has been the cause of many lost class actions.
Not a lot. Even when it isn’t a flatpak windows software running on linux won’t be able to interact with the system anywhere near as much as on windows.
How locked down a flatpak is depends entirely on the developer and what permissions they request. By default, they can’t really see much. For example, they can’t even see the processes running on your host or your user and system files.
Flatpak does not do anything about network access though, it can only do no access or full access, no in between. The data they can collect on Linux in a Flatpak is very limited but it does not prevent them from calling home.
So…if Steam is running in a Flatpak, and Borderlands is launched from Steam, how much can they even see…really?
Without using exploits to escape the container, not much. A very empty Windows environment with a single game installed, your network interfaces and any directories that the Flatpak has access to (usually just the SteamLibrary directories).
The TOS (www.take2games.com/legal/en-US/) changes are mostly related to data that they collect via their interfacing with Steam and through their website. This idea that they’re requiring you to agree to a root level access or installing a spyware rootkit is just nonsense.
A youtuber named Hellfire has been on a spree, basically discovering how fucked up EULAs have been in games for the past 20ish years… well this is all brand new news to him and and his Zoomer / Gen A followers.
There is, as of right now, literally zero evidence that Borderlands 2 has been updated with a rootkit, with kernel level anti cheat, anything like that.
The last update to its game files was 2 years ago.
This is almost certainly them updating the EULA everywhere, the precise timing of this being for some specific arcane legal and business reasons… TakeTwo runs a whole bunch more games than juat Borderlands… namely GTA V…
…
Is this EULA bad? Yes.
Is it much worse than it was before, or what other large gaming companies EULAs have, and have had for… a decade+?
Maybe by a bit, but not really, no.
…
Is Randy Pitchford a dumb idiot asshole?
Oh absolutely yes, but that shouldn’t give people the liscense to make completely unevidenced claims about other things.
…
The game does not have a kernel level AC or some kind of rootkit DRM, as many, many people are currently saying it does.
I guess gamer attention span can really hold onto a few keywords and phrases at a time.
… I say this all as person who is vehemently against kernel level AC, who has been pointing out for 4 years, that almost all existing anti cheat systems currently have at least one game that implements their AC, on linux, without using kernel level anything… it is entirely possible to do AC without kernel level shit, even on linux, and has been for at least 4 years. EAC and BattleEye have supported linux for 4 years, but nearly no game that uses them has actually used this feature/available and offered support.
I am glad that this level of hate is finally being directed at shitty EULAs, but lets at least get our facts straight, or actually provide some hitherto unseen evidence that Borderlands has had some kind of sleeper malware in it for at least the past two years, just waiting to be activated by a TOS update to every single Take Two game.
Sure the game’s setting predates the Nazis and there are none to kill in the game. However, there is an entire inexhaustible faction of Confederates to murder. But even better than that, the game gives you several opportunities to stumble on a Klan meeting.
These encounters are special because they’re a sandbox for creative butchery and guiltless massacre. Even the game’s honor system looks the other way while you toss a gallon of liquor onto the burning cross, dousing the Grand Dragon and all his Cyclopses, sending them in a screeching panic, fully engulfed, off a nearby cliff just like that dude in Lord of the Rings.
Evey time I run into the RDR2 version of the KKK (Lemoyne Raiders?) I get so giddy and happy that I get the opportunity to find a new, creative, fun way to kill them all.
Probably favorite is to hogtie the ones I can keep alive, toss all the live and dead ones into a single pile, then light it on fire
Lemoyne Raiders aren’t the Klan. There’s actual klansmen too. You have to find them at night in the woods near Lemoyne, but they’re never associated with the raiders.
I could have sworn I got some note off one of the hooded corpses that identified them as Raiders, and nothing actually using the actual KKK name, though it’s so obvious from the hoods and the cross that that’s exactly who they’re intended to be
SpoilerI love the part when you come across that old man who’s house etc has been repossessed and he wants you to go and retrieve some belongings. I initially I felt sorry for him so of course I went and did it, and then you find out he was a slave trader. I completed the quest anyway and liked the cut scene where Arthur just burns everything. Then before I rode away I shot him in the head and laughed when I saw it made my honour go up
I can’t speak for other people, I don’t even play solitaire. Realistically, I imagine most people get new PCs with newer Windows versions and play whatever solitaire is on there.
This isn’t really new. Solitaire has had ads for over a decade now since Windows 8, and there is a monthly premium subscription to remove them. As I understand it they also don’t show during offline play, but might be wrong about that.
If it makes you feel better/worse, the subscription is shared across multiple games. I was playing a bunch of Microsoft Jigsaw at one point (don’t ask), and while you could play as much as you’d like for free, the fact that they squeezed ads into it to extort you (or more likely, clueless older people) really cheapened the whole thing.
They had a lot of pretty photos which were probably not free, but come on, this is Microsoft, they have the money. I think this should’ve been bundled with Windows for free. I truly think a lot of people might even look back on it fondly the way they do with a lot of the older bundled-in games. We will take for granted how much the default option with any sort of technology around us has an impact on us as kids. Maybe not everyone, but not everyone loved pinball or inkball.
Actual textbook enshittification: what was once a space for a nice default thing to fall back on if you were bored and had their operating system has now become an “opportunity” to “generate more business.” Very sad. Computers are impossibly wonderful machines, everyone who has access to one should be able to enjoy a few basic things, packed in, for free - with no strings attached (looking at you candy crush).
I’m sure there’s a nice free or paid jigsaw game made with love out there that could satisfy that itch I felt that one week in 2020. Hm.
Edit: I have now redownloaded Microsoft Jigsaw and might just expand this comment into a full post/rant about the state of modern consumer software through the lens of Microsoft’s current casual games suite
There are daily challenges and things like that which is what I would refer to as online play. Not that crazy imho of you’ve put thousands of hours into vanilla solitaire that you may welcome something to spice it up.
I can’t see any news that you can ‘pay to remove ads’ but lots of “how do i remove ads in solitaire” with settings instructions or registry edits so i think op is only half right
I did. I’m not going to go buy it for this though. They literally use poker terms, poker imagery, and real poker hands. Saying it’s just because there’s cards involved is disingenuous.
You could use the same for majong or pachinko like games like Peggle. The issue is the actual gambling, not just the game elements or risk, reward, and points going up. Loot boxes are 10× worse.
Are people criticizing it? There is a certain critical mass that when something becomes popular enough a subset of the population will automatically oppose it.
Man the negativity. I’m so sick of gamers negativity. It’s not even a new game, it’s a remaster. you knew what the product was going to be. It’s oblivion. We all knew it was oblivion. If you don’t like oblivion, why did you buy it?!
I swear to God if they changed it too much I’d be commenting here on a post about how they had no respect for the original. Then we wonder why “they never listen to gamers”. Because we bitch and moan about everything.
Just musing on the fact that Bethesda doesn’t care about making games and instead just cashes in on nostalgia. I also think their finance bros realized their upcoming big IP drop is going to be an objective POS and wanted to prime people’s expectations by re-releasing a 20 year old game with some lipstick on it.
It would be neat if they hired some people who actually had innovative ideas about gameplay, visuals and stories to maybe make a neat new game within an existing or new IP, but they haven’t done that in literal decades so I think its pretty reasonable to not be incredibly excited about anything they are putting out or planning to put out in the future.
As someone with no kids and a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy video games, I wonder how much of this vitriol comes from bitter millennials who are mad at the world because they don’t have time to play games anymore.
As a long time Bethesda game fan I agree with you on almost everything you’ve said about Bethesda… But the remaster is a terrible example of your points.
The remaster does exactly what it says on the tin and they’ve been very upfront about how it was made and why it was made in the launch video.
It’s hard to criticise them for cashing in on nostalgia when they’ve shown time and time again with Skyrim re-releases that do a fraction of what the Oblivion remaster does still sell like hot cakes.
Nostalgia is at the core of their business model. That’s why they march Skyrim’s corpse out every two years like clockwork; that’s why they picked Fallout for a new franchise after ES; that’s, frankly, likely why Starfield sucks so much.
It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.
The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.
It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.
More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.
With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.
Emm, no. If you build something from the ground up it’s called remake.(Demon Souls, the Resident Evil series) Remastered is taking the old game and put on a fresh paint of coat and give it some modern QOL so it’s much more accessible today.
Skyblivion is closer to remake than remaster.
Also i feels like you misunderstand why people like this game.
If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.
A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.
A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.
I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.
Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.
They literally had a hour long stream explaining what they did, and then you could have watched any of the thousands of twitch streams showing it. There was zero reason that you should have bought this if you thought this. I knew exactly what I was buying, seems like pretty much everyone did.
You are describing a remake. A remaster is a fresh coat of paint. Todd Howard said verbatim “This is not a remake” and then talked about his reasons why. You’re going on like they lied to you when they literally said everything you just complained about, and then you still bought it.
And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison
Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.
844k now. Wow. I wonder what caused the sudden surge? Or is it just that most momentum can be gain at the start and towards the end like with Kickstarters?
After Ross announced the campaign is dead a bunch of YouTubers (and media, I think?) picked up the topic and started spreading the word far and wide. This is the result.
That’s actually one of the most annoying parts about the whole thing. SKG campaign has been running for what, a year now? Barely anyone with an audience cared enough to even look into it, let alone spread the news. Now that things came close to failing suddenly everyone thinks it’s an important topic and scrambled to make videos/posts/whatever. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt but I just don’t have that in me any more…
We could’ve been in so much better place with awareness, petitions and general sentiment if people in the industry actually cared about these things from the start.
Better late than never, I guess. I just hope there’s enough time to push through the EU petition as well.
Up untill Ross posted his ‘SKG is dead’ video… Thor had by far gotten the most views of anyone with a video discussing SKG.
And Thor… well, he was anti-SKG, and had been spreading a bunch of objectively false bullshit about it, actual FUDD.
So… about half of Ross’s video was dedicated to pointing out how Thor was wildly misunderstanding things, and fairly graciously and politely trying to correct these misconceptions.
So here’s the two sort of things at play I see, in terms of 'why sudden surge now?'
Thor was just shown to be objectively, factually wrong. Thus, the immediate effect of this would be to reiterate and clarify and reinforce with more specificity what SKG actually is… and that could directly convince people to give a damn, to believe in Ross’s SKG over Thor’s misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
But uh, almost certainly much, much more relevant:
Ross doing (1) created an absolute drama shit storm via the way youtube works now… which is very much just drama mongers and commentators reporting on e-drama. (1) kicked off an actual, organic, honest to god, truly viral explosion of many, many people who’d basically never heard of any of this before, mostly dogpiling on Thor for being such a disingenuous, egotistical asshole and liar, but also of course encouraging people to sign the SKG petition.
This kind of absurd, out of nowhere explosion of popularity of some topic, idea, meme, whatever, that spreads from person to person to person, from the ground up instead of top down… this is what something going ‘viral’ originally meant in the earlier days of the internet, 15 to 20 ish years ago.
You know, it spreads, from host to host, like a pandemic outbreak, shockingly rapidly.
These days we have everything hypermanaged by algorithms that silo you into your own content niche… and this was an exceptional enough of an event that it broke containment.
Videos like … this entire topic/event/story… used to be what the YouTube trending tab looked like… just totally random shit that for whatever reason, a bunch of people organically shared with each other, back when the algos were much, much more primitive.
…
Anyway… extremely ironically, a whole lot of the viral nature of this is due to Thor being just such an astoundingly massive piece of shit liar and manipulator.
He has a whole entire history of being astoundingly cocky, arrogant, dishonest, deceptive, intellectually inconsistent, rhetorically manipulative, etc, and it is genuienly… just astounding, i dont know what other word to use, to go through every single shitty thing Thor has done or said, not only in regards to SKG, but many, many other things Thor has done.
Basically, Thor is now a lolcow, a perfect person to milk by making content criticizing him, because he really is that much of an unbelievable, outrageuous idiot asshole.
I mean, its not technically completely impossible, but the vast majority of EU countries require a valid name, id, address, etc, its usually a pretty dumb idea to bot spam an official government web portal, and I’m sure there will be a review process after July 31.
Also… its not like it hits a million and then just no one else can sign up to it anymore.
It’ll stay open till the end of the month, could easily breach a million, maybe even two million if anything like this insane rate keeps up.
Right now we need 1669 per day remaining, though that number is probably going ot be smaller by the time you click the link.
Worth noting that the actual target is somewhere above one million, since there’s probably some invalid signatures mixed in and the initiative needs a million even after these get removed. Still, it’s looking really good.
That guy legitimately made his hobby into his job.
There’s 0 reasons for him to still keep updating the game with as much content as he’s doing except for his own satisfaction. Truly the best developer a game can have
It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
I can buy a new toaster from the shop, why can’t I buy a woman too? Does this mean Gamers are pro sex-work? Or pro indentured servitude for women more likely…
my inner engineer wants to challenge this: I know there’s a dildo company that does tours, and at least copies penises and vulvae of customers as a souveneir, im sure there are things that copy at least he surface of the vaginal canal if you want to be completionist. maybe with the right kind of 3d printer it could be done? not sure, haven’t really worked with nylon materials.
Nylon? I would think this would be a ‘print the moulds we use to pour in silicone’ situation, if we’re going for usability. formlabs.com/blog/casting-silicone-guide/ On an engineering note I’m also sure I’ve seen this exact thing before, but I wonder what would improve it. Self-heating? DIY solution could be a hidden pocket for reusable handwarmers lol
Gamers tend to think of things as quests. A box to check off. A completionist. Getting married and having kids is part of life’s quests for many people. It’s not seen as collaboration in many ways.
How does romance work in most video games? Select the correct dialogue options, memorize the correct answer to questions, give them the same gift every day?
The other main way a lot of young men “interact” with women is through porn, which is always made with a mind to what a woman would enjoy during sex…/s
because you think of “I never get laid” as a normal human need to connect with another person, which is what it is but they’re too deep in misogyny to realize it. instead to them getting laid is a quest to complete and it involves a quest item known as a woman, not a character. so I never get laid has less of an undertone of “why can’t I connect with a woman” and more of “when will we get our government mandated sex slaves”
I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
I watch this dude sometimes, he says he’s a fulltime game dev but all I see him do is play other games. The game he works on has seen very little progress.
Would be nice if he at least admits he’s a streamer and not a game dev.
I’ve also noticed this from watching his stream and the more I learn about the guy the less I like him. He seems to misrepresent and oversell himself quite a bit.
Btw did he tell you about the time he worked at Blizzard, for the millionth time?
Are Apple devs even contractually allowed to say that they’re Apple devs? I swear every employee from every other company won’t shut up about it on twitter but you never hear a thing from Apple people. Have I just been missing them completely?
I know a few people who used to work for Apple. The reason a lot don’t say it though is because if you do people automatically assume you had something to do with whatever feature they don’t personally like, and you get berated about it.
Ah, that’s completely understandable. Most people don’t realize that in a lot of companies, the decision to make the stupid feature/break your workflow comes from a suit 10 pay grades above your level and despite everyone involved trying to explain that it’s a bad idea.
Deltarune didn’t exist yet. It’s an undertale ripoff.
Which is very telling, tobyfox released a whole game on his own. While this " I worked at blizzard, BTW" tool hasn’t with an (allegedly) entire company around him. He’s a grifter, he scams people around him to profit off of other’s work. That’s all he does.
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